Girl's Camp!

Eliza and I went up to Girl's Camp tonight. I spoke at the devotional. Eliza did yoga on an anty log. I actually got ants in my pants. It was sublime. Hated leaving Amelia behind . . .

M'Ladies @ Jalisco's on Roosevelt

The ladies scored a table on the "patio" (aka busy sidewalk) for enchiladas, fajitas, and fish tacos (tacos were sadly disappointing).

"pain pals": a brief internet play staged by e/e

Hey, Eva, so what should we do about the world of dudes who are idiotz about stuff?

Your Pain Pal,
Eliza

Well, Pain, personally I typically refuse to "dialogue with" those who refuse to read all of the millions of things that other more informed and articulate ladies than myself have put out on this subject. I will point them towards that, if I can muster it, or, in the case of the terrible facebook abortion wars of '10, write extremely long-winded comments to someone named "Scuba Chad" and then be depressed for days.

Why do I refuse? Well, I wouldn't very much expect a sky diver to want to have an open dialogue with me, a person who has spent all of her life sittin on the hard ground, about whether or not gravity pulls us towards the earth. If you catch my drift. I experience this shit. Some people don't.

This is all, of course, assuming you mean dude in the gendered sense, and not dude as in any member of the human species.

I know you have a more open-door policy, and I give you hella respeck for that. Tell me, how do you have the fortitude to hear all of the idiocy and still have patience and good will and "the ability to do things other than just be extremely depressed all the time", as they call it?

Much love from your pain pal,

Eva

I guess being an expert sky diver, to me, is not something that happens to everyone. I mean, ideally it should. Wait, should it? But what I'm saying is, there are factors in peoples' lives that make them less apt than us to understand the Common Sense of Sociale Responsibilitye. And not that we should apologize for these factors or anything, but I think we're more likely to do positive work for the cause of Ladies by helping people understand rather than making them angry and resent understanding.

Hey, how do you feel about yoga in this context?

In solidarity,
Elza

Yes, yes, the oooooooold yoga parallel. I suppose we are all at our own places in our practices. But then again, in order to reap benefits, we have to be practicing at all, if ya know what I'm sayin.
You are right, of course, about spreading understanding. I will make a sincere effort to press down upon the backs of those who are in the child's pose of feminism. But it is difficult, you know? And some people, intentionally or not, will just get up and slap you in the balls in rage when really you were just trying to give them a soothing adjustment.

Care to further the metaphor? Care to tell me, for real, though, what your coping strategy is? And also, why I seem to be dependent on extended metaphors these days?

Metaphors be with you,

(GETIT?!)

Eva

Yoga, like feminism, can sometimes seem exceedingly intimidating/confusing/alienating to the outside observer. Similarly, there are many hurtful stereotypes which can be made about either practice, and which are often made in American Pie-like movies, as well as country music. However, I like country music. We should invite people into our warm, sweaty yoga studio of feminism, rather than shunning them for not having aluminum water bottles or knowing what "Namasde" means.

Here is my coping mechanism number one:
my ladies.
And my Lady Times.

Pain Pal 4 Life,

Eliza

This has been a brief Internetual performance piece. The artists do not wish to be photographed. The artists were childhood pen pals, and now find themselves "pain pals" in a harsh and disturbing world of sexism. The artists will be going on their laptops now, to try to find answers.

Joy

So happy that Eliza's here. On Friday I helped move some classroom equipment--mini-trampolines and therapy mats and bouncy ball chairs--to another school for a summer school classroom. It was a long day. Special Ed. Summer School (aka Extended School Year) was supposed to have been planned by a now former employee who has what I like to call the "Sadim" touch (opposite of Midas, see). It was actually less ready to go than if I had just left it alone. So we pulled it together last week. There were angry and frustrated teachers, teaching assistants, and parents because the planning and messaging had been so contradictory and chaotic.

So I offered to move equipment with my mini-van.

As I was making a trip into the new school with arms full of legos and an area rug printed with cars and trains I saw a sign in the school garden: Let nature be your teacher. William Wordsworth. I stopped in my tracks.

Wordsworth. Nature. In the back lot of an elementary school on Aurora Boulevard in downtown Seattle. Hot hazy sun--me in heels and a skirt, arms full of grubby classroom props. Twenty four years ago I went to the Lake District to a Wordsworth retreat, where I climbed Mount Helvellyn and swam in Grasmere Lake and listened to academic papers about Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and all of British Romanticism.

And here I am with a broke-down mini-van in a hot, damp city, so far from Grasmere Lake but nature, oh nature, she is teaching me. Babies are born and we love and hope for all the gifts of the world for them, but they don't talk by the time they should. Maybe they never will. Or they have no optic nerves. Or limbs. Or they can't stand the touch of their mother's hand.

But we build schools and teach them to play and touch and perhaps talk. We plant sad city gardens with tile mosaics, small clay hand prints, lazy bees buzz and carry life from lavender to beets and wild blackberries. Wordsworth said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility, or the memory of golden daffodils that flashes upon the inward eye. Nature is the garden on Aurora, the grubby therapy ball, the tired teacher, the summer session of school.

behold

oh that I were an angel,

(bizarre light in the window
stops her hand on the way
to its destination

and the light pulses in a smile.

o that I were lil wayne
o that I hadn't forgotten that night
and o that I could remember!

a wavering pulse of pink and blue color
in the darkest night-
jingling softly, the sound of bells
or the sifting sun over Timpanogos.
o that I were these things
or could hold them in the palm of my hand

in my dream I am a strange sound,
perhaps the sound of lil wayne weeping
and that sound makes her draw quick breath on the way to her
destination)

but I do sin in my wish.