i´´m here

and typing on a panamanian keyboard, so i´don´t really know how to use it all that well.

just wanted to drop a line. more later.

I thought it would be at least a month before I got yelled at about gentrification!

As Rachel Reinke pulled into street parking outside her new home on Spring Street, a middle-aged black man on a bicycle took a loop back into her driveway (I thought to avoid Rachel's opening of the car door.*  I said out loud, "What is that fool doing in our driveway?" only half-kidding...but half-not kidding, huh.  As we walked onto the porch, he started yelling (we didn't know at whom).  Rachel's friend assumed it was her bad parallel parking job (she had pulled up behind us), but once inside and on the upstairs porch, I soon realized he was complaining about the trash cans that belonged to the address and had been left on the sidewalk (thus, impeding his cycling). 

About the trash cans:

1)  In college of charleston fashion, no one is quite sure where they are exactly or when they are to be brought out 

2)  The tenant below most likely brought them out, but didn't bring them back in (maybe tacitly trying to establish some symbiotic-waste-removal relationship OR he didn't even realize that a new fantastic foursome of 20-something roommates had moved in over the past couple of weeks.

3)  At my own two former addresses I had no trash can responsibilities (on radcliffe street a helpful street person did it for a tip that not i, but a friend living below me paid, and on rutledge the coffee house below me did it all...well not the house itself) 

Back to the man in the story:

He was already in conversation with another housemember's significant other, so I took that as clearance for me to participate.  Once I/we realized what he was fussing about, we both apologized, said we did not do it, but said we would move them.  In the end, it was just me--but I'm a girl scout and like it that way.  

He didn't really care that it wasn't was.  

The conversation turned sour after a few exchanges.

"I was born here, and I've lived here my whole life.  This used to be all black people living here..."  (or something to that effect)

The first thing out of my mouth was something like, "I know.  I get gentrification.  But we're all victims of the capitalist system in some way."  (WHAT?!)  

Then he started talking about the trash cans, and I called him out on a (bull shit) city ordinance that you can't ride a bike on the sidewalk.  And (as Rachel Reinke drew to my attention), he was also biking against traffic.

He told my porch mate that I was a smart girl, and smart women always keep the men straight.  Then he mumbled a little more as he biked off and I was left a little dazed (in traditional white, upper-middle class, college-aged female -- black, lower class, middle-aged interaction fashion**).

I really can't walk down the street without thinking "oh god, I'm the gentrifier!" as I pass the new skate shop and floral shops at the corners of spring and st philip (thereabouts).  But really, I'm just a pawn of the gentrifying force...and of the 'real' bad guys--real estate developers.  

Thanks to my friend Tom, I know a little something about the Downtown Plan.  Part of this plan (with the goal of 'cleaning up' the neighborhood, e.g. no trash, no overgrown plants, no broken windows, no drugs, no loitering, and no visible black people) is to use college of students as 'chess pieces' in order to pressure tradition (working class black) residents from the neighborhoods.  

And cue Morris Street constructions.  Cue every other house (in chessboard fashion) now belonging to a white developer (who then in turn hires a minority workforce for low wages and poor conditions to clean it up for some rich white person to live in).  

College students are perfect because of our transient status and low standards of living.  Oh, and our parents' money.  

And having all of us college students do this really dumb thing where we live in a new apartment every year allows the real estate peeps to up the rent every year on us.  

Not in nearly as [insert intelligent, politically correct word here meaning something close to tragically misused] as our black working class neighbors, we're still cogs in the wheel.

Fuck the wheel.

*I have horrible width and depth perception.

**Well, really only when these interactions take place from a second-story porch to a sidewalk/street in "midtown" (when did this start to be called that?), Charleston.

taking my b.a. to c.a.

"Busted in Nicaragua"

Approximately 1 year and 7 1/2 months ago, I began a blog.  It's title was even worse than it's content, and only those with the most finely tuned searching skills should be able to find it (okay, there's probably a link from this blogspot to it).  It was really me just writing a few sentences and some formatting in order to avoid studying for my final exam for middle eastern politics.  

Well, now I'm back at it again.

And maybe it will last longer than an entry and a half.

And maybe it won't link to Islamic political cartoon in which Anne Frank and a certain-you-know-who are lying in bed together.  (At least google that-it's totally worth it!)

This time, however, there will be a somewhat more focused approach:  a trip to Central America.

I leave August 26 for Panama City, Panama (as opposed to this Panama City).

My purpose?  Self-discovery (ha-which is white, upper-middle class code for buying time until I have to have any real responsibilities)

I hope to arrive in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in time for the 3rd America's Social Forum. The overarching goal of the trip is to figure out (with the help of my Cuban professor who is helping put on the forum) how I can do research for the Institute of Philosophy in Havana, Cuba.

My date of return is October 15.  (I wanted to make sure that I would be back in time for Rachel Reinke's 21st!)

I don't usually care about AIDS, but...

So yesterday and today I've been helping my mom (a second grade teacher) makes her sound like she's my exhibit one or something move all of her stuff back into her classroom.  two u haul trips and a van load.  Per my federally regulated 1 hr break per 6 hrs of backbreaking labor, I have headed home for a bowl of soup and full house.  

On the ride home two things stuck out to me on the radio:

1)  a service announcement about the fight against AIDS.  the commentator says, "Let's not let this virus invade another continent," or something with the same idea.  what?  have we already crossed the entire continent of africa off the list?  if this disease is moving continent by continent, should we hope that it's antarctica so we can spare as many human lives as possible?  or should we pray* that it's asia so we can stop worrying about china, north korea, and the middle east?

but we both know that if it were any other continent so effected by AIDS insert obnoxious AIDS and HIV statistics for sub-saharan africa here  it would be another story.  how much more terrifying if it broke the hermetic seal that protects the first world and associated latitudes from such filth!  how personally relevant does awareness and prevention become when AIDS victims are no longer only starving, black Africans!  we both know that people would be running, swimming, and cycling with the same drive as for cancer if the disease wasn't associated with fags, druggies, and darkies.

shit, I can't remember the second thing i heard.  but it's time for me to return to lexington elementary.  i'll try to think of it for later.

*I don't necessarily endorse praying.

It's a nice day for a white wedding.

When I had no (important) emails in my inbox and nothing on my facebook, I realized that I didn't really have anything to do.  Maybe my parents paid too much for my macbook.  But then I remembered Rachel Reinke's homepage  (after accidentally visiting feminsting.com, a website devoted to weight loss, diets, exercise...and, oh yeah, its 'most relevant link' is 'sexual health.'  One might argue that the two domains do overlap. 

watchthevideohere.com

I watched the clip of the fantasy heterosexual marriage in which a bride keeps running into physical obstacles as she attempts to follow her father down the aisle where her beaming husband-to-be awaits.  The columnist asks whether the feminist-minded should see this ad as 1) a satire  2) a call for assimilation into (white)* hetero-normativity.  One commenter claimed that "when messages are constructed to appeal to certain demographics, that it creates constricting identity categories for the people it purports to target and that in itself, the message is a form of structural violence."  

After reading this heavily structured partial sentence a few times, I still had to ask myself:  structural violence?  Then you have to go through your head all those definitions for the individual and combination of that phrase...exhausting.  I'd rather look at it from the other end.  What's so bad in the ad?

I'm all for fluidity.  I'm all for meeting your audience where they are.  I'm all about flipping the white heterosexual patriarchal structure on its head (is there a quicker way to say all that yet?-if we made it easier to say, maybe it would be easier to do?).  

Side note:  I'm often (maybe just sometimes) criticized by my girlfriend for  not being entirely sensitive to the gender dynamics and implications in all situations.

The ad doesn't make the average straighty-one-eighty look away.  The woman and her dress is beautiful, the music stirring, the suspense mounting as she approaches the groom.  

That is until a killer tag-team composed of a tackling flower girl and a senior citizen woman with a cane brutally take her down feet away from the altar.  The wedding party even keeps the would be new guardian of her chastity from helping her up.  

Luckily for most same-sex couples, marriage prevention begins much earlier than the actual wedding procession, and such horrible scenes are avoided.  If anyone should be angry about anything, maybe it should be the horrible metaphors for the obstacles that same-sex couples face as they navigate a U.S. of A. of states with their own defense of marriage legislations, e.g. stepping through a crowded parking lot.  

What would be the ideal ad?  A dyke wedding?  A tranny in a white dress?  (Options offered by other feministing-ers.)  A wedding that completely rejects the entire heterosexual paradigm represented by the ad in present form?  I think it would be wrong to even say what that is.  Isn't that what rejecting paradigms is all about?  Not inserting ones, but leaving room for imagination?

Instead, if ad-makers really wanted to pull the heart strings of the 'intended' demographic (heterosexual and indifferent), they should display the first say 25 to 30 years of a 'normal' heterosexual's journey of sexual discovery and having parents, the church, friends, teachers, politicians, and the media telling him or her "NO, THAT'S WRONG!!!!!" every step of the way.  

But I think we can all agree that that would just be seen as wrong.  (Straight people, much like white people, don't like to have their attention called to any form oppression, lest they must entertain the idea that they themselves are participating in it.  Oh dear!)

In other words, I think it would be hard to construct the 'perfect' commercial.

Instead, I say, why don't we just take what we can get?  We can all nitpick the faults, but at least there's a commercial on t.v. telling (and showing) straight people to give a flip about 'the gays.'  Right on.   

Billy Idol, take us out. 

*The family actual appears to be 'brown.'  I say 'brown' because I don't know if Hispanic would be a fair assumption to make on someone based on skin color.  Or maybe just because they were really just Spanish and I didn't know.