Restore Sanity

I was inspired by Jon Stewart's keynote speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. ... and perhaps a glass of wine.


I got this idea for a project to perpetuate the magnanimity of this seedling movement toward saying "No more" to hemorrhaging broadcast and print media that stoke fear into its audience in order to cling to the last of the bait that remains to catch advertisers. After all, if fear can be used to win elections, couldn't it also be used to keep people watching and reading?


Media has been evolving since conch shells, pinafores and town criers, songs, the pen and the press. Its evolution mirrors the advances in both technology and ruling systems. Now we are at a new precipice for both. We are a global community with the technological tools to create a heretofore unimaginable kind of virtual utopia. It stands to reason that our media also evolves.


Usher in citizen journalism. We will always need observant and inquisitive reporters and careful scribes to convey news to the citizens of an everchanging worlds. But who let our current media rise to its current ruling-class status? And now that we have our own tools to report and disseminate, who really needs the fearmongers? And we certainly don't need media telling us how to think about the world we are all experiencing together. Only the individual can decide what is right and what is wrong.


Our community has been pitted against itself. The best way to destroy any society is to create discourse from within.


I believe that the United States is still the home of the brave men and women who, despite all their worries, still care about their fellow man, regardless of who they voted for in the last election.


Because of this, I want to be part of an ongoing movement to reclaim our country from a media dictatorship.


I want to help create a new platform for new citizen pundits and analysts to sensibly conduct civil interchanges with one another despite non-fundamental difference; a network whereby the subscribers are both audience and participant, interviewer and interviewee; where civic leaders can go to find out what their constituents really need; where we can all start talking again.


I want to use propaganda for a beneficial purpose and stage large group social projects that build the moral of our country, not destroy it.


I want to remember the hope I felt in 2008. And that hope had not so much to do with Obama and what he promised, but with what happened that year during elections. We voted in record numbers. We took part in civic events and civil conversations because we felt strongly about wanting something different -- regardless of our partisan allegiances. We were working in concert en masse for the first time in a very long time. And that mobile America is what gave me hope.


Two years later, we've become exhausted and disenfranchised.  We are dangerously divided because we've been listening antagonistic self-anointed demagogues demand that we be angry at each other while panning their cameras out on the small, but vocal collection of the worst of us on both sides of the aisle. We are being subverted into believing that the other side, no matter who they are, is irrational and will not budge -- so why should we.  And after awhile, one starts to believe it. If you're told repeatedly that all your efforts will fail, eventually you succumb to discouragement.


Our country was founded by people who refused to listen to flat-earthers. Nothing has changed. It's time we stopped listening trusting in media and start trusting in each ourselves.

Something old, something new

In a valley made my Oden's horses' hooves

Adam and I returned from our amazing honeymoon in Iceland yesterday afternoon. It was a nonstop, dawn-to dusk rush to take in as much as we could of this mysterious island country. With every twist and turn of each climbing crag or lolling foothill, we encountered a new landscape. Within minutes, the scenery would transform from lush seaside to black and jagged rock -- from roaring blue waterfalls on green moss to motionless, cold pools buried deep within the soundless cliffs.

We woke very early each morning and warmed ourselves with farm-fresh breakfasts before shoving back into the tiny white car that groaned under the weight of another day's drive over steep mountains that rushed into valleys. We traveled by road, by foot, and hand and knee to bellycrawl to the most hospitable vantage points. By the evenings, we were tired and dirty.

-----

We didn't know how it would be possible to return back to our home in monochromatic Houston. This morning, we worried ourselves about the inevitably of that ennui that hisses in the corners of a life of mundane routine. We made oaths to try to our best to stave off the pathos of pattern that often pulls at the weave of a marriage -- knowing that it would take a daily effort for the rest of our lives to not let the awe of each other and this world to get buried in a box with the guestbook and our wedding photos somewhere in the back of our conscious. We've heard the stories ...

My husband left for work and set myself to tend to hearth, unpacking and washing and putting the house right after the torrent of the past few weeks. Already, the tedium of duty and familiarity begins to draw sighs from my mouth. But I discovered something I didn't expect as I pulled our wedding gifts from boxes and put them away: I feel like a bride. Something feels different now. I don't know what it is, but I didn't expect it.

English teacher

It's a mantle I'm not ready to wear. The words sound strange out of my mouth. I'm still trying to hold on to being an editor.

The principal at the private institute where I teach adults (and young adults) English as a second language is always encouraging me and pointing out things that I might instinctually be doing right. She is convinced I may have found my second calling after having to abandon my first.

Students have recently started telling me that I'm their favorite teacher. And it makes me cringe. I would worry that they were only buttering me up for a good grade, or that perhaps I am too lenient, but I know these students; they are sincere.  I know this because I spend time talking to them in the hallways or during lunch or after class. They bring me their papers from other classes and ask for my help. I am really eager to help them understand ... and I guess that's what worries me.

I might be on the verge of really enjoying being an educator. The pay is low (and hourly in my current position) and I'm taking home at least 10 more hours of work each week for which I do not get paid. If it were a job I didn't care about, I'd phone it in. But because I care, I'm struggling to come up with ways to reach my students and it's taking up time that I simply don't have.

Taking a step back, I remind myself what led me to this school: I asked myself why I enjoyed about being an editor and what I enjoyed about by previous job. The primary reason is that I love my language.

And now, as a teacher, for the first time, I really feel like a writer because my colleagues and my students regard me as such. And I love that.

My red backpack

It's a silly thing, really. But I have this red, corduroy backpack that I love. I was thinking about who I was the day I bought it. It was in October 2004. (I even wrote about buying it in my journal).

I had been trying to work up the nerve to leave my then husband for months. I had left a bread crumb trail to redemption hoping that something would change; that I would finally forgive him of the mistakes he made or that he would stop making them.

And my grandmother was dying. In a morphine-induced non sequiter she told me, unprompted, that I couldn't save the world, so it was probably best to try to save myself. I had no idea where that came from, but since I was dealing with this other problem and it was one of the last things she said to me, it meant something.

It was a Saturday. We took a family trip to a sports store where I was encouraged to "get something nice for myself." (At a sports store?) So I wandered off to the camping aisle, nostalgic for the days when my car was filled with all sorts of ornaments of wilderness escapism. And then I found myself looking at backpacks.

This backpack was a regular school backpack. It was corduroy and a deep red color. It was the only one of its kind and it seemed out of place among the heavier "let's go camping" backpacks. It was on sale.

I looked at it and was suddenly filled with hope. I imagined all the things I'd put in it and all the places I'd go. I sat there daydreaming of college and airports and decks of cards and books and toothbrushes ...

So I got it.

A month later, I told my husband that I had to leave. At that time in my life, it was the most difficult decision I ever had to make. In addition to all the serious problems in our marriage, I felt like I just wasn't going anywhere in life. And it may sound selfish, but if I couldn't save us, I had to save myself.

Two months later, I went back to school.

Sometimes I took the backpack to school, but usually it was used for overnight trips, hotel stays, drives to Austin. Two years later, I had a degree. I took the books out of my bag and took a trip out to California for my 30th birthday. A month later, the backpack was carry on to my first trip abroad to Japan. Later, it accompanied me to Florida, then back to China, then to my boyfriend's house, back to California a few times, back to Beijing, to Tibet, to Chengdu, to Sanya, where my boyfriend asked me to marry him, to home, to Las Vegas ...

And it's been filled with decks of cards, toothbrushes, books, blankets, towels, swimsuits, cold medicine, souvenirs ...

I really love that backpack.

I used to write

For about a solid year, I was journaling everyday. Then I moved away and I stopped. When I finally had a buhjillion things to write about, I stopped. Part of it was because I had become dependent on the online journal platform and those sites were all blocked in the country where I lived. But mostly, I just simply didn't have both time and energy. I was too busy living.

Yesterday, I visited my friend Gretchen's blog (Chopstick Chatter). She's still in the trenches at Xinhua. She writes about the hilariously bizarre slice of life that is Beijing through an American girl's eyes. Her entries are witty and thoughtful and everything I wish mine were had I ever bothered to write them.

And I asked myself: What happened?

So I opened up my LJ and found my last entry. It was private. Lo and behold, it contained the very answer to my question. I was, essentially, poking fun at myself using highfalutin diction. Something I probably wrote under the influence of a couple glasses of Great Wall. I laughed when I discovered this tucked away. And although I get what I was saying, I feel like I'm missing something.

Anyway. I thought I'd share it.

***

(From my LiveJournal June 5, 2009)

Although I know better, part of me: toys with the idea that I can actually make a difference; and hopes that all my intellectual posturing and indignant rallying (and make no mistake, there was indignant rallying) had some small part in obliterating the chin ese dam against LJ.

Its so odd that here -- on the day after a day whose (pardon the possessive personification) mere mention shuddered hundreds ((conservatively)) of Web sites -- I am posting with liberty on a site from which I have been banned since my arrival in this upside-down world six months ago.

What a shame I have nothing significant to report.

Or rather, the business of experience has left me ill-want to report.

It's a strange transformation. I may actually have more to speak about than I ever have in my life. My head is loosening it's belt with lofty thoughts of thisisms and thatisms -- yet, I feel less inclined to burden my audience with these minor ornaments of experience. They are significant. They are monumental. But: An important thing I've learned about relative significance and monumnentism, is that what has meaning to one audience will not necessarily have meaning to another. Simply, some things are destined to be lost in translation.

So it goes.

I am member to a small society of nitwits and misfits who have, for individual reasons unknown, consigned themselves to a life of alien obscurity. At some point, you become so obsessed with the novel-like narrative in your head that you start to distill snapshots of the ordinary life that you witness on a day-to-day basis into a forced collage of witticisms or, worse, platitudes.

I just don't want to do that anymore.

Ming bai le!

First, some dream seepage:

I had a dream I had to stack blocks. The blocks came in different dimensions and configurations, but I had to stack them in a way that was modular so as to take up as little space as possible -- and to be uniform, clean. I was creating columns. I'd say it was a little like Tetris -- but I think it was actually very much a literal interpretation of me defragging my brain. I hate it when I dream in blocks and sectors. Sometimes I swear I'm turning into a computer. Dogs look like their owners. Old couples start to look like each other over time. We take on the characteristics of those who are our most constant companions, right?

Now, the update:
With April has come a renewal of spirit. I feel I've made it past the rough phase and now I'm feeling enthusiastic again. The idyllic weather has greatly contributed to this change.

I have gotten used to my own alieness. Aside from missing my friends and family at home, I don't really think about it anymore. It's really very simple: I live here. That's what I'm doing in Beijing. Just living here. That's all.

It's kind of cool.

Love my language

Last week some Chinese colleagues were asking if I meet be interested in karaoking with them. Of course! They started telling me who in the office had a beautiful singing voice which led to a conversation about talents. One colleague showed me a picture her daughter had made. It was amazing. Her daughter was 7 when she made it. I told them I wish I could do something like that, prompting one colleague to ask, "what is your special talent?"

Before I could answer, the colleague whose daughter is a budding artist said, "She's linguistically talented. She is good at languages, wordcraft and understanding what other people mean even if they're not using the right words.

Needless to say, I was incredibly touched.

Then she said, "That means you mostly use the left part of your brain. You are left-brained."

And I said, "Yeah, I left my brain at home!"

I think I was even more tickled when they laughed at and appreciated my lousy pun. I really do think puns are a good way to practice, understand and play with your language.

And now for some dinosaurs: http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001424.html