We Live and Learn from all Mistakes...

I was at the Farmer's Market yesterday morning when I realized that christmas is now less than a week away. I've become rather detached from the actual holiday that is christmas (formally for religious reasons, now more so for the fact that it is the epitome of capitalism), however this time of year is significant to me for two reasons. First, the coming of a new year is something that always puts me in an intensely reflective mood and encourages me to evaluate my choices, actions, growth, and change over the past 365.25 days. Secondly, this time of year seems to bring out the love between people--christmas songs increasingly focus on relationships or romantic attractions, the cold weather I think makes us biologically inclined to seek warmth in our closeness with others, and there is that overwhelming message that forces people to think of the ones they love over the holiday season.

A combination of my two points listed above cause me to reflect on the relationships I've fostered, with myself and others, over the course of this year. To be honest, 2010 was a crazy long year. I can say with confidence that no year has seen me grow so much as this one has. I thought it'd be interesting to lay out 2010 by each month's contribution to the year as a whole...

January and early February were rough...and confusing..and scary...but after coming out as a lesbian to my family over my birthday weekend in mid-February, the year transformed into one of self-discovery and immense personal compassion. I had the opportunity to construct my identity openly and honestly, I experienced what it means to be in love with someone for the first time, and I found a bundle of confidence that had been hidden within me for the past 19 years. It's amazing to consider how much our identity and our culture's response to it influences the way we think about ourselves--the early part of 2010 really pushed me to understand this.

March, April, and May were three months of my life that I couldn't really tell you what happened--all I know is that I felt balanced. I was learning about myself and I was happy doing it.

June, July, and August were spent at home with my family. I had an intensely difficult, yet extremely wonderful time baby sitting my little sister and living under the roof of my mom for the first time since starting college. In all honesty, the summer was hard for me. It was a unique transition from the independent self-led life that I had been so comfortable in while at school, to a structured existence with responsibilities to other people rather than myself. I had changed a lot over the course of the school year, my mind was opened to things I never even considered before and bringing all of that back to the life I used to live was difficult. I struggled to combine all of my new experiences and discoveries with the place I grew up in--or more appropriately, the person I grew up as.

September. Oh September. Coming back to school after three months away. Moving into an apartment. Seeing old friends that had disappeared from my life for the time I was away. Falling in love all over again with this city and everything that comes with this city--September was an interesting mixture of excitement, pain, happiness, comfort, and adjustment.

October and November went too quickly. I'm troubled by the way these two months went, primarily because I'm not sure how that was. On the bright side, I found an intense passion for the work I was doing to end LGBTQ bullying. Stop the Silence came into my life and changed my direction, it allowed me the freedom to address the huge cultural problems of homophobia and transphobia in a constructive way. One year ago, I would not have pictured myself in a position to work so intimately and passionately with these issues; although sad that we have to be fighting for safety and equality in the first place, I am grateful that my journey has brought me to a place on the forefront of this movement to make change and ensure justice for members of the LGBTQ community, including myself.

And that brings me to December. December has seen me do a lot of questioning and challenging. In stark contrast to this month 2009, the questions and challenges I've posed this December are not oriented inward but rather outward--Of our culture. Of my place at this university. Of traditions and accepted social constructions. Of other people and my relationships with them. Of labels and categories and identities. I suppose all of those are related to my inner journey, but within the larger context of society.

And that was 2010, it actually seems rather short when you cut entire three month spans into a modest paragraph. As the New Year draws closer, I would like to post a forward-thinking entry with my hopes and expectations for 2011. In the meantime, more reflection and evaluation are sure to consume my brain. I encourage everyone else to do the same, it's quite freeing and powerful to think of your life as a long journey that consistently changes directions and forces you to adjust, grow, find balance, lose it, and then figure out how the heck you'll find it again. shalom. 

So Hard When it Doesn't Come Easy

I've been thinking a lot lately about work and inequality in America. For my sociology class, we had to read Barbara Ehrenreich's ethnographic study called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001). The author spends time in various cities "undercover" as a low-wage worker; the goal of her study was to find out what it's like to make a living at minimum wage in the United States. She encounters issues with housing, eating, self-respect, and basic civil rights. This video--Nickel and Dimed--is an interesting mini-dramatic-documentary that does a nice (and maybe a little bit creepy) job illustrating the project that Ehrenreich undertook.


We must evaluate our dependency on the labor and actions of others. Think about the people who clean our bathrooms, scrub our floors, clean up our trash, serve us coffee, cook our food, ring up our groceries, put away the clothes we discard after leaving the fitting room....all of these people are underpaid and giving up their time and energy so that others can live more comfortably and cheaply.

I feel ashamed. Why do we allow our country to run this way? Why do we call a waitressing job "unskilled" when it requires constant running, smiling, talking, organizing, listening...for numerous hours every day? That takes skill. It's physically and emotionally draining; not to mention stressful, fast-paced, and high-risk. But if it were considered "skilled" labor, the wages offered to those in the waitressing profession would have to be higher--and when all that companies care about is the bottom line, terminology is key.

When a person must work multiple jobs to barely stay afloat. There's a problem. When "67% of adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs" (Ehrenreich 219). There is a problem. When employers are allowed to disregard safety regulations and labor laws because they rely on immigrant workers who are vulnerable to an oppressive and threatening system. We have a huge problem. When a full time job doesn't pay enough for even one person to live on..not even factoring in children, healthcare, or quality housing, food, clothes, transportation, etc. People, we have a problem! 

We have to take a stand or it's only going to get worse. Just today, California approved the usage of methyl iodide on strawberry farms. This pesticide is a known carcinogen and has numerous other negative effects on health--who is going to suffer most from its usage? The people applying it. The farm workers who will be exposed to it at close range for ten hours a day; these people have no job security, make low-wages, rarely have any form of health coverage or benefits...yet, their work gives the rest of us perfect strawberries. Talk about philanthropy. How can this even be legal?...is it because the workers are largely migrants so their health doesn't matter? Try telling that to a young pregnant woman who looses her baby from exposure to this fumigant that was proven to induce late-term miscarriages before even being considered by the Department of Pesticide Regulation. Sign the Petition to persuade California against using this harmful chemical.

As quoted in the video, the author closes her book with: "Someday...they [the working poor] are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end."

That "someday" that Ehrenreich referred to, it better come soon.

*Also as a side, yet highly relevant, note--check out: Dream Act 2010 to help make a difference for students who are connected closely with some of the issues I talked about above.

Because our love is strong...

Buddha once said, "Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind." 

With the same idea in mind, a Christian theologian named Lewis Smedes says, "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and realize that prisoner was you."

And Mahatma Gandhi adds that, "the weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." 

It seems to be the common consensus that forgiveness is one of the many secrets to personal growth and inner strength. I have a couple of questions about this:

1. Where is the connection between forgiveness and forgetting? They seem to be tied together a lot of the time. If you forget without forgiving, are you still carrying that burden on your mind?...are you still a prisoner waiting to be freed? Can you ever fully forget if you never forgive?

2. Why is the emphasis always put on forgiving instead of apologizing? We seem to think of forgiveness as this noble duty that people should always strive for. But if you've been wronged and the cause of it has never extended an apology, why is it your burden to forgive? Gandhi says it makes you strong, but I don't know that it's fair to call someone weak for not releasing another of the wrong they've done them without first receiving compensatory regards. 

I hold the concept of forgiveness on somewhat of a pedestal. I do think that you will never be fully free of something until you forgive, but I also think that forgiveness isn't 100% necessary to forget. In addition, I don't think that you're obligated to forgive someone if you haven't been offered a sincere and honest apology--that goes the opposite way too though, if you have been offered the apology, then pure forgiveness should be your ultimate goal. 

I guess what I'm feeling is somewhat of an annoyance at the plethora of rhetoric that tells us we must forgive or else we are weak and chained to our past. This ideology lets people off the hook even if they've really hurt another person. I don't understand why we value forgiveness and simultaneously teach people that, as writer P.G Wodehouse says, “it is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

We have to meet in the middle. With a sincere apology, forgive and forget. Without it, do the same, but only if you want to.