2003-12-05 - 2:39 p.m.
This week has been a question of balance- of getting bearings again. It is always an exercise for me to balance my life as I experience it here in New York (and on the East coast generally) with my experiences in Portland, Oregon. It’s hard not to divide and dichotomize the two, separating off parts of my self. But I am trying to bring these together. I’m confused about long distance phone calls again- how is it that some people I care about are not just right around the corner?
It is the first significant snowfall of the year, falling in wet, heavy flakes outside my window, collecting on trees and rooftops and obscuring my view of the Verazzano Narrows bridge. I’m back in New York and though I got here on Monday, I already feel like my time spent in Portland, Oregon over the holiday feels a bit dream like. I feel a warmness when I think about it- Michelle’s cat Snowman sitting on my lap, Jessica building us a fire on Thanksgiving morning, a trip to the coast with Jonny in order to witness “horizontal rain” and get soaked as soon as we left the car, laughing hysterically on the beach in Seaside, Washington.
Bike rides through wet leaves have been replaced with me squishing in my winter boots through wet snow. As I make footprints up the sidewalk to my block, humming a Weakerthans song about the sidewalks watching me miss you (or something like that) I think back to my feelings last year. Last year, making peace with things past, making peace with loneliness, and feeling a rage burning a hole in my stomach about the state of the world. I’m still bitter and full of rage, but in a way that feels a bit more resolved now. Last year I remember saying that love just insulated people from feeling injustice, but now I might want to be going back on my words. I feel more careful now, and less like someone so lonely and sad that was all I could dare to identify as.
Sometimes though this city does feel like it’s testing my so called open heartedness. An old man, maybe white, maybe not, sits across from me on the N train, his cheekbones hollow and eyes starting to sink into his face. Something about the greasy green bandanna he has tied around his head, his Spiderman backpack, grey chin stubble and worn orange coat, switching to the beat up old M train at 36 street (in Brooklyn) makes me too sad. Sad because, even though you can never assume things about people, in this city sometimes you can see the hope and hardship and heartbreak in people’s lives. I see that and I know that my very ability to leave this city, my college education, everything that makes up that ever complicated word “privilege” is something that plays into every interaction I have in this city.
I’m in a class that critiques the way sympathy and sentiment is used in order to mobilize people in positions of privilege to “feel” for the “oppressed.” This is something I think about a lot when I think about experiences like this one- how am I reproducing these histories, these stereotypes, these ideas about “helping” in every interaction? But how to I also acknowledge that to see the pain of grinding poverty and despair and hard work for little pay- that it does stir a profound reaction in me?
