Today I rearranged my living room. Never buy a light-colored couch, it will only lead to heartache. I also watched a film in which the protagonist knows she is stupid, and I’m not certain that was very helpful for anyone in the end. Is anyone fully self-aware, like, self-aware in-the-round? I don’t know. Sometimes I like to think I am, but then another bit of reality hits and it’s square one again. But I think that kind of “stupid”-to be aware that you don’t know what you don’t know- is different than the kind of stupid mentioned in the movie, perhaps more relating to intelligence than plain ignorance.
Is this sort of self-centered ruminating the most important thing to be thinking about right now? No. There’s Gaza. There’s the upcoming presidential election. There’s shit local governance and politics. Women can’t legally have abortions, racism can’t be safely discussed in schools. I watched an interview between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin where Giovanni noted that she tended to be more “parochial,” that she wanted to work out the issues facing her neighbors and, specifically, Black people in the US, before she could consider the issues facing the rest of the world. This thing of choosing battles, of balancing activism and community with personal health and self-care, that’s no small feat.
Their discussion moved into white people, and the thing white people not knowing how to love their children well, of self-hate and therefore other-hate. Self-love as the foundation would surely help one focus day-to-day energy on things outside of oneself, on community movement and mutual aid, being woven into the life of another(s). I see that type of love as one that has had to be learned, it was not wholly instilled and not something that seemed to be coded into my being, which has taken up a lot of time and space in my life, personally. It is exhausting and confusing.
This is going a lot of directions, and maybe the main thing I wanted to say was that this year, more than any year previously, it did not “feel” like Christmas. I refused to go too deep into that non-feeling, I instead..rearranged my living room, something I have to say is exactly what my Grandma Jones would do: an act of avoidance. I will write about that in another thing. I started this late Monday, so some of my tenses might be confused. Maybe I will write a song today.