CUT To Do List

A. Papers
1. Politics of Sexuality
b. Human Trafficking portfolio
2. Fem Theory
a. Living Theory Essay
b. Book Review
C. Creative Writing Assign.
4. correction of fiction
D. Forms
3. Internship required readings
E. Journal(s)
2. Fem Theory
b. 2nd half of journal entries
G. Service Projects
5. Relay for Life
H. Misc.
1. Find a grad school.
2. Study for and take the Psych-GRE.
5. Mother's day gift(s)
6. Train for internship.
7. Happy Bday Cono.

Heck Yes!

I dare you to move like today never happened before.

My window is divided into 16 rectangles. At approx. 7:45pm, Column 2 Row 2 rectangle (from the top) has a view of what could almost be mistaken for a tropical climate. There is an extremely green tree in the bottom part of the window, and another tree a little further away, and these blue clouds in a pink sky that makes me nostalgic like the Rx Bandits made me for Banana Boat. Even in that one rectangle I can see the different shades of bluepurplepink and it makes me achy to be somewhere else. Even when the sun goes down, the bottom 8 rectangles, when sitting at my desk, are completely filled with green leaves and thin brown branches. Maybe I'm not really here. Maybe I'm levitating above the ground, completely weightless.
Maybe I'm pink with yellow polka dots. But probably not.

My Mom Would Read This And Say "Good." And That Makes Me Want To Scream

"
An Indiana mother recently accompanied her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend to one of Indiana's Planned Parenthood clinics, but they unwittingly walked into a so-called "crisis pregnancy center" run by an anti-abortion group, one that shared a parking lot with the real Planned Parenthood clinic and was designed expressly to lure Planned Parenthood patients and deceive them. The group took down the girl's confidential personal information and told her to come back for her appointment, which they said would be in their "other office" (the real Planned Parenthood office nearby). When she arrived for her appointment, not only did the Planned Parenthood staff have no record of her, but the police were there. The "crisis pregnancy center" had called them, claiming that a minor was being forced to have an abortion against her will. The "crisis pregnancy center" staff then proceeded to wage a campaign of intimidation and harassment over the following days, showing up at the girl's home and calling her father's workplace. Our clinic director reports that the girl was "scared to death to leave her house." They even went to her school and urged classmates to pressure her not to have an abortion. The anti-choice movement is setting up these "crisis pregnancy centers" across the country. Some of them have neutral-sounding names and run ads that falsely promise the full range of reproductive health services, but they dispense anti-choice propaganda and intimidation instead. And according to a recent article in The New York Times, there are currently more of these centers in the U.S. than there are actual abortion providers. What's more, these centers have received $60 million in government grants. They're being funded by our tax dollars. A bill has just been introduced in Congress to stop the fraudulent practices of fake clinics, but it desperately needs more support.
Tell your representative to take a stand: anti-choice extremists must not get away with this any longer!
Go to: http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/fakeclinics
"
Thank you.

she's ashamed of all her somethings

I feel like something is missing. The thing is, I feel obligated not to complain because if WGS classes have taught me nothing else, they've taught me that guaranteed, someone else has it worse than I do, no matter what happens. And I don't just mean situational differences and crises, I mean racial oppressions and being singled out for who you're in love with. This is the cause for the title. It's adapted from this song I like, and it's related because the song is about a woman just happy to be alive, and the speaker fells ashamed of all the little things she finds during the day to complain about, because the sum of those complaints is much less than the parts of the problem the other woman is facing.
Having said that, I want to expand on missing something. I have urges to go for walks and drive places and blah blah blah. All those typical college things that are caused by an idle thought and one's spontaneous nerve being pinched. Things that would have been easy as anything to accomplish had a certain roommate been around. It's easy being by myself when I have work to do, but when I don't want to do work, it's hard doin stuff by myself. I don't really have much else to say on this topic. Just that, especially today, I felt locked up (aside from not feeling well) and I hated it. It was upsetting.

A Contribution

Bonding With A Dirt Floor; Bondage to Dirt

In lieu of helpless feelings
I will sing my heart out
Write words of comfort
Or try to.
No one knows your struggles
Better than you
And I don’t mean being ignored
By taxicabs.
No, your kind of hurt
Runs deeper than your skin
It seeps through your pores
And gets into your blood.
Your organs feel rotted
Wishing you were one with the dirt
That you sleep on each night
Instead of the dirt
That imprisons you
And holds you for ransom.
They all receive their pay.
Even the mothers and fathers
Who abandon.
Nothing short of the aunts and uncles
Who profit.
For that life to seem blissful,
The dirt must have clouded your mind
Something awful.
The skin and bones you’ve become
Reflect in the faces
As they mock you
On the bills you earn
On your back.

This is for the women
Who are traveling
To foreign places where most unpleasant events are waiting.
For the children who don’t understand
And when they do, are beyond hope.
Dirt floors and muddy, bloodied faces
Are not what you had signed up for.
Food for the “entitlement” of monsters
Is what you’ve become.
But know this:
If you ever escape
From the dirt that binds you,
Don’t let the shadow of silence
follow you home.
Be loud and pained.
Demand to be heard
For yours is a story to be passed down
And spread as far and as wide
as the eye can see.
Because monsters become monsters
And men learn entitlement.
No one is born ignorant to others’ pain.

[Not My] 'Report From the Bahamas'

June Jordan:
"
I am staying in a hotel that calls itself The Sheraton British Colonial. One of the photographs advertising the place displays a middle-aged Black man in a waiter's tuxedo, smiling. What intrigues me most about the picture is just this: while the Black man bears a tray full of 'colorful' drinks above his left shoulder, both of his feet, shoes and trouserlegs, up to ten inches above his ankles, stand in the also 'colorful' Caribbean salt water. He is so delighted to serve you he will wade into the water to bring you Banana Daquiris while you float! More precisely, he will wade into the water, fully clothed, oblivious to the ruin of his shoes, his trousers, his health, and he will do it with a smile.

I am in the Bahamas. On the phone in my room, a spinning complement of plastic pages offers handy index clues such as CAR RENTAL and CASINOS. A message from the Ministry of Tourism appears among these travellers tips. Opening with a paragraph of 'WELCOME,' the message then proceeds to 'A PAGE OF HISTORY,' which reads as follows:
'
New World History begins on the same day that modern Bahamian history begins--October 12, 1492. That's when Colombus stepped ashore--British influence came first with the Eleutherian Adventures of 1647--After the Revolutions. American Loyalists fled from the newly independent states and settled in the Bahamas. Confederate blockade-runners used the island as a haven during the War between the States, and after the War, a number of Southerners moved to the Bahamas.
'
There it is again. Something proclaims itself a legitimate history, and all it does is track white Mr. Columbus to the British Eleutherians through the Confederate Southerners as they barge into New World surf, land on New World turf, and nobody saving one word about hte Bahamian people, the Black peoples, to whom the only thing new in their island world was this weird succession of crude intruders and its colonial consequences.

This is my consciousness of race as I unpack my bathing suit in the Sheraton British Colonial. Neither this hotel nor the British nor the long ago Italians nor the white Delta airline pilots belong here, of course. And every time I look at the photograph of that fool standing in the water with his shoes on I'm about to have a West Indian fit, even though I know he's no fool; he's a middle-aged Black man who needs a job and this is his job--pretending himself a servile ancillary to the pleasures of the rich. (Compared to his options in life, I am a rich woman. Compared to most of the Black Americans arriving for this Easter weekend on a three nights four days' deal of bargain rates, the middle-aged waitier is a poor Black man.)

We will jostle along with the other (white) visitors and join them in the tee shirt shops or, laughing together, learn ruthless rules of negotiation as we, Black Americans as well as whites, argue down the price of handwoven goods at the nearby straw market while the merchants, frequently toothless Black women seated on the concrete in their only presentable dress, humble themselves to our careless games:
'Yes? You like it? Eight dollar.'
'Five.'
'I give it to you. Seven.'

And so it continues, this weird succession of crude inruders that, now, includes me and my brothers and sisters from the North.

This is my consciousness of class as I try to decide how much money I can spend on Bahamian gifts for my family back i Brooklyn. No matter that these other Black women incessantly weave words and flowers into the straw hats and bags piled beside them on the burning dusty street. No matter that these other Black women must work their sense of beauty into these things that we will take away as cheaply as we dare, or they will do without food.

We are not white, after all. The budget is limited. And we are harmlessly killing time between the poolside rum punch and 'The Native Show on the Patio' that will play tonight outside the hotel restaurant.

This is my consciousness of race and class and gender identity as I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself. They sell and I buy or I don't. They risk not eating. I risk going broke on my first vacation afternoon.

We are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other.
"

'You're Ugly, Too'

..."Zoe had been out with three men since she'd come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the Paris municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she'd brought in to protest and who then asked her to coffee. At first she thought he was amazing--at least, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong, he said, 'You would not be ill-served by new clothes, you know'. She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve. 'Did you have to brush that off in the car?' he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt."
Lorrie Moore