things to think about

Fundamentally, at the core of it, I believe in hope. I believe that there is a world out there that is even better than what we have right now. I believe that we can get there if we work together, and I believe that we can get there if we just keep looking for glimpses of it. The way the sky turns electric blue before it gets dark at night. The way our feet make it easy for us to walk. The way we breathe thanks to air pressure differentials.

There is magic in the world but we have to know how to find it. This is what drives me as both an artist and an activist. We undergo a series of alienations as we grow up that make us believe we are not as good as we all secretly believe we are. We learn about violence and being kept in line. And yet under it all there is still a kernel of hope and it is my job as an activist, as an artist, as a professional hoper to remind us of that tiny kernel.

Today I was trying to write one of one hundred personal statements and I write, by accident, “As a survivor of abuse, blah, blah, blah.” I got to the end of the paragraph before I realized what I had written, and simultaneously I wanted to puke, cry, delete it, and celebrate myself.

There is something holy about surviving. There is something holy about having enough of an engine to fight through and get to the other side. My body is a holy thing that took me there. My guts got me through. It is not that I did the best I could. I am not a broken remnant of a hard situation. I am a survivor like granite or like an old mountain. Worn down but still so strong. We are all that strong.

The worlds I want to create in my work are worlds where that hope and magic is apparent. I want the transcendent moment of ego-less wonder. I want the moment where it gets good enough you forget what you are and where you are and say yes instead. That is what I strive for in my art. The absorbing, healing experience.

I never think about myself as a survivor because I have not thought I had it all that bad. No one hit me and everyone tried their best to love me. But something about this — the way I always know where the door is, the way I try not to “mess up,” the way I am waiting constantly for those I love to lash out and leave me — this is the mark of someone who had to survive. And I did, fuck the inelegance, here I am.

Once upon a time I was at Neighbor’s in Seattle and it was 4am. It was sweaty and afterhours dancing and suddenly the room quieted and a spotlight came up and some old queen started performing an electric remix of “The Greatest Love of All.” Everyone hugged and everyone sang and behind her, boys danced. She brought us all under her spell and held us there and while the disco ball twinkled, for one moment, we were all home — queer, straight, gay, lez, whatever, that moment where it was ok, scabby knees and all.

THAT is the moment I want to make. That is the hope I want to refresh. THAT. THAT. THAT.

So suddenly I am a visual artist and I have openings, as you do when you are a visual artist. Me and my video art and my friend Quito and her photographs. So suddenly, because of this, I am dressing up again, dressing up but in a “funky” “arty” way. you know what I mean.

And friends, I have gained some weight over the past year. I no longer fit into most of my clothes. So today on my lunch break I went to church, aka Century 21. I needed some suspenders to hold my pants up. I needed a dress shirt, and friends, I needed a bow tie. Or several.

And I got it all, and brought it home, and played fashion to find the best outfit for my opening. And what we arrived on — new grey shirt, grey and black striped suspenders, dark jeans, black boots, orange tie — means that hello, my name is Ariel and I am the most stereotypical lez of them all.

I keep almost making my peace with my new masculine — butch? — identity. I keep almost making peace with my body. And then I cross some kind of line and I freak out and I run away. Some intersection of gender and size and my body and my fashion crosses the line and I go running the other way; I get horrified by myself.

And I was having, as of last night, this whole deep moment of introspection — oh god, is it butchphobia, lezphobia, homophobia, fatphobia, what is systemically wrong with my politics — when I figured it out.

Friends, I was having a bad case of the BAD FASHION PHOBIA.

Here’s what’s wrong with the outfit, as it currently exists. I am wearing a dress shirt and dress suspenders with normal jeans. The normal jeans are the jeans I wear almost every day — they’re dark, and cut skinny, but they’re still jeans with belt loops and everything. The grey shirt is a really nice grey shirt, now the nicest button-down I own. The suspenders are dress suspenders. The bow tie, also formal. The whole thing is a very formal outfit, and I put it with jeans — and so until my mid-stomach, I’m a fancy guy going to a fancy wedding, and from the mid-stomach down I am going to a farm hoedown. BZZT. DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Now it’s easy — I either dress up the pants or dress down the rest of the outfit.

I think so much of my phobia is about being seen as a BAD LEZ. You know, the kind everyone — including the queers — loves to hate. BAD LEZ with some gender but not enough, BAD LEZ with a tie and a t-shirt, BAD LEZ who is never appropriately or interestingly dressed — especially “interestingly.” BAD LEZ who doesn’t actually care, who looks good but not thoughtfully good. My fear of BAD LEZ execution keeps me away from sweater vests and keeps me wary of the sweater-collared shirt combo. It makes me triple check before I wear a tie that the outfit I am wearing can actually support the formality of a tie. And it makes me so wary of things like haphhazardly mixing levels of formality. OH NO. CAN’T BE A BAD LEZ.

There’s some deep lezbophobia that I am working out here that I think a lot of kids I know would do well to examine. I identify as queer, generally speaking, but lately I am thinking a lot about bringing the lez back into my identity. Let’s face it: mostly, I am lez in practice and my gender is one rooted in the world of lez, even if my experience of my gender is still reacting against the danger of being lumped in WITH THEM.

What am I so afraid of, anyways? Being lumped BAD LEZ to me means a failure (of fashion; of femininity AND masculinity); it means being called unsexy (at least in my head, and around my community); it means being called naive or misguided or incorrect; it means being called BORING. I don’t want to be BAD LEZ, I want to be HOT AS SHIT QUEER. It makes me uncomfortable the ways in which I find those two categories to be self-excluding.

And the real red flag — as I think about people who might read this and be offended, I think, “But I don’t mean you! I mean some OTHER lez who is actually bad fashon!” This categoric unwillingness to include anyone I like in this category means that it is a bias, not a real axis of judgement. Telling. Very telling.

So since we have last talked, progress has been made. Oh yes, friends, progress has been made.

That’s right, folks, we have gotten all the way to getting the song to turn on with a button press.

Hilariously, though, the hardest part — the hardest part of all! — is getting the song to TURN BACK OFF when the button switch changes state. I am working with a couple of different sketches for basic stuff — the LadyAda 6-button player and the digital audio player —

Ok, I was writing this and hacking along simultaneously and I would like to let you know that IT WORKS. You pick up the phone, songs play. You put it down, they stop. REPEAT AD NAUSEUM.

So now that is left is:
1) Power source this guy!
2) Get the handset to work
3) Put it all back inside the telephone

WHAT A GOOD NIGHT. Pictures to follow, and more narrative.

So it’s about one million inches of snow on the ground and I was coming back from a party. And it is one million more inches coming from the sky, and my friend is cold and I’m cold and she’s cranky and I’m cranky, and by luck we happen on the most transportational of Brooklyn’s black market economies, that of the gypsy cab. And I have never been so happy in my life.

So we’re driving along, we’re making awkward conversation, he drops my friend as close as he can get her and then he wants to know if she is my girlfriend.

No, she’s not. And no, I don’t want to get in a bed and hold her and no, I don’t care how nice she is and no, she’s not my girlfriend and no, I don’t have a boyfriend, and no, I don’t want one and no, I don’t want you to be my friend and no, cab driver, no, I don’t want to keep talking about this.

I got out a few blocks early and walked.

I really think hard about encounters like this. I think everyone who is at all female-appearing has had about 100 of them. I get so annoyed: I just don’t want to talk about it.

But you know, this shit is raced, right. I am working across a cultural divide, a language divide, and I am not unaware of the fact that it is me, a white woman, and the cab driver, a black, immigrant man. We come from different cultures and at the end of the day I really want to be sure before I consign this guy to the heap of another fucking jerk who wants to talk about why it is I don’t have a boyfriend.

Am I missing something in the language? Am I missing some nuance of translation? I make this assumption that when he asks if I want an African man for a friend, he is not saying he wants to come over and play Scrabble. This assumption is based on patriarchy and my experience being sexually harassed by dudes, and most often — I mean, it’s true — dudes of color. But what of it is also based on my inappropriate assumptions? Am I assuming too quickly it’s sexual? What of it is based on some sort of notion that I ought to say no, that I don’t want to “do that.”

I know people who have said yes — who have done it with their cab drivers, a couple of different people — and part of me is unsure why I just automatically assume I will not be one of those people. Sure, it is unsolicited, but there are other unsolicited sexual offers I would be fine with. What’s the difference?

Part of it IS a raced idea of gender and my own need to self-protect. It is this idea that there are MEN OUT THERE, many of whom are men of color, who WANT INTO MY KNICKERS and I have to keep them out. Part of it is the idea that nice (white) girls — even nice (white) queer girls like me, nice (white) queer gender weirdos like me, all of it — just don’t say yes to men who solicit them and certainly extra not if that man is your Guinean cab driver.

Part of it is genuine annoyance when I really, really don’t want to deal with having to say no to a question I don’t want, and I feel like there is something really honest and true about being tired of the patriarchal ways in which men think they can ask about the things that happen in my underpants, or invite themselves in. But it seems so shortsighted to ignore the ways in which this is also raced, and the ways in which I am assuming the worst. It is not like he was physically threatening me, or talking about me in a vulgar way. What if he did just want a friend? Or if he did want to sleep with me? Is that necessarily, and automatically so bad?

Lately I have been having 100 conversations about fear and gender. Or more accurately, about the ways in which I police myself and my friends police themselves in order to feel “safe.” I walk down the street and I make assumptions about men based on the ways in which I anticipate the threat of violence, and those assumptions are absolutely raced. Growing up a white girl means being worried about who might take advantage of you.

And I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to keep doing this math of danger but it’s math I have had a beast of a time unlearning. I wonder if I am taking on too much of his bad behavior here, and I mean that as a real question: am I implicating myself in someone else’s bad behavior? But is it ever really as simple as calling someone a douchebag and moving on?

I really want to know how other people think about these intersections, especially other people who get harassed in cabs regularly. I need another point of view (or 5, or 10) to figure this out.

So I was on this scrapyard trip last month. It was amazing. It is really worth its own business. But one of the things I found was this phone:

I dug it out of the side of a hill of garbage. This hill, I think:

And as I was trying to decide what to do with it, I thought, of course I know what I want to do with it: I want it to tell secrets. I want you to be able to pick up the phone and hear a secret.

And off I went.

The basic idea is this: inside of the phone is an Arduino — a programmable microcontroller — running a WaveShield (which allows the Arduino to play sound off an SD card.) The hook switch in the phone would be an input to the Arduino, and when it is up (when the switch is closed) the Arduino would play a sound file through the speaker in the handset that plugs into the WaveShield’s 3.5mm output. EASY PEASE, RIGHT?

I mean, maybe to some of the l337 h@xxorz, it is. But this is my first major project with the Arduino, or with electricity and circuitry for that matter, and I am having to, to put it lightly, learn as I go.

Doing this meant breaking this down into many, many steps on a couple of tracks.
ARIEL’S TELEPHONE EDUCATION

As you can imagine, I have been learning a lot, starting with LadyAda’s Arduino tutorials, which got me through button presses pretty well (not perfectly.) I at least have some idea of how I might go about working a button to do something generally speaking.

From there, it was off building the WaveShield, which totally (miraculously) worked, including having to go buy a capacitor with the right level of capacitance, which meant learning wtf that meant and then going to the RadioShack and hoping that it would work even if the voltage (again, wtf does that mean?!) was higher (guess what? it does! hey thanks, capacitor substitution guide!)

Then, having exhausted my programming muscles on buttons and LEDs, I turned to the telephone, which is the bulk of this post. Did you know taking apart a telephone is actually really interesting?

Here are some pictures:

But here’s the real deal, friends: MAKING THE PHONE WORK AS A SWITCH. I did it, thanks to my SparkleLabs DIY electronics kit, this circuit diagram (caution, launches a .pdf) I found on the internet for the circuit board of the phone I am working with (dear the internet, thank you), and a lot of good old fashioned trial and error.

I do not feel like making a circuit diagram right now — I will for the final — so here is what happens:
5v power to the telephone positive line (the tip line)
positive connects through the hook switch to another line
that line to a 220v resistor to an LED to ground

and VOILA Y’ALL VOILA:

Why is it so exciting to have an LED that turns off when I hit the hook switch? Basically, it solves one of my huge problems: can I get the hook switch to work for me? I have some things to work with still, but this means the phone will talk to a circuit that I built. From here, the next big problem is getting the hook switch to talk to the Arduino, something I will do via the prototyping shield; concurrently, I have to start figuring out how to get the WaveShield to hook to a breadboard, 1, and 2, accept input from that breadboard. If I can do those two things, and I think I can, it is all gravy from here on out — just reapplying the same concepts.

Also, side project: following these instructions to get the handset to a 3.5mm. That looks easy, though.

So, in sum:
ARIEL’S TELEPHONE EDUCATION

I am on the road right now, which means that I am spending my days in the car or on site for art — building shit, sorting shit, making shit, or driving through the tiny winding backroads of the southern midwest. It is an amazing change of pace from my day-to-day life in NYC, where I am a fundraising professional(tm) and I spend my days crafting emails just so and worrying about attribute fields in the database and I have to cram all my artmaking, socializing, personal care time, and “other” into my aterwork hours, which are always (it feels) under fire from the mountain of work I am handed at all times.

In the land of non-profit fundraising during a recession economy (sorry, economists, I’m not buying it), there is an enormous amount of energy put into trying to figure out exactly what we need to be doing. Do we need to be using Facebook? How? Will it monetize? How many eblasts are too many eblasts? How long should your subject line be? How do you get people to open? How does direct mail play into your online strategy? And (the subject of this): do we need to be Twittering?

Just before this trip, I went to a conference about fundraising and fundraising systems. Twitter was on FIRE at that conference — just click here to see what I mean — by the end I was joking I needed Twitter detox. I also went to sessions about Twitter, and how to do it “right”: conversate don’t shout; use short funny links; talk to other people on Twitter and link to them; use twitter metrics to figure out what other people are saying and how to join them in the conversation. These are how you “succeed” at Twitter, which no one actually really defined beyond “get more followers,” as if more followers is a good thing in and of itself.

So I love Twitter. I love Twitter because I like the challenge of being pithy in only 140 characters. But as I am on the road and able to check it only sporadically — when I am not working actively, when my hands are clean, when I am in a city large enough to connect on my phone or when I am staying somewhere with wireless internet and nothing better to do — I have to say, I am getting my detox. I go back now and I skim through and the signal to noise ratio is just astounding. I like the people that I tweet with, and I have some interesting exchanges, but I find myself sitting here wondering exactly what it is, aside from some loose connections with folks, that makes Twitter worthwhile. Would I go out to dinner with some of my Tweeple? I can ask them questions, which is useful, but that seems to only work if I have enough people to ask, and I do not want to just go around adding people for the sake of adding them. How does Twitter work in my life — professionally, personally, artistically?

See, back in NYC my life is completely unmanageable. I have a lot of confusion about what and how to spend my time, and I never have enough time to do the things I want. I just read this article about time management, and the thesis was basically “do only the things that get you where you want to go, relentlessly say no to everything else, and you will make miracles.” It is a seductive pose right now, especially as I am on the road and getting to be monofocal about the single thing I love the most. I want to go back home and clean out the clutter so I can do my job well, finish my job, and go to my other work. This feels challenging, especially since — as mentioned — the fundraising world is cluttered with a lot of noise as we all try to figure out how on earth we can do the work of bringing resources to the movements and concerns we care about. And then, of course, there is the other question: will Twitter and Facebook bring me better audiences for my art? For the other things I do?

I notice a trend between how often I post on FB, or how often I tweet, and how often people reply to me. Those rules hold true: people like conversers more than they like shouters, and frequency of participation means I am more likely to be seen in the endless and overwhelming stream. But what is this getting me? Is it really getting me more social connections — maybe. But I wonder: if the answer is no, it is because I am not using my best practices, or thanking the people who RT (that’s retweet) me — or is it because it just isn’t the place to make real connections? My real social connections allow for the fact that maybe I can’t get back to you immediately, or I might need you to repeat something. Are Twitter relationships so fragile that they need this much tending?

I am skeptical of a set of best practices that require spending all my time on Twitter. I am skeptical of how to make these things people recommend for Twitter etiquette workable in my life, a life that frankly does not need any more time at a computer doing work that is not the work I want to do.

So, artists: how do you use twitter? So, everyone: what are the material benefits you have gotten from twitter? Tell me about how you cultivate your twitter audience and how you feel it benefits and supports your life.

Now, excuse me: I have to tweet this.

So I am travelling for work right now, at this huge conference that honestly has been feeling daunting. I am used to movement conferences with hoodies and t shirts, not dress conferences with prime rib and art installations. It’s been ridiculous.

The best way to cope with this, of course, is to do what my people have done best for years: find the gay mafia. It took me all day Monday, but finally I found a few homosexual men to say hello to and trade conference tips. I am in a pretty lucky place for this conference, in that talking about my job requires me to be pretty out (“we are a social justice foundation that supports lgbti groups working for social change”), and I am rather visible in the context of fundraising fashion. So I made some homo man friends, and they’ve hooked me up: getting me into the fancy reception, having fun playing erotic photo hunt, and turning me on to something I never would have considered: conference ass.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, thanks to the 21st century, I bring you Craigslist.

See, this conference is huge. I am not sure how many people are here but let’s just say a crapload. We are a huge block of people in each of three or four hotels, each of which I believe sold out their conference space. And evidently, say the faggeaux, there are some folks who are using craigslist to see if they can’t take better advantage of their large hotel bed and clean hotel sheets than, say, I am.

Craigslist does this thing where links expire. So rather than linking, I am going to quote. I also have some difficulties about what happens when you expose secret cultures to the light of day, even when the light of day is still the relatively private venue of this blog; sorry pals. You’ll just have to trust me on this.

Here we go: the secret underbelly of the conference I will not name. (Why blow up someone’s spot?):

Laid back visitor to char. Looking for Jo buddy. Can host or travel. Role play…Jo/oral. Hit me back with stats and info about yourself. Glwm/5′11/160#

MWM, 42 in town Monday night for one night. In hotel by outlet mall and looking to have some man on man fun later that night. 5′10”, blue eyes, brown hair, hairy chest and 165. Looking for a wm my age or younger. Into body contact, sucking, nipple play and if chemistry is good, there will be more. If interested send me your stats and if you have one, a picture. Looking for after 8 pm monday night.

you needing 3 your 3 cock sucked,,,,,6,,,,like to 3 blow a 1 load 2 all over 3 my 1 chest,,,3,,,,oral bear type 6 botom here,,,,,msg me

white male here wanting your load, now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Any hot men out there vgl 5′9″165 hairy pecs legs, hit me up

Masculine, fit, discreet professional visiting on business… like to meet similar for mutual play and fun…. discreet, masculine, fit only…five feet nine inches 42chest32waist… get into hot, man to man, body contact, stroking, kissing, sucking, rimming if clean… ddf here and expect the same…Reply with stats, interests, and pic…. discreet and laid back is given and expected… just two buddies having fun….

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please note that this is not even opening the Adam4Adam bucket.

So this conference I have been at is — how do you put it — straight. Really straight. Not intensely overbearingly straight, but really straight. It’s a lot of huge organizations, development staff is generally speaking somewhat more conservative…you get the gist. I have felt fine at it, but definitely like something of an outlier. And here I come to find that there is an underbelly of gay sex pulsing right below my fingertips (figuratively speaking.) Some of these ads were at my very hotel – AS WE SPEAK there could be gays fucking. It thrills the voyeur in me that some of the men I might ride down in the elevator with are straightening their tie because it got loose sucking cock.

I’m not one of those people who gets mad that these guys are being discreet/not all identifying as gay. I know, I know, OUT PROUD WELL ENDOWED, it’s almost 2010, come out come out wherever you are. I don’t think you have to identify as gay to have gay sex and I can understand how some folks who might want to identify as gay just don’t feel like they can make the hard choices that can sometimes require. It’s not on me to dictate how someone else lives their life. (Provided they aren’t being anti-gay hypocrites — I’m looking at you, Larry Craig.) I am comforted, though, by knowing that underneath this veneer of professional professional suit suit suit, there are real people too.

Last night my mom called me again (like she does sometimes) totally out of her mind (like she is sometimes.) I was at an event for high-level clients that I snuck into thanks to the gay mafia, and I answered probably — to be honest — because I had had too much to drink. And as she started wailing and gnashing her teeth and all this, all I could think was dear god, not HERE. Not here in professional land where we’re all FINE and OKAY and GOOD THANKS. Not here while I’m wearing a jacket and meeting people. Everyone at these conferences is so FINE and OKAY and GOOD THANKS — maybe we’re tired, but with the eyeroll and shrug that means “that’s just because I am so busy and important and you know, the last time I wasn’t tired was 1993.” Being a professional means pretending you don’t have an animal self. The MLA had a panel on conference sex, and it is hard to find other written references but I know people joke about it — I just have to admit that I haven’t seen it. (Maybe I don’t know what it looks like when straight people are cruising each other for a little discreet fun?)

So I am comforted that something as public as Craigslist is blowing up my illusions of everyone as highly slick professionals at all times. I am comforted by the reminder that we are all people under our suits and collared shirts. I am comforted by the reminder that things are not what they seem, and especially that this conference is not as cleanly heterosexual as it appears. I hope all those ads got it on — maybe with each other — maybe in the room next to mine. Here in the South, where I have been expecting to be marginalized, I have to remember that things are often queerer than they seem.

I am writing to you from the floor of the 2009 Blackbaud Conference for Non-Profits. I am here as the representative for my job; at my job, I am officially the development associate but I am functionally the database manager. I came into this job a year and a half ago, a promotion from the administrative assistant. My only Raiser’s Edge experience was restarting the server a couple of times when the previous database administrator — the membership coordinator, now departed — needed me to hit reset.

In the past year and a half we have gone from a database that did not function to a database that is actually almost reliable. We have a gift coding system that is functional, predictable, and straightforward. We can reconcile with Fiscal — our October numbers reconciled out of the box. We can pull reports predictably and we can trust the numbers as they appear; we can make mailing lists that routinely exclude the people they need to exclude; we have policies and procedures in place for a variety of challenges; we have consistent styles in our database; we can process heads of households correctly; we have set reports we use and refresh every single time so that we know we are looking at the same thing. In short, the past year and a half has been some kind of database revolution, and at the helm of it has been little old me, a week of RE Essentials, 113 calls to Blackbaud Support over the past year (I called to count!), Google, common sense, and occasional professional assistance from a consultant.

I am so proud of this work.

But here I am now, at this conference, this huge conference with thousands of people, and all I can see is how far we have to go. I am one of many people here who must be the only person here from my organization — I am only here, in fact, because I won a registration — and rather than seeing all the possibilities, at this moment I am challenged by how far we have to go. Our big goal for our next appeal is to segment our list by giving level more finely than major donor vs. house donor — our big goal for our next appeal (which I anticipate won’t be more than 1500 pieces or so) is to have an actual targeted and numeric ask. For those of you who don’t do much direct marketing, this is such a basic step that I am actually unsure I can find a metaphor to adequately explain how basic it is.

So I am trying to find all the sessions that talk about things like “how to build maintenance routines for the first time” or “how to use query to really kick ass at that mailing” — and that information is here. I wish there was a track that was “Raiser’s Edge for tiny organizations” or perhaps “Help! I inherited this busted-ass database! What do I do first? What do I do second?” I can’t use tricks in RE 7.91 because we can’t upgrade until we figure out how to get PCI compliant, which we are doing but it’s slow. We looked at using NetCommunity or Sphere for our online work but it was just so expensive — thousands of dollars more than the other competitors — that we decided to forgo it and are cobbling together something we can do ourselves out of Democracy in Action, which we STILL might drop in favor of CiviCRM. This is a cross between a user conference and a sales event, which I knew going in but it makes me wish there was more overt discussion of these concerns and what non-Blackbaud based solutions might actually make more sense for some organizations, especially organizations like mine.

Of course, at a conference put on by the scion of nonprofit donor databases, the thesis will be that more information is always better and more analysis is better and the best way is using our tools. Segment your list and the money will come in! Track what your clients are doing, add these actions to the telethon script, and watch your donations soar! This is all so obvious that it is almost without comment; I am just frustrated because I know I am not here able to sign a contract and start my brave new world of metric-driven, well-staffed, scientific fundraising.

It is funny, because I look around this conference floor at all of these INCREDIBLY ESSENTIAL! TIME SAVING! COST-EFFICIENT! services people want to sell me, and I can feel that little voice at me: how on earth can we possibly raise money if we are still not 100% sure we are capturing all of our major donors all the time? How on earth can we possibly raise money if we are writing an appeal letter with only one ask paragraph for everyone? If we don’t have action tracks? Data enrichment?

Oh right: the strength of the work. The people who we partner with to change the world. All these systems will make us better, but we have made it happen anyways.

In our grantmaking and in our other programs, we are such firm believers that change takes time — justice is incremental and changing hearts and minds is a fight we are in for the long haul. I really just want a database revolution right now. But we are doing the work of the database revolution — beginning to use analytics. Making those 113 phone calls. Sending emails. The exports and imports. This stuff takes time and I am trying to remember that rather than feel inadequate that we have not already reached database nirvana.

Maybe I will take it on myself to twitter a revolution and make a meetup for people who need that small shop talk. Maybe I will take copious notes and make an action plan, distill the theory of what we could do from the practice of all of these more expensive branded solutions. There is something to be said for being scrappy, after all; there is something to be said for the innovation of need.

So i am sitting on st. mark’s place waiting for my friend and i am watching the parade: nyu, nyu, punk, square, nyu, neighborhood, tourist, tourist, impeccable faggot with round glasses and a beret and pointy-toe sneakers, tourist, punk.

and so far i have only seen 2 fat people, and they looked – at first – so much more poorly dressed to me. She was in black exercise pants that were too short, and a tank top layered under a purple shirt. Black sneakers, unexciting. he was wearing a flannel shirt and normal cut too-light jeans and i didn’t think to look at his shoes because i was too busy judging, one, and realizing i was judging, two.

I include myself when i say: why do i hold fat people to such a high standard of appearance? because i am watching the people and for every nyu fashionista there are plenty of sloppy students wearing exactly what those kids were wearing. and i can totally pick – “but her pants! but his jeans!” – but i’m obfuscating.

bc i am facing lately my own intense fatphobia. i am facing the standards i hold myself to and how ridiculous they are. no one looks perfect all the time, and no one should have to, and frankly it’s funny to me that an outfit that would look sloppy-chic on a skinny person instead looks sloppy, to me, on a fat one.

i am lucky to run in a world with many paragons of fatshion crossing through it. i am lucky to live in a world where i know i am bringing the garbage and that my pov is actually not correct at all. i can tell myself i just want to run after her and be like “hey! You should find pants that are long enough! Cuter sneakers!” because i love fashion, but let’s be real, in a liberated world it wouldn’t even matter if she was so sloppy or not.

i am thinking abt this in relation to gender presentation, too; in relation to how some people don’t care about fashion. How i need to learn those are valid choices too, not to judge, just to accept and let people be. Some genders aren’t on the same axes as mine; some people don’t care about pocket squares. I am neurotic abt fashion details in part bc of my own fatphobia; in part bc i just like it. Not everyone cares so much, and that’s fine – even healthy – it just challenges my own ability to be accepting. That’s on me, not the people who pass me. Sometimes – at least, they tell me – it’s ok to just put on some yoga pants and get on with your life.

I am in Springfield attending to my grandma’s death. She died Monday; she was buried yesterday at 2pm. Everyone is home, mostly; not me, not my dad, not his brother, not my cousin.

And so my grandma was buried and eulogized, and now I hope she is off somewhere big enough to hold her. There are meetings after a death, and there is eating, and there is sitting and grieving. And I got restless, and so – I am looking at art again, this time at the Springfield Museum of Art.

Everyone keeps saying my grandma was a lady before her time. She started businesses and she ran things and she was done up just right. She acted. She went to New York and took her boys to shows. She loved the theater. She grew up in a big city – St. Louis – and I wonder how she ever dealt with Springfield, MO.

This is what she did – she brought Broadway to Springfield with the Broadway Performance League, which she helped found. She started and ran businesses, a breast cancer survivor’s organization, a diet program. She wowed people. This is how they talk about her: dropping their head, shaking it. “She was quite a woman,” the real estate man said, “The first women’s libber I met, even before they had women’s libbers.”

The Springfield Art Museum is not the art museum I have grown used to. There is an exhibit of paintings about the circus that are largely big romantic wistful oils of clowns putting on their makeup. There is a lot here, but it’s jumbled and without context. I want to talk to the curator about how they put it together but I worry it would sound judgemental.

I want things to shine: a set of oil pastel tromp l’oeils that look like photographs. A Ben Shahn original. I turned the corner and there was a set of Warhol’s soup cans. I want this art to have context and definition, not just be jumbled together. I don’t mind doing the work but I want to see the story. There is so much i don’t know about art – way more than I do know, I don’t even know if I am spelling Shahn’s name right- and I can do the work for Ben Shahn but not all these other people.

I think my grandma, if she is paying attention, is probably glad I’m back at the museum. I think she is probably frustrated too about this exhibit and the ways in which neither of us can fix it. If I take one thing from all of this, it is that living boldly, like my grandma, is a great idea.

There is a lot more to be said, but I have to finish looking at art.