Tiny Jean Jackets Everywhere Twitching

refusing to 'do our jobs'

2011-11-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

i'm really tired of people questioning the legitimacy of #occupy protesters based on whether or not they have "jobs." raising, feeding, housing, transporting, entertaining, healing, and teaching people, and looking out for the wellbeing of other living and non-living beings are "jobs" that tend to be poorly paid when they are paid at all. moving around electronic sums of capital may be a way of making money, but it is of no social and ecological value. inventing new (and legal) technologies of stealing working people's money by getting them to invest everything they have into loans for their primary residences, then taking that, then taking their public money, and otherwise doing the "work" of making sure states are designed to function and intervene on your behalf, is not a "job." people should not be telling others developing capacities for direct democratic engagement to get jobs. they should tell the people on wall street to get jobs.

i lost two public sector jobs in late 2010/early 2011. one building social support with and connecting homeless lgbt youth with substance abuse treatment and another in youth and community led hiv prevention initiatives. those programs just don't exist now and so i worked unpaid in many of the same capacities through last july. i really resent the ongoing question about employment status, since its so clear that part of what is being protested is that there is no correlation between how to be ethical or socially useful and how to get paid in this society and that people are upset about unemployment! i'm so tired of armchair critics writing about how there is no nuanced economic analysis at play in the protests. all people are revealing is how their sense of political and social possibilities have been scorched and shriveled by the blazing sun of neo-liberal anti-thought and collapsed in on themselves in a kind of rigid grammatical daisy chain that will eat itself and the rest of the earth alive before stopping to consider that we might not have a ton of time left on this planet and that maybe there are possibilities for living and valuing life outside of a nearly self-willing system that has grown into a kind of golem stalking the landscape and extracting its fuel in surplus and human and non-human misery. i mean, i don't mean to get really crimethinc here, i'm just saying, we really need to shift the terms of debate and start talking really critically about capital. if we are all 'just doing our jobs,' no wonder the idea of people not having jobs is so scary. let's just really expand and blow up the idea of what it means to not do our jobs, okay?

2011-06-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

taking care of business in the gay bay, staying one step ahead of the yelp-pocalypse.

2011-04-09T17:39:00.001-07:00

a lot is up for me right now. this city and the rest of it.

one. my girlfriend, who is a high school teacher is dealing with some intense collisions between homophobia and racism staged through a shit-show of multiculturalized admin fumbles that assume a liberal tolerance of homo life but not without re-amassing racist assumptions, compounded through a general abdication of administrative responsibility that relocates the onus of dealing with bullshit onto basically, the queer dealing with homophobia. without being able to say too much about this, it's just really infuriating to watch white admin treat homophobia among staff of color as anachronistic, and the views and actions of people of color as external to the liberal, whitened, multiculturalism of an institution and its progress rather than dealing in a way remotely becoming of their salaries. the good news? my gf has serious skills and dedication and worked with all involved to reconcile this in a way that is accountable to her students, herself, and the people she works with, and manages to locate overcoming homophobia somewhere on the terrain of shared commitments to justice rather than alienating, liberal progress narratives.

two. i’ve been spending some time sorting through effects and responses with a friend who was trans-bashed in the mission last week. while on the one, the ability of this friend to politicize and direct responses, locate healing and transformation in a world while at the same time not forgetting herself and her own needs is teaching me a lot by example. at the same time, i am feeling aware of the eagerness of a gay-stablishment to make an example of the city’s competent application of anti-hate law enforcement strategies that can locate all problems of queer safety with a few, easily pathologized and criminalized bad characters without lending acknowledgement of the (compounding) issues that put queers--no less trans women--at risk, starting with the same increasing criminalization and policing. hello, sit/lie? yet, i’m realizing that no great ideas about community-determined responses as alternatives to state responses to violence seem to capture the fact that sometimes the state just responds without request, and with serious constraining effects on our ability to determine our own responses. btw, for info about supporting this friend, check here.

three. i’ve been looking for apartments. in the mission district, where i’ve lived for the last five years. my own race and class privilege, as well as having been pretty stable in an apartment with good neighbor and landlord relations for several years, have insulated me from the rental-market side of the ongoing epic of san francisco becoming a sanctuary city for the rich. the long and short of it is: we've been rejected for lots of apartments and haven't moved. maybe this isn’t so strange, but as someone who has never offered to lay down so much for rent, i really had no idea how cut-throat this process was, or that when one actually agrees to pay what they ask and qualifies, that you can still wind up without an apartment again and again.

this is generally how the terrifying process has gone so far: mercury willing, receive craigslist and padmapper alerts through a certain mobile apple device all day. read lots of ads that note their preferred proximity to google shuttles and new restaurants. call all decently affordable options immediately. show up at odd times for open houses lasting 15 minutes alongside a dozen other people and turn in exhaustive printed portfolios that include everything but a copy of our birth certificates. cringe as all white, all straight (no exaggeration) couples and dot-com workers show off offer letters from pay pal, apple, google, and zynga, tell their love-at-first sight stories from undergrad days at elite colleges, and talk endlessly about their appreciation for the sf 'cultural scene' to prospective landlords. get rejected again and again and feel ambivalent slash awful over compounding circumstances of who is already not among these white, professional-class, childless couples (we are among these) and being the only queer couple slash being women who work in the public sector and don’t make dot-com male-earner wages and want to live in a neighborhood where we work with young people slash that queer women have lived in for some thirty to forty years but realizing instead we are getting rejected for apartments that have no heat.

it is producing some intense ambivalence about being here for me. i feel super connected to this city, politically invested, involved in the lives of young people i work with, and able to think experimental queer adulthoods (i have earthquake plans that include people a gay mini-generation younger). i want to live here (why i don’t move back to oakland is a whole separate reflection). on the other, the apartment hunting and my recent practice of coffee shop studying alongside start-up workers have left me ultra-aware of how this city is increasingly (okay, its been going on for a minute) designed for this set of people that move through the world as though they were constructing one endless, giant, offensive yelp review. (munira sent me a really good example of this today re: the terrifying and amazing Lemi Ponifasio dance performance we saw on thursday). there’s a lot to love, but i can’t help but sometimes look around, survey the damage, and think, “shit is hitting the fan, and i’m going to be stuck alongside people whose worldly relations function like a yelp review? am i sure this is this a good idea?”

i suppose part of what commitment looks like is intervening on the same evaluative and consumptive impulses by sticking around for what needs to be done. which is why i’m feeling inspired these days by long time queer activists like tommi mecca, who after so many years of seeing the remaking/dismantling of a queer politic in this city are still out there, working for housing justice, mobilizing folks, and building meaningful connections with young people.

which brings me to four. the twitter deal. a bunch of folks have already spoken well to this being a queer issue as it literally declares a redevelopment zone for new businesses to settle tax-free in the tenderloin, home to so many residential hotels--housing, among other people, lots of queer seniors and poor trans people. worse, this deal was cut by some of among the city’s most progressive supervisors, scared into a twitter tax break by the company’s threat to pull out of the city on account of not being able to justify the expense of payroll taxes. zynga also threatened to do the same. this is a tax break that will cost the city tens of millions of dollars. like, neoliberalism is so totally pervasive that even some of the most progressive in city government can’t imagine anything better in this moment than massive trickle down schemes that rob the city and displace residents of the last affordable neighborhood with even more dot-com employees guided by mobile devices towards the holy grail of good cocktails.

and, long as i've been sitting on this post, five, six, seven, eight: nursing hip bruises from a cop confrontation following an attempted banner drop in support of the far-too-long-closed queer youth space at the eureka valley rec center at the castro "townhall," which was actually more like watching 15 (all male) talking heads explain their revenue shortages for 2 hours....high stakes kinda epic confrontation with a queer basher at a crowded party...the possible closure of longtime leatherbar, the eagle, in exchange for some condos...and some hardship over the (possible) virtual-to-actual transitions of hypothetical babies that helped land april an eighth plague of (internalized, in this case) homophobia.

finally, i’m working on a group project at school that is really challenging me to carve out space to talk about the political consequences and possibilities of the lives we live without dismissing the political realities and histories that form those lives in the first place. realizing that even though we may be able to trace the intersections in the lines of power that criss cross, perpendicularize, and paralell in their pummeling of varied and related ‘us’es' that it does not mean we always know what to say to each other about this when we try.

strictly hard.

2010-10-25T01:22:00.000-07:00

It Gets Better-ment

2010-10-06T00:34:00.000-07:00

The queer youth suicides this month have been a serious cause for reflection. For sure, they’ve been an occasion for many of us to look at the violences and despair we’ve survived, especially as once young people lacking any meaningful safety net. Probably the best known response to the suicides this month has been Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign. I certainly see the effort of a huge number of adults that have made videos for the campaign as an attempt to reach out to the unknown and inaccessible not-yet-here-queer youth that seem to only become visible once they show up in a news article about suicide. The “It Gets Better” videos mean to let these youth know that they are not alone, and that homophobia and transphobia are sometimes survivable.

As I considered making one of these videos, these questions came to mind: What is it, exactly, that we hope to accomplish by making videos detailing our own histories of violence and harassment, especially when the intended audience already well knows of these? Do we, as adults, still feel on some level alone and unable to effect these experiences beyond the retelling? What is the role of internalized homophobia in convincing us that we do not have real capacity to take care of people, maybe even people younger than us?

I understand that queer lives are often structured in such a way that we usually don’t know tons of much older or younger folks. This by no means means that we don’t otherwise have the power to make changes in the world that make sexual and gendered difference more livable, and that when we consider how to do this, that young people should not be at the center of this question. And so, I have a suggestion: let’s not simply view the loss of these lives as a chance to remember all we’ve been through. Let’s use that very remembering as a chance to reconnect with a sense of all the work that still needs to be done in the world, and that we have the means to do.

Much of the “It Gets Better” campaign seems to assume all will be well if LGBTQ youth stick it out long enough to leave their communities of origin. In other words, safety will become available when a young person has the means to move to a city or neighborhood with a large LGBTQ population and can reorganize his/her/their/zir life on the basis of an LGBTQ identity, trumping ties to family, community, and place--an exchange that might turn out to have unreasonably high costs to youth of color and immigrant youth. It is presumptuous that an LGBTQ identity should or will become the organizing principal of every LGBTQ person’s life. Even as I am grateful for a life in the queer cultural and political spaces of San Francisco, I believe there are losses that accompany such a shift.

And how should these young people find the means to live apart from the support of their families? Besides rising unemployment, the last few years in California have seen a massive defunding of state-funded higher education. The number of eligible high school graduates in the state getting accepted to the CSU and UC system is falling, as out of state admissions rise. Poor, working class, and some middle class youth who are admitted may find their families cannot afford the new tuition hikes. LGBTQ youth who lack family support are not considered for independent financial aid for six years after high school graduation. And after the transfer of 800 billion dollars of tax payer aid to wall street, there is no serious relief planned for the unmanageable student debt that saddles so many young people post-college.

For those LGBTQ youth who do come to San Francisco, the video campaign’s assumed promised land, they may find a city with no dedicated LGBT-safe shelter, an LGBT Community Center with no dedicated youth space and a youth program which only recently avoided a 100% budget cut, a Castro recreation center which began charging fees for use of the dedicated youth drop-in space, a mayor that can imagine nothing better to do with young people with no place to go than to criminalize them for being on public sidewalks, and a Castro business sector ready to elect a supervisor that supports the same Sit/Lie ordinance.

What I mean to point out, is that the conditions in which “things got better” for some LGBTQ adults in the video campaign have changed, even as they never applied to everyone. What I also mean to say, though, is that there are things that can be done. Things we can do to “make it better.” And that many of these things are not only about reaching out to the individual youth who might refer to youtube in a moment of desperation (though even after all I’ve said, that’s a fine start). Many of the things we can do involve taking seriously the role of adults in making a more livable world for young people and building youth capacity in this regard. This would include prioritizing access to public education, stopping increasing criminalization of youth, seeing the institution of anti-bullying curriculum (not criminalization), and supporting spaces for LGBTQ youth to build relationships, and understanding these as high priority LGBTQ issues.

Sit/Lie: http://www.standagainstsitlie.org/
Questions about the youth recreation campaign: adele.c2p@gmail.com
Questions about LGBTQ shelter project: Tommi at Housing Rights Committee

From the lost files of Portland hipster weeklies:

2010-08-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

Underdogging: A Tale of Bittersweet Bicycle Revenge

wire less.

2010-08-11T22:21:00.000-07:00

Today I'm thinking about cords and cordlessness.

birthday week.

2010-06-05T02:08:00.000-07:00

tonight i'm thinking about loose grips. holding lightly. kid gloves with the world and its coming. camp as beyond orientation; as roaming, placeless, sincere appreciation for being within and alongside. queer not as orientation, or location but as a light-holding and regard of now-ness, memory, objects, bodies. thinking about how i was taught growing up the importance of a having a 'good' handshake, a firm handshake. to look in the eye. to grip tightly. locate. this symbol of erasing history so equals can meet. equals who know how to give a good handshake. if we took each other's hands loosely, what would we be leaving space for?

Pastry Jaunte: A Celebration of the Precious and the Perverse

2010-05-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

Chrysaora fuscescens

2009-08-05T01:50:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I might lost myself for a bit while watching some male seahorses tether themselves to seaweed fronds and each other, nuzzling their very pregnant bellies together. But for the most part, I was able to keep my wits about me until I came upon the lit tank of Pacific Sea Nettles.

I love jellyfish. As I knelt inches from the glass, watching their pulsing and undulating forms move through my field of vision, I began to feel as though my heart was filling with a mysterious fluid and beginning a slow rise up through my throat. I began to drown from the inside out.

I knelt there for so long that one of my shoes broke. I had the vague sense at some point that it would be good idea for me to leave, but didn’t feel I had any command over the strange mammalian, land-dwelling body that I found surrounding me.

As I began to breathe myself back, I felt at once a deep sense of belonging to the earth and also a profound sense of being alien, ethereal. What were the odds that I would get such a chance—to inhabit this place—in this way—and alongside such creatures? I watched the jellyfish and understood that they were very much doing their job of performing the curious and delicate mystery of being alive on this planet. And this, in turn, made me want to do my respective job on the other side of the glass just as beautifully.

To be of the earth and to be human is an incidence so rare, so random, so fragile, and so precious that it warrants only one possible response from us: to do it well.

Closet Jock Steps Out

2009-08-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

I feel in some strange respect that today was the day I made final peace with my own inner jock. If there is no other way to know for sure, I am going to openly write here about my deepest darkest secret-jock secret, which is my love of the indoor rock climbing gym.

Perhaps it’s become a little easier with age. When I first moved to the Bay Area, my current roommate and I occasionally fronted to friends we ran into on weekends that we had just woken up—like normal gays in their early twenties would have—rather than admitting that already by lunchtime we had woken to consume something made in a champion juicer and ridden bikes for several hours in the Oakland hills.

When my roommate and I began regularly wearing bike shorts, we could not longer pretend we were some bike punks who had decided to meander around a bit beyond our point to point business. Then we moved in together and developed a special “camping crate” that would be ready to go at 5pm on Fridays, and finally fully embraced the title of ‘weekend warriors,’ if only privately.

These days it’s hard to predict what lefty or post-punk queer or random hipster I might run into in a spinning class. My secret-jock life has been not-so-secret for a long time, partly because I do a poor job of concealing it, but also because the juice that makes for a secret expires as my peers begin to think more about self-care strategies in their own lives.

So today when this woman asked to interview me about my membership at the rock gym for her cultural anthropology class, I wonder why I found myself prefacing every response I gave her with some disclaimer about being totally liminal to the culture of the climbing gym. The fact was, I had woken up at 8am on a weekend to “beat the crowd” at the climbing gym. More importantly, this is far from extraordinary in my life. So why did I find myself explaining my own misgivings with my secret sporty side to a random woman who already was so excited about the rock climbing gym that she felt compelled to do some sort of bizarre research project on it?

The whole thing is so absurd, I can only see this strange interview as an opportunity to recognize and perhaps purge some of my own internalized jock-phobia. So to answer one of her questions and come out of the closet:

I own more than one pair of sport-specific footwear. I love indoor rock climbing. And I really love bicycling. They have done nothing but provide me with opportunities for enjoyment, growth, and presence and in return I have refused to acknowledge our bond in other important areas of my life. Worse, I think historically this had to do with a need to disidentify with things that are lesbionic (or otherwise unhip) and this is unacceptable.

I love climbing and bicycling not just for giving me the chance to move my body, but I love them because of what they teach me about my body in relation to the world. Both lend me a new perspective on dimension—on the surfaces of my habitat and the way my body is placed within them and can potentially interact with them.

Rock climbing and bicycling make me highly aware that the world has texture to it, and so fundamentally shift the way I experience what it means to move in the world (I imagine some people feel this way about their iphones). They teach me there is complexity at every scale of observation—that however I try to move through my days here, there is always enough to pay attention to--always things worth noticing and showing up for, fingers outstretched, heart open.

Next, I am going for dual-element sporting. I am going to windsurf. I am super excited and I'm not taking any shit for it.

Underdogging: A Tale of Bittersweet Bicycle Revenge

2009-07-30T23:36:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of bicycle-related postings I plan to do.

I’m not really sure that I believe in revenge. It’s such a vast and tangled mess of wrongdoing we are up in the middle of. I figure we are better off honoring what’s been lost and arriving at more radical visions of justice out of that grief than we are spending our time calculating and meting out precise portions of punishment. I do care a lot, though, about whatever keeps the fight in people, and what that fight looks like, and I think for that reason I have a lot of respect for at least the desire for revenge.

For the most part, when we strike out in singular, uncoordinated acts against someone or something that actually has enough power over our lives to deserve it, it often lands us in more trouble. Revenge isn’t reparations. It isn’t justice. It doesn’t honor what’s been lost, and it doesn’t systematically hold oppressors accountable or particularly change the conditions in which they do wrong.

I do sometimes wonder if there’s a value to symbolic acts of revenge. And if that value is for the person who gets away with it, or for all the people who don’t. Then again, maybe it just makes for a decent story now and again. For your consideration…
----------------------------

When I lived in Portland, I had days where I’d find myself feeling inexcusably bored, uninspired, old, or just like I was forgetting what it meant to live somewhere where the mood-swinging adolescent landscape of the west coast was ready to throw some sort of seismic tantrum and reinvent itself any minute. I always felt this was a good occasion to ride my bicycle up one of the teen acne patches that dot the area in the form of extinct volcanoes in order to see the world below.

Mount Tabor is one of those spots. It is the namesake of a mountain in lower Galilee that is the alleged site of the transfiguration of Christ, the event by which the senses of Christ’s apostles were transformed so they might be able to fully perceive God’s glory. The volcanic cinder cone in Oregon does have giant and artistic uncovered reservoirs carved into its side which house a large part of the city’s water supply. Mostly, though, it functions as a poop-covered off-leash area for southeast Portland dog-walkers and sports a too-grand statue of a dead Oregon newspaper editor.

It is a good spot to ride a bike to. And so it was, that one day in 2002 my housemate Tuesday and I decided to take a picnic there. As we crested the top, we were surprised that instead of the usual yuppies flirting over purebreds, the park was filled with hoards of drunken bike messengers having some sort of drunken race.

As we rounded the corner on our bicycles, surveying for a picnic space that wouldn’t set us on top of littered cans of PBR and fixed gear bicycles, we were spotted by one particularly obnoxious, drunken messenger. Not recognizing us as being of the six female bike messengers in the city at that time, he began screaming a series of sexist epithets at us to get us off the pathway because we were apparently blocking his race by being too slow and female.

After the resulting confrontation, we decided to climb down the hill a ways and picnic away from the brodeo that was happening atop the park. Tuesday and I settled into the tall grass and wondered at how bicycling could be both so totally and fundamentally good for our lives and also regularly force us to contend with such bullshit.

This incident happened at a time in my life when I was particularly fed up by bike dudes. I would have liked to be earning a living as a messenger, but of less than a tenth of the messengers in town at the time were ladies, and every girl I’d known who had gone into the biz had quickly quit. Worse, I was on a racing team with an extremely chauvinistic coach who would intentionally withhold information and resources unless I and other members of the young women’s team performed all kinds of domestic labor like shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundering bike jerseys for the young men’s team in exchange for our coaching.

As Tuesday and I sat discussing our woes, a chocolate lab bounded down the hill and took a shit inappropriately close to our picnic. We looked around and realized how thoroughly surrounded by dog shit we were, and also at once noticed a hearty-looking stick lying next to where we were seated.

I don’t even think we really talked about it. We both just knew what had to happen. When we ascended the hill again, I had the two foot branch in my right hand. The chocolate lab’s poop had turned out to be the perfect consistency for our purposes: firm enough to stay attached to the stick, but easily spreadable.

After an hour of shot-gunning a can of beer with every lap, the messengers were still amidst their ‘last man standing’ race. Dudes were weaving around the track recklessly, and our man stood in the middle, near the very spot he had cursed us off of. Tuesday rode ahead to check him out and make sure we weren’t mixing him up with some other guy in a khaki jacket and black beanie with a PBR in each palm.

With her nod as queue, I took off riding. As I neared, I braked with my free hand and slowed enough to roll and drag the stick across his back before dropping it in front of the dude's feet. Tuesday and I heard him scream and saw a bunch of guys mounting their bikes as we started off down the mountain.

The next time we looked back, we were full force into our descent. We braked hard to take a sharp switchback that would lead us into deep southeast. Pulling bikes and bodies up against the side of the switchback, we held our breath and went unnoticed by our pursuers, who caught up and continued barreling forward down the straight drop back towards central city.

We spent a lot of the rest of the afternoon watching our backs and cutting a wide path around town to get back home from the far side of the mountain. We weren’t sure how to feel, but agreed we felt like we’d scored for a team we didn’t know we were on until then.

Two weeks later, the local weekly printed an anonymous explanation of our actions with a graphic of a devil-horned girl on a cruiser wielding poop on a stick. People would bring up the article for months afterward and Tuesday and I would grin at each other in private agreement, feeling I think, that it wasn’t exactly our victory to claim.

Multi-Cultural Competency, Non-Profitude, and Moving Beyond Career Development for White Service Providers

2009-07-30T00:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been participating in series of white subgroup meetings within a non-profit I work for, which has been leaving me sorting through ideas about the potential of working around anti-racism and organizational change in the social work field and non-profits more generally. It wouldn’t fare well for me or the trust of the group to process it publicly here, so I’ll keep my reflections general. I feel like no matter what criticisms I may have, I am responsible to show up to take a critical look at racism within any organization I am a part of and this means being ready to engage other white people with openness and sincerity, even if I’m having a rough time with how those conversations get choreographed...

Trainings in “multi-culturalism” and “diversity” within the corporate world have been widely critiqued as a means of diluting an anti-racist ideology into something that is expressly non-redistributionist; i.e., not about actually redistributing power or wealth or critiquing the ways that white supremacy structures the distribution of power within our world or within our organizations.

In the non-profit world I see another version of this, which is usually framed as “multi-cultural competency.” I have many concerns about it, but see it as important work. Whether clients of color are going to end up too alienated by experiences of white supremacy within an agency to access services there is obviously a big deal. The skills of individual clinicians do matter in this context, but I’m also concerned about the direction that training around “multi-cultural competence” can take in the very white-dominated mental health field.

White anti-racism is rightfully and frequently critiqued for over-focusing on the beliefs and attitudes of individual white people. While “multi-cultural competency” training for service providers often strays dangerously close to this, I do believe that the cultivation and engagement of anti-racist commitment among individual white clinicians is important as it affects their ability to recognize the harm and violence white supremacy produces in the lives of their clients, provide more relevant support, and think carefully about ways that racist domination is reproduced within the clinical relationship. Recognizing the value of this training has helped me to have patience and respect for the work of the white sub-group, but I’m still left with as many questions about how exactly white clinicians should be engaging issues of anti-racism, white identity, and cultural competency within their practice, and what level of institutional support should be lent to this work over, say, more organizational/redistributionist and less individualist-oriented anti-racism work.

It is easy to imagine that providing institutional support for the individual anti-racist “development” of white clinicians is scarcely more than free career development for white folks in an industry that is already stocked with a shocking number of white professionals (The California Board of Behavioral Sciences says about 74% of licensed clinicians are white. A friend who is in MFT school told me 94% of Marriage and Family Therapists are white!) And while I’ve made an argument for why I see such work as important, I think without a focus on anti-racist organizational transformation, it pretty much becomes free professional development for white clinicians.

In my time as a white non-management level worker in the social work field, I’ve seen how having smart things to say about racism combined with actually having white skin privilege secures my upward mobility within the field. Having white people who say all the right things—who can develop, implement, and export a model for anti-racist organizational development without actually having to give up any organizational power is a great way of maintaining the secret handshake between whiteness and middle class professionalism. Without a structural critique of who is running non-profits, it’s not clear whether “multi-cultural competency” trainings make non-profits more likely to be run by people coming from communities being served, or whether they make middle-class white people feel better about hiring each other to make decisions about running direct-service organizations.

Generally, the field of professional social work exists because poor communities are denied the means to meet their basic needs. A lot of the work in the field is done by working class people of color and young white people who are then supervised by white professionals. Ultimately, our agencies answer to the foundations and government contracts that fund us.

So what does it look like to approach issues of “multi-cultural competency” among clinicians who are often doing good work and make their dollars within the middle of these contradictions? I don’t mean to sit on the sidelines and suggest that the problems within the field and are too big to approach or that attempts at addressing white supremacy within social service agencies are meaningless where they fall short. As a white person, separating myself from other white people engaged with anti-racist work within my organization would be a particularly nasty and destructive way of engaging these complications and reinforce the idea that the orientations and analyses of individual white workers are the locus of anti-racist work. Rather, I’m suggesting that paying attention to our context and staying engaged with the questions are important in order to not allow anti-racist work to be reduced to confessionals or a veiled form of career development that ensures the upward mobility of white clinicians and further cements white people’s positions of power within the industry.

So, the big question in spaces devoted to multi-cultural competency seems to be: “What are the assumptions and forms of cultural arrogance that I carry into the room with me in my work as a clinician?” Here’s a quick list of questions that are floating around in my head that I want to hear in these spaces as well:
• If we assume we aren’t going to think, talk, or train our way out of racism, what do we see as our goals?
• How can our work in this group be accountable to the people of color working group?
• Who is in this room? What positions do they occupy within the agency? If most of the management team are white, who is guiding a process of creating “multi-cultural competency” within the organization?
• How will we know that that work is being done? Who do we answer to about how that work is happening?
• What if white people need to give up power within the organization? Is there safety for non-management level workers to propose this kind of idea within the room?
• What’s up with the board?
• Are there ways white supremacy plays out in who is tracked for promotions and management?
• For white non-management level workers, what are the reasons you would feel justified in taking a management position if one was offered to you?
• What communities are being served across our programs? Are there ways that racism is reflected in the way we prioritize our material, staff, and supervisory resources across our programs? Do we prioritize resources for the same programs we are most likely to present to funders as examples of our work?
• Why is the larger field of mental health clinicians so white-dominated? How might this affect the perceptions and experiences of our services in the communities we serve?
• How can we support communities we are serving in getting needs met that might also be addressed by our services? (In my position, I think a lot about prioritizing supporting social programming where queer youth can develop ongoing relationships)
• What are justice issues we take on right now and how do we determine those as the priority for our organization? What are the major issues we see affecting the lives of our clients? What would it look like for our organization to take on supporting racial and economic justice campaigns affecting the lives of our clients? What supportive role could our organization play, particularly in local campaigns? (To hear about a longtime LGBTQ org that is undergoing major restructuring, check out CUAV’s strategic plan to shift to centering issues of de-carceration and transformative justice in working to end violence in queer communities?

Dance, Dance, Revolution

2009-07-29T14:08:00.000-07:00

Notice of Intent to Squish

2009-07-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

When I started writing for this blog, I originally planned to have this be a place where I posted things of a deep-winger nature. I wanted a place of dialogue and collaboration where smarty pants weird girls might try to talk about some of the things we are paying attention to. Part of this vision meant maybe reserving some of my more political postings for another location, but lately I’ve really begun to question the logic with which I determine what writing is and isn’t political, and am also cozying up to the fact that this has turned out to be a less collaborative project than I’d hoped (though I’m awaiting Tuesday’s article on epilator time theft any day now).

My friend and I have taken on a new practice of summer list-making and the longest list so far is a "things that are squished together" list. If you are wondering if somethings are actually squished or just otherwise put together, the only way to tell is to ask yourself if they would come apart in a peeling motion or not.

This has got me to thinking about all the kinds of knowing that are squished together in the world. Kinds of knowing that would definitely have to be peeled if they were able to come apart at all. I suppose I'm feeling like the political and the woo and the everything else are a little more squished together than I wanted to imagine and if I'm going to do some poking and peeling it will just be to expose the layers better, but not because I actually want to isolate them from each other all together.

If the blog in the world is actually about mapping connections between disparate seeming bodies of information, I have begun to question why I would further enforce a political/weirdo division of labor on my own thinking and writing. In particular, when I already feel semi torn asunder by this division in the world at large and when this paradox is one I hold to be especially precious in myself.

So I’m going to try something different. When something bubbles to the surface that has more to do with accountability structures in the non-profit world rather than iPhone applications that don’t exist yet or frozen yogurt or apocalypse purse packing, I am going to post it anyway and see how it works out.

If You Were to Search for Digital Whoopee Cushions (You Might Learn About Virtual Toast)

2009-07-16T00:47:00.000-07:00

Bike Shop Backdoors

2009-07-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Summertime has me not only revisiting punk music but really really appreciating my bicycle, so I'm going to do a little run of bicycle-oriented postings where I'll write about things like bicycle-sizing for injury prevention, bay area bike rides that might end in oyster-eating, the endangered dune gopher-mouses of marin county rv parks, stories of sweet revenge against pbr-swilling bike messenger dudes, my titanium tibia, and if I can really get my act together with Mira: a pair of divinely-bestowed pants from our 2001 biketour.

Last week I went to work on my bicycle to prep for a mini tour I was leaving on. The bike kitchen, a massive bike repair shop open to the public, has relocated to the ground level of a new condo development blocks from my apartment. Many non-profits, strapped for space and cash in a city with astronomical rents, agree to these sorts of arrangements because of the language of “mixed use/mixed income” developments, another way of saying that enough “affordable” units were included to get the project approved. Both the inclusion of lower rent units and cheap and spacious units for area non-profits are a means of gaining public support and legitimacy for condo development projects that proliferate the Mission.

That said, the bike kitchen has a new, stable, spacious, and centrally located spot, where on a recent Thursday eve, I joined at least forty other people in going to work on my bicycle. The spot seemed to appeal to twelve year olds pumping up their BMX tires, hipsters working on their fixed gears, college students with commuter bikes, and a few older dudes who were affixing welded pieces for carrying boomboxes and suitcases to wildly painted ten speeds or mountain bikes. Everyone seemed to be getting along, sharing tools, minimally engaging in conversation as they settled into their respective projects. I was impressed by this rare side-by-side coexisting of the reps of so many different bike camps, temporarily united by the too-loud Ramones soundtrack and the need for metric allan keyes. So I was even more surprised when on second survey of the space, I realized I was the only lady in sight. (The bike kitchen has a once a month 'WTF,' women, trans, and friends, night you can read about here).

Generally when entering bike dude space I try to fly below the radar. This is because typically, dudes assume women don’t know why they are there and need to have every level of their experience managed, whether they came in shopping for a bike light or asking for a repair. Often, if a woman wants to resist this dynamic by stating specific needs or objectives, bike dudes will act as though she isn’t actually there for whatever reason she’s saying, but rather to somehow encroach on their space and show them up. This can mean simple brake pad shopping trips or bicycle browsing can turn into exhaustive barely-coded trivia tests if a woman acts as though she knows anything about what is going on.

When I enter bike shops, I know there’s careful choreography involved in actually getting what I need, even if I know exactly what that is, because acting too competent can involve getting lectured to about unasked questions. Already I was at the bike kitchen because a trip to a local repair shop had gone so badly in this respect. Eight years ago when I would spend my at-home days training with a racing team and planning my next major bike tour, I had more energy for these types of exchanges and even got some satisfaction from making bike dudes squirm. Now, over a decade into being a serious cyclist, riding an entirely un-cool bike four years on the other side of a major accident, I have settled into a different sense of why and how I ride. I’m just happy that my body, now with its own share of internal hard ware, can still make a decent team with a rolling pile of steel tubing.

As it stands, I know a lot of what I need to know about bikes and biking, which is far more than what most people know about what I need to know. And I’m really not trying to know about what I don’t care about, just so I can keep up with quickfire bike shop conversations. I think this sensibility is so antithetical to how many dudes approach the larger body of bike-knowledge, or how access to such knowledge is negotiated, that it almost offends bike dude’s sensibilities. It just doesn’t go over well that I could have a lot to say about touring geometry or bicycle sizing to prevent knee injuries but not really care to know much more than I already do about flashy componentry.

When I entered the bike kitchen, using the earlier week’s trip to the repair shop as a case study, I decided to be conservative in my communications with the surrounding dudes. A “Do you know where they keep the extra aprons?” (knowing they were all being used), was necessary to secure a means of covering up the coral sundress I was wearing, since it wasn’t going to do any favors for my cause. I surveyed the shop to spot needed tools and avoid aimless wandering every time I left my stand. When the time came for me to ask a question, I scouted the most chilled out looking mechanic, waited for him to become available, and prepared myself to get ten times the answer I needed.

--------------------------------
This could be a ‘how to’ post. I could share with you tips and tricks for pre-assessing how much of your dignity you are willing to sacrifice to get your needs met when entering a bike shop, how and where to pick your battles, and the top ten things never to say to most male bike mechanics.

But the truth is we all have different needs when we enter a bike shop, or any other armed fortress of dude-knowledge. We’re all there using what’s left of our lung capacity after the trek to blow up our hot pink floaty rafts to carry us across the castle moat. And they might think when we get there that we are there to take the castle.

More than wanting to tell anyone how to enter a bike shop, I am curious about our angles of approach towards the inaccessible worlds of skills and knowledges that we love too much to throw our hands up at. The millions of ways we figure out to say, “Dude, I didn’t come to take your castle. I am really wet and I am carrying a hot pink floaty ring. I just really like riding my bicycle. Can I buy some brake pads from you?”

State Control and Rock and Roll Are Run By Clever Men

2009-07-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

Summertime makes me a little nostalgic for Portland and full of punk coming of age tales, so I've been doing some more punk music revisits lately.

I was remembering how at 20, I was so fed up with bullshit dynamics in the punk scene and how totally excited I was when my gf at the time introduced me to the Poison Girls, a British band that formed in 1976 and was fronted by Vi Subversa, a middle-aged mother who followed her two grown children into the punk scene.

"I reject the system that murders my children." Vi must have figured that punk music had a lot to learn from mother love. She played music for moms to dance to (regretfully I couldn't find, "Jump Mama Jump") and sang songs about mental health, loneliness, and the forgotten and invisible: "housewives and prostitutes, plumber men in boiler suits" and anyone "dying in secret from poisons unknown."

I really like how this video, "Real Woman" kind of reminds me of the eight minute abs workout video and features so many women playing at a carnival. It recalls for me a "fuck if I care"/"the world is my playground" punk ethic, but kind of demonstrates that rather than this being super entitled and problematic it can also look like a bunch of ladies just taking some time out to enjoy each other's company inside a bounce house.

I prefer not to read the lyrics as anti-femme, but more an embrace of failure, a cashing in of chips on compulsory femininity ("I'm not lemon, so squeeze your own instead"). But it's not all bounce houses and joyous refusal. I always thought it sad how the song talks about lonlieness and inaccessibility, the parts women just learn to keep for themselves ("Don't be surprised, if I don't look into your eyes, my eyes are on a million miles away.")

Anyway, I think the Poison Girls were important, if goofy and irreverent, in refusing to be jacket-holders in an hyper-masculine early British punk scene. Did I mention PG were blacklisted by the Socialist Worker's Party, who thought the song "Bully Boys" was talking shit on them?

Dreaming M.J.

2009-07-02T00:12:00.000-07:00

I had a very vivid dream this week, the week of Michael Jackson's death. In my dream, humans had evolved into forms that were suspended in something of a sensory-emotive virtual mist. Nothing of form or visual cues indicated that we were still human, or especially related to humans. Only a certain sense of familiarity or practicedness helped me recognize my new self as non-alien.

The only language spoken was a series of passwords that functioned as a system of consent for marrying together our psyches within the ether-net. I watched as flexible fluid windows united and parted by folding in on each other and then peeling away, all within a web of space indistinguishable as either virtual or actual.

To say we were composed in parts both human and computer sounds too crude. Notions of part and whole were of little use for understanding these forms. Our existence and co-existence were virtual. Potential. Happening in the space of their own unfolding. Our password invitations were each unique and composed of a purely emotive language with a sort of rolling, lapping sound that landed pleasantly and pleadingly at the edge of consciousness. Mine was a sound I recognized as a sort of new name for my mother. It was the only word I could say.

This was not exactly utopia--this sort-of-bodied sentience suspended in gauzy spiderwebs of telo-internet melting into perfect crystalline consensual enagagement. I recognized from the human quality of the experience that we were not enlightened. We had just come up with new ways of doing the telling and the listening—of paying attention to each other.

The day after my dream, my movements through the world carried an investigative quality. What I was investigating, it felt, was the project of coexistence. I wanted to listen and I wanted to tell, and I only knew one way of asking how. kaythingsswoombordmoydoosbp. Requesting permission to connect.

All the Apocalypse Purses: Devotional Packing Practices for Posi End Time Spins

2009-06-17T01:24:00.000-07:00

This time last year, I was riding my bicycle on the north shore of Lake Superior with my dear friend, Roger. Route 61 in Northern Minnesota is one of the most gorgeous roads I’ve ever ridden. Roger had rigged a pair of solar powered ipod speakers to his handlebar bag (he was going all the way to Labrador) and with Fleetwood Mac on our side, we pedaled long into the far-north summer solstice days, stopping only for the homemade pie sold all along the Scandinavian-inhabited shore.

Maybe it was that Lake Superior itself was a cold and mean old Daddy such as I had never met. It could whip up storms so nefarious we were sure the fore riders of the apocalypse had arrived. I’d find myself one moment contemplating the water’s stillness, darkness, and eerie silence, the next riding through sheets of rain to the echo of distant tornado sirens. Maybe it was the Finnish wizardry that Roger began practicing to guide said storms after picking up a spell book at a small town solstice auction. It could have been that I was headed towards the Canadian border on a bicycle, riding a road made more lonely and gorgeous by the fact that gas prices had topped five dollars. Then again, maybe it was just that Roger was reading Octavia Butler’s Parables series and our nightly conversations over re-hydrated split pea soup and cans of tuna inevitably turned to what kind of getaway bikes we should build in case of industrial collapse…But somewhere on route 61, I took to casually referencing the end times in relation to how we might best approach any given activity or quandary.

The thing was, I felt pretty positively about the end times we spoke of. It’s not that we weren’t talking about doomsday, but that we were more so speaking about readiness—a commitment to being ready—not just for the coming world—but for the one already here. One thing I’ve always appreciated sharing with Roger is a sense of camp, emptiness, and maybe even possibility arising from an appreciation of the utter absurdity of late capitalism. It’s as though we both agree what we have on our hands already is, and will continue to become—far stranger than any end of the world we can imagine.

The end-times-speak used between Roger and me took on it’s own internal conceptual framework, that though unarticulated, we understood to be generally positive or at least matter of fact. I spent much of the rest of that summer traveling alone. End times-speak—the language of readiness—became a private language I used with myself to maintain a sense of agency, accountability, and in-placeness while regarding the brutality and absurdity of such realities as borders, capital, and US citizenship. End-times-speak was such a precious part of my private internal lexicon that I didn’t realize until I was back in the company of friends that constant off-handed references to the end of the world didn’t work well for most people.

In the midst of my re-integration, I caught a performance by Justin Bond in New York. I remember being particularly struck as Justin spoke of witchcraft and calling corners from SF drag show dressing rooms in the pre-ARV days of the HIV virus. She sang songs to lost loved ones—“luminaries of affliction,” she called them. “The end of the world already happened to queers,” I remember thinking. The end of the world already came for queers and the end of the world came to most of the world five hundred years ago when white people started running ashore all over the place.

The end of the world is happening right now, it’s just a matter of where you stand in relation to that end. And by ‘end’ I mean both death and violence and destruction and domination AND I also mean the end of stabilized and naturalized notions of those violences. By “end” I mean the world that is unfolding out in front of our feet again and again—all of the time.

The end of the world is scary not because it asks us to hole up with ammunition and iodine tablets but because it asks us to take responsibility for the world that we find before us. Right now. It asks us to be ready for what is coming—without having more than a guess about exactly what that might be and only educated guesses about how to best make it happen. It demands that we keep our shit fresh and our hearts open and that above all, we be paying attention.

As for preparation, I might burlify my bike. I might keep some iodine tablets around. The early summer’s draft of my apocalypse-packing list (made while biking the North Shore) included things like: spare bike parts, solar panels, autonomous Marxism, potlucks, sex, and calisthenics. I quickly realized my packing list was trying to balance out a need to take care of shit with a need to appreciate it as it is. And this made me think, that really, the best way towards the apocalypse/promised world was really in and through our love of this one. That by loving this world well—really well—that we also locate our readiness to have it change in ways beyond what we find imaginable.

I began asking myself and others: what is it we want to take into the next world with us? If we had to pack purses for the apocalypse, what would we put in them? What do we love enough to carry, or what are we loving so well that it delivers us to the next place, allows us imagine a profoundly different world?

For me, it turns out to be things like watching teenagers dance, or a pair of kittens I helped nurse in Brooklyn, or Stevie Nicks youtube videos, or stretch denim, and definitely this picture:

Munira, Tuesday, and Ser on a broken down ferry in Maine last August

When I ask most people what they would put in their apocalypse purse, the first thing they want to know is how big the purse is and how much space things like youtube videos take up. This is really hard to answer. I’m not here to tell you whether there will be anything like youtube after the apocalypse or help you figure out how big a purse you should carry. The apocalypse purse is a conceptual packing list. It is a practice, a sacrament of sorts.

Once, someone answered that the only thing they would need to pack was “world peace.” I don’t want to mock anyone’s packing process. Maybe you are a heavy packer. Maybe you don’t carry purses. That’s fine. But I will say this: How are you going to put it in the purse if you don’t have it to pack? That’s the only rule. That we are working with the material we have available to us.

It’s like Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. It’s bottomless. You might never see the things you put in there ever again. And I think that’s okay. Because it’s the packing, not the contents, that count.

It’s all tumbling out in front of us. The new world. It’s happening very quickly. Likely there won’t be any hard and fast lines we cross, but should we find ourselves having moved into a new territory, a landscape maybe even known as the apocalypse, I’m willing to wager the question is going to be not what we are carrying but how devotionally we have packed.

How I Became A Houseboy Hiring Agent (Or A Brief History Of Some Of My More Bizarre Jobs)

2009-06-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

For those who lived in Portland during the early 2000's, there was a special skill set involved in making enough money to pay for a two hundred dollar moldy basement room in a collective house while in a city that was: a) experiencing the highest unemployment rate in the country b) is a giant tea bag that is secretly geographically larger than all but a handful of U.S. cities and hence, where no one wants to leave their houses for nine consecutive months c) where despite aforementioned hardships, is known as a city where people go to underachieve in peace and so, d) is home to more than its fair share of culturally hip weirdoes who comprise a market wherein other, cheaper weirdoes can potentially make enough money to pay for their moldy basements.

I did have an on call job, as a drawbridge operator, that I had to quit when I had recurring nightmares of grain ships crashing into the Broadway bridge, probably on account of sleeping with a beeper (yes, a beeper) next to my head for three years. Thereafter, and during the low water months of the bridge job when no ships needed beep me for my services, I spent a lot of time dreaming up strange means for making extra money. Mira and I had long dreamed of an urban history scavenger hunt picnic dating service, which could have proved lucrative with my insider status on the city’s lift spans, but like most Portland ideas involving too much effort, it never got off the ground.

I did work special holidays at an area florist, snapping thorns off rose stems. I had a Summer job with Parks and Rec starting water fights, and I sometimes took on work repairing tent poles with a friend of my parents. Occasionally, my elaborate conceptual cake-making services were subsidized; until Portland’s art-cake market became oversaturated with the appearance of a team of inedible cake-maker girls who filled theirs with things like broken mirrors and road kill. I cleaned houses in Northwest Portland with green cleaning products and played gay nanny for a while, but I really got my break when I began working for a local company producing raw foods.

I worked in a small industrial kitchen managed by an ultra-conservative dessert-maker named Cortland, who had been raised in an ashram in the West Hills. We’d jockey over whether Fleetwood Mac or republican talk radio should be played in the kitchen, but either way, he always left behind for us the edges of his flourless brownies on our shelf in the walk-in. It was likely because of the brownies (as well as my general commitment to cooked food) that the owner of the raw hummus company found me to be far more dependable and grounded that the raw foodists who usually came around to help him.

I took well to the rhythm of the work and there was something about the aesthetics of the kitchen that suited me: massive mason jars of soaking garbanzos, lined in multiples of three and the way the hummus rolled in on itself forming strange hummus-labia whenever it was stirred. I became a regular and quickly began picking up work for other raw foods companies, beginning to distribute for several. The hummus kitchen became something of a center of revolving-door queer punk non-raw-foodist employment as more friends and acquaintances picked up work there and I always had enough leftover raw hummus to trade for things like homemade tinctures or fresh caught fish.

I lasted at Livin’ Spoonfuls until I was taken down by a pickup truck on my bicycle one day in 2005 on my happy way home from an annual pap smear. I returned to the kitchen, minimally, even before I could walk. But finding myself in more medical debt than I would like to put a number to, and feeling disillusioned with lifestyle anarchism and the lack of disability analysis surrounding me, I knew it was time to move on. I also understood that move meant going somewhere where some people, maybe, possibly, had health insurance. A harm-reduction-oriented herb school program in Oakland seemed a good excuse to skip town once I was healed.

When I arrived in the Bay Area, my rent doubled and I held onto this idea of wanting a job with a regular schedule (no beepers, no seasons) and maybe some health insurance. I wasn't quite sure how to make it happen, or how to relate to getting it, knowing most work in the world was paid by the piece, pound, freelanced, contracted, or just plain stolen.

While in Portland, I had discovered that scouring the shelves of health food stores for items with shoddy labels or biodegradable packaging was a great way to find out which companies were operating locally and might need a hand. Of course this search yielded the added benefit of being able to stake out the parking lot after hours for the dregs of their agave syrup or olive oil, not to mention food-grade five gallon buckets. I did the same sort of research in Oakland and after sending out about a dozen unsolicited resumes, the only reply I received was from a woman named Leila, who ran a small company making aromatherapy sexual lubricants in the East Bay saying she needed a production assistant.

I was charmed, if a little put off, by her website which hosted hokey names for glycerin-filled lubes and lots of pictures of her lounging on plush couches wrapped in pink feather boas. I was new to the Bay area, and didn’t really have an understanding of the vast number of eccentric thirty and forty-somethings that form the yearly base for burning man, nor had Portland prepared me to understand the amount of wealth potentially at the disposal of eccentrics like Leila. I simply assumed she was part of the Bay Area culture of white women who act like the project of their public sexual liberation might save the world, particularly if they make a business out of it (I would learn more about this when I went on to work at Good Vibrations).

When I pulled up outside Leila’s West Oakland loft (she insisted it was Emeryville) on my first day, I buzzed upstairs and was ready to leave for lack of reply when she hung her towel-wrapped head out the window, asking me if I didn’t mind waiting just a little longer, darling. A little longer dragged into twenty minutes before I was ushered into Leila’s palatial top floor loft. Literally, the ceilings and windows may have been twenty five feet high, as I would later discover teetering atop many a ladder for her. The vast interior was broken into various sitting areas of chaise lounges, massage tables, and other plush surfaces. A quick survey of the space suggested there were about thirty different places to have sex with scarcely a wall between them. The only separated spaces were her loft where she kept special things like her collection of Chanel heels and her tiny kitchen. “I mostly order in,” she said as she bypassed the kitchen on our tour of the space.

When I asked to see the production space, she led me to a separate apartment in the same building, which seemed to function as something of a glorified craft space. The production area was generally limited to a tiny kitchen nook where about forty kinds of essential oils were stored, but not much else. Business was not booming, but Leila did not seem especially concerned.

As she led me back upstairs, Leila handed me a notebook, suggesting I keep it at hand to take notes of her ideas throughout the day. Immediately she began rattling off things to be done: shirts to return to anthropologie, movies to be made (she was not a filmmaker), the best places to buy orchids, her weekly shopping list, new ways of decorating her loft, themes for her holiday party (it was October), and thoughts about astral projection. She could use me about six hours a day, to start, she said, and if we got along well and she found me a good creative influence, maybe more. She eyed my outfit and haircut, surmising, I guessed, that I had enough potential to keep around while also being pathetic enough to be a fun project. Immediately, she led me up to her loft to help her sort through older clothes (she was expecting a large order from BCBG arriving with UPS that day)and suggesting items for me to try on.

It was clear that Leila did not need a production assistant, and the only thing that had thus far kept her from having a personal assistant was that no one had yet suggested it to her. I spent most of the first week praying for my life and taking notes as Leila drove us recklessly about town blaming all of our near traffic accidents on the position of this or that planet and showing me off at the shops and cafes she frequented.

While at the loft, Leila’s bidding required constant attention. She frequently expected me to read her mind, and would chastise me and my astrological chart for messiness when I left behind one pointless activity to tend to whatever random whim she might have. Leila had an irrational fear of having her name be readable on any mail that was being thrown out, so on my tenth day, as I cut up the addresses printed on her eighteen magazine subscriptions and countless catalogs (Leila despised the sound of tearing paper and thought me crude for not agreeing) she began to get a read on me for making too much a mess as I processed the mountain of catalogs.

Looking over the utter pointlessness of my task, I realized that Leila was genuinely enjoying having something of a protégé and a submissive in me, and that the primary problem at hand (besides the independent wealth, her fake company, and her underpaying me) was just that she had simply chosen the wrong person for the job. I stood up and began to explain that I couldn’t work for her anymore because she was cruel and bossy and seemed to enjoy demeaning me, and that I really didn’t like it, BUT that I thought she had some special talent in being cruel and demeaning. I assured her there was someone out there who would like it and that she was really just barking up the wrong tree with the personal assistant thing.

At first Leila seemed shocked and offended but immediately was overtaken by the prospect that there was some territory of decadence, opulence, and eccentricity that she had yet explore and that I was about to reveal to her (these ideas were, after all, a part of why she had hired me). As soon as I said the word “houseboy” she lowered herself to the couch saying, “tell me more.” No sooner had I given her the rough wikipedia-style description of having a household submissive and Leila was telling me she wanted to have one for every day of the week. I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t just free labor, that she would have to interact with them, negotiate a dynamic—but that if her treatment of me as a personal assistant had been any indication, that I really thought she had what it would take. I spent the rest of my last day as Leila’s personal assistant pulling up and reading aloud how-to articles for her and negotiating the terms of my employment as her houseboy hiring agent.

The craigslist ad I posted got forty replies on the first day. Leila was an attractive, single woman who basically lived alone in a mansion, plus she had a young female assistant to play middle man, which I’m sure added an air of mystery and intrigue. I responded to about twelve replies and dressed up smartly one day for a round of rotating interviews at a local coffee shop. It became immediately clear to me that the more experienced subs would not get what they wanted from an arrangement with Leila and I was about to give up when Ted showed up.

Ted was handsome, but awkward. He was a massage therapist and had discovered his love of service as one of he main organizers of the yearly “hookah dome” at burning man, though he had no formal experience as a houseboy. Thinking it couldn’t get much better, I put him in touch with Leila and later set him up with a date to visit her loft.

As soon as Ted arrived at the loft, Leila immediately sent him to her hairstylist to get his rugged mane under control. He seemed neither annoyed nor amused by this, and I spent the duration of his appointment trying to think about how to construct the most hookah-dome like experience possible for Ted. It really didn’t seem like it would be hard in the plush ballroom of Leila’s home, considering it may have already resembled the interior of a uterus.

When Ted returned, Leila seemed to have less interest in taking out her ways with him than continuing to do so with me and then having me act as something of a middle management domme. It seemed that after all she really did want a lady in waiting more than a houseboy. So I played middle manager. Ted, for his purposes seemed to have fun with all of this. As for me, it kept me interested for a minute, but ultimately I decided it wasn’t much different than being her personal assistant had been, that I was still getting underpaid, and that if I wanted to be someone’s Mistress, I could be getting my own apartment cleaned.

I did finally get a job with health insurance. Ted and I did go back and work some seasonal events for Leila. It was my job, for instance, to choose a yuletide g-string for Ted which he could wear while feeding and offering massages to her guests. I also negotiated a much higher payment for myself and a few other friends to serve drinks, but ended up uncomfortable when the lady partygoers would lose their shit exoticizing the young queers holding the hor'dourve plates. When Leila asked me to hire and train a team of boys to dress as sexy cupids for her Valentines bash, I gave her a copy of the Topping book I picked up at my new place of work and bid her farewell.

Smorgasbord Strategy: Expert Tips and Tactical Maneuvers for Ensuring a Rewarding Buffet Experience

2009-06-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

This is my friend Nicoletta. She has a lot of good ideas about how to be fancy while staying on the cheap. Recently when her hours were cut at work, she told me that instead of switching away from using Bumble & Bumble products, she was just cutting her hair so she’d use less conditioner. Genius.

I recently had to consult Nicoletta because I was on my way to Vegas for my mother’s fiftieth birthday and I planned to hit up a very special buffet. I usually don’t go to buffets without Nicoletta, and wasn’t sure what I would do without her live buffet-coaching. In fact, I wasn’t really sure what I would do in Vegas at all without Nicoletta, but I did my best (future post).

Nicoletta came naturally to her obsession with Vegas. Her grandfather is a professional gambler in Oakland and when I met her as a teenager she was working as a waitress in a bingo hall in Oregon. None of us were surprised when Nicoletta fell hard for Vegas at age twenty, the same year she got “glamour for rent” tattooed on left ass cheek. She later got a job as a sex toy buyer which allowed her to make frequent trips to Las Vegas. Between her love of the mystical mermaid penny slots, food, and a good bargain, Nicoletta was able to develop the most comprehensive buffet strategy known to man. Below, Nicoletta shares her thoughts on buffet etiquette, pre-game high-fiber diets, and buffet-performance enhancing drugs.

Addy: So, often, eating at buffets mean we are skimping on quality. Is there some sort of buffet alogorithim of how low you can go on quality and still get good value? If I’m choosing a buffet, what do I keep in mind? How do I stay out of trouble?

Nicoletta: Do your research. There are some bad buffets. Survey the décor. If they haven’t updated the dining room, they might not have updated the menu. Also, yelp and citysearch can be good.

Addy: But everyone on yelp are these weird haters who can’t enjoy anything about their lives because they are too busy being fake food critics for free. What is it that you look for in a buffet?

Nicoletta: Well, Breakfast buffets are always a favorite. I love breakfast food. It’s hard to make breakfast food disgusting. It’s just harder to mess up. Except for that time you and I went to the Flamingo (makes gagging noise), but usually—usually it’s harder to mess up!

Plus, the breakfast buffets are the cheapest. Brunch is another story. The great thing about going for breakfast—okay, I like to get there about like, 40 minutes before lunch time. So you pay the breakfast price, you get to try the breakfast food, but THEN the lunch stuff comes out. So you take a break, you chill out. and then you get lunch at the breakfast price. Lunch stuff is usually worth more money. And I really like to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth at a buffet.

Addy: Yeah, so these are tough times. Are buffets an unnecessary indulgence or a wise bargain?

Nicoletta: Well, they are a little bit of both. You get to treat yourself, but if you find a good deal—if you go at the switchover times—it can be a bargain. Also—well don’t try this in Vegas because they are really intense there and have cameras everywhere—but most places you can take some to go. I mean, you aren’t supposed to, but just line your purse with some tin foil or ziplock bags and. you know…I went to this amazing fried chicken buffet in SF and I mean, I don’t even usually like fried chicken but it was amazing. We got a whole bag to go without being harassed.

Addy: A fried chicken purse! But not in Vegas?

Nicoletta: No way. I have a friend who tried to put a roll in her napkin there and they sent someone to ask her where she was going with it.

Addy: What! Did they want it back?! Brunch big brother is watching you.

Nicoletta: I know right! Seriously! Cameras everywhere. Most places that don’t have buffets all the time aren’t as strict.

Addy: Their buffet surveillance technology is a little less evolved.

Nicoletta: Exactly. And anyway, you don’t always want to-go. Sometimes you don’t want to look at food after a buffet. When I went to Vegas, I just got up every day, did the breakfast-lunch crossover, and then swam the rest of the day. That was it.

Las Vegas' Wynn Buffet

Addy: So, what’s your take on buffet performance enhancing drugs? Are they cheating?

Nicoletta: I think they are great, I’ve really been enjoying them before going to my new favorite buffet, Salty’s on the Columbia. But that’s not always the experience you want. But I have a new buffet. The spirit mountain casino in grand ron Oregon. They have a Wednesday night sea food buffet. And it’s ah-mazing. The desserts were in-sane. And the crab legs. I drank a lot of orange juice.

Addy: Okay, about orange juice. Beverages—a necessary component of the buffet experience, or a waste of precious stomach space?

Nicoletta: You know, it really depends. I usually would say waste of stomach space, but I always feel like I should order things at buffets. One thing I like to do—and I’m not usually a juice fan—is order some apple juice. It helps to settle my stomach throughout the buffet. The pectin is really good for holding your poop together.

Addy: Okay, it’s the night before a buffet. How are we getting ready?

Nicoletta: Well don’t make the mistake of not eating or eating too little because your stomach is going to shrink before he buffet. You know, eat your normal amount, maybe a little more. Things that move through you fast. You know, fruits, vegetables. Don’t overdo it, but keep eating. Then stuff will move through you quicker later at the buffet because you’ll have something in there, I think.

Addy: Were going for high volume, high fiber. Next item. Talk to me about attire. What are we wearing to the buffet? I understand expandability is a primary concern. There are basics. No button flies. And we may need to look respectable enough to fly below the radar if we are packing a fried chicken purse. What else?

Nicoletta: Yeah, totally totally. Well, luckily these days there is a lot of jersey cotton in the world and I’m a big fan. I like to dress up, you know to go to a nice buffet. Recently I did make the mistake of wearing tight jeans. I felt so full and so sick I didn’t even come close to eating in buffet quantities.

Addy: That’s pretty much my general experience of wearing pants in the world. I feel really held back. I mean, what if you want to dance—or eat a buffet? You never know when you might need an elastic waistband.

Drop crotch pants may be a fashionable and sensible buffet choice for maximum expandability and extra space for smuggling your fried chicken purse.

Addy: Now, a question that may concern many of us when we cross through the turnstiles. Is there such a thing as buffet etiquette?

Nicoletta: There is. There is buffet etiquette. You know, don’t cut in line. I mean, it’s okay to go around someone if they are stuck on one thing, but you don’t want to reach over people. It’s hard. You see something good, or you are on a final round and you know what you want and you just want to make a beeline. One thing that is always good to remember at a buffet, though, is that it’s not a race. It’s just not a race. You can relax. You can take breathers. Maybe go poop if you need to.

Addy: Okay, and about poop. We touched on fiber before, but…Laxitives? Coffee?

Nicoletta: Well, I wouldn’t recommend laxatives. That’s just me.

Addy: Well, I’ve been wearing heels, training for Vegas, and I’ve been noticing something. See, this yoga teacher I used to know had a poop stool in her bathroom, you know, to rest your feet on to emulate a squatting position. It’s way better pooping ergonomics. And high heels, they really jack up your knees and put you in that classic squatting position that is conducive to bm’s. They are like poop stools that are actually attached to your feet. They can really help things. Maybe a good choice for buffets?

Nicoletta: And people who don’t wear heels, they can think about propping their feet up on something. Tampon disposal boxes.

My Las Vegas poop stools plus KFC's witch flats

Addy: Okay, let’s get back to the good stuff. Stomach space. You are approaching the buffet. What do you start with?

Nicoletta: I think it’s good to start with ruffage. Some salad. A lot of people think you can make salad at home and it’s a waste, but I think it’s a good start. Whatever you do, you want to never ever start with carbs. It’s the most common mistake. Round two I go for proteins. After that you are free to roam and finish yourself off in whatever way you like.

Addy: And what about if you get something and you don’t like it?

Nicoletta: Well, take small portions. You can always go back. You are at a buffet. Also, start with small bites. I personally like it when buffets have paper napkins and I can discretely spit the things out that I don’t want to designate stomach space for. It helps if you have a bowl to put them in, and if the people you are going with aren’t grossed out by this. You know, the great thing about going to buffets with crab legs is that they have buckets you can put the legs in. I just put all kinds of things in there. I think more buffets should have disposal buckets.

Addy: Maybe they should have compost motes that flow behind the tables for people to just throw stuff into. But we’d have to be careful that everyone tottering around in their poop-stool high heels wouldn’t fall in. That could be dangerous.

Nicoletta: And smell bad. I think the buckets are better. Just remember, small bites.

Addy: And I have to ask about the old salty panty trick.

Nicoletta: Ah, well one thing you can do at a fancy buffet is plant a pair of dirty underwear under the table when you arrive and then when you are done with the buffet you can “find” them under the table and try to find out what’s going on. This happened to my friend’s family at Salty’s on the Columbia, but it was all accidental. They didn’t know where the panties came from until later, but they got half off their buffet anyway.

Addy: So, it works better if the people who find the panties didn’t plant them there so they can actually complain in earnest?

Nicoletta: Yes, and it helps if you have a kid to find them under the table (laughing).

Addy: So talk to me about this: how do you know when it’s time to stop? Just stop eating?

Nicoletta: Just listen to your body. I think when I first started going, I overdid it. It’s exciting. It’s hard. You just want to keep going. But it’s really not a race. It’s not worth it. When you are done, just be done. It’s okay. There will be more buffets in the future. There will always be more buffets.

Fibs, Fables, and Fifty: An Interview With My Mom As She Preps For Her Next Half Century

2009-06-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

This is Kathy Failes Carpenter. She is my mom. She is also one of the coolest, wisest, and weirdest people I know. In a lot of ways, she is sort of what this blog is about. When Mira and I first talked about a weird girl blog, we mostly wanted to do a lot of mom-interviews, but then missed the mother’s day release date. Luckily, KFC turns 50 on June 5th, so we are just in time.

Now, KFC isn’t an eccentric lefty or an ex-hippie. She’s a Catholic lady from Minnesota who through the here-and-there of a career Air Force marriage now lives in the suburbs of Washington state.

There’s a lot to say about KFC. She is super smart. She figures stuff out faster than anyone I know, is really good at teaching herself things, and pretty much isn’t scared to say anything to anyone, ever. She has this way of moving through the world as though she doesn’t have enough information to know she might fail, or isn’t paying attention to it if she does. As a result, she gets mad shit done.

Somehow, she manages not to trip over herself with self doubt or neurotic self evaluation (which I am still trying to learn from her). I think this has a lot to do with having had to figure a lot of stuff out on her own. KFC married my Dad at 20, followed him overseas (he was in the Air Force) where she had a baby (me) and realized she couldn’t relate to other military wives (duh) and so hung out with neighbors twenty years older (and taught herself German).

Other things about Kathy: She knows more people and has an easier time getting phone numbers than any queer hipster I know. She enjoys doing karaoke alone in her living room or sometimes out with her hairdresser. She enjoys pickles dipped in chocolate malts. And, she just knows stuff. Like, how she gave me kombucha and the new sandpaper hair removal system in my Easter basket. She isn’t missing a beat. She takes information from anywhere and everywhere.

KFC is working with this form of deep mom-wisdom. And she knows it. What’s unique, though, is that she has this almost unshakeable faith in her own weird wisdom, especially since Mira and I started a campaign to convince her she’s a witch. Now I receive all sorts of mixed medium text messages from her involving strange pictures and abbreviated poetics. Important clues in the mystery, all of them. KFC even bought a pair of witch shoes last year that she wears on days she really needs luck on her side.

KFC turns fifty this week. Each year, she becomes more brazen and less apologetic for her ways, and she’s here as living proof that where weird girl wisdom is concerned, it’s good to get started early.

I’m about to leave for Las Vegas, where I’ll be celebrating KFC's 50th by taking in Bette Midler on the full moon (yes). I’m excited about honoring fifty years of her on this planet, and excited to have already gotten to be around for 27 of them. Below is KFC’s first interview for the weird girl blog where she talks to us about fibs vs. lies, the art of toilet-papering houses, and the benefits of graying hair...

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Addy: So, I’ve never interviewed you before! How are you feeling about turning 50?

KFC: So for some reason there’s all these things that go with turning 50 that mean you are older and I’m not sure if that’s working. Working on the garage floor with your dad has reminded me I’m not 30. I’ve had to go to the chiropractor twice already. Though your Dad and I went to the chiropractor for our 30th anniversary, so I guess it’s a favorite outing in this family. Oops.

Addy: You’re entering the second half of a century, how you are you feeling about the first half?

KFC: Well, people know I’m here (laughs).

Addy: So, you know this is for the weird girl blog, right?

 KFC: Oh, yeah. Sure. I think it was in third grade, or oops, maybe it was fourth, I spelled 'weird' wrong and they made me write it on the board a hundred times. It didn’t help.

Addy: So, a lot of the blog is about information people are working with in the world. What do you know a lot about?

KFC: Um, flying by the seat of my pants. Backing up ten and punt. Because everything is a crap shoot and oops, maybe it’s a carp shoot. and you have to do what you have to do cause anything could change and you can’t be stuck so you have to kind of go with the flow. And my motto for my 50th birthday is WYSIWYG.

Addy: What does WYSIWYG mean?

KFC: It’s been on my refrigerator for 15 years now, and it means what you see is what you get. It’s an old computer term, but it sort of personifies me in six letters or less.

Addy: So, how do you think you learned to do that? The WYSIWYG flying by the seat of your pants stuff?

KFC: It’s about paying attention. Also, my environment. The dynamics of my family with disabilities and other things that created a situation where I had to walk through and make sure people didn’t get stuck on my watch.

Addy: So you had to be thinking ahead.

KFC: Always always. Staying a step ahead of it, and then when it changes, back up ten and punt again.

Addy: What are some other things you know a lot about?

KFC: Being loud. Making sure everyone else is having fun. Flying by the seat of my pants. Computers. Flying. I know a lot about helping people who are visually impaired. I know a lot about tools in a funny way. I had to because i was Opa’s eyes. I know how to make a party happen in a moment’s notice.

Addy: Well I know at the last two parties of mine you came to you threw down. One you came to dressed as a kangaroo, bearing toilet paper and scared away some uptight crust punks I didn’t even want there and then at my bike accident anniversary brunch you made all the Mission hipster queers write their names with their butts.

KFC: You know that’s on the agenda for Vegas. It’s a prerequisite to getting your WYSIWYG temporary tattoo, Write your name with your butt.

Addy: Dot the i’s and cross the t’s? Too bad this isn’t a video blog.

KFC: Ah--yeah, jump. Good. (laughs). Don’t wanna go there right now.

Addy: So, we know what you are good at, what do you like?

KFC: You mean when I'm not stuck working in front of the computer? Oops. I like to fart around in the garden. Riding my bike. Big big hobby. You come by that naturally. Pretty sure i did that while pregnant with you and then with you on the back and Meghan on the front. I was kind of like a one man band rolling through our neighborhood in North Carolina. It kind of worried people, but i was careful. Rode my bike everyday this week.

Let’s see, what else? Internet searching. I’m the internet search queen. If you need something. you tell me a few words and you’ve got ten links.

Addy: You are the internet. I also ask you if i need to know if I can accomplish something. Like, if i needed to know if i could borrow a wheelchair from Ohare airport. I would call you.

KFC: And the answer to that would be go for it, and if they say no, stop. Two words: Just ask. Or not (laughs).

Addy: Or not, how about not.

KFC: Ignorance is 99 percent of the truth. I think there’s a really good pic of you in fake fur coat in that wheelchair.

Addy: Yeah we took my busted ass out to brunch in that. Chicago’s big, I would have never have made it around just with crutches. Good thing we had it. Well yeah, you are kind of my go-to man on a lot of things. Not just mom things. Those too, but if I needed to tell a lie to some sort of authority, and I wanted to know if I could get away with it, I would call you.

KFC: Well, the other day, I knew this person was from Minnesota because they said “it’s a fib.” And this is the key. A fib. It’s not a lie. And a fib is something that isn’t toally the truth but isn’t going to hurt. It might help.

Addy: Healthy embellishment? Story truth?

KFC: I actually need to look up what it means cause i really want to know now, hold on. I always used to do that before the internet. We’d make a list of stuff to look up when you were kids and we went to the library most weeks. (looking up) Okay, 'fib' is related to 'fable.' And fables pretty much have a moral to the story, so oops, I don’t know, maybe fibbing is telling the truth in a way. Fibbing fables in a way.

Addy: Okay, so some other questions. How do you stay willing to learn?

KFC: Paying attention. You need to be open and willing to just work with what’s happening. because if you get too stuck on what you think it should be like, well, number one: You aren’t going to have any fun. Number two: You are going to piss somebody off. And number three: the opportunity won’t present itself again so you might as well not be that guy and have some more options next time.

Addy: Do you think it’s hard for people to keep up with you with that attitude?

KFC: No, they are kind of all to the point now where they can at least go, ‘Oh, that’s Kathy.' On the other hand, I don’t know there’s gonna be times I’m not as good at something as they are and then I acknowledge and embrace their talents and so I back off. I’m learning to delegate.

Addy: What’s the greatest thing about getting older?

KFC: Oh! Being able to get away with stuff! Nobody looks at you cross-eyed. It’s like, ever since I stopped dying my hair, nobody tries to stop me anymore.

Addy: So then, what’s in store with the clever middle aged lady disguise?

KFC: Toilet papering.

Addy: Who is your next target and why do they deserve it?

KFC: The you-know-who’s [sexist male neighbor and his friend who is on the SWAT Team].

Well, they have a horse-sized dog with horse-sized shit that makes me about pass out every time I’m on that side of the house. Plus, they think they can solve all the worlds problems with a cigar and a folding chair in their driveway and I’m always the butt of their jokes. Like when I’m on my bike. They are always asking me where my broom is. And where my little dog is.

Addy: They are still at it then? Feminist toilet papering revenge, then?

KFC: It’s not revenge, It’s just a message. It’s art. It will be beautiful.

Addy: I hope so cause it’s next to your house, you’ll have to look at it.

KFC: It will be beautiful. Maybe we’ll do our house too and then they’ll just be really confused about what hit them. [Some other neighbors] are staying here while work is done at their house and I’m going to teach them to do it.

Addy: Passing the torch? So, will you save the toilet paper?

KFC: Well, you don’t live here anymore, so that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Like the last time I brought you that big black bag of toilet paper you kept in your tub at your house in Portland cause you were mad we were wasting the paper.

Addy: Well, I came politically of age during late nineties forest activism in Oregon, what was I supposed to do?

KFC: You crack me up. You are really interviewing your mother.

Addy: You should write for us.

KFC: Send me some topics, then.

Addy: Okay, I love you mom. Goodnight.

KFC: Thank you it was lovely (laughs). And in the scheme of things, I’m just gonna say that the related forms of 'fib' are 'fibber' and 'fibbster.' KFC changed from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Kentucky Grilled Chicken, so I need a new claim to fame. Now the 'F' isn’t for fried. It’s for fibbster. It’s a new half a century for me. Hey, how come you are so cute?

Addy: Cause my parents are cute.

KFC: Oops, just checking.

Post interview text messages sent by KFC:

Two minutes later: “synonym for fibber is fabulist speaks for itself in one way but means a composer of fables hmmm.”

Four minutes later: “fable meaning a short tale to teach a lesson. when you tell your story, you set someone free. amen and good night.”

Being Abundance: Some Critiques, Concerns, and Loose Predictions for Norcals Woo-Woo Industry

2009-05-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

woo: concerned with emotions, mysticism, or spiritualism; other than rational or scientific; mysterious; new agey.

Northern California's Woo Industry

For those looking to make a living by means involving the use of crystals, offering office feng shui consulting, selling fleur de sel and raw cacao marijuana truffles, serving food prepped so as to not violate the energetic lifelines of onions, hanging business executives upside down over a ravine until they confess their deepest fears and desires, or teaching owner-pet partner yoga, Northern California is the spot to be. An enormous excess of wealth combined with a larger-than-usual consumer base that places higher-than-usual stock in lifestyle values around holistic health, “green” products and services, “alternative” spirituality, “human potential,” and general new-ageyness make Norcal ground zero for the Woo Industrial Complex (WOOIC).

Much as I would like to be your first source for the best-of-the-best in woo-witchy Marxist political economics, I lack some assessment-making skills for really summing up the role of the WOOIC within the political economy of the Bay Area. What I can say is this: a lot of people here are making and spending their money in some woo-ass ways and it is a far bigger part of the economy here than actually gets talked about.

I’m hardly in a spot to draw hard and fast lines. Recent schemes for making extra cash dreamed up by myself and friends have included things like adult baby-burping for somatic release, agave-sweetened lavender lemonade and advice stands in Dolores Park, and you-tube video DJing at area cannabis clubs. And I’m not about to say that I don’t live here in part because I can eat food grown within 100 miles or say public health and holistic health care in the same sentence.

I’m far from too crudely materialist or insufficiently woo to appreciate woo’s appeal (as if the blog does not stand as proof). A quick look at my own woo resume would turn up that: My roommate and I own a special cape to wear while dancing to Stevie Nicks. I attend a school where people may be able to get master’s degrees in transpersonal psychology and drumming. I have full moon rituals and a google calendar track for my menstrual cycle. I pretend to be gluten free, went to herbal medicine school, and keep Pema Chodron books in my bathroom. I consult with an astrologer. Probably worst of all, I worked at a restaurant where all of the menu items were named after affirmations and did not quit within the first week.

Woo and I are well acquainted.

So what's the bone to pick with the WOOIC?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how poorly positioned the people pushing the Woo Industrial Complex are to make much useful meaning out of this economic moment. I’m noticing how profoundly depoliticizing and generally lacking in a materialist analysis woo-world is, and it’s time to try to actually break that down.

It’s hard to know where to start.

A short list of problems associated with the WOOIC and woo itself might include:

• Rampant white supremacist cultural appropriation and a problematic propensity for buffet-style spirituality.
• New and more sophisticated ways of fucking over workers using bizarre spiritual bypassing.
• Phony and weird anti-technology beliefs.
• Reductionism of feminist critiques and analysis into essentialist versions of the sacred feminine.
• A creepy Protestant-esque sense that things are right and people with economic privilege deserve their wealth because of right-consciousness or good acts.
• Bizarre and baseless progress narratives.
• False beliefs in notions of sustainability.
• Problematic beliefs that the world is a story we tell ourselves so we can “choose” to disengage from un-cute economic realities.
• Finally, shock, dismay, or even denial at the fact that the WOOIC is bound up with the same problems associated with capital accumulation that it sought to avoid.

Foreriders of the apocalypse bring message of human transformation from afar

As an industry, the WOOIC concerns itself with offering lifestyle and consumer choices that are meant to help people heal from the harm, emptiness, and unsustainability associated with living during late capitalism, but it does so without offering any useful materialist analysis or critique of capitalism. In this respect, it has a potentially profoundly depoliticizing effect by concerning people with envisioning desired worlds through consumer choices without connecting those visions to a respect for the work of making serious bids for power.

Frequently this “visioning” involves a fetishistic romanticization of pre-capitalist and indigenous societies and cultures. Indigenous peoples are framed as the unself-interested victims of colonial domination, too lacking in deceit to have conceived of the unfortunate and brutal fate that would befall them—let alone pose any meaningful or lasting threat to empire. Much of new-agey culture treats indigenous and non-Western spiritual traditions as artifacts of dead-and-gone or good-as dead-and-gone peoples that there is no ongoing need to have accountability to—rather than cultures that are alive, struggling, or possessed of their own internal contentions.

By these calculations, it is now up to Western new-agey folk to resurrect these “forgotten knowledges” which likely contain overlooked details capable of ushering in new evolutions in human “consciousness.” This set of beliefs is prone to naturalizing capitalism and empire—seeing them as completed projects, rather than ongoing processes—and thus, releasing new-agey folk from the need to assess complicity in the destruction of the cultures they romanticize, or have any meaningful critique of the mechanisms of empire. Certainly, it does not equip people with a sense of solidarity with ongoing struggles for indigenous sovereignty.

Despite the distrust of capitalistic and “scarcity-based” modes of consciousness, the WOOIC at once naturalizes capitalism and believes that the ills of capitalist domination that have befallen the planet will be ended through evolutions in “consciousness” rather than redistributions of wealth or power. In this model, “conscious” capitalism and “sacred commerce” become possible proselytizing forces for this proposed evolutionary shift in human consciousness. We’re working with global capitalism here, people.

Gratitude-speak and class-contortionism

This consciousness “shift” obviously must begin first at an individual level. The path for the “shift” most compatible with the bottom line of the WOOIC is for an individual to stop “telling themselves a story of scarcity.” In this model,nobody needs to be especially critical of their wealth or economic privilege if they believe they are deserving and live with gratitude.

I received one such a loving lecture while lying in savasana last week. It was not met with a chorus of criticism when delivered to a room of people who had mostly paid seventeen dollars for their am yoga class.

The WOOIC works first by obscuring consumer’s ambivalence about “conscious consumption” through astounding feats of class-consciousness contortionism. Using a protestant ethic of “good deeds,” consumers who choose to take care of themselves by eating organic food, supporting local businesses, or investing in their spirituality deserve the level of class and economic privilege they enjoy. Further the only way to keep deserving it is to keep consuming “consciously”—ie, supporting the WOOIC.

Capitalism gets sacred

Sacred commerce, is composed of the belief that the exchange of capital has the potential to be a sacred exchange of life-energy. Several business models currently exist that see themselves as having a “fourth bottom line”—the transformation of the spiritual lives and consciousnesses of their employees and customers. I had the displeasure of working for one such company. A few highlights of working at Café Gratitude included:

• Being told to stop telling myself a story of scarcity while working without health insurance and living with massive medical debt.
• Being required to attend unpaid new-age workshops.
• Experiencing a general attitude that I should be “grateful” that my employer would take an interest in my spiritual development (we aren’t even going to go down this historical road).
• A paternalistic idea of what that “development” should look like, so that they could be justified in forcing workers to ‘push through resistance’ and participate in types of emotional and spiritual engagement against their will.
• Watching other employees work for free or work unpaid overtime in service of the organism of the company. This is part of a larger technology of union-busting and undermining worker control utilized in the WOOIC. Another great example of this is the “Team Member” policy at Whole Foods which establishes a sophisticated system of worker-on-worker policing.
• Being told that the owners of the company were able to open several new locations and rapidly expand their business because of their spiritual enlightenment and not because of their access to capital or profit from workers’ labor.
• My personal favorite was being told that I could not be helped and was “choosing to tell myself a story of negativity” after threatening to call OSHA when the company repeatedly failed to cover up a drain hole in the kitchen floor and I became the fourth worker to twist my ankle by falling in it.

The WOOIC meets economic crisis

Because the WOOIC lacks any materialist analysis beyond where its own profit margins are concerned, my prediction is its adherents will have scarcely little idea what to do with the current period of economic crisis.

Here are a few observations and predictions for how the WOOIC is equipped to view capitalism's crisis:

• This period will be viewed or even romanticized as a time to reconsider what is really important (ie, our consciousness, not our consumer desires), without acknowledging the major suffering of working families or unemployed people. The period will not be viewed as one for either chipping away at capitalism or even supporting solid economic justice initiatives.
• New notions of alternative economies will be developed. Especially "gift economies" but these ideas won't include an analysis of who these new enclosures do and do not include or of expropriation in general. In this case, everyone in a new age gift economy can be rubbed raw by so many massage therapists, but not much else.
• There will be numerous suggestions of retreat into simplicity or sustainability without understanding the imperatives of accumulation and consolidation or the reality of globalization.

Obviously, these could rapidly shift if a lot of boug-a-tron woo-sters start to feel the burn in serious ways. I don't like to be such a Debbie downer, and wish I had more creative solutions for marrying lifestyle politics that make us want to be alive with anti-capitalist analysis. Tale as old as time. Let me know what you've got, folks.

And finally....

Some words on anti-woo

We did not get entirely deep with the problems with woo (future post), but I think it is important to say that obviously the idea of being entirely anti-woo has its own set of problems

Anti-woo leaves no space for nuanced relationships with woo. It leaves little space for curiosity about how people are making it through this bullshit. It assumes people all arrive at woo in the same way, and that they lack legitimate cultural claim to such ideas or practices—that they even relate to woo as woo.

Anti-woo forgets that many ideas or practices cast as woo have a legitimate cultural basis. Further, anti-woo fails to acknowledge that concepts like legitimacy and cultural purity are very complicated to begin with. In gens, all-out reactionary anti-woo runs the risk of upholding epistemological and cultural values that are all-around pretty nasty. Ones we've seen before.

To get out of this mess, we’re gonna need all the help we can get. We aren’t about to be saved alone by leftist men with bad haircuts who have no curiosity about who the supposed masses actually are. This may mean that if we weren't already, we may need to get woo about it, folks.

The case for woo needing a materialist analysis has been made loud and clear. But materialism can’t stand alone because we’ve got a mystery to build. Besides, does anyone else feel there's is a deep woo-ness--a dynamic and internal intelligence--to the material makeup of stuff and things anyway?

I'm not giving up on woo.

I want to hear from you.

The Lactobacillus Diaries: The Untold Scandals Behind Fro Yo’s Self Reinvention

2009-05-07T01:32:00.000-07:00

Recently while heading home from the beach on a warm day, I stopped for a bubble tea at Quickly on Geary where I was greeted by signage proclaiming the arrival of a “new generation of frozen yogurt.” While I had heard tell of fro yo’s bizarre self-resurrection in New York and LA, the fad had yet to hit SF, probably on account of the fact that it is secretly freezing cold here all of the time.

My only contact with fake-Pinkberry in SF was with a high-end imposter, Ce Fiore, which on too many occasions had lured me into the mall while running work errands downtown. I had been forced to swear off future trips after a confrontation with a man trying to sell Israeli nail care systems from a mall kiosk which involved some non-consensual nail buffing, insults about lesbian nail bed disrepair, and an attempt to take away my fro yo during said demonstration (it was actually more epic than it sounds. BTdubbs, read about boycotting Israeli goods here).

So, as I sat with my .59 cent Quickly fro yo cup, my mind wandered to all of the ugg-clad ladies paying six dollars for their Pinkberry fix. I figured it was well worth the wait now that the fad of designer frozen yogurt had ushered in its inevitable scion: knock-off designer frozen yogurt. Indeed, Quickly, the woman-owned Taiwanese bubble-tea giant with over 2000 stores worldwide and over 14 in SF alone, announced the upcoming arrival of fro yo at multiple Bay Area locations.

But there was one other thing I couldn’t miss: the numerous posters and brochures proclaiming not only fro yo’s re-arrival, but it’s authentic yogurty-ness. Quickly had printed several versions of postcards with pictures of cows and happy women, making claims to the alive-ness of their live cultures and the details of their non-powder dairy sources. This was my first clue that fro yo’s second coming was fraught with more drama and intrigue than may meet the eye.

Ever interested in live cultures, all things related to healthy crotch Ph, fake-sinful lady indulgences of all sorts, and the drama that makes it all go round—I couldn’t resist some research. Consider us the Veronica Mars of your Cathy comic strip.

A Brief History of Fro Yo

Fro yo materialized sometime in the late seventies—no doubt the doing of some hippie fermentation enthusiasts. It was less than well-received by a world with a palate too unevolved to appreciate its signature tartness. Fortunately for fro yo, it’s chalkier, less-live-cultured cousin was developed by the time the eighties fat-free craze hit, racking up fortunes for chains like TCBY and ushering in a new era of supposed “guilt-free” indulgence.

With the increase in lower fat ice cream technology and the emergence of carbs--rather than fat--as the new threat to diet democracy, fro yo became largely relegated to retro-future corners of weird university villages. Tasty D Lite, a favorite of skinny rich women in upper Manhattan, remained the single mysterious survivor of the general extinction of softly-served frozen desserts.

Now, most well-mannered dessert fads would have gracefully accepted their fate by now, but fro yo has miraculously managed to dust its chalky-ass self off in time for another round as our favorite "food of the future." And really, would we expect anything less from the Cher of dessert fads? After all, this is a food which, despite having always been somewhat weird, only very questionably healthy, and perpetually overpriced—spawned several competing national chains for decades.

I couldn’t help but wonder at the apparent cultural amnesia that allows fro-yo to reposition itself as such a future-food, but then could hardly contain my excitement when the Quickly in my neighborhood got a soft serve machine. Why fight it? It’s good to see you again fro-yo.

Fro-yo-nalysis

So how did fro yo manage to turn the beat around? The answer is deceptively simple. Fro yo went back to it’s roots: it got tangy.

Sure, there’s the whole new line of toppings. People acting like they have never seen Captain Crunch or a kiwi before. The question here is: is it new toppings we want, or just new-old ways of topping ourselves? Lady Tigra's Pinkberry rap says it well:

Sorry ice cream, I'm dreaming of a different dessert
Pinkberry shaved ice and frozen yogurt
It doesn't feel like I'm cheating when I'm eating it
Cuz it's healthy; I'm feeling better already

Now, we know that frozen corn syrupy crap pooped out of a noisy machine isn’t healthy just because it has some vitamin C and decent bacteria thrown in. But really, what’s better than being a good girl and a bad girl at the same time? Not much. And so it goes.

Seriously, I like eating fro yo and imagining the private satisfaction of so many women as they too enjoy this “guilt free indulgence.” It’s almost this weird form of private-public collective-unconscious mass lady-masturbation. Thinking about each other eating frozen yogurt while eating frozen yogurt. And so there’s a hook even for lovers of dairy fat and body fat both: being the fro-yo eating fox in the henhouse that is actually a henhouse full of other fro yo-eating fox-hens.

The New Era

As if fro-yo’s miraculous reinvention weren’t interesting enough, its rise to fame is littered with untold secrets involving powdered lactobacillus, lawsuits, fake yelp accounts, stolen fonts, and a tangled web of intrigue and threats made by men brandishing cigars between Redmango and Pinkberry knock-off kingpins. TJJET is no stranger to the tangled web of yelp, the better businesses bureau, and organized crime (See Mira's upcoming post: "Psychic pain holds for protecting your credit from scamming self defense schools.")

The tang as we know it started when restaurateur-designer couple, Shelly Hwang and Young Lee, decided in 2005 that it was time West Hollywood had designer fro yo. They launched the first of LA’s now 72 Pinkberry stores. Hailed as the yogurt that “caused a thousand parking tickets,” the brand caused outcry with West Hollywood neighbors who were tired of women in Uggs double parking to wait in line for an hour for overpriced fro yo. Not to mention the Pinkberry cups that began blowing through the yards of West Hollywood like swarms of paper locusts.

Pinkberry brought fro yo back in tangy new flavors like pomegranate and acai (hello, what is acai flavor, really?) and outfitted them with toppings like fresh fruit and mochi. Hwang and Lee have pitched giant containers of fro yo as a new sort of meal and their stores—with a signature interior design aesthetic, cozy furniture and wi-fi—as the new coffee shop. We are talking Starbucks-esque ambitions.

Though Pinkberry credited itself with having invented a fro yo for the new millennium, it was itself a knock off of the Korean chain, Red Mango. Ironically but not surprisingly, further knock offs popped up all over So cal. Many with “pink” or “berry” in the name and uncanny design similarities. All equally tangy.

Around this time, it was discovered that Red Mango was actually made with an Italian powder, not real dairy. This led to speculations about the real-ness of the dairy products used in Pinkberry. After all, the supposed live cultures were the whole reason we’d given ourselves an excuse to fall for fro yo again.

After an LA times lab-sting revealed that Pinkberry did not contain the number of cultures needed to meet California’s definition of “yogurt,” there was a lawsuit regarding Pinkberry’s live culture claims, which sent all new tangy yogurt companies into a hustle to ensure customers that theirs was real yogurt. It was then that a competitor accused Lee of approaching him after hours and threatening him with bodily harm while brandishing a cigar.

Lee counter-sued. An out of court settlement demanded the competitor admit to stealing Pinkberry’s font, name, and general design concept, that they deny all connections to Pinkberry in their advertising, AND that the competitor admit to posting fake yelp reviews to his own site while posing as “a regular yogurt eater” going by the alias yogurtfanatik. So far yogurtfanatik has not come forward.

Meanwhile, Pinkberry, having restored the authenticity of their yogurt with a new recipe, is now endorsed by the National Yogurt Board. The yogurt-pushers have since tried to distract us from the probiotic dramas of yesteryear by beginning a mad dash to win celebrity loyalty. At last report, Red Mango had installed a machine in Leonardo DiCaprio’s office, but the pictures will speak for themselves.

Obvi, this is to be continued.

Some people talking about the 22nd century

2009-04-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

I've been unable to find the original 1971 release of this song by Exuma, a band headed by Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey, the Bahamian artist better known as Obeah Man, but I can't help but feel like he wrote this song knowing it would find other ways to land in the world:

Here as released in 1998 by Nina Simone:

And performed by Justin Bond last year. I'm pretty sure Our Lady J is playing the piano in this. There is a version of this on YouTube that makes me pee in my computer chair but the embedding is disabled:

I think the reason the song has been hitting so hard is that I recently re-read Bernice Johnson Reagons "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century." To be fair, she was talking about the 21st century, but what is a century, really? It's become a bedtime story I read to myself now. She has so much to say about the not-cute but totally necessary work of figuring out how to survive in this world together. About the work and the reckoning, keeping our shit fresh and belonging in the here and now--how we need to do that belonging and working in a way that throws us into the next century. About it being the right time to be alive, and about committing ourselves to our work in the world "each morning we do wake up and find ourselves alive." It's a necessary visit and revisit if you can find the whole piece:

"I want to talk a little about turning the century and the principles. Some of us will be dead. We won't be here. And many of us take ourselves too seriously. We think that what we think is really the cutting line. Most people who are up on the stage take themselves too seriously--it's true. You think that what you've got to say is special and that somebody needs to hear it. that is arrogance. That is egotism, and the only checking line is when you have somebody to pull your coattails. Most of us think that the space we live in is the most important space there is, and that the condition that we find ourselves in is the condition that must be changed or else. That is only partially the case. If you analyze the situation properly, you will know that there might be a few things you can do in your personal, individual interest so that you can experience and enjoy the change. But most of the things that you do, if you do them right, are for people who will live after you are long forgotten. That will only happen if you give it away. Whatever it is that you know, give it away, and don't give it away only on the horizontal. Don't give it away like that, because thye're gonna die when you die, give or take a few days. Give it away that way (up and down). And what I'm talkin about is being very concerned with the world you live in, the condition you find yourself in, and be able ot do the kind of analysis that says that what you belive in is worthwhile for human beings in genderl, and in the future, and do everything that you can to throw yourself into the next century. And make people contend with your baggage, whatever it is. The only way you can take yourself seriously is if you can throw yourself in tho the next period beyond your little meager human-body-mouth-talking all the time.

I am concerned that we are very short-sighted and we think that the issue we have at this moment has to be addressed at this moment or we will die. It is not true. It is only a minor skirmish. It must be waged guerrilla-warfare style. You shoot it out, get behind the tree so you don't get killed, because they ain't gonna give you what you asked for. You must be ready to go out again tomorrow and while you're behind the tree you must be training the people will be carrying the message forward into the next period, when they do kill you from behind the tree." --Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon

Here's BJR:

Yes and yes.

lady liminality

2009-03-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

i haven't figured out how to talk about this yet. it's doing me like geena davis on figure skates with a machine gun plus a dose of inspirational dance movies but better.

Stage call

2009-03-26T03:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Dance-Daddy,

We are a trio of mixed-gender, deviant artists. We are all intelligent, creative, well-read, and multi-lingual visionaries. We are looking for the psychic-campy-mind-kink arrangement of a generous patron to support our quarter-life dance-troupe dreams.

We need an attentive, supportive stage-Daddy to watch us from the wings as we develop into the performers that we know we can be. We are seeking a benefactor to support our regular attendance of dance classes, healing bodywork treatments, and other needs we may have as developing dancers.

You may wish to proudly watch our dance classes from the sidelines, enjoy private performances, outfit us in matching costumery, or commission portraiture of our team for framed 8x10 glossies. We are equally open to a loving coach who would like to plot our training program, a theatrical mentor, a wise art director, or simply a silent backstage admirer.

If you interested in helping baby out of the corner once and for all, we are ready for our stage call.

The West End Girls

The blog in the world or blogs as curatorial practice

2009-03-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

It used to be that I worried desperately about everything being told. In my later teens and the darker days of Portland winters, I regularly cried over knowing how the details would disappear--how there would be no record of the rotating pots of rotting mung beans that stocked the stoves of drafty punk houses lived in by depressed queer girls with gluten sensitivities and good layering schemes that made nine months of rain and underemployment look okay. I experienced a panicked mourning at the feeling of time passing underneath me, seeming to worry about everything not getting told but moreso being terrified of not remembering, not being able to hold it all at once.

In a half attempt to catalog all of the knowing and not knowing I made, compiled, cross-referenced, and later consolidated list after list: Lists of things to be told. Lists of things to be written. Lists of things to be done. Lists of things already done. Lists of things to want from the world. Lists of lists to be made.

I don't remember when I decided to give up the campaign. At some point, I started to know that too much had come to pass for everything to even possibly be told. That the world was too full of of this untolded-ness. That instead we are all just arriving, delivering ourselves to each other. We are building the mystery and we can try to do some telling, but really the best we can do is just keep paying attention.

And we are all paying attention. To really different things. These days I am less concerned with obsessively and comprehensively cataloging everything awaiting to be told. Instead, I am much more interested in how we offer our respective bodies of specialized knowledge--whatever it is we are paying a lot of attention to-- to each other and the world. I want to know how it shows up in the now and in the sharing. And that process--of working from your mass to decide what is worth the telling--really, that's your blog.

In this way, I've come to understand blogs as something of a curatorial practice. And not just blogs that are blogs. but blogs in the world--all the paying attention. All the noticing. All the curating. All the offering.

In reflecting on what our blog in the world might be, Mira and I realized that the bizarre and neurotic brilliances of women in the world and the information they are working with is where a lot of our noticing lies: The logicslashmagic when you organized your tea collection or chose your socks. We may miss a beat, but not many.

So this is the weird girl blog. There's too much weird girl in the water--too much being known and too much knowing about how not to know--to ever really be told. But consider this as our offering. A blog for the world about blogs, bodies of information, in the world.

Everything you need to know about surviving the scabies half of the mite-pocalypse

2009-03-25T00:31:00.000-07:00

Late nineties apocalyptic preoccupations were primarily concerned with ubiquitous vaginal infections like bubonic BV and the tenacious and fearsome colonization of all bodily moistness known as candida. While fears of basic vaginal ph levels are hardly a thing of the past, evidence suggests that the apocalyptic proportions of such vaginal infections may have decreased over a timeline roughly coinciding with veganism’s decline in popularity.

Declines in the rate of bubonic BV may also be due to experimental research in “bouch-wear,” leathery protective talismen crafted by fermentation artisans out of the dried liver-like substance of “kombucha mother,” a gelatinous colony of yeast and bacteria originally found floating on the surface of Ukranian lakes. While conclusive proof is still being awaiting, it is suggested that bouch-wear may have powerful balancing effects on microorganisms, including the bacteria known to cause BV.

While MRSA staph has emerged as the new and arguably more formidable and mysterious form of infection to colonize our skin surfaces and minds, recent reports from both and left and right coasts have shown mites—namely bedbugs and scabies, are beginning a new all-out offensive to position themselves as the primary threat to our lives, minds, and ability to comfortably inhabit bodies in the world alongside other bodies in the world.

While at TJJET we prefer to offer you information that may be less technical or at least more uplifting, we believe that knowledge about scabies has turned out to be sufficiently mysterious to qualify itself as general esoteria. Also, due to the high number of readers who are public health workers, are having sex with a lot of people, or who are public health workers fucking other public health workers (an especially vulnerable demographic), we have come to recognize this as a subject of growing concern to our readership. To that end, we have agreed to undertake an intensive study of all information about scabies currently known to humans, including original research in mite-specific banishings and excorcisms. While we realize that scabies only represent one half of the mite-pocalypse, the extent of this research has been far more exhaustive than originally intended. We welcome the expertise of any known bedbug experts who have taken that one for the team, because we have no intention of doing so.

The information that follows is guaranteed to have been experientially tested with more weird-girl rigor and neuroticism than anywhere else on the world wide web. We hope to spare you the hours, dollars, and possible mental ruin that could result from a thorough perusing of internet message boards on the subject, where you are likely to encounter numerous scams and the details of horrific science fiction skin diseases unrecognized by the CDC and possibly related to chem-trails and alien abductions. To be fair, we wouldn’t want you to miss this ad featuring a sports-nut scabie-sufferer. But really, you are ill-advised to google scabies.

The Basics

Scabies are a microscopic mite that colonizes your skin. They itch, especially at night. Some people will have rash-like symptoms. Sometimes you will see “burrows” which are wavy lines made by the tunneling action of the mites under the skin. Medical experts will tell you they usually show up around the arm pits, belt line, chest, ass, elbows, webbing of toes and fingers, ankles, and back of legs. If this sounds unhelpful because it describes almost your entire body, it’s because it does, and it is just one part of what keeps scabies infections generally shrouded in mystery.

If you’ve never had them, the symptoms can take three to six weeks to show up because your body develops an allergic reaction to them over time. During this “window period” you can still infect others. Before you call every person you’ve hugged, consider that if scabies were that easy to get, we’d probably all have them from the unfortunately upholstered surfaces of BART trains. Scabies mites are not very hearty. They don’t like to live off the body for more than 36 hours and generally there aren’t too many live mites on the body at one time. Infections are likely limited to parent-child contact, and people you’ve had sex or shared a bed with, though it is not unheard of for scabies to have been passed among roommates by way of couches or bath towels.

Diagnosis can be tough. Everyone’s reactions and symptoms look different. Healthcare professionals often lack definitive information. While diagnostic tests (if you can convince a doctor to do them) do exist, skin scrapings often show a high number of false negatives because there are so few live mites on the body as a whole. Things to look for include a pattern of escalating itching, especially during the night, after exposure to an infection.

Taking care of business

The usual prescription for infection is permethrin 5%, a topical cream that kills the mites and eggs. While this one shot deal might seem appealing, keep in mind that it is a neurotoxin applied to the largest organ in your body and it is recommended to only be done three times in a lifetime. A tube is usually good for two full body treatments, aka overnight coatings. If you have health insurance or a friend who does, one can usually call in and give them a line to have a prescription written. There are other types of prescriptions. Lindane is an ultra-toxic topical treatment and there’s also an internal anti-parasitic for particularly bad cases.

Even in the case of successful treatments, you will probably continue to have symptoms for several weeks as your body reacts to the dead mites left behind, so don’t freak out and keep reusing this toxic shit. Our only other cautionary word is that permethrin does not always work and it does not protect against reinfection. While you hardly want to subject everyone around you to toxic rub-downs, if roommates or lovers are not treating you should pay special attention to the window period for symptoms before letting down any hypervigilant campaigns of cleanliness.

With any kind of treatment you choose, it is important to clean the environment as well. Vacuum like crazy. This also means washing and drying bedding, upholstery, and all recently worn clothing and shoes. If you don’t want to wash everything, you can bag it up for a couple days. If there’s no moisture, the mites supposedly die quickly. Go get several rolls of quarters and some good Laundromat reading because it is incredibly likely you will be cozied up at the coin-op a lot more than usual until everyone in your midst is definitively scabies-free.

The low down on non-toxic treatments

Permetherin 5% is not recommended as a treatment for pregnant people or infants due to toxicity. In these cases, pharmacists can mix an ointment of 10% sulfur. Why, you might ask, is everyone not being prescribed this cheap, non-toxic treatment? Good question. Besides it being somewhat messy and taking a couple days, we see no reasonable way to account for the fact that this time-tested favorite of commune dwellers and forest activists seems to have fallen out of use, especially when one takes into account all of the expensive and ineffective alternative treatments being tried.

Here’s how it works: You buy some sulfur powder. We were able to get a pound for five bucks from the local herbal apothecary. You mix it 1 part to 10 into vegetable glycerin or some highly absorbable lotion. We don’t know whether 1:10 means by weight or volume, but let’s be real, you are going to put in way more sulfur than it calls for, so just mix it up. The glycerin can be messy but gets better coating-action. You might want to try a coat with glycerin from the neck down at night. In the morning you can shower and apply another coat with the lotion mixture. Continue this for three 24 hour cycles (days).

If you are trying to select a lotion and you think all gross drugstore lotions are created equally, they are not. The ingredients appear similar, but Lubriderm got a less messy, more even coat on. You can be out in the world in your sulfur coat, you just might smell a little like a home perm. It’s messy enough that you might want to refrain from wearing black or dark colors. The glycerin washes easily out of clothing and bed sheets but the sulfur does leave a faint smell, nothing that can’t be explained by saying you fell into a hot spring until the smell washes out entirely.

Other pro’s of this treatment method: Besides being cheap, not too labor intensive, and non toxic, sulfur has the added benefit of having a common witchy use of being a hex-repellent and expellant. Witchy proprieters of the powder sell it as "brimstone" and claim it removes enemies’ powers over you. If this is true, the sulfur treatment could also be effective in treating the post-scabies syndrome commonly known as “scabies of the mind.” Finally, another notable benefit of the sulfur treatment: If there is anyone you’ve smashed with that you end up needing to tell about the scabies, you could make a date out of a beach blanket sulfur soak with special snacks and a themed movie marathon, which is much nicer than offering someone the other half of your tube of toxic paste and telling them you’d like to see them again in a month.

Some words on Neem and other “natural treatments”

Although we’ve already put forth another, far cheaper non-toxic treatment alternative, there are simply too many wild claims about neem oil to not address it. Internet searching will yield all kinds of vague information about the use of neem for scabies. What is impossible to find, though, is anyone who is claiming to actually have fully managed a scabies outbreak with the stuff. Proponents of the neem approach say the neem disrupts the scabies ability to reproduce and so slowly kills the outbreak.

We personally subjected ourselves to over two weeks of nightly neem baths and just as much tea tree oil. While the outbreak was managed during that time, the mites returned as soon as the baths were stopped. And in case nightly neem baths sounds like a relaxing ritual, consider how you and everything you own, touch, or look at will smell like rancid peanut butter even after several washings. This is especially bad if you live in California where the offensive smell of neem may spark “friendly reminders” at work about company scent-free policies. We wish we were joking.

As for tea tree oil, people have been claiming this as a virtual panacea for every apocalyptic ailment mentioned in this article (BV, MRSA, mites). One question we would like to put forth is if tea tree oil kills everything known to exist, is it really that great for us? Also, the tea tree oil may have helped manage, but did not actually rid us of mites, so we say keep the TTO in the toothpicks where it belongs.

We hope that this information, more acutely painstaking in it’s collection than much of what we hope to offer here at TJJET, proves useful. Since no amount of information about microscopic mites will ever be completely satisfying, we welcome additional questions, comments, speculations, and hearsay related to the mite-pocalypse. Together, we survive.

The Situography of the Imminent Future

2009-03-10T23:38:00.000-07:00

Generated by collaborative divinations, illustrated by Ivy. Click to enlarge: