Your Regularly Scheduled Post

My new posting routine is going to be upended this week because I have back-to-back-to-back job interviews on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

I'm basically a giant ball of anxiety and nerves right now.

It's awesome having a high-stakes job interview, on the first day of the new school year, after a long weekend, when your partner is a teacher and is similarly a ball of nerves.

I will leave you with some quality reading I've come across lately:

Mindy Kaling's Guide to Killer Confidence

Patrick Ness, who is one of my favorite YA authors, started this fundraising campaign to help Syrian refugees because he was tired of tweeting his despair.  A bunch of authors (at first limited to the YA community, but now expanding) pledged matching 10,000 pound contributions and now the campaign is up at 500K pounds!  This makes me so happy

Bill Hader and Fred Armisen and Seth Myers are doing this spoof on documentaries in the series, Documentary Now!  It is so, so, so funny.

This article on Amazon was depressing.

Speaking of refugees, I came across this poem on a blog and it totally moved me.  The author is London-based, Kenyan-born, Somali poet and author, Warsan Shire.

Home

by: Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless 

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
n*****s with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess up ours
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Fin.

Complicit

I sat at my desk on Friday and wiped away tears and tried (unsuccessfully) to keep snot at bay as the stories from Newtown started to colonize my social media spaces.  It was really hard then, and is really hard now, to not feel overcome thinking about how scared and frightened those little tykes were and the school teachers and administrators and the people in the town.  Exhortations to hug your kids and loved ones ran rampant, and even I, staunch resister of all clichés that I am, came home and revelled in the fact that the Big Yam was there and safe and happy and unwilling to be hugged because he wanted to look at pictures of the moon on the iPad.  Even the antidote memes that have floated around in the wake of Newtown (like this one about 26 Moments That Restored Our Faith in Humanity This Year, or photos of the first same-sex marriages performed in Washington state), have made me cry.

You have to believe that humanity is good.  At the end of the day, I do (although reading the Huffington Post crime section challenges this belief).  I think the coverage of these events and the rapaciousness of the 24-hour news cycle is disgusting and an enabler of this type of sociopathic behaviour, and yet, I couldn't stay away from the New York Times live updates.

I'm conflicted by my own degree of complicity with many facets of this problem and my sensitivity to the urban-rural divide that exists in gun discourse in Canada.  However, I do not believe that gun control is a political issue, or should be.  Technically, a lot of issues that shouldn't be political issues have become politicized because people are dummies, but still.  Regulation is just that - regulation and I think the idea of stricter controls on guns should be something that is supported by gun enthusiasts and pacifists in equal measure.  The idea of having a constitutionally protected right to own "arms" is one of the most asinine things I've ever heard of, and makes me grateful for the the relative youth of our Charter here in Canada.

In the meantime, I'm channelling all my inner rage and feelings of powerlessness towards a renewed hatred of the Westboro Baptist Church.  On the topic of complicity though, do I contribute to the societal conditions that allow for sociopathic behaviour when I say that I wish members of the Westboro Baptist Church would be cursed with adult hand, foot, and mouth disease?  Does that make me a bad person?  A really bad person?  Or an awful person?  I don't know.  I have a feeling it does.

I ended up cancelling my plans to have the gals from Canoe over on Friday night because I was so depressed about what had happened that day in the news.  I really just wanted to be with the Dotytron and the Big Yam and to sit with them on the couch and feel warm and secure in Lil' Ugmo and feeling very, very lucky for the opportunity to do so.

Fin.