Month: January 2019

I recently heard advice for appreciating where you currently are in life, by recalling who you were 10 years ago and asking whether that self would’ve been impressed by who you are now. I was 25 then, and tbh I don’t know what the fuck would’ve impressed me then. I was obsessively watching Jay Z (formerly Jay-Z) on Fade to Black, which maybe means that my ideal future involved taking center stage at Madison Square Garden with R. Kelly by my side. That self didn’t care about museums (or really much art that wasn’t hip hop) and would’ve have been able to tell you what a curator was. My 25 year old self saw poets who were in their mid-30’s, bewildered as to why they couldn’t/wouldn’t perform gut-spilling poems at poetry slams anymore. My 25 year old self thought 35 years old was old af, and wasn’t impressed by old people. My 25 year old self was envious of Chris Brown for blowing up at age 15. My 25 year old self was generally broke but still managed to scrape the funds to invest in issues of GQ because it made me feel grown up (but not old). My 25 year old self thought eating shit tons of fried tofu was me being a health nut.

But my 25 year old self did want to be in love – though my 25 year old self thought I wanted to be with Lisa Bonet. My 25 year old self didn’t know how how important it was to see my parents often, and felt like a 35-minute drive was too far for frequent visits. My 25 year old self thought that adulting meant lapses from family. My 25 year old self once compelled my dad to ask, “So do you only visit us to do your laundry?”

But my 25 year old self made music more often than I can dream of now. And wrote more too. And wasn’t so cynical about the state of the world. My 25 year old self was content with less things and simpler things. My 25 year old self was down to stay out past 2am even if he didn’t plan to that day.

In my 20’s, my vision of my future was unrestrained and went as far as my imagination could go, and even though that seemed endless then, today I find myself doing things far beyond what I could fathom. I think my 25 year old self might applaud what I’m doing now, but more in like a “good for you but that’s not for me” kind of a way. Sometimes we don’t really know what we want until we have it. It would be fine if my 35 year old self impressed my 25 year old self, but part of being in your 30’s means not giving a fuck what people in their 20’s think about you. In fact, I if I really start obsessing over what a 25 year old numbskull high off his ego and obsessed with fame thinks of me, I hope my 45 and 55 year old selves come over and slap the shit out of me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to build a community. It’s what I studied in school, and is what colored the activism and work that I’ve done for the past 15 years. Community is a word that, when spoken in the Bay Area where I grew up, immediately offered a tone of warmth, belonging, just cause. When Sarah Palin spoke the words “community organizer” with a tone of disgust, I was offended, but mostly baffled. I had never heard that word weaponized. When I entered the fine arts world and learned that community arts was frowned upon, I was baffled, but mostly offended. I had never thought of that word as less than.

A few months ago, a curator took me to task when I told her that the entire axis that my work spins upon is that of building community. “But what does that even mean?” she asked. “Who exactly is your community?” I looked around at the colonial buildings of Singapore that loomed over our café table. I suddenly felt foreign. I realized that I’ve been truly treating this world like it was my oyster, proud of the fact that I could land in almost any country and make friends within a day or two. Is that what my community is? Just my friends and the people who I like?

A few months later, I heard another curator shrug off the word, but in a different way. “I don’t really like to use the word community, because it’s constrained to people with common interests and agendas,” she said. “I prefer the word society.” I looked around again, this time from inside a museum auditorium in Australia. I saw all the pensive brown and black faces in the room. And then it occurred to me that these are all just words.

The art world is quick to roll their eyes when someone asks, “But what is art?” It’s an inescapable debate that never turns out an answer. It quickly becomes a hot potato for people to pass around so they can emit their intellect, there thinking-ness (not necessarily the same as thoughtfulness). But the “What is community?” question can feel so much heavier. It’s not always open to discussion, even if everyone in the room envisions different boundaries for what that could be. What makes the defining of community so much more white-hot than defining art, is that we are community, in ways that we can’t say that we are art. When I was questioned about who my community is, it felt like my own being was questioned. I can’t say that I was offended or baffled, but my body responded as if I were. I spent the rest of the day lost in my head, and in some ways the question lingers whenever I utter the word.

I’m not sure it’s the most productive thing to do to actively seek to answer the question of who is and isn’t in my community. I’m sure the historians could tell me how the search for this answer has built and destroyed nations, the activists could trace this on the rise and fall of movements, and the algorithms could reveal this based on who I follow online. But I do know that community isn’t a club and I’m not a bouncer. And since the only person I can truly testify is and will always be part of all my communities is me, maybe it’s okay for the search for this definition is as epic, complicated, and trivial as the search for self.

Today’s the official first day back from the government shutdown, and I’m fitted with a sword and shield for the tidal wave ahead. During this morning’s meditation, the familiar distractions crept in for the first time in weeks – mind wandering to the things that will be waiting in my inbox, the ways I’ll need to pay tetris with my time, the commitments that I was unaware that someone else had committed me to. Once again I’ll need to come to terms with the fact that my attention is a timeshare, and even though I have the choice to say no to things, it takes energy to express even that.

I’m reminding myself that I can, at the very least, give myself these 20 minutes each day to unload. I hope it doesn’t come down to it, but if I need to I’ll schedule emails to myself just so that I feel like I’m going through the motions of responding to something. But let’s hope I don’t need to resort to band-aids of that sort.

The news outlets are saying that nothing came out of this shutdown, but I beg to differ. It might not have been a political win for anyone, and even those of us on the side of resisting that stupid wall recognize that we just spent the past 5 weeks fighting for a status quo. Looking out the window, it looks nothing different than it did the past few weeks. Maybe this is what it looks like to start fresh without the climactic-ness of an actual fresh start, to feel excited, rusty, unsure, and ready all at the same time.

I’ve been contemplating a hiatus for a couple of years now. It’s something that seems like I’m not old or established enough for. It’s contradictory to the hustle culture that my generation is driven by – a culture that can’t decide if it wants to retire early or sleep when it dies. A hiatus is defined as a break, interruption, fissure, gap, and other words that are at odds with being a productive member of society. Coming out of a government shutdown that followed a holiday vacation, I have to ask myself, didn’t you have your hiatus already? I think not. Unlike a mandated holiday or temporary unemployment, what compels me to a hiatus is that I still have agency. A hiatus isn’t an extended vacation, it’s a move toward evolution. It’s a vocation for life.

The last time I brought up the concept of a hiatus to someone above me in my professional hierarchy, I was told that those things typically need a material reason and a product-based output, like a book. So in order to get some headspace from my heavily ambitious plate I need to put an even more ambitious thing on my plate? I consider this a difference in personality and opinion. Some of the best things that have emerged in my life have come out of spontaneity, boredom, reaching a point where my slate was completely blank. The notion of a hiatus merely as an interruption where, upon my return, the same stack of tasks are still waiting for me, does not appeal to me. Neither does the idea of taking a hiatus that follows a predetermined agenda, probably set by an over-worked person or self. It’s like trying to make a meal when you’re famished. With a stomach growling, who has time to conjure something gourmet, measured, thoughtful, flavorful, and with intention? You’re hungry AF so you just end up with a sad quesadilla.

So what does it look like to take a hiatus that doesn’t taste like a sad quesadilla? I sure as hell don’t know, but the shutdown did give me a little taste. Despite the avalanche of work that’s sure to hit me tomorrow morning, I want to continue developing a curriculum for the major I mentioned a few days ago. Because I know that anything that even resembles a hiatus is not in my cards this year, I’ll resort to the typical surrogate, which is trying to reach some sort of <span class=”eyeroll”>work-life balance</span>. If and when I do get the chance to take one, I’d like for it to not feel like the quiet of a storm, but a change of seasons. A hiatus wouldn’t be a break, but a scene change that helps the rest of this story make sense.

They should’ve never let the shutdown last for more than 21 days. That’s just enough time for us to get into the habit of being our full selves. It’s selfish of me to wish that this lasted for just a bit longer. People need their paychecks, people need their government services to be reinstated. I feel guilty for even humoring the question of what people did with the wealth of time they were afforded, albeit in the absence of money. I certainly hope not all 800,000 of us were what was depicted in the news – starving, stressing, staring at CNN waiting for some breaking news. So many of us felt our holiday expenses collide with the emptiness of postponed paydays. But I hope that even those who needed to take cash advances, fill out unemployment forms, visit food banks – that at some point over the past month they were able to find moments to feel free.

It’s not that I don’t take pride in my work. I love my job. And even if I didn’t (like how I didn’t during the shutdown of 2014) I’m familiar with the stone that sits in your stomach when you’re broke. I know how debilitating it can be, and how it can color everything else that happens in the day. I recognize that for many people this wasn’t just a forced vacation with eventual backpay, and that people are hurting. But if all 800,000 of us are as proud, driven, ready to contribute to society as we believe we are, I can’t help but wonder what has been added to the world by almost a million people with nothing but free time on their hands. You can’t tell me none of that innate motivation saw the light of day.

The news has focused on how the shutdown will affect the economy. The companies that will report slower earnings, the rise in unemployment forms filled, the loss to small businesses because people didn’t spend. I get all that. But simultaneously. How many people picked up meditation in the mornings? And exercise regimens? Who strengthened their relationships by spending more time with family? And learned what they don’t actually need to buy in order to be happy? How many of us will come back to work ready to not take the shit they took before they were temporarily discarded?

The catch 22 when it comes to imagining a life beyond capitalism is that anti-capitalists are quick to remind you of everyone else who doesn’t have enough money to think that way. And it’s been at least five years since I crawled out of debt, three years since I’ve tasted the cottonmouth that comes with paying a penalty for having a negative balance. So it’s likely that my ramblings as an uppity furloughed curator are distinct from those of a struggling TSA agent. But nobody is a cog. Nobody is an empty vessel who experienced the shutdown as time frozen, like an extra from an episode of Out of This World when Evie touched her fingertips. I hope that especially those who only had the currency of time found a way to invest in themselves – not so that they could return to work as better employees, but because they can exist in this world as fuller selves. How would that be for a resolution?

Over the past week I’ve followed a strict digital curfew, which involves keeping my phone out of my bedroom before going to sleep, and not looking at it (or anything else on the internet) until I’ve gotten my journaling done.

But sometimes you come out of meditation and feel like you just have to google something. I thought I’d cheat a little bit this morning. Everything went to shit. Before I knew it, that search turned into me watching two videos, which reminded me that I needed to text someone back, which hurled me into a couple of conversations, which made me need to check my calendar, which made me need to check my email. All of that happened within the course of an hour, so I was able to reel myself in, but as I sit here to write, I’m recognizing how different I feel in my mind and my body right now than I normally do. I already feel like I need to hurry up and finish this, since a ton of other to-do’s saw that crack of light and are rushing to the top of my mind. Each comes with a person or an opportunity that would be disappointed if I dropped the ball, and that urgency makes something like writing a personal journal entry seem all the more arbitrary. With so much that presents itself as more important, I struggle to remind myself that I AM A WRITER! I must write, otherwise I fall back into the familiar trap of making it my job to maintain my life as an artist as opposed to just being an artist.

We are living in a time where more people are talking about doing than actually doing. Social media allows us to convey like we’re living lives of action and accomplishment, but can we really do it for the gram while doing it for ourselves? Maybe I’m just too old for that shit, but for me it tends to lean one way or the other. I choose me.

Coming to the table to write everyday means doing so even if you don’t know exactly what you’re going to say. It’s surprisingly difficult, given how often we transmit ourselves off the cuff these days. There’s something about a blank page that holds more weight than a status update box or a comment field. For the writer experiencing a block, the conventional wisdom is to just sit there and write. Just let your pen start moving or your fingers start typing and no doubt, something will come out. Just like right now. Whether or not this post will end up being a contribution to the collective consciousness, or just a long-winded version of a useless tweet is to be determined, maybe, at another time. Or more likely, this will just be suspended in existence like most of the other content out there. Read only by the author while writing it, and even then, just barely. Orphan pixels posing as prose…because you know I could delete this entire website if one day it proved counter to the narrative that I desire, no problem. I’ve had too many hard drives and computers crashed, files swallowed by the cloud, memories emptied out with my desktop trash to get that sentimental about any of this. At a certain point, you come to accept that there probably won’t be a retrospective. There will be no biographer to pore over your every notebook, no filmmaker to give your coming of age the Ken Burns treatment. It’s probably why so many of us are so willing to pick up our phones and do it ourselves. How much life do we live if we spend one half documenting the other, and how did we learn to reminisce but forget how to reflect? Or maybe it’s just me. But sometimes I try to imagine how things would’ve been different if Jesus had Instagram. Or even if he blogged. But if god’s son himself didn’t think to leave behind a memoir, a notebook, even a to-do list, yet somehow was able to be remembered for eons – albeit somewhere between fact and fiction – maybe people just remember who they want to remember, how they want to remember them. I can leave behind all the breadcrumbs I want, it doesn’t mean my legacy will stay where I left it. So I used to be prolific, but my lapse came when I realized hardly anybody was paying attention and I asked, “What’s the point?” The problem is that I took that statement as the answer, instead of actually trying to answer the question.

One of my favorite books I read last year was Epitaph for a Peach by David Masumoto, a memoir by a peach farmer in Fresno as he rehabilitated the land that he had acquired. I had never thought about it before, but the rising popularity of organic food means that much of this needs to be grown on land that has endured years or decades of pesticides. In the book, Masumoto describes growing onions, not to harvest and eat but to let decay back into the ground so that they can slowly break apart the toxins and bring life back to the soil.

One of the things I’ve learned to love about winter is being surrounded by trees and plants that would appear to be dead and wilted if it weren’t for the fact that we know that by spring they’ll be flourishing again. Here in D.C. the weather can be volatile, and sometimes a spell of warmth will strike through the city, only to be followed by a snow storm. While it is still winter, any buds that dare to emerge will be frozen over, never reaching full blossom.

I’ve found these winters to be the best time for writing like this. The habit is easy to keep up when it’s cold and dark outside, and the human world is still ramping up for the year ahead. So does that mean writing for me is seasonal? I’ve proven to myself time and again that it doesn’t take much for the words to start coming back out again, but each time I fall off the wagon it seems so daunting to get back on. I doubt that I’ll be able to do it again each time, not realizing that the rubric that I measured myself with previously might not be the same now. With the imagination, there is no standard measurement.

In the spring, when life resurfaces and daily demands are higher, it gets harder and harder to convince myself that writing daily like this is “productive.” But when I look back at the last few years, it’s not the periods where I lapsed in output that I’m tempted to wish I could redo. It’s actually the opposite – the times when I was so focused on delivering some kind of product to the world, that I didn’t start the day making sure that the ground I was standing on was nourishing rather than toxic. It’s become clear to me that mornings are for planting onions. I’m giving myself permission to keep this going year-round.

I’m beginning to zero in on my course of study for this self-imposed life degree, and I’ve landed on the major of Collective Imaginology. I’ve found very sparse use of the word (it’s an imagined term 😅) but the most compelling is based on this 2006 paper by Michael Vannoy Adams presented at a conference for the International Association for Jungian Studies. It has me thinking a lot about the Century of Self, which I started the year with and that has been informing much of my thinking and doing lately. But I’m not necessarily trying to make my life about comparing Jung and Freud, and by extension I don’t see this as a foray into philosophy (even though I will definitely need to brush up on it). I see this as more of a field study than a theoretical one – I’m much more interested in a hands-on approach than a theoretical one, maybe some study of the collective imagination as a topic, but really weighing more on the practice of it.

Collective Imaginology is plainly the study and practice of how multiple individuals conspire to manifest ideas, creations, and realizations that would not have surfaced in isolation. If I am to have a thesis, it may be in The Role of Collaborative Arts in the Practice of Thriving – here I use the word arts very vaguely as it can relate to any creative generation, and thrive based on its etymological definition of “to grasp oneself.” It’s fascinating to me to think about how practices in self-knowing and self-unknowing may hinge not purely on continuing to go deeper into oneself, but actually on symbiotic relationships, intentful collaboration, and collective consciousness.

I have a bit more brainstorming to do (a.k.a. geeking tf out), and this involves coming up with my minor as well as my courses, syllabi, etc. I’m fighting a voice in my head that’s saying that this is all for naught, that I’ll either get bored and drop this whole thing, or once the gov shutdown lifts “real responsibilities” will come in and overtake life again. But I’m hoping that this is something I actually take in stride, and that informs the kinds of projects, relationships, and decisions that I make moving forward in life. More on this soon.

Throughout my twenties I made a career of giving college kids advice. iLL-Lit was touring universities for shows, and one of the main questions we were asked was how we were able to turn our passions into our livelihoods. College can be such a hard place to learn what your true purpose may be, without completely aligning it with your major, which may have been determined somewhere between the spectrum of arbitrarily picking something that you thought would give you a better chance of getting into your school of choice, to following a path that you feel like you’re destined or at least supposed to go with. The advice we gave was to soften your grip on your major and the predestined path of courses and life decisions that usually come along the way. We discovered our lives as artists and activists during our free time, which we transformed into extra-curricular activities, then side hustles, then eventually main hustles. We hopped majors until we found the ones that aligned with our sporadic attentions, and even then didn’t take those as beacons for our lives but just merely a set of requirements to get a degree and move on.

Good advice for then, but I’m not sure it applies the same anymore. Because capitalism has a funny way of squeezing money even out of innocent hobbies. In 2019, when a fair portion – if not a majority – of young people are more likely to form their careers by piecing together a series of side hustles, rather than pursue a field of expertise. Where the question for people like this back in the day may have been “how do you do all those things?” now it might be “is that all you do?” Out of college, I took pride in listing that I am an artist, musician, graphic designer, web designer, educator, etc etc etc. A human Swiss army knife! Little did I know that I was in danger of becoming a tool.

The bright side of my approach to following a multi-prong career meant that I had endless possibilities and options. When the economy tanked and universities ran dry of funding to book me for performances, I was able to pivot to designing websites for all the people who had quit or been laid off and were ready to finally pursue their own side hustles. But not all side hustles are created equal, and even though I had picked up design along the way of my young wanderlusting through skillsets, I never really learned to pursue it in the way that I loved. When it stopped being sustainable for me to design funner, simpler websites for artists for a couple hundred a pop, I promoted myself to designing for non-profits and companies. The demands of these projects left little room for my imagination, and steered me into things that I definitely don’t love doing, like engineering, e-commerce and cyber-security. Along the journey of picking up a bunch of creative hard skills, I never learned general soft skills like delegating or narrowing my focus.

I’m hella fortunate to find myself in a situation where I have too many opportunities coming my way and I have the hard task of filtering which ones offer purpose, joy, and the kinds of experiences that will put me in the presence of the regular rituals that would compose a fulfilling life for me. But it means I need to figure out my major in life – and here I’m giving myself the opportunity to be a double- or even triple-major. But instead of focusing on career fields of subjects, I’m looking for the kinds of majors that are vast and flexible enough for me to continue to dive into wormholes and pick up new experiences and interests, while still being focused enough to help me sift past projects that won’t contribute to the kind of person I want to be. It’s a new way of thinking, that’s forcing me to ask different questions when considering what I want to be involved in.

Instead of asking, “Do I have the skills/capacity/time to do this?” I will ask, “Will this lead me to the kinds of experiences/people/information that will motivate me to be who I want to be right now and into the future?” This means not choosing things based merely on my own qualification, but on my rooted sense of aspiration.

Instead of asking, “Is this connected to a topic that I’m interested or knowledgeable in?” I will ask, “Will this offer me the learning moments I need to be an expert in the grand themes I’m pursuing in life?” This helps me avoid following small side interests by making big commitments, and interrogates which of those small interests can actually accumulate toward something that will last beyond my fickle short-term interests.

Instead of asking, “Is this project for a good cause?” I will ask, “Will this project allow me to be the best I can be for the causes I believe in?” This one is hard, because one of the main reasons I end up picking up projects that I regret are because they align with my politics. But without intention, this qualifies any and everything that can be deemed “progressive.” Even within the issues that I personally am invested in, I have ended up picking up projects that are attached to toxic interactions, tasks that drain me, or compensation that doesn’t match the time and energy I invest. Several months or weeks into a project like this, the fact that it’s toward a social cause that I care about proves to not be enough legs for my dedication to stand on – and in the cases where the social interactions involved are sucky, it’s actually detrimental to my perspective of that given cause.

Here, I recognize that I’m not who I was 10 years ago when I launched my design career in stride (which meant scouring Craigslist postings and picking up any little thing that might help me cover rent and groceries). Making decisions out of scarcity is a hard habit to kick, and it involves fear of sliding back into the need to do so, as well as guilt for being able to make this choice while so many others in the world aren’t. This is all a process that may or may not work, and has probably been done and written about ad infinitum, but oh well. What remains consistent in my message is to just take agency, believe in the process, and see how it goes.