What am I going to do with the big balloon energy?

1. make jasmine tea
2. nothing
3. this pigeon

pigeon

learning I was not going to be in the top math class in eighth grade

The big balloon energy comes up when one or more of my kids have friends over and they get even the least bit boisterous. Maybe not even boisterous, maybe they just have to exist in my airspace. In my auraspace. My mom and stepdad’s house (built in 1975) had no second story but it was a mile long and had a soundproofed basement, so we (annoying kids) could be in one distinct environ, while my mom and/or stepdad could be in their own separate one. This made sneaking out at night way easier, but it also made coexisting easier. Also, my stepdad was a male lion so he was better at ignoring us cubs. That’s a skill I lack. I worry too much about what they might be getting up to. I feel left out too much. I feel the need to clean up too much.

Whatever the reasons, when the kids are being big and taking up space (as they should!), I get this fervid urge to flee — but there’s nowhere in this adorable 1955 post-war cape cod (I don’t think it’s really a cape cod but that’s what it said in the realtor listing) to hide. I can hear everything on every floor. (Nevertheless, my youngest has managed to sneak out at least a few times — she’s more adroit than I was, I guess — I didn’t even have to climb out a window, and I still eventually got caught!)

So I flee into dumb stuff like watching a Netflix show I don’t even really like, eating all the sugar, sealing myself up in a long bath, or kind of rigidly vibrating, not really doing anything. Used to be drinking too, but not anymore, but as every quitter gets to discover, not drinking doesn’t automatically make you stop doing other dumb stuff. So I thought I’d try something different tonight. Maybe them having fun doesn’t have to mean I don’t get to have fun or relax or take care of myself.

So what am I going to do with the big balloon energy?

1. let go of the girls a little bit — maybe one of them will do something bad. They’ll learn. We can clean up later.
2. turn on some “focus” music, run a fan, do whatever I need to do to make my little upstairs lair more leonine
3. this pigeon

Letting go is hard. Feels like if I turn off the emergency force field constant alert system, something catastrophic will immediately happen and it will be my fault. I’ve been both lion and lioness around here; I suppose that makes it a bit harder. Them’s the breaks.

Here’s another quick aside, something that’s been on my mind off and on since one of the speakers at L–’s college orientation started with an indigenous land acknowledgement. I don’t fully understand those; sometimes it seems like a facile assuagement of guilt, or a moral performance. Just now I read a little bit about them, and I thought this Native Governance Center page did a good job showing how “[s]tarting somewhere is better than not trying at all.” This part especially caught my eye, as I never would have guessed this was in any way a common practice:

Commit to returning land. Local, state, and federal governments around the world are currently returning land to Indigenous people. Individuals are returning their land, too. Research your options to return your land.

This all seems related to how it feels to read about the current regime’s human rights abuses, particulary the illegal and grotesquely cruel seizures and detentions. This Human Rights Watch report, for example, goes to great lengths to describe the changes that should be made. The authors make detailed recommendations “To the US Executive ... To the U.S. Congress ... To the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ... To Florida’s State and Local Governments ... To Private Contractors Operating Detention Facilities ... To the UN Committee Against Torture, the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees” I guess that too is “starting somewhere.” cogently laying out the facts, setting the record straight, delineating an authentic, achievable alternative is probably important work. I don’t know if any of those addressed are going to take any of the recommended actions though. And where does that leave you and me? What am I supposed to do? Go to protests, OK, call or write your congress people and get a form email back, OK. What else? Think ahead about how we’re going to break the law and harbor someone they’re trying to disappear, when the time comes? OK. I think I would actually do that, if the opportunity arose. Guess I shouldn’t put that in writing. Whatever.

Sometimes reading about this stuff feels like a necessary but insultingly inconsequential penance. “Have to stay informed” can feel like “have to say a land acknowledgement” but the only audience is my own inner monologue and the only effect is — nothing. I don’t have any land to give back. I mean I guess I do! I am a home “owner” after all; I’ve made about two years’ worth of payments on my thirty year mortgage. Should I try to find a Native American or a homeless person or someone in danger of being deported who wants to take my house? I’m not going to do that. That’s just the reality of it: I’m not actually going to do that. Does that make me an immoral person? Is this why people love to hate billionaires so much? Because at least there’s someone else not giving up waaaaay more than I’m not giving up — but are we really, fundamentally, all that different?

This is probably all wrong and naive and privileged and oblivious and insulting. I shouldn’t “publish” this because I’ve probably “asked a question” that shows I’m a bad person masquerading as a good person. “Oh look — if he appears worried about being a bad person, he can’t be a bad person, right?”

What the hell does any of this have to do with today’s pigeon, anyway? I don’t know, probably not much except that people being tortured by the people I was taught would always be the goodguys sure does make my little problems seem cheap and trivial. What about when I was in 7th grade? Sure, we didn’t have this current piece of shit monster¹ as, inconceivably, our fucking President for fuck’s sake, but I’m sure plenty of people were being abused and detained and tortured then too. I just didn’t know about it.

If I had known about it, would I have felt any different when I saw my score on the math placement test? When I learned that most of my nerdy friends were going to be in the “advanced” math class in 8th grade, but I wasn’t? Nobody was grabbing my mom or dad off the street and stuffing their head in a black hood. Who fucking cares about math class? But I cared. I felt like a loser, alone, betrayed by my scholastic expectations, like I had just fucked up something that was supposed to have been predetermined. I was a smart kid. If I wasn’t a smart kid, then what the fuck was I? In order to maintain my sense of identity over the remaining course of my secondary education, I had to learn to be smart in other ways, and some of those ways were really fucking dumb.

But you know what? I got over it. It wasn’t even that I got a bunch of questions wrong on the placement test; I just didn’t finish them all. I was slow, not stupid. Whatever. What I didn’t fully know then that I’m learning now is, what matters is that people are people. Other people matter. And it’s not just other people that are other people; I am other people. Get it?

Back then, I thought I was an alien. Not the kind that gets deported, though. Just the kind that lives in mental self-exile. I’m not sure which came first — the assumptions I made about other people, or the assumptions I assumed they would make about me. I was a chicken eating my own eggs. Habits form. You can loosen them up, bend them back and forth like taking pliers to a wire, and eventually break them. Recently I’ve been playing this little game — when I drive or walk or bike down the street or sit on the bus or whatever, I look at people and I listen and feel for the assumptions that leap to mind, and then I pause, and think, what if that’s not true? Then I try to leave a little space to let the other person be whoever they might be. I’m gonna be honest, sometimes it’s easier than other times, but I guess that’s kind of the point. I try to do this every day. There’s a revelatory quality about the little things we choose to do every day. Like writing, like a bike ride, if you only do them on the good or exciting or easy days, the magic doesn’t work right. You get twisted-up gaudy fake shadow magic. Can’t drive a nail or start a fire with that.

If we’re afraid of people, we’ll believe lies about them. Like that they’re slow, or dumb, or hostile, or trying to get away with something, or they don’t like you, or their questions are disingenuous, or that we deserve to be here for some reason but they don’t.

Acknowledge it. Bend it. Break it. Let the big balloon dissipate. Start somewhere. That’s not the pithy ending. I don’t know how to end this one. I only barely have a glimmer of an idea of how to start it.