the wrong end of the telescope

Antilamentation
By Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

It's been a strange week. I haven't been doing especially well (semi-difficult news and continuous uncertainty will do that to the anxious heart) but today I realized something. A year ago, I was sitting in a subway station sobbing because I couldn't get myself to walk down the hill and join the conference dinner I was supposed to be at. The same dinner is happening in a week, and I'm fine with that. This weekend I joined my coworkers for a dinner and then a bunch of local bands in a pub, and that was mostly fine, too. It's been a year, and what a year it's been.

I wanted to talk a little about what that means. I'm using myself as an example, and I'm absolutely not saying my experience is universally applicable. At all.

( on anxiety and getting better )

Yesterday was my birthday. Ten years ago, I was very ill (I had a fairly serious case of mono) and home from school and spent a couple of hours not knowing if my best friend was alive or not. I was lucky that day. So many people were not. Eight years ago I had just started college and I woke to find out our foreign minister had been murdered.

It's a little strange, having your birthday be 9/11. For more than one reason.

And yet, yesterday was a birthday like any others. A really wonderful one. My parents, sweethearts as they are (the most wonderful), came by with breakfast and a mixer and a giftcard for my favorite bookstore in Stockholm. Mom cried, I cried, dad cried. There were a lot of hugs.

In the evening, I saw relatives and a couple of friends at a restaurant, and I got some fuzzy slippers and a yoga mat ♥ and everyone was lovely and the vegetarian buffet was great. I spent some time freaking out about my birthday in the past week (not because I'm getting older, more because, well, it's just one of those anxiety-inducing social musts) but none of my fears were warranted, it was absolutely the best. Despite having a mammoth cold, a maternal grandmother who does her very best to be bitchy, and an application to work on.

And you lot--thanks for the birthday messages and twitter congratulations and general awesomeness, I so very much appreciate it. Also, did you know torakowalski is the best? She wrote me a fic about bb!Rogue and pre-Alex/Hank and Charles and Raven and the mansion and basically about how family is what you make of it and you can choose your family, if you need to. It's wonderful. She's wonderful. Send Me The News From A House Down The Road.

That's sort of what I've ended up taking away from having my birthday on what is historically a very violent day (going a little further back, it's also the day Salvador Allende died). Love, that is. Family. Friends. A quiet reaffirmation of what is important. Part of why I like doing the work I do (youth policy work). You know. Etcetera. That sort of thing.

At least 7 dead in the city center of Oslo and at least 9 dead in the shooting at the Labor Party Youth Camp at Utoya Island (outside Oslo). The death toll is expected to rise, particularly for the island. Where young people were meeting because they wanted to change the way their country works. It was, in fact, an attack on democracy. That in itself hurts, but it doesn't--teenagers are dead. I don't care why, it only matters that they are. I can't. I'm in shock, I think.

A 32-year old white Caucasian male has been arrested. He did the shooting and apparently they think he had something to do with the bomb as well. So he first set the bomb, then drove out of the city and went to the island.

God, everything feels numb. I can't. This isn't. Fuck. Everyone I know is safe and accounted for, but oh. God.

ETA: According to the police, he belongs to a right-wing extremist group. I don't even know what to say about that, except, no, I do, because we have a party who likes to talk about the disintegration of Swedish values due to immigration, and who claim all Muslims are equally extremist (one of them tweeted "finally!" when the failed terror attack in Stockholm happened, because it was proof they were right, you see). Tell me, dear Sweden Democrats, tell me what kind of values this man represents? Tell me, how Norwegian do you think he is? Extremists are extremists. And fuck you.

ETA 2: 84 confirmed dead at the island. 84. That's 84 teenagers and people in their early 20's.

I appear to be experiencing the only good thing to ever come from period cramps: they improve your circulation, and consequently my crick in the neck (that had me in such pain yesterday I could barely move off the couch and had me going home an hour early from work) is improving. Mobility, you guys, I kind of like it. (Even if I'm in a different kind of pain right now.)

Today is World Poetry Day, they're telling me (♥), and so, here, because it's late and I'm rather tired:


The Sciences Sing a Lullaby


Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren't alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

--Albert Goldbarth

First given to me (and I do think of it as a gift) by novembersmith. Thank you, dearest.

If you want to add your own calm or joyful or sleepy or spring-like or thundery poems, feel free. Or just read that one over, let it help with the breathing.

The world is making me sad. If it's not victim-blaming, it's racist riots in Moscow and a suicide bombing in my city. (The latter of course taken by the Swedish racists as some reason to be smug, conveniently forgetting in one case that he got arrested back in 1993 for showing up at a leftist rally with a hand grenade in his pocket.)


But I went skiing and I'm going to go talk to students about multilingual writing tomorrow and I get to be encouraging and tell them that what they're doing matters, that literature should reflect the fact that we're not all monolingual and monocultural and that the racists and the extremists are all wrong. So there's that. (I get paid to do this! It's a one-off, but still.) I'm nervous, but oh, well-timed.


And this, too. I have a million tabs open from it, you don't even know.

HOLIDAY LOVE MEME
my thread

You are too lovely; my family is too lovely; it was a weird roller coaster of a day (I always feel weird about birthdays) and it's mostly over now, and everyone has been so nice. A post that actually thanks people properly is forthcoming, for now just know I love you so much, each and everyone of you. Thank you. ♥

Hey, darlings. Am home, am a little too awake for 2 AM in the morning, especially considering I'm getting up in five hours, but I can live with all that. Tomorrow there is a birthday party, I have a million books to read (for fun), a thesis to write (for, er, academic purposes) and six weeks to do it in, and an apartment for four out of those six weeks. London was the best of all good things.

It's been a bit of a strange week, with many many ups and downs. The weekend was incredible, the heat is overwhelming, my city is beautiful, I had bad news and good news and now I'm a little tired. I would like the thesis and the election to be done, please. Also, I'm trying to get myself together enough to write a job application. And studying for GREs.

petra is hosting a wonderful Be Excellent to Each Other meme, and that might be precisely what I need. It's on dw, but openid is easy and anon commenting is on. My thread is here. Positive reinforcements/reminders of my awesomeness/etc. would not go amiss. ♥