Political is Personal

I’ve always wondered what I would say to them if they ever spoke to me: bundled up grad student-aged white men and women wearing dark blue and orange standing behind a table with Barack Hitler’s face on it. They always look unassuming and quiet. Approachable, but not like they’d have anything interesting to say. The kids who only have conversations with professors and the seats on either side of them are empty in lecture. It’s nice that in a community this large they can find each other and unite. There were three of them there today.

No, they had never talked to me before. But I always wanted to talk to them. Tell them how ridiculous I think they are. Tell them how highly I think of the man in the House. Tell them how my dad listens to their radio station for comedic relief after his day at work. Negative brain waves are as far as I have gotten and with the stern, solid super hero capes strapped so tightly around their necks, I’m not positive the negativity registered. They’re still desperately trying to save the world.

“Hello!” one of them said to me, cheering and hopeful as I turned the corner to walk into the Husky Union Building. Our president’s enlarged face was blowing in the bitingly chilled Seattle wind and he likely felt it moving the artificial tiny black moustache they placed on him as a “political statement.” Their shifting feet moved across bricks that blanketed a school which suggested Dreams From My Father as summer reading. I wonder if they read.


“No thank you.” It was the first thing that came to mind and thus forced itself through the bit between my lips as I walked past them with the most distance attainable, refusing to make eye contact with the people who I think are so mislead, with whom I entirely disagree. As I jetted through the liberal and conservative faces of the University’s students lunching in the cafeteria-like basement of the HUB, I experienced that joyful “hello” resounding on a reel of guilt through my consciousness. He got up today to the same Seattle I did. Put on his clothes as I did: one leg at a time, right? He walked to work, to volunteer behind that table probably thinking, I’m going to change some minds today, enlighten some people. Get them educated, you know? He must anticipate rejection. He has to in a city like this, and with such a bold statement as the sign hanging from his sad empty table, he must experience it often. But he pushes through. That’s commendable.

“Hello!” There it was, in my head.

After the shuffle of getting a dissatisfactory lunch as I always do at the HUB and eating it, miscommunications with a barista, and a disagreement with a pastry bag, I was still haunted by the rude remark I handed to the optimistic Obama-hater. I returned with the mismade latte and an apology.

“I just completely blew you guys off,” I said, looking at them directly in their ice-cold eyes, trying to reach any substance and pull it to the surface. “You said hello to me and I just totally ignored you.” Their lips pursed while they blinked. I offered them my mistake latte. Shifting feet over red bricks. They felt awkward. I pressed on: “You know, just because I don’t—” I had to stop for a moment. The idea of three souls staring right into me, hardly listening to me, seriously judging me, scared me more than anything else in the world. But that’s the Republic of Discomfort they step into every time they move behind that table. It was suddenly the most important thing I could possibly say to them. So I continued. “Just because I don’t see the world as you do doesn’t mean I don’t recognize you as people.”

If we were cartoons, the high-pitched “boink-boink” noise would have accompanied their stark blinks. There wasn’t even a hint of thought indicated by their one-layer, wide-open eyes and pale faces. Did they know what that was, dehumanization? The term doesn’t exactly fit comfortably with their agenda. I wondered what kind of shapes their hands made inside their pockets.

The evening before, I had coffee with my good friend Erich. He and I met in the summer of 2008 and he has since been, and will continue to be, one of my favorite people on this planet to be in the presence of. We walk a finely comfortable line with the clashing of our political views, Erich having voted against Obama and continuously voting for any interaction between myself and anyone who looks like Mr. President. We find honest humor in it all. I have yet to have a serious conversation with him about his down-to-earth political views (if Erich has that serious level).

That night at our two-hour table, long past the bottoms of our lattes, Erich explained to me the four levels of conservativism. Erich dwells in the smallest sector, the top of the moderate pyramid: Jedi conservative. A few of our friends he named to be in the next tier amongst the “oh I guess I’ll be conservative” bunch, who I named passive. Then come the Christians, the extremists. Scary shit, homie. The bottom tier I have since forgotten and am still not sure if we discussed for as our conversations are already streamline, the upbringing of radical Republicans has serious subject-changing power, especially between the Jedi and me.

I’ll place my weighty, no-nonsense new ally friends in the Christian category. It’s just scary enough to work.

And they still hadn’t said anything. Not a sound except for the cartoon “boink-boink” of their opening and shutting eyelids resonated in that vast brick-covered space. Not an idea of what they were thinking (did they have thoughts?). No energy at all. Not a single inkling.

“Okay well. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” Boink-boink. Compassion?, they may have been thinking, what’s that? Now my feet were shifting. “Alright—” I turned to walk away then turned back, “have a nice day!” The cold wind hit me and felt warm. I laughed to myself then was stopped by a voice from the table, the first voice I’d heard from LaRouche since the initiating hello that started this entire fiasco.

“Would you like something to read?”

I turned around. “No thank you, I’m pretty set in my ways. Thank you though!” My smile followed me all the way to work, where I entered a building to find the boss who makes fun of me for recycling absent. Figures. My latte was likely still untouched on that ugly table, getting colder faster than any latte had ever chilled. I got now why they’re always so bundled up.

An hour into things, a paper got slapped down on my desk. It was wrinkled and had writing in two columns. A diagonal crease ran down its body like it had been carried for a while. I turned immediately around. “Hi, by the way.” And looked back at the paper. First Steps in the LaRouche Plan, it read. How had it stalked me across campus? It, like my friendship with Erich, tight-roped between politically strange and personally hilarious. After all, personal is political right?

Boink-boink.

“I’m just surprised that these people are on a college campus,” my likely conservative (Jedi, of course) boss said.

“I know, what is this, 1980?” Shaking it off, I left brewing for a later hour.


When I got home, I read the last paragraph of the flyer:

And that’s what we have to make clear now. So, don’t waste our time, bringing up subjects that are not worth discussing! Because, either we’re going to do what I just indicated, or we’re not going to exist. So there’s no point in discussing anything different!

I read it a second time and a third.

I felt the soil beneath my feet from Sachenhausen in Germany and closed my eyes to see the baracks and the ovens.

I saw the Jewish museum in Berlin.

I read it a fourth time. And I wondered why they don’t call themselves dictators with such a demanding message. What kind of training had those extremists gone through? If Obama is Hitler, who are they?

Boink-boink.

Campus Notes

A communist cause I'm left-handed
That's the hand they use
Well, never mind


A silently complex sound-filled murmur falls over this campus, my world, every time I take the time to really listen. I hear sniffling captured in the crisp golden fall air. Zippers. One o’clock bells. My hair matches the leaves on the ground and a chilled breeze reaches down my dress and up my legs. Fall wants some. High heels on bricks. Lazy sliding feet slouched against the dusted floor. I could hear that skateboard from a mile away. Cell phones. Face to face chat. “Like an authentic Chinese restaurant or like a white Chinese restaurant?” This stone is a cool pulse on my legs.

The plane is louder in the sky than the clicking gears of the bicycle before me. Walking alone with a smile. A crow, a squirrel, a hornet. They all peruse the leaves but on different levels and for different reasons. The wind tickles my hair across my brow. I send a pollenless thought to the yellow and black flies inspecting all things brown. Wasted time. Keys. Red pants, yellow tights. A loving hug between two people who don’t look suited for each other but then again I am left handed and love my country for the most part. “Do you have a cigarette?” Eyecontact: red eyes through small dark slits. Hardly English.

Bouncing injured walk. Silent walk only discovered on the crunchy brown fallen leaves. Julie. Mitch. Number 69 on the football team. My heart jumps for fear of a different number. And I owe you one. Free samples and hands dig into the tray hanging from his minimum wage neck, if that. We all attend the University of Freebies.

That guy. Where do I know him from? Psychology 200—answer dude with his hair falling upon his shoulder holding his arm in the air. Her dress is awfully short. Three skateboards, no helmets. Nicole Wilberding and her iPod; semi-skinny jeans. Red tights with black pointy, upturned clogs—she is a witch: wicked or good, West or East I cannot tell but in my lack of cynicism, East it is.

The leaves begin to dance as the low murmur rises to a vibrating hum and I know what time it is just by the number of feet that fall upon the ground. The atmosphere changes and a seagull calls, a leaf falls beside me, and the sun comes out. Just in time to go back inside.

Athletes and Romance

Tight pants and butt slapping must be what I go for. Sure, the aesthetic comes with the territory. The independence, the appeal of commitment, the being good with his body… all these things are true, but I’m trying to decipher whether it’s the man or the uniform to which I am attracted. So they’re all men of color. They’re mostly tall, nice to excellent bodies, physical people, arms. Got to have the arms. But it turns out that it doesn’t matter if he spends his time swinging a bat, making a touchdown, or scoring a goal: they’re all ass holes.

It’s simple to say, well, just stop falling for butt heads, but it’s not like they make these dudes wear signs. There’s no Brotherhood of Jerks membership jacket that all these homies wear (and if there is, I’m attracted to it). An interviewing process doesn’t occur, complete with a sweaty, wrinkled resume handed over by a shaking hand, so I don’t learn that it’s in this idiot’s track record to peace out before he even arrives…or after.

“Well think about it Kelsi, they’re football players,” tight end/defensive end Sean Brown said to me last night, “they run at 300-pound guys as hard and as fast as they can every night.” He said this to ask me if, when considering this, I still expect to be treated gently. Yes, actually, I do. He and I spent five hours on the phone last night (mainly this morning), covering all topics imaginable: memories from senior year, philosophical chat, people we’ve dated since, school and football, but we came around to my romantic life four or five times. And it was weird because I wasn’t concerned with sounding perfect to my ex—I was cozy in the conversation, cuddled up with that familiar but much matured voice of his I know so well, warm under the blanket of nostalgia. I didn’t really care what he thought of me, how he thought of me, or why. He was just my old friend in that time who knew me very well. This role was played off and on throughout our conversation.

While talking to Sean I realized that these fit, rough, goal-driven prospects always manage to get points and that while I do get to score, I never get a W on my schedule. Everything I pick up is an L. Even with the boxer. The football players. Soccer. Baseball. Save for Sean, whose innocence can only be attributed to the fact that I walked away with it, I have been treated the exact same way by each of these men and I think I have finally come to peace, terms, and understanding with it. “It’s the chase,” my senior year boyfriend said to me in the middle of the night as his California phone line stretched to Seattle, “you might surprise yourself.”

It is about the game. Of course it is. They don’t have to be wearing shoulder pads or a cup in order to want to feel in control. When he’s not wearing kneepads, the boxing gloves are still on in a way. “You’re so generous and giving—you’re everything,” so that when he wants to play for more, the clock’s already out. After all, football players will push through a snowstorm if they have to just to get the numbers on the board.


But it’s not this generalized stereotype that can reign true for all athletic men, or even for all athletes of a particular sport. I need to stop meeting prospects in classless arenas, such as clubs and through random mutual acquaintances. This is true. However what about those who I meet doing something I love or in class? What about these guys? What’s their excuse? They don’t have one. I’m the one who carries the big messenger bag of excuses. Sean even said it without knowing it—I’m so generous and giving. Too much so that he can never be wrong. He can never be sketchy. He can never be out of line (or out of bounds). Three strikes? Let’s try seven or eight. This here is the problem.

In practice if he runs the drill poorly, it’ll be known and it’ll be fixed. He’s taken out of the game if he gets too many penalties. He can only throw so many pitches before he’s jogging away from the mound to an honest or sympathetic applause. Injury, out. Altercation with a player, out. Not enough baskets, too many balks, fly ball. Out, out, out. There are seemingly more outs in sports, especially at the higher level, than there are ins and maybe, though I find it a bit harsh, it’s about time I start applying these no-guilt rules to my involvement with such players. It could be the age, my reliance, or my dumb open heart, but in my experience even if he’s not an athlete, he’s still a playa. However the clock is far from running out. Still little sweat. There’s barely a score. And it’s still the first quarter.

About This Intense Guy I Know

I am challenged by the concept of emotion. My color-filled stark-white living room surrounds me in a soft silence that makes me feel comfortable and cold. The round white specks of this or that on my black laptop test my commitment and a bleeding chin blemish mocks me. They all want my attention.

Yesterday, Emotion approached me. “Hey you!” I looked around inquisitively, confused, I’m never a ‘hey you’ type person to Emotion. We generally have a good relationship. I’m never picked on. But yesterday, I did something to change the rolls. His acid-washed ripped jeans grazed against his hairless legs. When he talks, he waddles in a stance, swaying nervously back and fourth. He pierced his ice-green eyes not into mine but through them. Emotion meant business. “Hey you! It’s time you and I had a little talk.” He was serious and bossy. He said it in the kind of way that makes you question if he’s reading from a script. Because come on, who talks like that? Emotion does, that’s who.

He told me I wasn’t taking him seriously and so he placed a balloon inside my ribcage to see if I could pop it. I thought I did last night, but turns out I simply extracted air. It has since filled up.

My eyes have that feeling. They’re hot in the back. Warm. Rigid. Sticky. I can feel the crease when I move them around and attaining that soft focus is easier than ever. Emotion and I have a deal: he’ll leave me alone until I let him occasionally pound it into me. This day and the last I received the beating of a lifetime. He’s that sultry kind of violent; you know the one, the type with the fire behind the eyes, which evokes passion and not fury. He’s sexy when he balls up that fist, purses his lips, and squints his eyes. It’s scary to like that sort of thing—like when Emotion is slamming your head against the ground and you actually think it feels good, but when you spend so much of your time unaffected by his actions it’s nice to have that seemingly terminal hot coughing, screaming, insanely pitched cry. People don’t recognize it enough.

Sometimes, when he has time, Emotion and I just sit and look at each other. A mental conversation begins: Hi. Hi. I’m looking at you. I noticed. I can see right through you. It’s okay. You’re wasting my time. So go spend it somewhere else. I’m only nineteen but I’ve developed this passive relationship with Emotion because I accept that he’s quite the bully… but he’s like Judd Nelson and Bender and I’m Molly Ringwald. I’m Claire. A fat girl’s name, but he knows he loves me.

So we spend our days, ins and outs, eye contact and none, loving and fighting. He even has those funny leather biking gloves. Emotion thinks he’s a bad ass…he kind of is. I’d love to take him to dinner some night. Open him up smoothly like a Petrus 1982 Pomerol: rich and definite. But for now, this scalding stern figure must piece me apart, every bit of me, til he can move onto the next. And this is it: blogs into paragraphs into sentences. Words. Syllables. Letters.

When might he return and to whom will he visit next?

Yellow My Orange

I saw the two bags of oranges resting on the table as class started and went on; we played a game with tennis balls, triggering our awareness and memorization and I thought to myself, actors just love their props. He clearly had an orange for everyone. Was this linked to a game or an exercise or was Drama 251 just a preschool of undergrads, comprised of games and snack time? During that speculation, they were just oranges in bags: they all looked the same, smelled the same, had stickers, had green stems, and were orange. Ask me to find #4012 and cover its sticker and I’d have to make a wild, likely incorrect 1-out-of-25 guess, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because it was just an orange. And I was hungry.

With twenty minutes left in that two-hour acting class, he handed them out. He had told us to find a comfortable spot on the floor, a good distance away from all the others. We were barefoot as a requirement of the exercise we had done just before. I liked the corner I chose. The ground there was nice and somehow attractive. My orange came to me in a requested cross-room chuck from classmate Joey who found himself close to the now ripped-open bags. The concept of throwing the orange made me nervous, but I caught it: #4012, orange sphere of chewy citrus.

“Don’t eat them yet.” The word yet was repeated by a few anxiously, eating the fruit was clearly on everyone’s mind. “You’re going to observe your orange with all five senses,” he said, holding a stopwatch, “and you’re going to do it for ten minutes.”

A slightly shocked, however somewhat expecting and speculative humph filled the room and escaped out the window as the two dozen of us sat cross-legged, speckled across the light brown wooden floor in room 211 of Hutchenson Hall, looking at, feeling, smelling, tasting, and, yes, listening to our oranges.

“Please do not peel them—that’ll just make a mess. I’m going to keep talking while you’re doing this,” and he did.

A small brown stain, the size of a pen cap, was the first thing I noticed. Positive it was caused by coffee, I tried to smudge and scrape it away but it wouldn’t budge. It had that look, though: a bizarre shape not even a Rorschach test could name the picture it formed, it was just a shape. Dark brown thin border and light brown inside. Part of it perfectly circled a pore of the fruit. Could it have been a blemish? If it was a stain, why didn’t it come off? These were just the first of my questions.

This texture that I felt on this orange, what was it made of? Small, circular pores covered the citrus sphere, going in and going out. There were concentrated points of outs that looked similar to bubbling hot tubs, mistakes in this orange’s growth, but beautiful and interesting in their imperfection. It occurred to me that while I couldn’t feel the individual ups and downs, I could sense the texture on every inch of the surface, its only smooth portion being the ring surrounding the navel.

The way the light interacted with this texture was like a sun drawn in one of the cartoons that went along with PBS’s Reading Rainbow: a circle of light in the middle and almost parenthese-like semi circles surrounding the main point of light, downsizing in density as they moved away and interacted with the rounded shape of the orange. Noticing this made the fruit seem almost majestic.

“Think about the smell. How would you describe that smell to someone who’s never smelled anything before?” It smelled like that feeling of right out of a great shower. It smelled like being ready for anything, feeling fresh and excited for what ever might come your way. It smelled like how the morning feels when you’re well rested and happy.

It smelled like clean, fresh happiness. That’s what it smelled like.

I licked it a few times, in confidence, trying hard not to be that girl but when you’re sitting in a room with a whole bunch of twenty year-olds all looking at, caressing, and smelling oranges, you kind of already are that girl…and so is everyone else. It didn’t really taste like anything. It tasted like the bottom of your sandwich that’s been resting in Tupperware or a plastic bag all day. It tasted like fourth grade lunchtime on a rainy day, kept inside, sitting on the floor… sometimes eating off of it. It tasted sterile, but not so just enough to make you feel uncomfortable admitting you actually licked the orange.

No, my orange did not talk to me. It did help me confide in it that it is known not only for—but as—a color it is not completely. My orange was mostly yellow and got to be more and more yellow as the ten minutes went on. This is what a chose to call it, in sympathy, in protest, and in observation. My ears did connect with the experience however as I listened to the silent room of twenty-five adults closely examining oranges for credit, as I dropped it in my hand from various distances (it made a “pat” noise, changing in intensity according it the duration gravity pulled it for), and I listened to the marble-like noise it made as I rolled it, almost out of my reach, across the floor.

The ten minutes were up before I even knew it. I had dots of citrus juice on my fingers and palms. I smelled like my orange. I knew its flaws and its number, what its sticker looked like and read (Naval #4012 Chile). The class compared experiences and agreed we could pick our orange, our specific orange, out of a bunch if they were to be recollected. I was no longer hungry. It wouldn’t have even mattered if I was, I had a connection with that piece of fruit: it had become a work of art, a gift from nature, a story, a complex mosaic of biology and history. Yellow my orange is known to me better than it knows itself (it does not have five senses like I!) and is known to me better than it is known to you, for sharing every detail would deface the experience and insult its sincerity. I have only scratched the surface. What fruit lie ahead?

Pre-Teens and Relativity

“Relativity is a mind-fuck,” someone almost as smart but maybe not as sophisticated as Einstein said to me when we found ourselves in the middle of two big rigs on a highway going through Arizona. The speed we were traveling seemed not even close to what the speedometer read as the trucks apparently moved the same speed as each other, probably three miles under ours. We felt we were inching our way across the state in the same way that our speed would have felt twice as fast had those trucks been going 80 mph in reverse.

“Does it look smaller to you?” It’s a common question my dad asks me when revisiting places I frequented in my childhood. Even the doorways and the steps, objects I encounter everyday, of my elementary school look miniscule to my now only five-foot-five eyes. The freshmen looked so young my senior year and sixteen isn’t this crazy grown-up age to me anymore, yet I never seem too old or too young, too big or too small. Relativity is quite a mind-fuck.

My fingers scrambled across the black and silver keypad of my T-Mobile Samsung to compose a text message as quickly as possible. “Two year olds have cell phones?” and Sally received it in a timely fashion. I watched her lean her back against the sideways bus bench to fetch her phone out of her Washington sweatshirt pocket, read my text message with quick-moving eyes and look back up at me for a smile. Of course I was exaggerating a bit. Our eyes were fixated on a clan of kids coming home from school in hardly matching Limited Too and Gap Kids merchandise. Their Jansport backpacks, stretched to their fullest potential, hanged from their shoulders like piggyback rides and their soft fingertips raced across the surface of their cell phones.

“She’s texting her boyfriend,” one of the kids said to the other. She was talking about her four-foot, flat-chested friend standing in the middle of the bus. Her hair had been pulled back into a frizzy black ponytail and her baby blue tee fit her like those on a pre-preadolescent mannequin in the kid’s department of Penny’s. I tried to imagine what kind of boyfriend-girlfriend relationship could prosper in the arena of titlessness. I decided for reality’s sake and for the sake of my own well being that it was a joking, playful, childlike kiss on the cheek type set-up.

My observations were interrupted, or aided, by Katie asking the group how far it was to our destination. “It’s just ten minutes from here,” the boy in front of us offered up. He was small and fair with a blonde mushroom cut that curled in with forehead-intruding waves like my brother’s used to do. Dark aviator sunglasses rested on his nose and teeth he’d grow into announced themselves as he parted his rose colored lips. He sat on the bus across from Sally, still wearing his backpack, which draped over red plaid from his neckline down to his shoelaces. I wanted to ask if it was pajama day at school but I was afraid to insult his choice of attire.

“You look like my brother.”

“Oh yeah? Is he charming and dashingly good looking?” He asked to our surprise, wiping his hand over his hair and face like his idea of a flirty model might do. He paired it with a charismatic smile.

The girl texting her boy toy gave out a humorous huff and the rest of the group let out a little chuckle.

“You’re such a douche,” the oldest-looking one said, gripping her backpack. Her blonde ponytail matched Sally’s, who she was sitting next to, and her red fleece zip-up draped over brand new breasts, just coming in. Katie gasped and said quietly that she didn’t know the word douche until her junior year.

“How old are you guys?” I asked them openly: I was curious and I figured since they were talking to us anyway that it wouldn’t be an unwelcome question.
“Eleven,” said the girlfriend, just barely looking up from her cell phone, “well, I’m eleven. She’s eleven. He’s twelve.” We nodded our heads.

“Yeah. I’m in eighth grade.” Our charming pajamaed buddy proclaimed.
“No you’re not,” said the girl in red. She seemed to be constantly disgusted with this boy.

“Okay, I’m not.”

“So,” I started, “Friday night! You guys got some big plans?”

“Just relaxing, watching some cartoons.” I expected the witty non-eighth grader would give me a more interesting response.

I egged him on, “no parties to go to?”

“Oh, yeah, that too. Crazy parties.”

“Sometimes I wish my parents weren’t divorced,” Sally’s seatmate in red spoke up, “that way I wouldn’t have to spend my weekend doing chores.”

An awkward silence overcame the back of that city bus. The sixth graders looked like they had been suspecting such a comment, that this classmate was one to break the mood of light conversations and push over a cloud of her own family-induced darkness. I was somewhat waiting for one of the girls I was with to offer up some light-hearted insight to her situation but as the dark cloud sat there, so did the silence.

“It says a lot about your outlook on things,” our suave friend in plaid stated, “that you want your parents to get back together just so you don’t have to do chores.” She shrugged, blocking off the wisdom aimed her way and bouncing it toward us, amazed with the very real outlook this child managed to somehow have. Sally eventually asked him if he was dressed for pajama day, which he was, and their stop came soon after. We all said goodbye and as the wise jokester departed, he yelled, “follow me on facebook!” and left us laughing.

I spent the rest of my day astounded by that ten-minute block of interaction I had with those kids on the bus. I thought about how much older I look in my head at eleven than those kids looked; I thought about their vocabulary and quick whit and I thought about the content of their conversations and how all of this seemed so beyond what eleven should be. What I forgot to remember though was how eleven actually is.

When I was eleven I learned what a blowjob was. I was interested in boys and I first started wearing makeup. At eleven I dyed my hair for the first time and I started my period. I wrote my first and last name on my homework and inhibitions were suddenly a huge factor in everything I did and took part in. When I was eleven, I got my first cell phone. Eleven didn’t seem young to me when I was eleven. It was cool. Middle school! Sixth grade! I hated it when I was babied.

I feel that the movement to “not grow up too fast” is impractical. When you’re young, you want to be older. When you’re old, you want to be younger. That’s jus the way it is. What’s important is that when you want to be young, be young. And when you want to be free, be free. I’m still working on not letting inhibitions rule my world—I’m positive not only love, but salvation is on the other side. Just ask Maude.