12 Germinal CCXVII

I don’t go to half my classes. It’s really a problem, and I don’t know how to solve it. I feel so stressed out when I don’t do my work; and when I’m actually working, it feels so good and satisfying, especially since I love what I study. Yet somehow, I still manage to avoid all productivity and responsibility.

I try to tell myself I can avoid distractions &c. by myself, that I don’t need some clever open source program that blocks Facebook or blogs or news sites, but I’m not sure if I can keep it up for more than a few days at a time. This last week was so productive for me, I wrote one long paper for one of my Anthro classes and made a pseudo-zine as a midterm project for another one. Yesterday I actually managed to get out of bed and work on a paper that I thought was due in class, but turned out not to be. I love classes, I love reading, and I love writing. I still avoid it like it’s going to kill me, and it doesn’t make sense. It just makes me exra-stressed and flipped out.

I went to Brooklyn last night, to the 123 space to volunteer at the Freegan Bike Workshop, and to build my own bike. I worked for 3.3 hours sorting through tubes and cutting up the ones that were irreparable. I only managed to patch up three tubes though, not out of laziness or slowness, but for lack of patching material. At the end of the day, I walked around with a friend and picked out a minty green (!!!) bike frame and claimed it by putting my name on a tag and tying it around the front tire. Over the next few weeks I’ll be schlepping to 123 and slowly putting my own bike together, building it out of spare parts and desire.

I’m actually rather decent with my hands, or maybe it’s only surprising because I hardly use my hands for anything other than sex, writing, cooking, and tying my shoes. When I was cutting up and putting my zine together I felt that sense of satisfaction that you get from making something; I also felt it when I was handling the tubes, getting grime and glue on my fingers.

Whenever I look at my hands I think about what I can do with them, what makes them feel skilled. I like the way they look and I think they’re pretty good at certain things, which makes me – and hopefully, other people – happy. My entire life, I’ve wanted my hands to look like my dad’s- working hands, hands that make. His hands can build things and hold things tightly and have cuts and burns, but they’re also gentle when he writes longhand and still subtle when he draws and paints.

As for the good feeling of making something, I think I also feel it when I write something- writing has always felt like an act of the hands for me, as much as anything else. The only difference is that, even when you print a text out, it’s not tangible in the same way as any other crafted thing. The closest you can get to it is with a collage- you manipulate the text, arrange it in space, give it shape even if it’s only on a 2-dimensional plane.

Working on my midterm project has really made me want to write a couple of zines. I have some images and texts I think I’ll recycle, and I’m excited for it. Even though it was made at the last minute and came out a little less than fully satisfactory, was a good first zine-making experience.

I’ve realized that I’m actually decent at something else as well- I’m not quite as inept as I used to be at making friends. Recently I’ve had the chance to really go ahead and engage with people I greatly, honestly like and want to be friends with, and surprisingly, I’ve approached them and we’ve had a good time. It’s always heartening as hell to know that people appreciate me and want to talk to me.

Maybe this year is the year to read Germinal during Germinal. If I manage to get through my Anthro readings in the next week, I’ll attempt it. I’m learning Catalan. I’m making mix CD’s of songs and emotional investment. I love many people in many ways.

Ça va bien.

18 Ventôse CCXVII

Tea is great, tea is delicious. Coffee however, will forever be my drink.

I’m thinking I may be an ok person to know: I like candy, I like cuddles, and I like friends.

I’ven’t written a story in a long time, I actually don’t think anything I’ve ever written really constitutes a story.

Exams were looming, and now I have my first midterm this afternoon. I doubt I’ll be leaving the library today except to go to class and for the occasional break.

Summer calls me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about language and semantic gaps; I’ve been coming across parts of my life that are difficult to describe in conventional language. Often, there are no words to describe things i consider critical or foundational parts of my life. I think a lot also about linguistic privilege and what it means to be part of a radical community that has its own manners of speech, linguistic conventions, and terminology. Also, we reclaim words and use them in counter-normative ways that are confusing if not off-putting to a casual listener.

While I can understand where issues of alienation and elitism/cliquishness are very important to address (particularly when it comes to “bullshit intellectual” jargon and elitist academic language), I also think it’s critical to recognize that as “radicals” we’re not only trying to fight capitalism or some oppressive institution or another, we’re also creating a culture of our own. All cultures, including radical cultures, revolutionary/insurrectionary cultures, and cultures of resistance require their own language through which it can be transmitted. I think Zapatismo is a great model of how struggle can be applied to cultural fields equally as it is to politics. Like they say, our word is our weapon.

One place where I keep coming up against semantic gaps is in how I understand my personal relationships with others. While the categories of “acquaintance, friend, girl/boy-friend” are broadly functional, I know it’s impossible to categorize my relationships according to any standard typology. In politics, of course, there is always the trusty, friendly, and super-functional “comrade.” I know some folks don’t like to use it because of perceived communist/Soviet interpretations, but I understand the word as falling within a general leftist or far leftist tradition. In Spanish I like both the direct equivalent and cognate camarada (gender neutral, despite the -a) an the more general compañera/o. In Arabic, there’s rafiiqah (رفيقة), the politicized equivalent to ṣadiiqah (صديقة). However I still make pretty extensive use nonstandard words such as comradical, only partially tongue-in-cheek.

11 Frimaire CCXVII

So I know I’ve been away for a long time. I’ve been busy this semester, what with taking six classes and maintaining some sort of presence in campus activism. While I haven’t posted in a long time, I just added two papers I wrote recently to my “academic essays” page. One is a short essay on medieval Islamic concepts of free will and the other is a pretty scathing movie review of The Mission (with Robert DeNiro, directed by the same guy who did The Killing Fields).

I’ll be done with classes and finals in 2 weeks, ojalá. After that, I’ll probably be posting more regularly and, if I manage to scavenge some initiative from the brutal work weeks ahead, I might even make some collages and even a zine. That reminds me, take a look at the Barnard Zine Library blog! If you live in New York City, you should contact them and see if you can get access to it (access to Barnard Library is generally restricted to Barnard, Columbia UTS, JTS, and NYU students, but zine librarians are sneaky people).

barnard zine library