It got me here

“He’s a gem”

That he is. Have you ever met someone that radiates electricity? So much so it’s shocking? Have you ever met someone that seems to get their energy from the Sun? They aren’t drained by the bullshit in the world, water off a duck’s back. And they give, give like it gives them happiness because… well it does.

“It’s not random,”

he counters me. How could it be? How could everything that came before this, not have led us here and crafted us into what we were meant to be? Am I not the best version of myself for this very moment. Rainier wrote to his beloved how the first love is naive and thus unrealized, just two lovers throwing themselves helplessly towards each other. Neuroscience tells us that as we practice and “fire and wire” our neurons together, using what we know from experience in new contexts, we strengthen the dendrites and grow myelin that makes thinking (neurons firing) much more rapid — a fancy way of saying that practice makes perfect. I guess all of our coaches had more insight that transcends the field and the game. Or maybe the game is really the one we are playing now.

“Critical,”

my mentor instructs me to write, “that’s what these people are to your story. I had woven a web of consciousness with lines connecting people, feelings, an places before he arrived at the coffee shop. I had taken a chance and asked him about his book that sat betwixt several others on the table at the Obama Foundation Panel for ComplexCon. The title resonated to me as if just the right frequency had been played for my heart strings. This interaction was enough to put into motion what I already see to be a challenging mentor-relationship. Race, identity, and rationales were discussed over coffee and pages and screens and scribbled notes. Notes were stuffed between gray folder pages.

I am on chapter 8 of 9. I don’t usually rewatch movies, reread books, or text back. Only kidding. But on the topic of books, I don’t. I had leant this text after reading it, only to not get it back… yet. I reordered it and have been consuming it as I read for the dual purposes of my own learning and classroom, as well as informing an opportunity to work with the incoming teachers at my school in the format of a book study/ PLC, which I am working to bring into reality.

Who would have thought that I could love this much? Who would have thought that I could do this much? Who would have ever thought that I would end up here, in Chicago, as a teacher? Not me… for sure. And yet, I am extremely proud and grateful to be here in the place that I am.

Musical Chairs

All is a semblance of normalcy, glossed over and bright smiles, blurred lights dancing with the steps that outpace the rhythm in my ears. Life is strung upon the cadence of the song, that we hope will not shut off. We hang to each measure like children to balloon strings, old men to pipes and oxygen tubes.

Flowing, ever flowing, but flowing only because at any moment it might stop. A looming drought for longing ears. Left in thirst, how many nights can one last on one’s own? What did it feel like for rivers to merge and waves to crash? When the music dies away and suddenly ceases, will time still exist with no metronomic crutch?

Where will I be left when the music dies? Was my heart beat pitched to the percussion’s beat, a tubular tent vying not to collapse upon itself? Will my lungs hang like a wet shirt in the rain, no choir to ruminate and open its inner, now ruined void?

If I stop moving, what will still exist? If I stop running from song to song, when I let my heart to still and my ears to silence, will I still exist? When I take my seat as the music shuts off, I stay stuck there in a singular, static place. Stopping is a sentence that I’m not ready to answer to.

I can promise you that

Slipping through embraces

Grip, Grasp, Grasping at smoke-like apparitions I thought were more whole

Speaking through windows where sound waves drop like uncoiling snake from baobab branch

No one can hear you when your words freeze and shatter in Chicago cold

No one can feel you in Chicago cold

No one can be here and the feeling’s getting old

This place doesn’t stir until it stirs you into frenzy of heightened madness

This place is unhappy

If strangers stay? Stranger.

You’re not meant to be here

You’re not meant to stay here

Catching up with the horizon line would be easier

Catching up with the old you would be pleasing here

The one drained and extracted from heart valves

The one ripped and pulled from sore gums

The Midwest is empty, lacking depth, lacking height, lacking what once was’s and what will be’s, lacking mountain ranges

Ranging from my name on your tongue, secrets, averted eyes, and dark nights, to losing years when I’m young

So I can be here. And for what?

I’ll be home soon. I can promise you that.

 

Colder

How the heart can break. Into tiny pieces and yet speak to you through this refracted state, singing a cacophonous call through the darkness of it all. A million silent screams. Inaudible language of grief and thick, red tears.

You have my comic book swimming beneath piles of countless others I know you’d rather read. You quit your job at the bar down the street from my house. Your tattooed forearm will always read what eyes did read at first. But countless new voices will whisper them to you. Not mine.

You had an affair with a women who has some 9 years on you. You called me intoxicated by night and steeped in your own tragedy. I wished you had called earlier and then later that you hadn’t at all. 9 hours is too far away to feel the other. The warmth of summer (your winter) starts to fade, like memories – first black and white, then falling apart – burning, an old film reel.

You smiled at me from the bar while I sailed between the arms of a boy who could only wish to dance like a man. You bought me a beer, I bought your third. You are writing your thesis and I am writing the monotony of my existence. Coffee, pages, and film. Dinner, I can do the dishes. Speak of wealth, happiness, sanity, and imagination so that I can understand you better. But where are you now?

Your uncle died. The one that I met years ago, miles ago. You flew home and told me. You tell me too many things, yet not enough. Since the day I stood in the street vomiting existential philosophy (nonsense), where your face is in my mind, there has been darkness, filters, nothingness. What is it we cling to? And for what?

Today it is cold, but not cold enough to freeze boiling water in the air to no one’s surprise. But how quickly feelings and memories can fade when you let them. Once a summer’s day heat to colder than an Antarctic chill in the evening. What has become of the belief of love?

There is a permanence of impermanence. An impermanence of permanence.

Hill of Introspection, Geography of Mind

Sink, sank, sunk into the feathery heaven that is the big brown couch that angles itself in the living room. Now a tree covered very purposefully with only gold and red ornaments orients itself to the spacious room at this time of year. It is Christmas and I am home to the West coast from the Midwest, a flat, second city that riddles itself with strange people that I can’t manage to attach myself to. The only thing keeping me there are my children. There are more children in California, says my mom. And I know this.

Here I am, sitting on the couch for my annual return to the central valley. Yet, something feels different this year. I give my gifts to my parents and my sisters, gifts that I was proud and excited to give and yet in that moment feeling I hadn’t done enough. Instead of managing to slip away and get out of helping with tedious cleaning and tasks before the family came that day, I organized and when they had arrived, I helped play host. Was I finally growing up?

The next day, I ran around the park in new workout gear that had come out from behind red, green, and silver packaging; all the while thinking of the importance of things, people, places. Why was it that these hierarchical, prioritizing type thoughts lurk at this time of year – who and what is important to me? Who am I missing? What do I want around me? Aren’t these winter days just the same as most in the year? What makes them special?

Being home has a strange feeling, one of reflection, as if I were standing on top of some hill of introspection overlooking the geography of my mind. This year I am satisfied to be home, not pulled in so many directions as I often feel being in one place. But I know this might soon change again.

 

 

Blue + Boom

Smoke bomb, flare, hit, cacophonous boom down alleyway, sneakers hitting blacktop and running away from impending blue lights. Second crash. More rubber hitting asphalt. Glass falling like raindrops, crystal cacophony, chimes. Between white banded blinds, the blue streamed and wiped white apartment walls clean. I buried myself in pillows and towers of blankets to protect from the hurting world around me.

When “i don’t have feelings” responded earlier that night, I dropped a jar of salsa. Black pants stained now green. Chunks of peppers, garlic, and onion in between toes and computer cords. I felt as if I had stepped out of my teacher Halloween outfit only to see myself wretch cold, green salsa across the wood floor.

I woke up to music: cold and loud. Shivering in the car. Moving through the day.

The end was the most meaningful.

One of my students used the word neurotransmitter in a sentence last week. [I have been working with my friend and learning about his research — about DNA, PCR, bacteria incubation, and testing methodologies. For some reason, using a microscope is the most difficult of these things thus far. My friend at the lab is thinking of tasking me with my own small project. Today I used a pipette to test the concentration of DNA in solution. Machines that look as if from the 80s with displays that require too many buttons, cost 10K. No germs, no breathing, open flames. I wear green gloves today, not the powder blue like the others in the lab.] She used it correctly and joyfully, so excited about what goes on in her brain. That day, she made me smile. Cheeks hurting

Today, she made me cry. Heart hurting. Do not cry in front of your kids. Be strong for them, consistent, emotionally stable for them, I tell myself – in a world that is full of no’s, impossibles, inconsistencies, changes, be something that proves all of these things are the / can be the exception. Today I failed. My ability to hold back emotions with my kids is something I begin struggling with more and more. As weeks pass into months, I’m realizing how much I love them. I thought it would be difficult to love another group of kids as much as my first (and second, the same babies), but it is like I have learned over and over again – our hearts are funny things. Love is not zero sum, we can only love more. Today I cried because I love this kid.

Her face hung lower and lower as the class passed on. An eager student ready to share an overly-prepared presentation evolved into eyes holding back tears. All I could do was offer ears and words. I remember last year, a student of mine had broken down in the hallway, tears soaking cheeks as she talked about her family. Reducing me nearly to tears then, too. She is now a favorite.

How anyone can teach and neglect to look at the child as a person with a story that so informs them as learners baffles me. How anyone can go through this life without feeling, without listening, without humbling themselves to understand another person’s perspective is no life at all. This last part is hard and only recently do I think I came to understand how very wrapped up in a perspective we can be if we don’t shift out of comfortable positions we lean, lie, and remain inclined to stay in.

I open my laptop, looking at the survey results from my students. “HI ms.gini its o—– d—–” A name reads back to me that I have not seen since last year. One of my students who was redistricted has happened back to my website. I ask in the survey, “What do you want to tell Ms. Gini?” His reply, “A great teacher.” I ask in the survey, “If you could travel into the past, what would you do? If you could travel into the future, what would you do?” His reply “go back to m——— (elementary school name)” A love for a student is something that I cannot equate to having my own kids as I don’t have any of my own, but it is akin to kin, there is something familial about spending so much of our waking hours together, seeing each other on good days and bad days, making mistakes together, growing, learning, laughing, crying together. I miss this student and feel a sense of sadness and happiness at once in knowing that he sought out my website to reach out to me.

And again as I am writing there are the familiar blue lights that paint my white apartment walls again and the two throaty sounds emitted from the car outside my window. Blue is a color of calm, of sadness, of trust. So much of that is needed in this world that is so in need of love. My kids remind me of that every day. My kids remind me why I do what I do.

 

Last Day of Summer in October

What did you do on your last day of summer? What warranted your time and your attention? What grabbed your last moments of warmth by the affection of the Sun? What gripped at your collar and plunged its mouth against your own turning your cheeks crimson?

Slippery, green, mossy walls that dove down along the man-made division of Earth and mother nature and barricaded in the swelling blue of Lake Michigan, served as perch and enemy today. The Sun was hot outside the bee-lingering post of the new hotel on 53rd. We walked, friend and I, from 52nd until we got to Promontory Point. There, we sat and filled the air with talk and songs. I jumped into the icy water, joining ducks, seagulls, soggy bread; and cosine and sine of water’s waves. Saving my life and reminding me of importance, significance, and peoples’ centrality – I pushed, pulled, and tugged at outstretched arms. Damn, I was heavy and that wall was slippery.

Sometimes the extremity of good and bad, sine and cosine of negativity and positivity remind us of our fragility and finiteness. Sometimes it takes less than that. Sometimes more.

Summer ended already, but the Sun said goodbye today. A good book on a doorstep and a good slip into the freezing lake water served as simultaneous end punctuation and indented line of the next chapter.

Your Daughter

If you want a daughter who leaves you

to explore the world, to find problems and solve them, to pursue dreams and make new ones, to share, to play, to fight, to work, to do, to be

then you must tell her goodbye (sometimes), let her go, then you must not hold her hand

let her lead (you) when she is ready

If you want a daughter who laughs at danger

to break down hegemonic, maybe heteronormative, definitely sexist institutions and patterns of being in this world, to rebel against silly systems that are antiquated and barriers, to march to her own internal cardiovascular rhythm

then you must tell her that she can’t do it in the hope that she overcomes, tell her that she is smart but can be smarter, throw her into the deep end of the pool, let her fail a thousand times in the hopes that she succeeds when it matters

let her lead (you) when she is ready

If you want a daughter who doesn’t think like you

to be open to a changing world, to push you to be so too, to be empathetic with others, to learn from the stories of others, to resist entrenched lies passed off as unchanging, unbiased truths, to be critical of the ideas of others

then you must ask her why in the hopes that she can be analytical and seek out truth even when it is not spelled out across the facade, challenge her, let her challenge you

let her lead (you) when she is ready

 

A letter to a young me

Dear younger me, you’re going to live through hell. But you’re going to get though it and be strong. So strong you might not recognize yourself if we’d have the chance to meet. But don’t let that discourage you. Great things are coming. Great people are coming into your life and you of course will mess most of those things up. Oh but the learning you’ll do with them. Oh but the growing you’ll do. This cranial circus act will launch your mind to new heights, as if your head wasn’t already set between the clouds. Let me tell you that you’ll be happy, a happy that you can’t even fathom at this age. You will know such sadness, loneliness, heartbreak, hurt, and questioning that you’ll more fully understand their opposites and contrasts. As you’ve already started to understand, love is not a zero sum game. It’s possible to love so much more and more and more. I’m proud of your rashness and absurdity. You’re living out some brazen form of your childhood dreams. Don’t be scared to love. Don’t be scared to throw it all away and dive into something completely new. Don’t be scared to give up the only pair of keys you own without a sure plan secured yet. You’ll see soon enough that trusting in the good of people and the universe won’t fail you. And remember, you’re strong, so when it seems to, there’s something bigger coming up next. 

Living in Stars

Social media quickly became the time warp that we were dancing to and about in the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. We found a way to wormhole our way back to this day ____ number of years ago. I click the pictures and think about my face has hardly changed and yet so much has happened, expired, come and gone, and so it all goes to the memories that haunt in the some number of data points that Facebook collects. Thank you for collecting the constellation of points that together create the pictures of the past I cannot always see. It befuddles me that I have seen so much, done so much, been so many versions of myself.

Who I am today, could not have been fathomed by the me that stared longingly at a boy with curled eyelashes by the shores of a nameless lake in 2012. Who I am today, could not have fathomed me that wore short spaghetti strapped daisy dresses in the wintertime of California. Who am I who is so nigh unrecognizable to even myself? My professor and coach asked me a few nights ago, I gotta ask you, how did you do it? How did you become the teacher you are today if it is true how badly your first year went?

Few people care to ask about the process, the journey, the road you took to get where you stand. Many people care more about what you can offer them, what you’re doing, where you are going and what that future you might have to offer them. This is the transactional, shallow fellow who you should allow to fall to the wayside without so much as a glance. It is this path that you take that tells much more than the story that you let show from your face. For the present you has learned to hide the bad. The present you is stronger than the you that started out on this journey. Some people might not like this new version of you. Some might even hate you for it, for becoming something better than you were, for becoming something unfamiliar, new, improved, progressing. These people are those you should not even give a glance.

How I wish I could know what I am journeying towards. How I wish I could talk to the old me or the people of my past without tearing at hearts and scabs. It sometimes feels lonely on this precipice of newness. As if I am creating the ground on which I walk. Not that each step should be imagined as strenuous, but effort is taken. So this path is to be noted as unjourneyed. Because I move too fast and, geographically, too often (maybe) I feel disjointed from my own reality and web of loved ones. Who is a loved one for me? Because it keeps changing.

I wish I knew where it was I was going. How I should get there and if that meant I would be circling back to the West Coast. I wish I knew if I should make the decision to stay with these students whom I have whole-heartedly fallen for and grown to love. I wish I knew what it was I meant to do with this knowledge. Or if it was all for nothing and the experience of it all was the reason and rhyme – why I had spent all this time. That the search had been the sought after and that I was wrong along to think there was more to this. That getting there and living my life alongside this vast array of stars would be the ends I was moving towards. That is not to say I had made not progress towards a goal, but that had I opened my eyes, I would have seen that I was living in the goal all along.