America's Ghostwriters

Okay, so in my little corner of the internet we’ve been talking a lot about how to deal with white supremacists/racists/misogynists who refuse to respond when called out. The Liberal view, the view that I have always had, is that these are Good People who just don’t understand the implications of what they’re saying and that we need to meet them where they are and do the emotional work for them so they will see how harmful their views are.

This is coming up again while I listen to Immigants (We Get the Job Done) from the Hamilton Mixtape (by far my favorite song on this album besides Dessa’s). How is it possible that people hate immigrants? That “immigrant” has become a bad word in this country? I mean, if you want to talk about white and nationalistic privilege I am about as high on the scale as you can get. I had an ancestor on the Mayflower, I had one who signed the Declaration of Independence, I had ancestors on both sides of the Civil War, everyone in my entire family – both sides – was in this “country” before 1700 – before it was one. If I can see that our country is built on the murder of millions of Native Americans, forced immigration/slavery/oppression of African Americans and oppressed and vilified immigrants from all over the world – that we wouldn’t exist without them and that they make our country and our lives measurably better and that it is ridiculous to deny immigrants, especially refugees, entrance to our country and equal rights and every possibility that is supposed to be the cornerstone of being an American…if I can see all that other people must just not be looking. If I could just open their eyes. If I could just trigger their empathy. They have to be able to feel it. They HAVE to. It’s just ignorance, and ignorance has to be fought with information. Right?

But through a conversation with Gordon I realized that for anyone spouting these views who is unwilling to engage when they are called out it isn’t really about ignorance. They don’t really think that nonwhite people/people of other faiths/women/immigrants aren’t people…they just don’t actually care whether they are or not. This argument is physically painful to me, that someone could not be blind to what they're doing but actually just not care, but I think that it's true of most of the kind of bigots we're talking about. You can’t get them to engage their empathy because they are purposely shutting it off. They want things to be better for them and they don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else in the world and they’re using bigoted rhetoric to advance that position. Engaging their cover argument legitimizes it.

Here is the paraphrased conversation I just had with Gordon that finally has me feeling like giving up on arguing sense and empathy into humans who refuse to employ them and instead focusing my energy elsewhere. There are two ways this conversation goes:

Bigot: Group X aren’t people and don’t deserve the same rights as me and I’m going to crush them for my own benefit.

You: You can’t say that! Group X are real people and you should care about them and imagine them complexly and think about it from their perspective here let me explain why…

You will lose. You have already lost by engaging because they don’t care whether they should care or not. They don’t. You can’t convince them. You will expend a huge amount of emotional energy and they will MAYBE come away with something to think about that MIGHT EVENTUALLY blossom into understanding but they WILL NOT immediately change their mind except in EXTREMELY rare circumstances.

Bigot: Group X aren’t people and don’t deserve the same rights as me and I’m going to crush them for my own benefit.

You: You cannot say that.

Them: Stop me.

You: I will.

That is the only way you win. Don't convince them. Stop them.

Word Portraits

               In the age of selfies, when everyone carries a camera in their pocket and knows precisely what they look like at every moment, there is a burgeoning new market for the return of portraiture. Not with paint, no of course not. No one now would sit still that long or pay an artist when they can style themselves into oil with a few swipes of their finger and a good filter. They can post it immediately and gather Likes. It’s the easiest thing in the world.

               But perhaps these people who constantly show the world how they wish to be remembered could benefit from Word Portraiture. Anyone can take a selfie but who can describe themselves with accuracy? Who knows how they move? How they look in unstudied moments? For a nominal fee I will paint you into a prose-poem. Like any good portraitist I will soften your wrinkles and make warm the light. I will learn the briefest flash of your eyes, the falter of your lips, your shyness as you glance aside. I will witness you with all the accuracy you can handle.

               So come into my shop. Sit with me in motion and emotion. To ease your mind I will share my story. I would have been a writer but I had no gift for plot. Good with verbiage but not verbs. My characters moved through one dimension with a complicated grace but nothing ever happened to them. I was an artist, not an author; words were just my medium.

               It’s been two years and I am still in business. The secret is to be studious but soft, true to life but just a little sweeter. Look around the gallery and sample my wares. My hourly rate is reasonable; all you have to do is let me in. Without Da Vinci all that’s left is Mona Lisa with a selfie stick.

Live Broadly, Love Deeply

There’s a kind of motto I came up with (or stole? It’s so hard to tell) when I was in Texas trying to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life. “Live broadly, love deeply”. It is still kind of a mission statement of my life but the thing is it’s hard to do both at the same time.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been cultivating the courage it takes to living broadly. Going new places, trying new things, spending a lot of time alone doing the things that I want to do, experiencing new parts of the country and the culture. I started dancing again: first jazz, then hip hop, then Latin, I learned how to catch and tag sparrows and rats and snakes, I tried new restaurants by myself, went camping by myself, spent all day with the ocean alone, had strange wonderful conversations with random strangers. I’ve seen and done a lot of amazing things and I am extremely proud of the person I’ve become in that time (or perhaps, always was).

But it’s been really, really lonely. I have a lot of friends I love a tremendous amount and a couple I even keep in pretty good contact with but the phone can only do so much. I’ve made a lot of fantastic acquaintances. I love meeting new people, but it’s hard to really get to know them beyond a surface level, hard to integrate yourself into their life when you both know you’re leaving in a couple months. Hard too, to break yourself of the habit of being a loner enough to try to get close to them. It’s a layer of protection when you know you get attached easily and are leaving soon (plus a lot of underlying trust issues that made me want to be a loner in the first place but we won’t get into that here). Here in Florida has also been the least social field job I’ve ever had. Even though I live with several people who all seem pretty cool, I almost never see them. We all pretty much just smile and wave when we pass each other in the kitchen and basically don’t talk or hang out. It’s weird. And that was sort of how I felt living in South Carolina, too. It felt very temporary. Living with my parents was very familiar but also a little uncomfortable. There comes a point at which you can’t go home again, not for very long (especially when “going home” is a brand new house in a state you’d never been to). I made some friends but by the time we started getting close I was leaving. I loved Charleston, I loved exploring the city and living on the coast and all the new experiences, but it was broad and not deep.

I left Wisconsin triumphantly in January, planning not to come back for more than a short visit for a long time. I’ve been saying I want out of the Midwest for YEARS and I do hate the winters and the springs, now that I know that spring in the Southeast lasts for MONTHS and is BEAUTIFUL and full of FLOWERS instead of lasting for two weeks and being mostly mud.

But I went back to Wisconsin a few weeks ago. I’m sorry if you’re a Wisconsinite reading this and I didn’t tell you I was there. I was only going for a few days and I wanted deep quality time with the few people I was going to see. I stayed with Gordon, with whom I’ve had a strange, slowly growing relationship for a while now. We’ve been quiet about it, we didn’t really know what it was. It didn’t truly solidify into something really real until we saw each other again. After months of phone calls it felt so good to be with him. So much better than I imagined. It was indescribable. I don’t even really want to try except to say that it was such an intense amount of love and care that it was sometimes too bright to look at.

I went down to see Jenny and her brand new tiny human. I got to the hospital the day after she gave birth. I’ve never seen a baby that fresh before. I helped Jenny get in and out of her chair, still in a lot of pain from her C-section, and held baby Charlotte who slept peacefully and made tiny squeaky noises while Jenny and I talked about our lives and our loves and everything. Rob stayed to chat for a minute before he went off to check on Ryker and they both insisted if I ever wanted to I could stay with them and Charlotte’s hair and chubby cheeks were softer than anything in the world and it felt unbelievably good to be a part of that family.

LOOK AT THAT FACE

The next day we met Maggie for breakfast. I literally ran down the street and flung myself at her. God I love her so much. We held hands and sat in a tree and dangled our feet over the water and talked about everything and cried and laughed and hugged and kissed each other’s faces and I have missed her. So. Much. And we vowed that even though we are both terrible at long-distance communication that our love will never ever ever decrease, only increase and pieces of me that I hadn’t realized were missing fell back into place. 

After that Gordon and I went to see my horse. I’ve owned Lark for 16 years and I hadn’t seen him since January, one of the longest absences ever. He let me hug his face – which he never does. He stood completely still while I untangled his tail for an hour – which he never does. He was patient and sweet in a way that showed me that he had really missed me. I rode him bareback and it felt like coming home. Gordon even got on – his first time on a horse – and it was maybe the cutest thing that has ever happened. Afterwards we stood with Lark as he ate grass, just standing quietly with him and listening to the munch of his teeth which is one of my favorite sounds in the whole world. I like to just stand while he eats, to be part of his herd, because that’s how horses bond. Gordon understood and stood quietly with us, the three of us herding.

TRUE LOVE

And I burst into tears. Gordon put his arm around me and I buried my face in Lark’s mane and Lark made comforting munchy noises and I just sobbed. It felt like my heart had grown twelve sizes and still overflowed.

The truth is that I am really good at the living broadly part. It’s not that hard for me at this point. I like being alone, I’m brave about trying new things, I am curious and fascinated by everything…I could spend my whole life skating along the surface exploring new things and meeting new people. Loving deeply is hard. I didn’t realize how hard until recently. Through a lot of talking to Gordon and some therapy and some medication I have realized…well, a lot of things that I’m not going to go into now. Suffice it to say I’ve been numb and terrified for a very long time. I crave deep, real, love, but never feel like I can break through and find it. I haven’t felt it in person like that for a very long time and I certainly wasn’t prepared for feeling so much love so intensely in 24 hours.

For a long time, I thought that real strength meant Independence, meant being off on adventures alone. And I’ve certainly found that kind of strength in myself the last few years and I love it and it is so much fun. It’s one of my favorite things about myself. But I think the much more difficult (for me) kind of strength and courage is the strength to be open and let others in. That would be a much braver act for me. I still have a lot of work left to do but I am definitely less numb now than I have been in a very long time. I’m not ready to settle down forever, but I want a community. I want people around that I love and to build real trust, to really feel like I can be open. I want to be able to really get to know new people. And really get to know a new city! I want to be a regular somewhere. It’s so strange that that sounds so much more terrifying to me than running off and living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere in Texas, or driving all over the country on a solo roadtrip, or any other low-paid, short term, dangerous job alone in the boonies. I think a lot of that has to do with the fear that learning to love deeply and trust others and forging a friend family for myself will take away my ability to run all over the world alone and do crazy shit, but that’s the beautiful part: I don’t have to choose. I can have both. Live broadly AND love deeply, after all. I just have to prove it, to work hard at it. It’s a challenge. And luckily, I’m both competitive and stubborn.

So this is my current Life Plan:

Tomorrow is the last day of my job here in Florida, which I have absolutely loved. I’m going to go back to South Carolina for a couple of days and then I’m driving back to Wisconsin and staying with Gordon and Andrea for a while. I am extremely nervous and excited about this. I’ll visit as many Midwest friends as possible while still having time to just be in Beloit. I’ll really sit down and work at applying to grad schools. Two to three years for a masters is a good amount of time to find a new place, settle, make new but real friends, build a community, etc. But before I go to grad school, I’m going to Europe. Alone. To just wander and adventure and see things I’ve never seen before.

Live broadly, love deeply. This is my plan, anyway. Maybe it’ll fall through. Maybe I’ll chicken out. Maybe something will go terribly wrong. Maybe I won’t get into grad school. I’m terrified about basically every part of it, but then again, I’m terrified all the time. So. Nothing to do but walk forward with my eyes, mind, and heart wide open and see what happens.

Go Fish!

It feels so strange to describe what I'm about to describe as a huge adventure, an ethical experiment, a big step in my life, when I know for so many people it is enormously commonplace. But, there you are. I just ate fish! Let me explain.

I've been a vegetarian for over 14 years now, more than half my life. I went cold turkey, so to speak, no easing into it by cutting out red meat first, no slip-ups in all that time, no exceptions for holidays or shellfish, nothing. My reasons for becoming a vegetarian were mostly centered around the cruelty of slaughterhouses but as I grew up I learned more about the incredible unsustainability of meat and fish consumption in this country as well as the inhumane practices and in time I just lost my taste for it in general. Until recently I was pretty positive I would never eat meat again. For the last two years through friendships with some extremely ethical hunters I've started to consider it but something was always holding me back: I would never feel comfortable eating meat without facing the fact that I was taking a life in a direct way. If I went hunting in a sustainable way, if I killed something, and watched it die, really felt the sacrifice that was being made for me, then I would eat meat again.

But the opportunity never presented itself, plus I was worried after all of that I wouldn't like it or I would get sick - either due to guilt, the placebo effect, or the fact that I don't have the enzymes to digest meat anymore - whatever the reason, I'm really not into vomiting. I try to avoid it at all costs. So I had settled into believing I would probably never eat meat again.

Until, as a thank-you for all our hard work, the head of the gamebird lab at Tall Timbers offered to take us all on a deep sea fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico. I said yes, excited for the sun and the sea, and did a lot of soul-searching about how I felt about the fishing. Gordon was enormously, incredibly helpful, having done a lot of the research I was now trying to do in one night. He had researched, for instance, the fact that suffocation/freezing are actually pretty painless ways for fish to die. That their bodies just sort of shut down gently like falling asleep. I researched the species we'd be likely to catch to make sure we would be harvesting sustainably (http://www.seafoodwatch.org/), and I tentatively decided that when I went I would fish, that if I caught anything I would try to cook it and eat it and use this as an opportunity to explore my world in a new way.

We woke up at 3:00 am to get to the boat by 5:30 when it was supposed to ship off. Most of my coworkers aboard were kind of good ole boys and there were bets laid on who would get the biggest fish and plenty of southern trash talking. There was also sea and sky and wind and it was lovely to be on the water and heading out far enough that we couldn't see the land.

Sunrise as we set sail.

Also we saw dolphins!

Before we even got to the first place to drop our lines there was a tug on one of the trawling lines, continuously streaming from the back of the boat. My bosses were extremely excited for me to catch something so they had me sit in the chair with the rod and reel as fast and hard as I could. I caught the first fish of the day: a fairly small king mackerel. The first fish I'd caught since I went catch and release fishing for tiny freshwater sunfish with my dad when I was nine.I got high fives and a healthy dose of pride.

The rest of the day was fast and furious fishing. More often than not I baited my own hook, even though poking a hook through a dead fish's eye made me wince every time. Once I accidentally grabbed one of the live bait instead of the dead ones and I could feel its heartbeat as a strung it on my hook. That was horrifying. I seriously considered putting it back but no matter what I did that fish would be used as bait that day, and my inability to kill it would not save it and ultimately it was fulfilling its purpose in the food chain to help us catch the bigger fish that would feed us, but it was still a feeling I will always remember, the fish limp and cold in my hand with the dull beating in my palm. 

I watched the fish we brought on board intently to see if I could tell whether they were suffering. I am not an expert in animal cognition but at this point I'm a pretty keen observer of animal behavior and to my eye it looked like Gordon's research bore out. Once on board, once the hook had been removed and they were laying flat in the cooler, the fish quickly settled down. If poked or riled they would flop and seem to gasp but when left to lie in the thin air on a bed of ice they seemed to settle and expire as peacefully as possible. I did my very best not to turn away from any of it.

I caught two more king mackerel - fun because they are real fighters - including the biggest mackerel of the day! I caught two runner jacks and a bonita - a beautiful fish that put up a hell of a fight. I caught a tiny red snapper, too small to keep, that the deckhand slid off the hook and back into the water for me. My last catch of the day was a small vermilion snapper, right on the border of being big enough to eat. The first mate was busy, so I hauled it up myself, held the almost beatifically calm fish in my hand and ever so gently coaxed the hook out of its mouth and where it had been wedged below its eye. It didn't puncture the eye, the fish didn't seem to feel it, but it was dainty work to pry it loose without ripping its face or puncturing its eye. I did it patiently, without making the fish squirm too much, and then let the small fish slip back into the deep water. That was my last catch of the day and it felt good to end on a note of mercy.

To be honest, it was fun. It was a new experience. It was sun and salt and surf. It was fighting with nature in a new and unaccustomed way, sometimes triumphing, sometimes bringing up my hook to find I'd been outsmarted. It felt like being a part of the food chain in a way I'd never experienced before. There was a nice camaraderie on board, I got a little southern twang going trash talking with all the dudes. All in all, it was a pretty wonderful day.

The king mackerel I caught, biggest of the mackerels we caught that day.

In the end, I didn't keep much. Most of my catch went to the other folks aboard to keep them from buying grocery store unsustainably caught fish which I feel really good about. My boss took the mackerel I first caught, the small one, home and cleaned it for me. They all insisted I take two of the snapper fillets home even though I didn't technically catch any.

I'd caught and killed fish all on my own, now the only thing left was to learn to cook it. And see if I liked it. And if I could keep it down. Well, it took two weeks to get the time and to get my nerve up but tonight I cooked the mackerel, the one I caught and killed myself. I haven't cooked any kind of meat since I was young enough to need adult supervision. I've never cooked fish. I looked all over the internet for different recipes but the most popular ones were always very simple. In the end all I put on it was olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika, and lemon.

I broiled it for maybe eight minutes, completely unaware of how to tell when fish is done.I felt pretty confident that it was done well when it moistly fell apart when I tried t transfer it to a plate. I screwed up my courage, took a bite, and...

I loved it. It was DELICIOUS. Light and lemony and perfect. It was moist and practically melted in my mouth. I was so afraid that the texture would be abhorrent to me but I just loved it. I had to force myself to eat slowly, little bites, and take breaks to make sure my stomach didn't rebel at any time, but it's been an hour and I've kept it all down! I ate the entire thing. It was absolutely delicious. It felt so good to know that I had fought for this meal, that I had won it in a contest of strength and learned to cook it myself and that I was enjoying the fruits of my labor. I felt bad that it was at the expense of another living creature, but it felt good to be a part of the food chain in a new and interesting way. Also it was SO GOOD. I ate salad along with it to trick my body into digesting it well.

I don't think this is the end of my vegetarianism in any way. I still consider myself a vegetarian. I will probably eat those two red snapper fillets in my freezer and still consider myself a vegetarian. I may never go fishing again. I may make it a staple of my diet - fresh fish caught by me. I'm really not sure what it means about the future, but it was a really excellent experiment and experience! I found out that I am stronger, braver, and better at cooking than I ever thought I could be. I did something brand new, something WAY outside of my comfort zone. I took a risk, I took a chance, on a gut feeling and advice from people I trust and respect, and it turned out beautifully. Honestly, better than I ever thought possible. My world is a little bigger now.

Snake face, baby bird heart

I haven't posted much since I got to Florida on Monday and here is why: I've been trying to figure out what to say.

I love to be seen as adventurous and brave. I am both, I know I am, but it's the side I like to show off best. I like to post beautiful pictures and crazy stories and leave out the hard stuff unless it's funny or shows how tough I am.

I love being the person who lets a snake crawl up their face.

I adore my crazy adventurous job. I want to post pictures of mice and lizards and songbirds and Spanish moss and leave it at that. Would it be better if I did?

Or should I tell the whole truth? The truth is that in addition to being brave and adventurous sometimes my heart feels like this:

Gaping towhee nestlings we found yesterday.

And by sometimes I mean a lot. It's hard to admit but just as real and I am tired of trying to push it away or harden my poor baby bird heart.

This is the longest I've ever been out of the Midwest. I've had lots of little four month adventures, to Australia, to California, to Texas, to South Carolina, but this is the first time I haven't gone back. It feels right and it feels good and it feels terribly lonely and isolated and scary. I'm not even sure I can be homesick - what home is there? And I'm not building one here, I'll be moving who knows where in four months. I'm trying to become a turtle through sheer force of will.

No, not homesick - heartsick. I miss my people: not just in the Midwest, all over the country, all over the world. Everyone is moving or putting down roots and doing great things either way and I'm so happy for everybody but I worry a lot about the people I love disappearing or not knowing how important they are to me. To anyone who is or has ever been close to me (if you're reading this chances are it includes you) here is what I want to say:

Don't forget me. I hope you carry me around in your shell the way I carry you. I hope the next time we meet it will be like no time has passed, even if it's years (though I hope it's soon). I hope you like the pictures I post of snakes on my face and birds in my hands and I hope you have crazy beautiful adventures and share them too. And most of all I hope you know I love you and I miss you and I wish we talked more and you mean more to me than you think. Try to reach out from time to time? Even a little, even rarely. My baby bird heart will eat it up. I'm not great at it either but I'll try too, I promise.

Love,

Karis