round-up: 6/15
resources, what i'm reading, & some quotations
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
It is both inspiring and terrifying to live in LA right now. Inspiring, of course, because the city is coming together, as it always does. Terrifying, of course, because ICE is truly everywhere—my roommate saw the trucks on the freeway last week, and this week the agents stayed in a hotel a few blocks from our apartment.
For updates and resources:
Back in February, I put together some immigrant defense resources for Californians in a one-page zine to distribute at work. Here are PDFs in both English and Spanish in case you want to print them out and give them to people.
And here are instructions on how to fold them up into little books.
What I’m reading:
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, Jackie Wang
Quotations:
Does my life have no plot? I’m unexpectedly fragmentary. I’m little by little. My story is to live. And I’m not afraid of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling.
-Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life
There are many ways to periodize a life. The time of lovers. The time of geography. The time of school—the undergraduate years, the punctuation of semesters. The time of mental states—the summer of my mania, the winter of my grief.
-Jackie Wang
Under what conditions do we become who we are?
-Jackie Wang
The sand forms to my body as the waves recede, trying to pull me out—I look up, waiting for meteorites. I made wishes that were vague. I don’t like being disappointed.
-Jackie Wang
She yells. People would probably say, It’s just a dog, who cares, get over it, just an animal. But you have to imagine—what if you couldn’t love anything but a dog, and that dog loved you back, and it was pure and mutual? Why does love have to be complicated to be considered real?
-Jackie Wang
Even though it seems like she really does like-like me, the circumstances will probably prevent it from ever happening .Maybe it would happen if we were the sole survivors of an apocalypse, because only then would the barriers be erased.
-Jackie Wang
I started to cry in the cafe, not because I’m sad, but because I can’t cultivate indifference. Because I am too forgiving. After a while it starts to wear you down.
-Jackie Wang
When you saw her, she wiped your tears and hugged you so hard and instantly everything felt okay, so safe. How can a hug mean that much? How can you feel it that much? How can such a simple form of touch fix everything so easily, all at once?
-Jackie Wang
Here’s to life and not being defeated by defeat—
-Jackie Wang
On some days Philly starts to resemble the postapocalyptic landscapes of your nightmares—trash lines the bottoms of mangled metal fences, buildings are blown out and abandoned.1
-Jackie Wang
Maybe I am guilty of romanticization, but I say, fuck it. Our lives are grandiose. I am still so delighted to see color.
-Jackie Wang
Be true to yourself [even if that truth is an unfinished sentence; an unclosed bracket
-Jackie Wang
It was so foggy. […] I think I saw two lovers but can’t remember if they were only shadows or objects I thought were lovers from a distance because that’s what I wanted to see.
-Jackie Wang
I am on a mission to feel and to not be interrupted by prattle or anything less than transcendence.
-Jackie Wang
Becoming physically stronger was an important part of me becoming mentally stronger. Because it really proved to me that I wasn’t nearly as weak as I thought I was, or that improvement was possible.
-Jackie Wang
I am all extremes and no middle. All separation or obsessed, all torn between paths leading to opposite ends of the universe.
-Jackie Wang
I read recently that we need silence to hear because words cannot be constituted without gaps, without the spaces between, without the space to hear the other.
-Jackie Wang
Let’s consider the logic behind “feminine” and “masculine” morphologies. When we think of “female anatomy,” it is largely defined by absence, which is represented by the vagina. The cunt is considered a hole, not a thing in itself, but the absence of the thing. “Male” anatomy is defined by the ability to penetrate. The thing goes into the hole. Not only is this binaristic divide dubious because it renders women “passive” and men “active,” it’s also a mythic fabrication. Even cis men have holes. They’re called anuses, mouths, nostrils. Women can penetrate with their tongues, fingers, fists, tits. Breasts can be round, but so can testicles. Dicks can be long, but so can tits. Cunts can engulf.
-Jackie Wang
In the bedroom we make and remake our bodies.
-Jackie Wang
It gets confining, doesn’t it, being expected to do everything, while being denied so much? When you think on all of the societal rules that guide your life, and the punishments you’ve faced that taught you what those rules were, doesn’t it get difficult to move around freely, to place your things where you’d like them, hell, even to breathe?
Like every lifelong eating disorder sufferer, I am quite good at inventing rules for myself to follow, and then crushing all gasps of selfhood beneath them. When I was a teenager on the pro-anorexia Livejournal community, my rules were concerned with calories. But after I started trying to get a little bit better, the rules were about how much time I spent in physical activity. After I got invested in fatphobia, my rules had to do with getting enough nutrition and looking “healthy” in other people’s eyes. But still I had this need for rules, to create a structure that could contain my life, and set specific guidelines by which I could judge my success and failure.
One way to get over that shame, potentially, is to banish all aspirations of being a good person, and simply allow oneself to be.
I’m not going to heaven. All I have is this life as I am experiencing it right now.
Let us go back together to the hills.
We could say we’re motivated to love others so that we’re loved ourselves, but I think there’s this inexplicable thing about being a human being — something beyond biological coding, something spiritual, that makes us want to love. And if we ourselves are loved, I think we can show up better for other people. Maybe that’s just it, it creates a balance. I think we empathize not for some selfish reason, but because we know it makes the world a better place.
That’s all for today—
Be safe out there.
-Despy Boutris
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I love this quotation because, when I went to Philly, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the whole city was filled with buildings like this:
