comp lit and mediaphilia

…because my family doesn’t really do that. We do things for each other when opportunities arise, and nobody really does surprises except when I buy things for people and when we buy things for my nieces, so it’s rare that my need of new shoes coincides with a certain date on the calendar.

That said, I think my pile o’ swag this year helps illustrate my point about how we do low-key, tell-me-exactly-what-you-want-and-I’ll-buy-it holidays.

These books: Continue reading →

Posted in rambling

Tagged family , grad school , holidays , presents , privilege

Dec · 27

My parents have been visiting, and I’ve been taking three different classes, and a fourth starts on Tuesday, hence not writing or doing anything, really. Aside from being crazy stressed about things, I’m actually really enjoying summer. It’s pretty amazing to be in a part of the country where summer means you can actually go outside and do cutesy, twee things that previously I only knew to be possible in books and movies. I have walked around MIT’s campus and around the Charles; I’ve sat on a swan boat in the Public Gardens; I’ve been to Newport, RI; I know where all the good bookstores are now; I’ve been to Concord and learned about the Revolutionary War; etc etc.

I’ve spent a lot of time saying I don’t like it here, and I still don’t want to make my life in Boston. But all of a sudden I’m again more open to just about anything in my future, and I’m a lot more comfortable with the idea that I currently live here. It’s like I needed my parents to see me living here and being a grownup and being okay before I could believe it myself. Continue reading →

Posted in adventures

Tagged boston , family , happy , identity , life , nothing

Jun · 17

I’m sitting on a bus heading back to Boston from DC, where I spent the last two days with my aunt, uncle, cousins, cousins’ significant others, and cousins’ kids. I had a great time, and even though I didn’t want to admit it, it was definitely preferable to spending the holiday alone. Also, I got to go to a speakeasy on Wednesday night and drink old, Ragtimey drinks, some of which come with raw egg in them.

But I am not a big holiday person, even when I try to be. There are some things about a person inherent and unchangeable, and my inability to care about books and movies about war/military strategy or to get excited about holidays is something I can’t change, even when I know that it’s an award-winning film or that the entire rest of the world thinks it’s interesting that once a year at midnight it becomes not only a new day and a new month, but also a new calendar year. I’m not big on commemorative or celebratory things that are deemed obligatory. I didn’t go to my college graduation and a year later, I still don’t care; even if I weren’t someone who had never had the option of celebrating Valentine’s Day with a boyfriend I don’t think I would be big on celebrating it; I haven’t really done much for my birthday the past few years because it’s always awkward and an exercise in finding out how little my friends care about me. I much prefer showing people I care, and being shown they care, in random ways that mean a lot more because they come from the person just thinking about you and doing something special, not seeing a calendar date and feeling like they’re socially obligated to do something. And it’s not that I’m anti-capitalist or trying to make a stupid hipster statement; I have honestly tried to get excited and buy Halloween costumes and I always end up not following through, even if I mean to. Continue reading →

Tagged family , happy , holidays , love , thanksgiving

Nov · 26

Wished-for mentor? Hero? Creative and intellectual idol? Spiritual mother?

I just finished Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , her first collection of essays, mostly from the seventies. It struck me in so many ways that I can only begin to enumerate here, but I’ll try, because I think she deserves it, and so do I.

First, people have been telling me that I’m black (or that I’m half black) my whole life, and I did plenty of my own searching and researching and reading. I read and watched the requisite books and movies about slavery and Selma; I had the biographical sketches of women I was supposed to be inspired by; I never denied that black was part of what I was. But this book made me realize that I’ve never fully comprehended what the Civil Rights movement did or meant, and how it influenced creativity, politics, and culture in the years and decades after it. Of course I’m not an expert now, but many of the essays in this book dealt directly with the movement very soon after it happened, which I thought was interesting and enlightening. I think it will help me, as other experiences in the past four years have, find a way to incorporate a black or African American identity into my already complicated self, and to see where I fit in in that community. Just as spending Thanksgiving with my birthfamily (a matriarchal, all-female, close-knit group of well-read, educated, religious, musical; strong-willed group of black women) let new roots spring out from under me, this book has given me validation in the ways I like to be creative, and it has made me see again the value in searching for background and reflecting on the now.

I also appreciated that this collection was not so tight, at times academic, at times journalistic, at times diary-like, at times just good old creative non-fiction. Without knowing it, I think Alice Walker is who I have been trying to be all this time, who I can most closely tie my creative endeavors and aspirations to. Though I’ve only read her The Color Purple before this, I can tell I will be reading more of her, and I’m glad that I went through this collection of essays before reading more of her novels, if only because I feel now that I understand and appreciate her, and this makes me curious to read the things her mind has created. The essays in this collection make personal connections to literature and literary figures she has read, researched, and loved, just as in this blog and in much of my non-fiction writing I have found that the books I love most are those that allow me to make applications to my personal life. I appreciate many books for their literary quality, for their worthiness of being a part of a canon of American literature, for the potential they have for academic study and discussion. But those are books I respect more than love. This book, this Alice Walker, I loved.

To Zora Neale Hurston I gave her due: I studied her for a year in high school and revisited her last summer while I was studying at Rutgers. I read a biography of her this past year, and perhaps someday I will pick up her folktales or autobiography when I have time. To Toni Morrison I afford the utmost respect, but she is not someone I can hope to emulate or even delve deeply into as both a scholar and a human. She is too advanced for me to find connections, though I do greatly enjoy her work. Nikki Giovanni I always enjoy reading, but since I am not foremost a poet, we are not exactly kindred spirits. But in Walker’s collection, I (cliche, I know) found a garden–I found someone else who loves scholarship as much as creativity; who sometimes has a volatile temper; who struggles with which of her minority identities she should identify with; who loves to read; who loves to write; who loves to live. I think I’ve just found a fountain of inspiration.

Posted in books

Tagged authors , books , creativity , family , famous people , feminism , summer reading , writing

Jul · 31

Except actually, I haven’t been on the Golden Gate Bridge in a really long time. But I did just get back from a week in the Bay Area, and even though it was a little exhausting, it was also rejuvenating. Now I think I can get through the next two weeks, before I quit my job and start my new one.

I loved it there. I think maybe that’s where I want to end up in the future. Berkeley was lovely; San Francisco was cool. It made me wish I were a photographer, or that I were just the sort of person who remembers to take photos. I took maybe 10 photos the entire time, and the one photo I really wanted to take, of the turkeys that roam near my grandparents’ house, I didn’t get to. But there were also photos I imagined taking in restaurants, stinky, muraled alleys, rocks overlooking the bay, downtown sidewalks and sunken houses. I don’t have a visual mind, and I’m not someone who spends a lot of time looking at photos from vacations anyway, but sometimes I wish I could be.

I got to do everything I wanted to–saw all the relatives and old friends I wished to see, got really good tours of places that were personal tours, not generic visits to museums and parks, learned how to drive on a California freeway, got to take public transportation and find my way through a city I know next to nothing about. Stayed up late last night eating vegan pots de crème and talking about life and changes and growing up and moving on and how going to new places can be really wonderful .This makes me really excited to move to Boston and get to know it. And I can’t stop thinking about how, three years from now, I’ll be on the verge of another life change, and the fact that I’m so excited and know that I’ll be so prepared helps me feel less worried about all those life milestones others keep asking me about–the ones I’m nowhere near getting to. I think I’m on a good track.

Landing back home today was horrendous. I get worse at landing every time, and I think the air quality in Tucson gets worse every time, making it more and more turbulent. I’m not an anxious kind of person, but I make myself so every time an airplane starts rattling. I tell myself all these awful things and then try to convince myself that I’m going to go on in life, and then I freak out even more because I’m being so irrational. But it always works out, because I don’t think my hometown would try to kill me. I love it too much.

Tagged family , friends , happy , magic , travel

May · 10

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