| The Men are In Love |
[04 May 2008|04:40pm] |
Yesterday while in a bus, I got to overhear a man on the phone with his love, Sandra, as he assured her that he loved her and would never wrong her. At that same time we drove by a man sitting on a bench holding flowers and from that emerged these words:
The men are in love
and they're walking down the street
Speaking pretty words and carrying flowers in their hands
Gentle lions that they are
Sons of Atlas and of Zeus
Whose achilles heels have been cut, by cupid's mastery in aim
Oh how these men are so in love, as they're running down the streets
Stumbling by with their weak knees
But with strong convictions in their heads
Yes these men are in love
and they are courting dames in modern towers
loving their Rapunzels with fake extensions
And their Snow Whites in tanning booths
Emancipated Cinderellas
Who prefer to date a beast
and who all make great sleeping beauties
(as they smudge their make up on their sheets)
Yet the men are in love
with their little mermaids in their beds
and mermaids they are
and mermaids they’ll stay
The men are in love
and blind
and tamed
and good
Becausse,
Everyone enjoys the sight of the vulnerable patriarch in love
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[05 Mar 2008|11:15pm] |
I am tired of hearing about the consciousness of poverty.. that Latin Americans are stuck in this endless wheel of societal mistakes... do we not remember that perhaps that the wheel originated when unwelcomed visitors came without knocking at the door? that they keep getting new visitors with promises of "development" which is really just a bunch of maquiladoras benefiting from a widespread desperation for labor?
Ok, yes no one is a complete victim, people choose at times to accept poverty, to be abused... but have we been in their shoes? or walked barefooted like them? how is it to step out of the victimization when its the only tools we are granted?
I am empowered because i was socialized in an environment that nurtured my education, my thirst for knowledge, and I am lucky.... but with that luck comes responsibility and I can't help but think that I am just being pulled between ideologies, that all I am living is in blanket generalizations... I mean is there even such a thing as "Latin America" when the experience of people in this romanticized land is so diverse?... yet I write about it, hear about it, and still speak about it as if I had claim over it... 12 years since I stepped off that land, sorta makes you loose credibility.. but we can always pretend
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| I litttle something I thought of in my postmodernism class... |
[20 Feb 2008|06:16pm] |
Now
This is now,
no this is now
now
now
I am writing right now
but that now just passed
present now past
As I say it,
I also bid it...goodbye
Now is not now
there is no now
neither now nor present
Just constant motion
If the past is all just dead nows
and there's no now?
Is there a past?
How about future?
But future is merely illusion
once it happens, it no longer is..... future
or past or now
This is now
no its future
or maybe past
... maybe its just eternity
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[16 Dec 2007|12:16pm] |
La novicia del convento está escribiendo una carta y comienza:
'Querido Monseñor'.
Se da cuenta de que aquél puede mal interpretar sus palabras y vuelve a
empezar...
'Excelentísimo Monseñor'.
Recapacita pensando que es demasiado formal.
'Señor Monseñor'
Este título le parece muy mundano.
Así que probando varios títulos, decide que el mejor es 'Don Monseñor'.
Para asegurarse de no meter la pata, le pregunta a la Madre Superiora:
¿Madre, Monseñor se pone con Don?
Claro que se pone condón, si no, este convento
sería una guardería................
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| The Lady Outside of Bengladesh |
[19 Oct 2007|02:02am] |
There’s an old lady living in a village right outside of Bangladesh
I was told her gentle hands were the ones that made my purse
(For which the five dollars I was paying had been part of a fair trade.)
If I could one day share a meal with her and over food exchange our stories
I would ask her countless questions of her life within such world.
How do you spend your waking hours?
What are your thoughts during the day?
What do you think of those outside your village or of the one who sold your purse?
What makes you suffer?
What makes you happy?
Who do you love?
Who do you dismay?
I have so many questions for the one who made my purse
I come from a faraway village where we have traded labor for machines
Where the craft has been replaced by assembly lines to satisfy the market needs
I wish I could meet the lady who must compete with factories
Do you struggle day to day?
Do you live your life in peace?
Do you care that everyday I flaunt your labor on my shoulder?
I want to know her feelings
Her thoughts and her concerns
Ask her what she dreams of
And if her reality is far from them
There’s an old lady living in a village right outside of Bangladesh
I was told her gentle hands were the ones that made my purse
(But are the pieces of paper she received part of a just and fair exchange?)
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| Ahh Faulkner... for a little inspiration... |
[27 Sep 2007|02:32am] |
William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
* The speech was apparently revised by the author for publication in The Faulkner Reader. These minor changes, all of which improve the address stylistically have been incorporated here.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
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[17 May 2007|11:12pm] |
"To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern - and to take the jump and stake everything on these values."
- Eric Fromm
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[17 May 2007|11:07pm] |
Charity
I see humanity as a herd of cattle inside a fenced enclosure. Outside the fence are green pastures with plenty for the cattle to eat, while inside the fence there is not quite enough grass for all the cattle. Consequently, the cattle are trampling underfoot what little grass there is and goring each other to death in their struggle for existence.
I saw the owner of the heard come to them and when he (sic) saw there pitiable condition he was filled with compassion for them, and thought what he could do to improve their condition. So he called his friends together and asked them to assist him in cutting the grass from outside the fence and throwing it over the fence to the cattle. And they called that charity.
Then, because the calves were dying off and not growing into serviceable cattle, he arranged that they should each have a pint of milk every morning for breakfast. Because they were dying off in the cold night he put up beautiful well-drained and well ventilated cow sheds for the cattle. Because they were goring each other in the struggle for existence he put corks on the horns of the cattle so that the wounds they gave each other might not be so serious. Then he reserved a part of the enclosure for the old bulls and the old cows over seventy years of age. In fact he did everything he could to improve the conditions of the cattle.
And when they asked him why he did not do the one obvious thing—break down the fences and let the cattle out, he answered, “If I let the cattle out, I should no longer be able to milk them.”
Leo Tolstoy
****************
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequences of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.
- David Whyte
********************
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[14 May 2007|12:01am] |
En una peluquería.... Una pequeñita
>>de 5 años acompaña a su padre a la peluquería para que éste se haga
>>un corte de cabello. El peluquero, hombre muy amable, decide dar
>>a la niña una pieza de pan dulce para hacer más grata la espera.
>>La niña se sentó a un lado del sillón, precisamente debajo de donde
>>cortaban el cabello a su padre. El peluquero voltea a ver a la
>>niña, y le dice: "¿Sabes algo, muñeca? ...Se te va a llenar de
>>pelos tu bizcocho." La niña pronta responde: "Sí, ya me
>>platicó mi mamá...y que también me van a salir chichis..."
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[06 May 2007|01:11am] |
I think I am ready to go back to where I had left off in my discovering of God.
I think I am ready to take all the injustice, corruption, poverty, opression, hunger, war, death, greed, selfishness, ignorance, and hatred I see around me and begin to discover how I can find the beauty hidden within them.
The past few months I've lost myself... but now I begin the reconstruction of who I WANT TO BE.... and its a rather exciting feeling.
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[26 Apr 2007|02:00am] |
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The allegations made by the Save America fund (http://www.saveamericafund.com) stating that Bush is allowing the foreign takeover of the United States is an unfortunate example of the failure by many of us to understand the complexity of the immigration debate. Illegal immigration is not the attempt of foreigners to infiltrate our country but rather the result of the economic desperation lived in Latin American countries. So much energy is being spent on creating divides between the pro or anti- immigration arguments that the commonalities are being overlooked. There’s so much attention in creating borders and “keeping them out” that we often ignore the fact that the vast majority of illegal immigrants would much rather stay in their country but unable to do so.
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| Virginia Tech and Gendered Violence |
[24 Apr 2007|11:37pm] |
I wrote a note on facebook... if you get a chance to read it, i'd definitely like to hear your take on it.
Love you all,
Jess
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[09 Apr 2007|09:46pm] |
Random Thought:
What makes me a woman?
The structure of my bones?
Childbearing abilities?
Or sexual pleasure agilities?
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| My sister e-mailed this to me: I found it rather cute |
[09 Apr 2007|03:27pm] |
An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole, which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water, at the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.
For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.
After 2 years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. "I am ashamed of myself, because this crack inmy side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house." The old woman smiled, "Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?" "That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house."
Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it's the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. You've just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good in them.
SO, to all of my crackpot friends, have a great day and remember to smell the flowers on your side of the path!
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[26 Mar 2007|09:14am] |
A veces me canso de que mi mente curiosa trae conotaciones que no son reales... no me gusta cuando me meten en una caja con un nombre que no pertenece a mi.. por eso escribi este poema:
Pedí igualdad
Y me llamaste comunista
Dude del gobierno
Y me transformaste en anarquista
Cuestione a papa dios
Y me excomunicaste como atea
Y por no querer ser utilizada
Me clasificaste como feminista
Pero nunca me trataste como una ser humana
Única
Que no quiere ser catalogada
Quien quiere que veas mi belleza
No por las curvas de mi cuerpo
Sino por el fondo de mi alma
Que no quiere ser manipulada
Ni aceptar tu ideología
Solo quiero hablar contigo
Para preguntarnos porque no?
No necesito tu protección
Nada más tu compañía
Pues el peligro es invisible
Y tu fuerza masculina en verdad no vale nada.
- 25 de Marzo de 2007
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[17 Mar 2007|08:35pm] |
Trip to the border was life-changing and I could never ever do it justice by writing about it(but i will very soon, I am just still processing it).
We are planning a "Border Awareness Week" at Georgetown the last week in April leading up the to May First March for Immigrant Rights on the Capitol.
If at all possible you kiddos should really consider coming out for that week/weekend because its gonna be filled with amazing people, stories, marches, and good old times.
Love you and miss you all,
Jess
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[02 Mar 2007|05:51pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 indescribable |
] |
| [ |
music |
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Juana Molina |
] |
In a couple hours I leave to spend a week in the Mexico/ US border..... When I return I expect to be angry, upset, dissapointed with the the world for failing to treat human beings with dignity. I also expect to meet beautiful strangers walking in the desert and sharing stories only believed to be myths. The theories and illusions of that space of earth will become real and I will return with a desire to do something about it....
Well those are my expections... now I am leaving them here on this little livejournal so that I can go with an open mind, expecting nothing, knowing nothing... to come back in seven days with a week's worth of stories and and experiences....
Love you all very much,
Jess
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[27 Feb 2007|02:15am] |
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, "the people must have a religion." That is the safety-valve.
- Voltaire
And so the faith slowly withers and reason pleads for loyalty...... I don't know anymore
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html
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