Do work.

I recently got an email from an insanely prestigious radical editor. “ZNet posted your latest ColorLines piece on their website and sent it out to an email list. Kudos on such a fine piece! Saludos from Chiapas!” I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and there are still no words to describe the humbled elation.

I’ve been blogging for Bitch about ecofeminist issues, but if someone said, “How’s it going?” I’d be stumped. I’m not a very good blogger in that I tend to avoid arguing in comment sections. I also never know if I’m doing a “good job” by pissing people off. Some folks would argue that starting fights is effective communication. I learned long ago via a next level feminist therapist that arguing was a pattern to transition out of my life, not one to more fully integrate. In this case, the personal is most definitely political—or at the very least, professional. If I make people mad by speaking my truth, it’s more traffic for my contractor—but does that come at a cost to me? That I managed to put up some of my most controversial posts two weeks ago with snot clogging my sinuses and wheezing onto my computer seems to be an indication that I’m quicker on the uptake than I thought. I love a deadline, but I never get used to the manic speed of the internet.

I call this photo “learnin’ about other women.” I turn on my Indiana accent to say it.

Sitting on the train with my bike next to me a while back, another commuter with a bike in tow looked over and read the stickers on my ride. Without irony, he asked, “Is ‘fuck work’ a shop or something?” Bewildered, I responded, “No, it just is,” wondering what was difficult to comprehend about the simple phrase adhered to my bike’s middle bar, near others that say “demand justice,” “organize,” and “go beyond comfort.” He didn’t question me further and looked away. Maybe he thinks I’m just another freeloader immigrant. I didn’t bother to tell him I was on my way to a job, part of my typical 50-hour work week, the minimum I clock on average.

After fighting with my underwire for months and finally realizing that I hadn’t purchased new bras in over two years, I let a woman in a department store measure my chest—size me up, so to speak. That’s her job. Doesn’t make it any less weird for anyone involved, though amazingly, she guessed my cup size without touching me. She’d just transferred into intimates (intimate what?) from another department, so her visual assessment was only that much more impressive. She also complimented my Danish pronunciation, and I helped her learn the English words for “padding” and “sheer.” A week later, I took my best gal pal back with me for a similarly productive encounter. “How did she do that?!” If only we had been taught to understand our own selves as well as random saleswomen.

We are on the verge of buying our own photo developing chemicals. The canisters are in a box at the end of the bed, waiting to be filled with film and fluids. The time—the time to take control of our own processing—is now. The latest addition to our increasingly large collection of cameras is a teeny autofocus Olympus. It looks like something another kid’s parent would have had at one of my childhood birthday parties. Inevitably, we always buy our old cameras from elderly men in the suburbs, who are endlessly amused by our willingness to travel in search of outdated equipment. They also inevitably think I’m pretty funny, since I’m relatively unable to say anything useful in Danish while we test our purchases before buying.

I’ve been trying to take time to work on fiction, contemplate why mood disorders are useful, and to follow some recently compiled excellent wisdom. I’m also trying to ramp up my editing-based income but it’s a tough sell. Who doesn’t think they can edit? Then again, who doesn’t think they can write? To date, the worst sentence I have ever edited: “This book is a collection of poetry from the author.” I rest my case.