The Journey

Its about the journey, not the destination… or is it?

I like to travel. Walking, biking, riding, flying… if there’s a place to go, I’d like to get there. I’ll take all modes. Planes, trains and automobiles.  Books, music, festivals. Its not just the physical journey, but the spiritual, intellectual, physical movement into new places, new realms, new ideas, new states of being. But as much as  I love the open road, the feeling of knowing I’m going to a new place and doing a new thing, how do I feel about the actual Journey?

I am obsessed with arriving. Being there, the elusive there of the future.

I am an anxious and wrestles person, if not by nature, then by upbringing. I am always 2 steps ahead of most people and at least 1 step ahead of myself, envisioning everything that could and should happen, good or bad. I don’t like to wait, I make things happen, and due to my anxiety, have a way of manifesting the outcome (good or bad) that I have obsessed over. So, by the time I get to any one  destination, I am thinking about the destination just around the corner.  Its like wanderlust on speed.

Two years ago I got a glimpse of how serious my obsession with arriving is. I was going to New Orleans on a service trip. The flight was rough, turbulence pushing us across the South. Being anxious as I am, I was sure that we were going to die. A group of do-gooders trekking to New Orleans to paint a house, dead on a plane that crash lands in a cornfield all due to turbulence. I nearly started writing goodbye notes, and stopped when  I realized they would burn. When we didn’t die on the plane, I was sure that we would die on the drive to where we would be staying. We rode in a 14 passenger van, so much luggage you couldn’t see out of the back or move. We hit the dusty Louisiana  road, all the way to Marrero, Louisiana. Marrero, I thought. Surely a town where blacks would be lynched. I was anxious, and too wrestles to sit still in the car. I threw up as soon as I got out.

It didn’t help that when we got to where we would be staying, it was an abandoned orphanage, replete with a graveyard in front. What the hell kind of journey was this? Worse, what kind of destination. Trying to get closer to myself, I left my cell phone in LA. I had no one to call to share my anxious thoughts, which were on hyper-drive at this time. I needed to know everything, and for every problem, and every possible problem, (including but not limited to: being murdered by homeless vagrants, eaten by swamp alligators, falling down a dark stair well and just dying). This journey was no longer romantic.

Louisiana is a sleepy place, it forces you to slow down. In the end, with good music, good people and Everclear, I was able to rest enough to focus on the journey. But that was a vacation, and here we are in real life. Though I take some of the calmness of Louisiana with me, I’m still not sure how I feel about my journey, my destination points, and where the rest stops are. What about you? 

RESPECT

Sorry I haven’t been writing in awhile. I’ve been sick. Just a cold, so that shouldn’t be an excuse. I’ve been lazy. Not respecting my craft by giving it little effort. So I’ll write about RESPECT.

We all know the song. Aretha wails it R.E.S.PE.C.T, find out what it means to me. I never remember any of the words to the song, but I know Ms. Aretha wants and gets her respect. I think respect for ourselves and others is lacking in this day and age.

Exhibit A: The Slauson Swapmeet.

So, I’ve been trying not to judge others (as much) lately. Many of you have heard me say “there are many ways to live a life”. And its true. There are many ways to live a life, and until I walk in someone’s shoes, how can I know their motivations, how can I look down at their choices… But a trip through the Slauson makes it hard to maintain this perspective.

You all know the people that frequent it. Women with trails of children lingering behind them, girls with gold that looks like it will break their earlobes, men selling women, men selling drugs, men just trying to sell something. I hate the racist classist structure of the swapmeet. Black people buy buy buy from Latinos who are selling, while Asians are profiting. And while I can’t be mad at anyone getting their money, I just wonder this: How come no one ever looks anyone of the other race in the eye at the swapmeet? Where is the respect for the consumer, and deeper than that, where is the respect for a common humanity?

I walked through numerous sections. The Latinos who were on the floor were more interested in talking to each other than to me, who was clearly interested in spending money. They walked around like they owned the place, half answering my questions and talking in that tone that says buy or leave. I thought they were the owners. Until I walked to the counter. Ming!! Ming! The Latino girls screamed. From seemingly across the Swapmeet an Asian woman emerged. “You buy?” No hello, how are you… she was staring at my wallet but not looking at my face. Before I could say yes she started ringing up the goods, and at the same time, screaming into the phone. She only looked up to tell me the total.

I handed her a $100 bill. She inspected the bill like she had lasers in her eyes, before she rang it up and handed me the change, then walked off. Just because I’m buying cheap clothes doesn’t mean I’m not human, but at the Swapmeet I guess so….

Exhibit B:

 left to get my nails done on Gramercy & Manchester. $10 pedicures, can’t beat it. I was practicing looking at the sights and sounds in non judgement, trying to push the word ghetto out of my head, when BAM, a woman falls on the floor. She is screaming, and can’t hoist her 300 pound frame off of the rough linoleium. I’ma kill these muthafuckin bitch ass Asians! She screams! I’ma kill them. So much for Respect, huh? The woman is visibly in pain. However, NO ONE STOPS. No one stops to ask her if she’s ok. Does she need help, not even to pat her back. NO ONE STOPS. 20 black women in the shop and everybody, just staring, laughing, texting and saying girrrrl I can’t believe it. I can imagine what they were thinking about her (many of these things I overheard… “fat bitch, black bitch, middle aged bitch, ghetto bitch, every kind of ignorant bitch who would come to this ignorant place and act ignorant type bitch…” And even if all this was true, she was still a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend to someone in the world. But no one saw that there. No one respected her, black or Asian, and just like in the Swapmeet, no one looked her in the eye. One girl, not even a teenager, started videotaping it for Youtube.  Others just laughed about “the bitch who was tryna come up on a lawsuit”. But though she sat on the floor for over 30 minutes, screaming, no one stopped to help her.

Where did our respect go? When we look at each other only for what we can buy and sell from each other, when we don’t even look each other in the eye, when watch each other get hurt and made fun of? Finally, after realizing that no one would help, the woman crawled to her cell phone and called her own ambulance. I can’t help but think that a little bit of her dignity left with her. 

The Camera, My Sanctuary-- Part I

Last summer I started going to church. I hadn’t been in years. I didn’t know how to feel. There is always some pressure about going to church. What to wear? What will your dress suggest? Are you trying to hide something or to reveal something? Even in the quest to draw attention to the Lord, there will be attention on you, cameras, old friends, ect. They don’t call it Sunday Best for no reason.

Every thing about church produces some kind of anxiety to me. Where to sit… front, back, middle? Alcoves… Those spaces on the side don’t give you a clear view, but what am I trying to see with outer eyes anyway…

And then there is the whole issue of hugging. I always try to hug people before they hug me, as they might hug too long and border on groping. Aah the dilemmas.

But let me take a few steps back, as you might be wondering how I can say that I have not been to church in years. You’ve probably seen me in the church. But I wasn’t really a member. I was a camera operator. My job was not to worship, but to capture the most “interesting”, “glamorous” moments of church, to package them neatly and to sell them.  To be a good church camera operator, you must know the church. The screamers, the wailers, the people that fall out in the spirit every Sunday, the people who wear new outfits just for you---- those are your money shots. Those are your friends.

Except you never actually talk to these friends. You memorize their habits… what time they come and with whom, what songs make them pull out their Blackberries, who they are texting and sexting in the pews, and what they think of other church goers. But you never talk to them; you only get close to them from behind the lens. It alters your personality, to see the world from behind a camera. You are always seeing people for what they will do and what they will become, how their behavior will manifest into a reaction that you want to capture on screen. You’re only as good as your last camera shot, and the audience is only good as their last reaction. Individuals are nothing except faces, predictable, boring faces. I have the whole church service memorized verbatim, down to the pastors walk, all of the prayers, the hymn and refrain, the nuances that soloists think are unique—I know what people do on camera and what they think, because I have spent over 2,548 hours looking at them from behind a lens.

Seeing life through this buffer makes it hard to take church unfiltered. I often find myself walking around the lobby; making sure people are still in their same seats, “proper places”. Is the lady that sits in the front right of the church still in the front right? If she moves to the left, my whole vision of church might fall apart.

It is taking time to look at church people as real people, not people that I can crop out or edit down to who I would like to see them as. It is taking time to look for God in a place that you have casually referred to as a stage, where you control the lights and sound and where one obscuring focus can change the meaning of a whole service. And it is taking time simply to talk to people who I have observed so long, all while pretending to be invisible to them.

“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.” – Ralph Ellison “Invisible Man”

The Magnifying Glass: My Relationship to Writing

When I was younger I thought I’d be Harriet the Spy. I wanted to see the world and write it in my composition book, documenting all the things the world thought were secret. I didn’t know what I’d do with those secrets, but at least I’d know…

When I was in 5th grade I started a journal. It wasn’t a flowery diary, but an investigative report into Ms. Martin’s class. Who caused drama? Note it. Who liked who? Wrote it down. Each person had a name and a page, and I would save it all in my head, until I went home, and wrote it down. Tensions, conflicts, the dark and gritty underside of elementary--- I wrote about it. One day I decided to go E! Hollywood story on my class. I dropped the book on the desk of a very popular girl. Did I have a death wish? She never spoke to me, surely I couldn’t speak to her, about her, and her secrets. This little book had the power to turn the magnet class upside down.

In the end, everyone loved it. You can write so much that you can’t say. Words I used to describe or explicate, to replay or revise, helped everyone look at each other and take a step back from the drama and gossip. In the pages of my composition book, people were able to laugh at themselves, and learn from themselves, and see what people really thought of them. My class begged me to write more about them. Hold me to the magnifying glass, they asked, show me who you think I am, I want to see my name in the little black book.

  I stopped writing, and picked it up intermittently, whenever I wanted people to pause, reflect, and see the way I wanted. Writing has been a great tool to reflect outward.

I’ve skillfully used writing as a magnifying glass, putting a spotlight on the people and problems around me. But this tool I wield can be more than a magnifying glass, it can be a mirror. This is an attempt to get closer to the mirror. 

Statement of Purpose

I am a writer. Well, not really. Writing is a gift of mind, a talent, a hobby... something like that... Lets call it what it is. Writing is something I'm good at, but I don't do. Like most "writers", I'm to scared, nervous or caught in the moment to reflect on the page. The badge of honor that is "writer" is more like a shield to guard against true self expression and a fortress around the inability to develop the discipline necessary to produce written work.

This blog is an attempt to get out of that bad habit. 30 days, 15 minutes a day. A dream comes through much doing, right?


This blog focuses on relationships. Why? Because we are no one independently, we are identified by our affiliations and associations. You are not "you", you are a daughter, sister, lover, student, employee... each day I'll write about and thus challenge one aspect of my relational life. Your job: fasten your seatbelts, challenge me to be honest with myself, and let me know if these words mean anything to the world outside my head.