October 05, 2006 - 2:43 p.m.
a hyphenation of pseudonyms, a hyphenation of alibis.
this is how i know myself.
My girlfriend's shirt tells me "it's okay to be happy, i thought you should know". her shoulder is reassuring.
i wish i had known.
when it came time to recognize privilege, i never had a problem. it had been aparent from the start. it seemed that i should always be aware, the reminders were there, and i was grateful for these gifts.
but like the many people with degrees and no job, or jobs that pay less now than if they'd just kept that job behind a counter for four years instead of reading all those books and getting a piece of paper for it,
I know that none of this guarantees you the things you sorta thought they would. the things that might eventually bring you happiness.
i never thought that material things would. but it was so aparent, watching my smart, capable lover clean the apartment, chaneling her frustration into the pursuit of cat hair and lint, while low paying jobs told her that her brain was not legible to them, not valuable until someone else would pick up their phone and say that she had been present, that she showed up for two years to some unchallenging job, so that she'd could put 'experienced' down beside her imaterial ability to learn; it wasn't the lack of material things, but the idea that playing by the rules had somehow gotten you a penalty. That inspite of all the people with pens and their gold stars, your well-used brain wasn't being appreciated and that someone you'd never seen was closing the door that you thought your mind had opened.
it makes us all want to be self-employed.
at a conference
