Beneficial nematodes

I have drunk the kool-aid. Or rather, I have drunk the swamp goo. This is the second year in a row that my lovely squash plants have begun to grow insipid and die. It's all account of the squash vine bore - an evil greasy looking grub thing. Prior to discovering my new love, all of the books told me to get out there as the sun was rising, squat down and see if I can see those squatting bores chowing their way through my plant, then pull them off and kill them.

I'm not that kind of a gardener - organic, sure, but spending my morning pulling bores off my plants is just not going to happen. Enter the lovely beneficial nematode.

"Beneficial Nematodes are microscopic and live below the soil surface and like a moist environment. Looking like short non-segmented worms these voracious predators make their way through your lawn and garden looking for food. Nematodes do not harm worms, birds, plants or the environment, in fact they are part of the environment and are found the world over.

When the nematode comes incontact with a pest the attack by entering through body openings or simply by boring through the body wall, once inside the Nematode will release a bacteria that kills it's host within 48 hours. They will feed and reproduce before exiting in search of fresh prey."

Apparently, we fuck up the natural nematode order of things with our chemicals and construction and general damage to the ecocycle. But now we can reinsert them and let them microscopically munch their way through the big bad bores and other squishy cousins.

I will report back after I scatter my nemotode friends and watch to see my squash plants unfurl in companionable pride - their roots protected by their nematodies.

Twin Cities US Social Forum

I know, it's been four months since I last blogged. I am an incredibly part-time blogger. I am, however, pausing here to add a post about a new blog - the Twin Cities US Social Forum blog.

For those unaware of the US Social Forum, it took place in the last week of June and was a movement- building gathering in which 15,000 people from all over the country - mostly people of color with a significant queer and youth presence - gathered together to share workshops, strategies, lessons learned and visions for, literally, making another world possible. This was the US contingent of the World Social Forum - the WSF has the theme "Another World is Possible" and the US Social Forum carried the theme - "Another World is Possible, Another US is necessary".

A few months before the US Social Forum, a small group of us began to organize in the Twin Cities, seeking to help local activists get to Atlanta for the US Social Forum and working to begin building connections for an eventual focused and ongoing social justice movement building effort in the Twin Cities. There is extraordinary work happening here - particularly in immigrant justice/worker rights and green urban planning - but there is also a lot of work to be done. Our Twin Cities moment is, what we hope will be the start of a slow and thoughtful effort to make connections between communities and groups working in the Twin Cities for broad-based social justice, something that is, at its core, led by and envisioned by those whose lives and communities are most affected by the ravages of capitalism and US imperialism.

So, check out our new blogsite - it's mostly for communicating about activities and sharing resources, but it's a start!

http://tcussf.blogspot.com/

Caucawhatsit?

Twice this week - once on the radio and once in a magazine article - I've heard people refer to "Caucasian" as a race. Please please can we throw this term - and all attached to it like Negroid & Mongoloid - to the ground?

The term "Caucasian" originated in the 19th century when physical anthropologists (remember, anthropology at this time was a newish academic discipline born when the colonizers wanted to study the colonized - Europeans studying Africans, Asians, Indians, etc. - and needed something to differentiate them from us so while sociology could continue to be the study of ourselves (white on white) anthropology became the study of the other) tried to find a way to define different types of people/races based on the shape and size of their head. Yup, race as skull bumps, nose bends and chin juts. "Caucasian" comes from Mount Caucasus in what is now, I believe, Russia and was used because some British folks at that time thought the people who lived on Mount Caucasus were particularly beautiful - in a light-skinned, thin-nosed, small-lipped way. The same folks who brought us "Caucasian" to describe Europeans (and people from the Indian subcontinent due to the Sanskrit-Aryan connection) also cited Mount Caucasus as the origin of all human life on earth. They believed it started with all us light-skinned, thin-nosed, small-lipped white people. Poor folks, what would they have done with tiny dark Lucy, the mother of us all?

I'm not sure why some folks still use "Caucasian" to describe white folks, other than its what they learned. I've heard some people talk about white people as "Europeans" in a way to distinguish us without using the politicized idea of "white" but, since Europeans in 2007 are dark-skinned, olive-skinned, snow-skinned and so on down the line, that isn't accurate either.

For me, "white" is what we have, however inadequate that is. But then, that's the problem with race. It doesn't exist. There is no real difference between individuals based on skin color, facial features, hair texture, or body type. It's the systems we've created that exist - racism, white supremacy, etc. And to try and talk about us individual bodies impacted by and propping up these systems, we have to use this largely ineffectual language.

But please, not "Caucasian" anymore.

As exotic as housepaint

This morning, walking down Lake Street towards the bus stop, I was reminded by how subjective the experience of "exotic" is. There I am, meandering down a street that is two blocks from my house, peeking in the store windows, trying not slide on the ice, when I noticed a family standing on a nearby corner. A white middle-class-seeming family - mom, dad, two adolescent children in warm nonstandoutish clothes. They are holding hands and looking around them with very big eyes. As I approach them, I hear this: "Yeah, I know, it's amazing isn't it," said the dad. "And it's not even 9:00 yet but look at all the people." The daughter was peering into the window of the Latin American grocery store on the corner and she turned to her mom, "I'd be afraid to go in there. I wouldn't know what anything is." "Aw honey," said her mom, "It' s just exotic. You don't have to be afraid of exotic things."

At that instant, I felt a part of their "exotic" urban tableau and wondered if I was an addition to their movie or a disappointment. Was I too white to fit into their exotic white frame or was my fake fur coat and Tibetan scarf "urban" enough in that earthy crunchy PC way?

This reminded me of something that happened when I was 18. Accepted into a private liberal arts college that was about 20 minutes from my high school but which none of us had heard of before, I was sitting in the coffee shop, reading and people-watching. I idly noticed a group of students at the next table over talking about this service project they had completed the weekend before. The group had gone into "the city" - Cleveland, in this case - and had helped kids do some gardening or build a playground. All of these years later, I can't remember WHAT they were doing, only that there were kids and they were helping them. I wasn't paying super close attention to what they were saying until I heard, "God, I couldn't believe how poor they were. Those poor kids, I mean, I don't know what their life must be like everyday. Doing this made me really realize how much I want to help people." Now, the youthful enthusiasm and raw feeling aside, there really isn't that much to examine in that statement beyond unpacking the notion of "help". But that isn't what I did at the time. It was the next statement that caught me. The group began to describe in detail a Virgin Mary grotto up on the side of a hill, talking about how "cool" it was and how amazing and admirable it was that poor folks still hold on to folk traditions instead of just watching TV or something like that. What caught me was that, with their description of the grotto and the rest of their words, I realized that they were talking about MY neighborhood, the one where my grandparents lived, where I had gone to elementary school. My emotional or political or personal development at age 18, combined with how much I was struggling at this college anyhow, meant that I felt embarrassed by their comments, as though they could see through the cafe divider and know that I was one of "those people." I felt like I was part of their tableau and the conclusions they were drawing made me deeply uncomfortable, even alienated.

It's hard to look at anything with compassion, curiosity and zero judgement. The tapes play in our heads: "papers blowing around a streetlight, must be poor here, oh is that tagging, what annoying hoodlums they are" or "white nuclear family looking out of place on Lake Street and somewhat afraid, probably Republicans from the suburbs."

I'm trying, really trying, to just listen and look without defining and judgement. It's one of those life lessons I'm feeling all embroiled with. It's also astonishingly difficult, particularly when I realize just how much of my history is based on gaining recognition and even a kind of strength through the articulate nature of my judgements. In some ways, and my friends will laugh, these days I am feeling quite mute.

What did you say?

I told you I was an inconsistent blogger. Here it's been a timespan again since last writing - and so much has happened, too. I could have blogged about the day that Luca and Raquel came home from Brazil, about putting Luca to bed after not being home for three weeks, about how cute she looked nestled into her bunk, and how startled we both were when Raquel, following her nose, came in to Luca's room to see what smelled funky, picked up the duvet covering Luca's innocent little body, and then gasped as a cascade of dried cat shit flew through the air, bouncing off our heads, the bed, and the walls. I could have written about that and asserted that my nose was stuffed and smelling no wrong, that I hadn't been in Luca's room since they left for Brazil, but I did not.

I could have blogged on Monday about how lovely the snow was this past weekend, how we spent Sunday morning as a pod of kids and parents, breaking the new snow with our sleds on the hill in front of our house. I could have told you how funny it was to see the kids, tired from climbing up and down the hill, all sitting at the bottom and playing in the snow while their aging parents whooped and hollered on the sleds.

But none of that got me to blog. Instead, I'll write about what happened this morning - with a preface first.

Raquel and I will have been together for 12 years this September. That qualifies as a "long time." Over many of those 12 years, Raquel has frustratingly asked me to get my hearing checked. This, of course, in response to my vacant looks, my request that she repeat herself (usually expressed as "huh?" or "what?"), and my lack of response to her repeated questions.

Because I love my girlfriend, I went this morning at 7:30am for a hearing test. First, those booths are kind of cool. I mean, you're in this little gray womb, all hushed and dead air, and then you put on little headphones. The sounds that come through each earpiece - one ear at a time - is specific and sent straight into your head. There is something strangely intimate about the whole thing.

So we did the bup-bup-bup sounds and the high pitched squeals and the low heartbeat throbs. Sometimes the sound was so quiet that it felt like a slight vibration, like the ghost of sound itching just on the precipice of your hearing. After the assorted timbres and tones, we went into word repetition: "Say the word: throat." "Throat." And so on.

Having told the hearing technician that I was getting a hearing test to see if I was losing my hearing or losing my mind, and then having explained that this was a gift for my girlfriend, the technician, named Mike, came in at the end, took off my earpieces and whispered, "You have freakishly excellent hearing."

"Freakishly excellent." Shit.

Time to pay better attention.

Internet magic

It's Valentine's Day and my love is far from me. (Guitar music picks up, something "olde english," like Greensleeves only different.) She is gone to lands across the sea. With her silvered hair and shotput wit, she carries my heart with a catcher's mitt. Oh my lo-o-o-o-ve, on Valentine's Day, I sit here at home, alone and gay. (Music slowly winds down into something evoking longing, ocean storms, dykes wandering alone atop widow's walks on old Cape Cod houses, the sound of seagulls....)

Yeah, well, I sent the olde luv and the young daughter some roses via the internet. Funky that it's cheaper to send a dozen roses to Rio from Minneapolis than it is to send them to Minneapolis from Minneapolis.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm baaack part two

Here's the other thing that happened upon getting back: I had four different phone and email messages from friends telling me they missed me, were glad that I was home, and would like to see me. I hadn't checked messages when I last wrote.

I feel very loved.

I'm baaack

Thanks to the wonders of the red eye flight, I am back in Minneapolis, staring blearily at my first television in two and a half weeks: the Today Show. My partner, Raquel, and daughter, Luca, are still in Brazil. I called them right after I arrived home to let them know I was safely here. Luca was in the process of throwing her first snit fit since being in Rio. She cried and grieved, Rocki was impatient with her while trying to stay connected to her poor lonely lover on the other end of the phone line.

I miss them.

So now I have to take all of this stuff from the last two weeks - that hands on the skin kind of quiet - and find a way to build it into my life here. I'm sure the Today Show is not part of the strategy.

I talked on the phone with my mother a few days ago and she reflected on how scary it is to face a total life change - meaning I am currently "career" successful and have plenty of work as a fundraiser/nonprofit organizational type. I now want to shift this, move the focus away from this work as my primary and build my craniosacral therapy training to eventually move into the lead. It isn't scary to imagine that outcome, it's more overwhelming to think about how to build a daily practice, the new lifestyle that supports craniosacral therapy.

I don't think this makes for terribly interesting blogging - nothing pithy about navel gazing and life change.

Let me get my hands on ya.