born to lose, baby
o1. noble's
Oh, what can even be said about this place. I have written a lot, actually, about how waiting tables affects your psyche: you're obviously in a subservient role, and you get treated like shit a lot of the time, and sexualized as fuck if you're female-bodied. All this while you are assuming power over your guests through their food. If they fuck with you, you can fuck with them right back, and they might never even know it. It grates on a body.
Even so, I love waiting tables. I did a lot of conscious reclaiming of that position; my choice to love it has to do with the inherent shame I felt at the hands of the (wildly rich) diners and really at the hands of anyone who eats in restaurants and is a dick to servers. Such people offend me in a very personal way. I had to take it back! It also had to do with the fact that I knew a lot of rich whiny kids, between Early College and Guilford, who had never had to work. I worked a lot; since I've had a car I've had to work. Bussing and waiting were class markers for me; being proud of them was a part of being proud of my working class origins. Waiting tables consolidated my intense hatred for the rich.
Also, I love fine food. I learned so much about food at Noble's. The management was totally fucked and I worked with some really awful people, but most of the chefs were legit, and even though they constantly made of me for being vegetarian, they were usually quick to make me plates of food, and to talk to me about food. Fine dining is fucked, but goddamn if my palate didn't get pretty sophisticated because of working at Noble's.
o2. the greensboro science center
No one who went to elementary or middle school in Greensboro has not taken a field trip to this place. O, place of bag-lunches and fake dinosaurs! What a weird, crumbly, sort-of-sciencey place. I went with Danielle once and it was awesome. We all love nostalgia and Focault pendulums, and we got kinda weird pizza afterward. That place is a bizarre Greensboro landmark, not to be missed.
o3. direct action
...gets the goods. I'm a CrimethInc punk, I admit it. I actually just did a writeup for my lawyers about why I did the AIPAC lockdown, why the move from what I called "armchair activism" to direct action was necessary for me. Direct action also scares me shitless. I hate cops, and I don't like getting into confrontations with them. I lose my shit. I didn't at AIPAC, but I would if I did it again. Pigs have motherfucking guns and there's nothing you can do about it. They can do whatever they want! You can sue them later, but not if they shoot you in the back first.
So, anyway, I'm scared of direct action, maybe because I know it works, and they know it works. I am so deeply angry at the world I know that I kind of just want to destroy everything. Such is the life of an college-educated anarchist, I guess. I just want to fuck shit up! I am sympathetic to reform causes, to campaigns that make life better for the oppressed in the present moment, but secretly (who am I kidding--explicitly), I'm gearing up for the rev. Lately I've felt a lot like an outlaw, a bandit, a cowboy (with a red bandana 'round my throat) because I know I'm being watched, because they know I am not about to stop taking direct action, as scary as it is. Kids look at me funny in lectures when I bring up the O; my professors love it. I had to fucking bum around New York for a week because I took direct action, and I took it to the very end. I am an outlaw. They know it.
Direct action gets the goods. Capitalism ain't gonna overthrow itself! And it's sure as shit not going to stop making life hell for you and your friends and everyone on this earth. Direct actions are battles in the war in which I find myself embroiled. They are victories, and we are winning, and they can't lock up all of us, and we have to keep doing them. They work well to back up reform campaigns (would MLK have been taken seriously if not for the threat of Malcolm X?), but they are ends in themselves. The occupation was an end in itself: we took the space. It was ours! We didn't get shit, but goddamn, if we didn't take that space.
o4. early college
A whack-ass place that spent me spiraling into radicalism, into the militant rhetoric I so vitriolically spewed above. What a weird group of kids. The first two years fucked with me pretty hard, getting me wrapped up in a conception of academia as valid--utmost, in fact!--and a place in which my personal worth could be proven. And damn, did I prove it. I got a lot of Bs, actually, for an Early College kid, but I was an excellent student. None of this constant internet-dickery and arrest and suspension that I have pursued this semester.
And then there was Guilford, that world of simultanaety, of passing. I felt a lot of anxiety about being 17 in sophomore-level college courses with people I found immeasurably cool (in some cases). I proved myself pretty well, I think, and I've made friends to whom I am more than the token young kid. I felt like such a badass at that place, with my rad 21-year-old friends and dance parties and trespassing at the dorms and getting drunk in the Greenleaf office. I felt a lot cooler than most of my Early College compatriots, for whom I had a fairly vocal disdain. I feel more and more different from those kids. But the people you share your most awkward years with are important ones, whether you like them or not.
I identify my high school experience more with my Guilford experience than anything I did at Early College. Guilford was where the magic happened; it's what I speak of fondly and try to explain to people here. In retrospect, the kids I spent time with were a lot less politically active than almost anyone I know here, but that was a place I needed to be. I miss it all the time.
o5. SARC blowout extravaganza/photoshoot outside harris teeter (also driving home after SARC meetings & silly stories about andy)
Why did we see that weird movie? What the hell was that? Why didn't we have a pool party? Danielle and Andy contemplated buying beer at Harris Teeter and I remember marveling at what it must be like to be able to drink any time you wanted. Then we smoked cigarettes and did weird things, as we were so wont to do.
SARC, I don't know, I put it on my resumee as though it were a real thing. It was a real thing! It was, considering the circles in which I moved at Guilford, a very weird thing. We five had that shit on lock and no one quite understood it and I don't think we did either, but it was important. Danielle and Andy had so many stories that probably played a big role in how I romanticized Guilford. I also gained a radical perspective for thinking about healthy sex there, and that fucking ruled. Obvi. Everyone in SARC was and continues to be very important to me.
More pontifications, via Danielle.