manic pixie dreamgirl (we are callus-fingered women)
i love: mornings, bridges, tall buildings, greenery, and the existence of parameters.
was all set to hate the bus-ride up to nyc, and whenever i'm all set to hate anything is usually when it starts to turn out not so bad. the greyhound station in a2 isn't much of an upgrade from some bus stations i've frequented in the slums of Dhaka--less flies, more air conditioning--unless you consider the safety thing. then it's pretty solid. i digress--
in the process of finding somewhere to plug in my dying phone (3+ hours of rambling at Kami, realizing bus was an hour late so MORE waiting!) i met a girl with a mysteriously large cardboard box who knew the locations of the only functioning outlets in the room (behind the vending machine).
the box contained a bicycle. she was going to New Hampshire, then biking up to Maine for a party on the beach. she sat next to me when we got on the bus, i asked her to keep me from falling asleep and missing important stops, and we began what became a 20 hour conversation.
she had lived in L.A. last year, didn't love it. the undergrad next to us with the words "Los Angeles" tattooed on the back of his neck felt the need to defend his hometown. we all talked about where we were from, where we've been, but surprisingly, not too much about where we were headed. LA-boy fell asleep.
bicycle-girl and i kept on.
where we'd been was easy--("I hate buses--even after village buses in rural Bangladesh where my knees were closer to my chin, there were no windows, motion sickness was perpetual, and the dust of the road had to be washed off for a week." "Sounds a lot like Nicaragua. Somehow it's just more bearable when you expect it to be difficult and are too busy drinking in new things." "Nicaragua? What was that like? I've never quite managed to make it to South America.")
where we were from ("We've been crossing Ohio forever, it's like it never ends!" "I think the rest of the states go by faster, somehow. Ohio has its own gravitational well, because no one does anything but drive through here." "I knew a guy from Ohio. He used to get really offended when I said 'Ohio is the South' and didn't realize it was my equivalent of pulling pigtails or snapping bra-straps." "Maybe he was afraid you were right." "Compared to Michigan? Seems pretty pot-kettle." "No one said the kettle wasn't too insecure to see the black on pot.")
("I know stereotypes are silly but some part of me is afraid that they'll all just be good-looking stupid people." "Wow, that's--I guess I've never looked at it from the other side, but it makes sense. At State the stereotype about Michigan is hippy, crunchy granola women." "What, vegan nerds with unshaved legs? Armpit hair? Isn't it funny how the people we have the most misconceptions about are the only people we have any conceptions about at all--the ones right next to us?" "Yeah, in the U.S. it's 'Damn Mexicans stealing our jobs!' in Mexico, it's the Hondurans--")
where we were going--that was where i fell in.
if you want me to fall in love with you, all you have to do is show me something you've created. writing, art, code--something you designed, drew, built with your hands--even the deliberate syntax of your speech if it stands out enough to be an art-form. if there's any part of me that's ever going to fall for any part of you--that'll be it. that'll be what pulls me in and makes me want you.
"I used to always want to leave. Come home between months, a year, in Mexico, Nicaragua, Chile, L.A., until I realized home didn't mean where I grew up. I moved here. I have furniture."
"I think I might want furniture. Not worry that it's just more things to carry or leave behind when I go. Sit still for a while, not forever, but somewhere you don't have to leave until you want to."
the sun was setting but the light felt like dawn, her hands grasping and soft and inexorable (like Diana's, when i used to watch those first days, and wonder how she could let herself be so open--didn't it hurt to be that earnest? but it worked, didn't it? my perpetual mockery thinning to transparent and my insides just as prone to puncture.) pulling words out of her chest and i stilled. the rest of the world blurred. i felt a sense of recognition, that sense of this, right now. this is important. remember this. later, when individual words fade, still remember how it felt: we understood each other.
we fell into pauses that i didn't even notice at first--comfortable silences--i couldn't remember the last time i had them, as meaningfully, or with someone so new. we talked about feminists, lessons from past loves, and the hesitancy with which we say "mud-huts" when describing where we've been, trying to get away from the connotations of primitivity, poverty, of ignorance.
(at a stop in Toledo, a man in cowboy boots and a leather jacket interrupted us while we were in line for the next bus to ask me: So do you prefer to speak your own language, or do you prefer to speak ours, American?
suspecting the man was mentally handicapped, i answered him politely, "I grew up in Michigan, and usually speak English.")
i remembered 5th grade and Candace Park ("You have barbers in Bangladesh??" "Duh, who else would cut your hair?" "I don't know! I thought you used sharp rocks or something!") and how even though i knew she wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the box, it was hard not to project her ignorance onto everyone else. maybe other people weren't stupid enough to say "sharp rocks" but plenty of "intelligent" and otherwise perfectly rational people have said worse things since then.
"My mom works at Kellog. In Ecuador, my friend and I managed to tag along with a group of anthropologists who were going to meet an Amazon tribe. We got off the truck and this little kid came running out, in this Frosted Flakes t-shirt. Kellog. I felt like my life had come full circle. [..] before we left, they all went off for a while, and came back dressed in traditional wear. All the anthropologists and everyone started taking pictures with them--"
"--Facebook profile pictures!"
"Yeah. Exactly."
"For a long time, I had a hard time imagining Americans--especially the white middle to upper class Americans of stereotype--being in the third world situations. Going to AUW was the first time I saw Westerners in those situations, and though many weren't enthusiastic about them, there were some who COULD deal with it.
I realized that in my head, despite all my academic dissections of race, I had paired people by colors and privilege to the extent that it was hard to imagine them separately, to imagine a white person being as comfortable in "poor" surroundings as a nonwhite person, completely bypassing the fact that many nonwhite people grow up not poor, and vice versa, and that other factors than race, such as disposition, upbringing, exposure, also contribute to their behavior.
And not only that--but that lack of exposure and ability to cope with conditions may result from having had privilege, but privilege does not equate to superiority or entitlement. (The way in feudalism the concept of "nobility" ties owning land and titles with behavior--being "noble" and "good".) It seems obvious, but to put it explicitly: being privileged doesn't mean one is entitled to privilege. No human being is more entitled than any other.
Probably a classic case of internalized discrimination, but once pinpointed, it made all the difference to my worldview. I still feel a disconnect in being able to communicate my moderately privileged Bangladeshi context to my (predominantly white) American social and academic context, but I no longer feel as insecure, isolated, or defensive about it.
This is crucial because I often end up having to "represent" to a socioacademic world of incoming medical students whose facebook profile pictures are more likely than most to include poor African/Asian/Hispanic "ethnic" children they met while abroad while doing "charity" work, of National Geographic and New York Times photography that so easily pairs people into the same race/class/gender slots that I'm still shaking myself out of."
(side note:
coffeejunkii posted the link to Where Children Sleep a few days ago, and helped me put into words what about it makes me uncomfortable--the reinforcing of class/region groupings with emotionally provocative images (good photography!) and no effort whatsoever to acknowledge the limitedness of the lens' scope. yes, this is part of the picture, but a shack shared by a family in Phnom Penh is not the same as a home of someone in the Kraho tribe in the Amazon.
this is not to say that the children photographed in this book is not a thoughtful and thought-provoking collection--but that perhaps more exposition and direction should be present to discuss the scope of the collection and prevent polarizing farther views so pervasively present.)
at about 4am, an hour outside of New York, traffic came to a stand-still for two hours due to an accident. we took a walk between the cars. people came out to lie on their hoods, on the roof, even lie on the asphalt and stare at the stars in the nearly complete dark. at dawn we shared homemade fruit and granola bars (her vegan roommate) and smiled fuzzily at Amish girls who passed us at the nearby gas-station.
i've been enough people's manic pixie dreamgirl to know the irony of waxing lyrical--but maybe it's all good since i'm waxing over this finite set in time, a closed interaction, an incident, not a film-loop.
just one more thing on which we'll grow.
was all set to hate the bus-ride up to nyc, and whenever i'm all set to hate anything is usually when it starts to turn out not so bad. the greyhound station in a2 isn't much of an upgrade from some bus stations i've frequented in the slums of Dhaka--less flies, more air conditioning--unless you consider the safety thing. then it's pretty solid. i digress--
in the process of finding somewhere to plug in my dying phone (3+ hours of rambling at Kami, realizing bus was an hour late so MORE waiting!) i met a girl with a mysteriously large cardboard box who knew the locations of the only functioning outlets in the room (behind the vending machine).
the box contained a bicycle. she was going to New Hampshire, then biking up to Maine for a party on the beach. she sat next to me when we got on the bus, i asked her to keep me from falling asleep and missing important stops, and we began what became a 20 hour conversation.
she had lived in L.A. last year, didn't love it. the undergrad next to us with the words "Los Angeles" tattooed on the back of his neck felt the need to defend his hometown. we all talked about where we were from, where we've been, but surprisingly, not too much about where we were headed. LA-boy fell asleep.
bicycle-girl and i kept on.
where we'd been was easy--("I hate buses--even after village buses in rural Bangladesh where my knees were closer to my chin, there were no windows, motion sickness was perpetual, and the dust of the road had to be washed off for a week." "Sounds a lot like Nicaragua. Somehow it's just more bearable when you expect it to be difficult and are too busy drinking in new things." "Nicaragua? What was that like? I've never quite managed to make it to South America.")
where we were from ("We've been crossing Ohio forever, it's like it never ends!" "I think the rest of the states go by faster, somehow. Ohio has its own gravitational well, because no one does anything but drive through here." "I knew a guy from Ohio. He used to get really offended when I said 'Ohio is the South' and didn't realize it was my equivalent of pulling pigtails or snapping bra-straps." "Maybe he was afraid you were right." "Compared to Michigan? Seems pretty pot-kettle." "No one said the kettle wasn't too insecure to see the black on pot.")
("I know stereotypes are silly but some part of me is afraid that they'll all just be good-looking stupid people." "Wow, that's--I guess I've never looked at it from the other side, but it makes sense. At State the stereotype about Michigan is hippy, crunchy granola women." "What, vegan nerds with unshaved legs? Armpit hair? Isn't it funny how the people we have the most misconceptions about are the only people we have any conceptions about at all--the ones right next to us?" "Yeah, in the U.S. it's 'Damn Mexicans stealing our jobs!' in Mexico, it's the Hondurans--")
where we were going--that was where i fell in.
if you want me to fall in love with you, all you have to do is show me something you've created. writing, art, code--something you designed, drew, built with your hands--even the deliberate syntax of your speech if it stands out enough to be an art-form. if there's any part of me that's ever going to fall for any part of you--that'll be it. that'll be what pulls me in and makes me want you.
"I used to always want to leave. Come home between months, a year, in Mexico, Nicaragua, Chile, L.A., until I realized home didn't mean where I grew up. I moved here. I have furniture."
"I think I might want furniture. Not worry that it's just more things to carry or leave behind when I go. Sit still for a while, not forever, but somewhere you don't have to leave until you want to."
the sun was setting but the light felt like dawn, her hands grasping and soft and inexorable (like Diana's, when i used to watch those first days, and wonder how she could let herself be so open--didn't it hurt to be that earnest? but it worked, didn't it? my perpetual mockery thinning to transparent and my insides just as prone to puncture.) pulling words out of her chest and i stilled. the rest of the world blurred. i felt a sense of recognition, that sense of this, right now. this is important. remember this. later, when individual words fade, still remember how it felt: we understood each other.
we fell into pauses that i didn't even notice at first--comfortable silences--i couldn't remember the last time i had them, as meaningfully, or with someone so new. we talked about feminists, lessons from past loves, and the hesitancy with which we say "mud-huts" when describing where we've been, trying to get away from the connotations of primitivity, poverty, of ignorance.
(at a stop in Toledo, a man in cowboy boots and a leather jacket interrupted us while we were in line for the next bus to ask me: So do you prefer to speak your own language, or do you prefer to speak ours, American?
suspecting the man was mentally handicapped, i answered him politely, "I grew up in Michigan, and usually speak English.")
i remembered 5th grade and Candace Park ("You have barbers in Bangladesh??" "Duh, who else would cut your hair?" "I don't know! I thought you used sharp rocks or something!") and how even though i knew she wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the box, it was hard not to project her ignorance onto everyone else. maybe other people weren't stupid enough to say "sharp rocks" but plenty of "intelligent" and otherwise perfectly rational people have said worse things since then.
"My mom works at Kellog. In Ecuador, my friend and I managed to tag along with a group of anthropologists who were going to meet an Amazon tribe. We got off the truck and this little kid came running out, in this Frosted Flakes t-shirt. Kellog. I felt like my life had come full circle. [..] before we left, they all went off for a while, and came back dressed in traditional wear. All the anthropologists and everyone started taking pictures with them--"
"--Facebook profile pictures!"
"Yeah. Exactly."
"For a long time, I had a hard time imagining Americans--especially the white middle to upper class Americans of stereotype--being in the third world situations. Going to AUW was the first time I saw Westerners in those situations, and though many weren't enthusiastic about them, there were some who COULD deal with it.
I realized that in my head, despite all my academic dissections of race, I had paired people by colors and privilege to the extent that it was hard to imagine them separately, to imagine a white person being as comfortable in "poor" surroundings as a nonwhite person, completely bypassing the fact that many nonwhite people grow up not poor, and vice versa, and that other factors than race, such as disposition, upbringing, exposure, also contribute to their behavior.
And not only that--but that lack of exposure and ability to cope with conditions may result from having had privilege, but privilege does not equate to superiority or entitlement. (The way in feudalism the concept of "nobility" ties owning land and titles with behavior--being "noble" and "good".) It seems obvious, but to put it explicitly: being privileged doesn't mean one is entitled to privilege. No human being is more entitled than any other.
Probably a classic case of internalized discrimination, but once pinpointed, it made all the difference to my worldview. I still feel a disconnect in being able to communicate my moderately privileged Bangladeshi context to my (predominantly white) American social and academic context, but I no longer feel as insecure, isolated, or defensive about it.
This is crucial because I often end up having to "represent" to a socioacademic world of incoming medical students whose facebook profile pictures are more likely than most to include poor African/Asian/Hispanic "ethnic" children they met while abroad while doing "charity" work, of National Geographic and New York Times photography that so easily pairs people into the same race/class/gender slots that I'm still shaking myself out of."
(side note:
coffeejunkii posted the link to Where Children Sleep a few days ago, and helped me put into words what about it makes me uncomfortable--the reinforcing of class/region groupings with emotionally provocative images (good photography!) and no effort whatsoever to acknowledge the limitedness of the lens' scope. yes, this is part of the picture, but a shack shared by a family in Phnom Penh is not the same as a home of someone in the Kraho tribe in the Amazon.
this is not to say that the children photographed in this book is not a thoughtful and thought-provoking collection--but that perhaps more exposition and direction should be present to discuss the scope of the collection and prevent polarizing farther views so pervasively present.)
at about 4am, an hour outside of New York, traffic came to a stand-still for two hours due to an accident. we took a walk between the cars. people came out to lie on their hoods, on the roof, even lie on the asphalt and stare at the stars in the nearly complete dark. at dawn we shared homemade fruit and granola bars (her vegan roommate) and smiled fuzzily at Amish girls who passed us at the nearby gas-station.
i've been enough people's manic pixie dreamgirl to know the irony of waxing lyrical--but maybe it's all good since i'm waxing over this finite set in time, a closed interaction, an incident, not a film-loop.
just one more thing on which we'll grow.