with love and solidarity forever
This post is long, because this post is my life, right here, right now, and life is complex and needs time to be talked about. This post is hectic and scattered and non-linear, because life is hectic and scattered and non-linear. This post is deeply personal, because this post is life and growing up and education and politics and sex and revolution, and these are all deeply personal things. But even though what I am about to talk about is in some sense rather private, it's a story of a profound time in the life of a human being as as such this story needs to be told, and it needs to be out there in the world. I need this post. I need it to preserve this time. I need to keep a record of these years, these wondrous, glorious, just-as-awesome-as-they-said-they'd-be college years so I can relive this feeling whenever I need to. Everything is so beautiful right now, so wonderful and empowering, and I need this. So, so much, I need this. So let’s get started.
Occupy Wall Street. I’ve been. I went to Occupy San Francisco on my birthday (continuing on a tradition in which I went to the UC Berkeley Walk Out on my birthday last year), and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. However, I didn't feel like I was really a part of something. So I went home that night and went to the first General Assembly of Occupy Berkeley the next day. I have definitely felt a part of this movement. Maybe it's the active role I’ve taken in building Occupy Berkeley, all the General Assemblies and all the hashing out of every. little. thing. because that's what one does in a direct democracy. Maybe it’s the amazing people I’ve met (more on this later). Maybe its something I haven’t even though of. However, as much as I love Occupy Berkeley, the occupation is not without its problem, and it can be emotionally draining.
Enter Occupy Oakland. A few days ago I was talking to Badr, one of the Compass GSIs, and he told me to get down to the Oakland Occupation because it was so big; a few other people had told me to do the same. They had taken Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall, renamed it Oscar Grant Plaza, and made it the home of what they called the Oakland Commune. It was a co-op and tent city with a library, a children’s center, a 24-hour kitchen, and just lots of little thing that takes a group of people and turns them into a community. But on Tuesday night (10/25) Oakland Police raided the commune. Cops in riot gear used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear out the peaceful protesters. They hit Scott Olsen, a Marine and two-time Iraq War vet, in the head so hard he wound up hospitalized with a fractured skull and a swelling brain, in “critical condition” and medically-induced coma and threw flash bangs at civilian protesters attempting to come to his aid. (Today it was announced that Olsen’s condition has been upgraded to “fair.”) They then destroyed the encampment. I was up until 2 am on Tuesday watching the live converge of this on tumblr. Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday), as I was sitting on the patio outside Free Speech Movement Café not starting my 53 homework, I suddenly knew I had to be at Occupy Oakland. I grabbed my shit, went home to change into something warmer and pack a bag with my camera and some swim goggles (in case they tear gassed us again) and jumped on BART. I was at Occupy Oakland for 5 hours, I was a member of the General Assembly that voted for a General Strike of the city on November 2nd. It was one of the most beautiful, most inspiring things I have ever been a part of. The People have risen up and come together to create an environment of not just resistance, but of solidarity and love. Growing up in the South Bay, Oakland was that scary place where bad shit seems to play out each night on the news. But the people in Oakland are beautiful and amazing and I felt so safe, and so loved, and so supported. We hella occupy together, in solidarity forever. (Of course, the cops really don't like that.)There exists a real, tangible feeling of connectedness among the People at Occupy Oakland, and that feeling extends to all People occupying cities around the world. Occupy Wall Street donated twenty thousand dollars to Occupy Oakland to help rebuild the Oakland Commune on Oscar Grant Plaza before marching in the streets chanting “Oakland! Oakland! End police brutality!” Egyptian revolutionaries in Tahrir Square are going to march on the US Embassy tomorrow (Friday) in protest of OPD and all the other police forces from central California, including BART “police,” who colluded with the brutalizers. At Oakland, I was among over a thousand NorCal residents chanting “We are Tahrir Square!” in unison and in solidarity under a city sky where a few brave stars managed to shine through the bleaching effects of light and pollution. It was….just…it’s like FemSex, ya know? The Occupy movement is good for me. It makes me a better person. It heals me, and as a movement it will heal every soul so crushed by injustice that some of us have never even thought to demand freedom and liberation.
Something I keep hearing again and again is that America has not had this revolutionary spirit since the 1960s, and from older activists I keep hearing that they have been waiting for America to come to this point again. This is big. This is major. This is the People standing up and joining hands, fighting together to free themselves of oppression. This is the revolution.
Now, I said I’d come back to the amazing people I’ve met at Occupy Berkeley. And I think I’ll just starts with a Friday night two weeks ago and work from there. I feel the need to say that it is at this point where I start to feel self-conscious about writing this. This is where this post really starts getting personal. As such, this is where this post really starts getting important. So awkwardness and self-consciousness be damned, and I hope no one I know in real life ever reads this. (This would be the point where a reader might ask “Why are you putting this on the internet if you don’t want anyone you know to read it?” or “Why don’t you just make this post private?” to which I reply “Because I don’t want to, okay? This isn’t a logical decision so stop using logic against me.”)
Alright, so Friday night. You know what? No. First I need to say something else. I’ve been thinking a lot about my sexuality ever since FemSex (or really ever since I’ve gotten to college) and I’ve been really examining an exploring it in the last few months. It’s been confusing and frustrating and I’ve been reduced to tears each of the three times I’ve tried to talk to/come out to my mom. It’s hard. It’s confusing. I’m not going to get into that mindfuckery here, but I needed to say it before launching into this story in order to properly contextualize everything from here on out. So: I am a queer woman about to tell a story about sex and sexuality. Either settle in or click away from this page, because there is no holding back.
Alright! So! Friday night! No more digressions, I promise. So there’s this guy, and let’s go all Dollhouse and call him Alpha (not that he’s anything like the character Alpha, just…yeah. I said no more digressions and I’m sticking to that). Alpha and I had been kind of flirting since the first Berkeley General Assembly the previous Saturday. Whenever I’d look over I’d catch his eye and he’s kind of smile and look away…it was like a bad romcom and I fucking loved it. We’d started talking over the next few days and we just had this instant chemistry. The thing that pops out most in my mind is the day after I’d met him I was talking to someone at General Assembly and Alpha touched my shoulder to try and get my attention. Now, I do not like to be touched. I’m an awkward hugger even with the people I genuinely care about and I tend to tense up when strangers try to do anything more than shake my hand. I have some strict personal boundaries-it’s just who I am. But when I realized it had been Alpha who had touched my shoulder, I felt completely fine. I even smiled. For me this is so huge. I didn't even feel comfortable hugging my fellow FemSexies until the very end of the semester, after we had bared our bodies and our souls to each other in such an intellectually intimate and emotionally empowering way.
So like I said, Alpha and I spent the next week kind of flirting until we got to the Friday night I’ve been building up to this whole time. It was there that we just kind of clicked and I wound up practically falling asleep on his shoulder. Then once it got dark we started flyering around the city for Berkeley’s demonstration for the international 10/15 Day of Action. There was more talking and clicking and an awkward moment where I was like “yeah, I know you think I’m straight up lesbian but actually I’m queer sooooooo…” Anyways, long story short we wound up at Berkeley Bowl (because really, where else in Berkley are you going to flyer for a political event, except maybe Cheeseboard which we'd already hit?) in the middle of the night, in a deserted parking lot, when Bravo, another Occupy Berkeley organizer, biked over to us and invited us back to the place he shared with yet another Organizer, Juliet (who is actually a guy…I didn’t anticipate this when I decided on a NATO naming thing), for some coffee to help us stay awake. Coffee turned into watching some great Occupy video streaming which turned into marijuana which turned into a really awesome light show set to European electro-dance music with the sickest gloves you have ever seen which turned into hanging out with Alpha in his car while we waited to sober up so it’d be safe to drive which turned into cuddling and “I can’t believe I just met you I feel like I’ve known you for so long” rhetoric which turned into going back to my place. Really the whole night had just been everything I wasn’t ready for in high school all crammed into a few hours. There was barefoot walking, car cuddling in a deserted parking lot at 2 in the morning, a first real kiss…Like, I’d been kissed before, but only once in a sexual non-friend way. And I hadn’t liked it. It had been kind of wet and unpleasant. But Friday night (which by then was technically Saturday morning), even though I had no idea what I was doing and felt awkward and self-conscious, I liked kissing Alpha. And it was like I wasn't confused anymore, you know? I wasn’t freaking out about whether I was gay or straight or ace or pan or whatever, I was just comfortable and happy and so so curious. Clothes came off, body parts were kissed and groped and stimulated and I was confident and happy and just having fun. Honestly, I’ve had kind of a fear of sex, and I think part of that was because I didn’t really know anything about sex. But being almost naked in bed with someone who makes me feel good has almost completely erased that fear, and instead it’s just me and him and…yeah. It’s connecting with another human being on a level that is completely new to me and if climbing into bed with someone less than a week after meeting them makes me a then slut I will fucking own the word slut and wear it like a badge of honor because that’s what it is.
I’m writing about sex in the same post that I’m writing about revolutionary politics because to me these two things are inseparable. It’s hard to explain, and I’m kind of too tired to try. But this time in my life is so intense and so full of change and personal growth and that’s college, you know? An education is a revolution on an individual basis. It changes minds and makes us better people. So I just want to wrap up with talking about how much I fucking love Cal (and Berkeley and San Francisco and now Oakland). This school has become my home, and I wouldn’t trade my time here for anything in the world. When I was getting my college acceptance letters back I was sad when schools like MIT and Caltech rejected me, but now I am so glad they did. I would not be the person I am today without UC Berkeley. Sure, MIT and Caltech are more prestigious and perhaps I would have gotten a better STEM education out of them. But would it wouldn't have been a Berkeley education. Yeah, my math and science classes are wonderful and I have no desire to change my major from physics, but STEM classes, however fascinating and mind-blowing and empowering, lack a certain revolutionary spark. It is my humanities classes at Cal that have had the most impact on my changing self: Native American Studies, which has recontextualized everything I ever thought I knew about American history, started the process of decolonizing my brain, and awakened a strong desire to connect with my own ancestry and past; and FemSex, which I have gone on (and on and on) about. Those classes have fundamentally changed the way I view both the world and my place here on this earth. Those classes are the epitome of an education because they made me a better person. Math and physics and other STEM classes, as much as I love them, simply do not have that power, that capacity to change the world by changing the People. And that’s why I fucking love UC Berkeley.
So feel the love with me and hear about the exciting things that make me say “I fucking love Berkeley” because this place is like no other place in the world and I am so thankful that I’m here.
*I touched a human brain! The Cognitive Science department was having a recruitment…thing, and they flyered on Sproul for it. So I showed up to Drugs and the Brain one night and my friend is like “Hey, you wanna go touch a brain with me?” and I’m like “Of course I want to go touch a brain with you” because really, is there any other response one could even give? It was so. cool. and I touched a spinal cord as well. Check that off my list of lifetime wants.
*I toured a physics lab and learned that this universe is different than its mirror image because odd-dimensional universes like our own can be either left-handed or right-handed. If you’ve ever studied vectors you’ll remember the Right Hand Rule. You can use it to see how this handedness thing all works out.
*I looked at an otter penis under a microscope. This was in my Intro to Archaeology class. Apparently otters have actual bones in their penises. I was so full of not knowing.
*I learned that the human brain has cannabanoid receptors which are directly activated by marijuana. However, THC looks nothing like the neurotransmittrs that the receptors are made for, except for perhaps a long carbon chain. The endocannabanoids produced naturally by the body include anandamide, named after the Sanskrit word for “bliss,” which is one of the chemicals in chocolate. So neurochemically speaking chocolate = coffee + pot (sort of). And I learned all this while eating chocolate nibs (which are 100% roasted cacao and smell so. good.) in Wheeler Auditorium provided to me by a professor who had previously shown the class pictures of himself grinning in front of a giant wall of marijuana growing by the side of the road in India and who we’re pretty certain has tried most of the drugs he’s teaching us about.
Aaaaaaand that’s pretty much it. Now excuse me, It’s almost 2 in the morning so I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.
Occupy Wall Street. I’ve been. I went to Occupy San Francisco on my birthday (continuing on a tradition in which I went to the UC Berkeley Walk Out on my birthday last year), and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. However, I didn't feel like I was really a part of something. So I went home that night and went to the first General Assembly of Occupy Berkeley the next day. I have definitely felt a part of this movement. Maybe it's the active role I’ve taken in building Occupy Berkeley, all the General Assemblies and all the hashing out of every. little. thing. because that's what one does in a direct democracy. Maybe it’s the amazing people I’ve met (more on this later). Maybe its something I haven’t even though of. However, as much as I love Occupy Berkeley, the occupation is not without its problem, and it can be emotionally draining.
Enter Occupy Oakland. A few days ago I was talking to Badr, one of the Compass GSIs, and he told me to get down to the Oakland Occupation because it was so big; a few other people had told me to do the same. They had taken Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall, renamed it Oscar Grant Plaza, and made it the home of what they called the Oakland Commune. It was a co-op and tent city with a library, a children’s center, a 24-hour kitchen, and just lots of little thing that takes a group of people and turns them into a community. But on Tuesday night (10/25) Oakland Police raided the commune. Cops in riot gear used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear out the peaceful protesters. They hit Scott Olsen, a Marine and two-time Iraq War vet, in the head so hard he wound up hospitalized with a fractured skull and a swelling brain, in “critical condition” and medically-induced coma and threw flash bangs at civilian protesters attempting to come to his aid. (Today it was announced that Olsen’s condition has been upgraded to “fair.”) They then destroyed the encampment. I was up until 2 am on Tuesday watching the live converge of this on tumblr. Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday), as I was sitting on the patio outside Free Speech Movement Café not starting my 53 homework, I suddenly knew I had to be at Occupy Oakland. I grabbed my shit, went home to change into something warmer and pack a bag with my camera and some swim goggles (in case they tear gassed us again) and jumped on BART. I was at Occupy Oakland for 5 hours, I was a member of the General Assembly that voted for a General Strike of the city on November 2nd. It was one of the most beautiful, most inspiring things I have ever been a part of. The People have risen up and come together to create an environment of not just resistance, but of solidarity and love. Growing up in the South Bay, Oakland was that scary place where bad shit seems to play out each night on the news. But the people in Oakland are beautiful and amazing and I felt so safe, and so loved, and so supported. We hella occupy together, in solidarity forever. (Of course, the cops really don't like that.)There exists a real, tangible feeling of connectedness among the People at Occupy Oakland, and that feeling extends to all People occupying cities around the world. Occupy Wall Street donated twenty thousand dollars to Occupy Oakland to help rebuild the Oakland Commune on Oscar Grant Plaza before marching in the streets chanting “Oakland! Oakland! End police brutality!” Egyptian revolutionaries in Tahrir Square are going to march on the US Embassy tomorrow (Friday) in protest of OPD and all the other police forces from central California, including BART “police,” who colluded with the brutalizers. At Oakland, I was among over a thousand NorCal residents chanting “We are Tahrir Square!” in unison and in solidarity under a city sky where a few brave stars managed to shine through the bleaching effects of light and pollution. It was….just…it’s like FemSex, ya know? The Occupy movement is good for me. It makes me a better person. It heals me, and as a movement it will heal every soul so crushed by injustice that some of us have never even thought to demand freedom and liberation.
Something I keep hearing again and again is that America has not had this revolutionary spirit since the 1960s, and from older activists I keep hearing that they have been waiting for America to come to this point again. This is big. This is major. This is the People standing up and joining hands, fighting together to free themselves of oppression. This is the revolution.
Now, I said I’d come back to the amazing people I’ve met at Occupy Berkeley. And I think I’ll just starts with a Friday night two weeks ago and work from there. I feel the need to say that it is at this point where I start to feel self-conscious about writing this. This is where this post really starts getting personal. As such, this is where this post really starts getting important. So awkwardness and self-consciousness be damned, and I hope no one I know in real life ever reads this. (This would be the point where a reader might ask “Why are you putting this on the internet if you don’t want anyone you know to read it?” or “Why don’t you just make this post private?” to which I reply “Because I don’t want to, okay? This isn’t a logical decision so stop using logic against me.”)
Alright, so Friday night. You know what? No. First I need to say something else. I’ve been thinking a lot about my sexuality ever since FemSex (or really ever since I’ve gotten to college) and I’ve been really examining an exploring it in the last few months. It’s been confusing and frustrating and I’ve been reduced to tears each of the three times I’ve tried to talk to/come out to my mom. It’s hard. It’s confusing. I’m not going to get into that mindfuckery here, but I needed to say it before launching into this story in order to properly contextualize everything from here on out. So: I am a queer woman about to tell a story about sex and sexuality. Either settle in or click away from this page, because there is no holding back.
Alright! So! Friday night! No more digressions, I promise. So there’s this guy, and let’s go all Dollhouse and call him Alpha (not that he’s anything like the character Alpha, just…yeah. I said no more digressions and I’m sticking to that). Alpha and I had been kind of flirting since the first Berkeley General Assembly the previous Saturday. Whenever I’d look over I’d catch his eye and he’s kind of smile and look away…it was like a bad romcom and I fucking loved it. We’d started talking over the next few days and we just had this instant chemistry. The thing that pops out most in my mind is the day after I’d met him I was talking to someone at General Assembly and Alpha touched my shoulder to try and get my attention. Now, I do not like to be touched. I’m an awkward hugger even with the people I genuinely care about and I tend to tense up when strangers try to do anything more than shake my hand. I have some strict personal boundaries-it’s just who I am. But when I realized it had been Alpha who had touched my shoulder, I felt completely fine. I even smiled. For me this is so huge. I didn't even feel comfortable hugging my fellow FemSexies until the very end of the semester, after we had bared our bodies and our souls to each other in such an intellectually intimate and emotionally empowering way.
So like I said, Alpha and I spent the next week kind of flirting until we got to the Friday night I’ve been building up to this whole time. It was there that we just kind of clicked and I wound up practically falling asleep on his shoulder. Then once it got dark we started flyering around the city for Berkeley’s demonstration for the international 10/15 Day of Action. There was more talking and clicking and an awkward moment where I was like “yeah, I know you think I’m straight up lesbian but actually I’m queer sooooooo…” Anyways, long story short we wound up at Berkeley Bowl (because really, where else in Berkley are you going to flyer for a political event, except maybe Cheeseboard which we'd already hit?) in the middle of the night, in a deserted parking lot, when Bravo, another Occupy Berkeley organizer, biked over to us and invited us back to the place he shared with yet another Organizer, Juliet (who is actually a guy…I didn’t anticipate this when I decided on a NATO naming thing), for some coffee to help us stay awake. Coffee turned into watching some great Occupy video streaming which turned into marijuana which turned into a really awesome light show set to European electro-dance music with the sickest gloves you have ever seen which turned into hanging out with Alpha in his car while we waited to sober up so it’d be safe to drive which turned into cuddling and “I can’t believe I just met you I feel like I’ve known you for so long” rhetoric which turned into going back to my place. Really the whole night had just been everything I wasn’t ready for in high school all crammed into a few hours. There was barefoot walking, car cuddling in a deserted parking lot at 2 in the morning, a first real kiss…Like, I’d been kissed before, but only once in a sexual non-friend way. And I hadn’t liked it. It had been kind of wet and unpleasant. But Friday night (which by then was technically Saturday morning), even though I had no idea what I was doing and felt awkward and self-conscious, I liked kissing Alpha. And it was like I wasn't confused anymore, you know? I wasn’t freaking out about whether I was gay or straight or ace or pan or whatever, I was just comfortable and happy and so so curious. Clothes came off, body parts were kissed and groped and stimulated and I was confident and happy and just having fun. Honestly, I’ve had kind of a fear of sex, and I think part of that was because I didn’t really know anything about sex. But being almost naked in bed with someone who makes me feel good has almost completely erased that fear, and instead it’s just me and him and…yeah. It’s connecting with another human being on a level that is completely new to me and if climbing into bed with someone less than a week after meeting them makes me a then slut I will fucking own the word slut and wear it like a badge of honor because that’s what it is.
I’m writing about sex in the same post that I’m writing about revolutionary politics because to me these two things are inseparable. It’s hard to explain, and I’m kind of too tired to try. But this time in my life is so intense and so full of change and personal growth and that’s college, you know? An education is a revolution on an individual basis. It changes minds and makes us better people. So I just want to wrap up with talking about how much I fucking love Cal (and Berkeley and San Francisco and now Oakland). This school has become my home, and I wouldn’t trade my time here for anything in the world. When I was getting my college acceptance letters back I was sad when schools like MIT and Caltech rejected me, but now I am so glad they did. I would not be the person I am today without UC Berkeley. Sure, MIT and Caltech are more prestigious and perhaps I would have gotten a better STEM education out of them. But would it wouldn't have been a Berkeley education. Yeah, my math and science classes are wonderful and I have no desire to change my major from physics, but STEM classes, however fascinating and mind-blowing and empowering, lack a certain revolutionary spark. It is my humanities classes at Cal that have had the most impact on my changing self: Native American Studies, which has recontextualized everything I ever thought I knew about American history, started the process of decolonizing my brain, and awakened a strong desire to connect with my own ancestry and past; and FemSex, which I have gone on (and on and on) about. Those classes have fundamentally changed the way I view both the world and my place here on this earth. Those classes are the epitome of an education because they made me a better person. Math and physics and other STEM classes, as much as I love them, simply do not have that power, that capacity to change the world by changing the People. And that’s why I fucking love UC Berkeley.
So feel the love with me and hear about the exciting things that make me say “I fucking love Berkeley” because this place is like no other place in the world and I am so thankful that I’m here.
*I touched a human brain! The Cognitive Science department was having a recruitment…thing, and they flyered on Sproul for it. So I showed up to Drugs and the Brain one night and my friend is like “Hey, you wanna go touch a brain with me?” and I’m like “Of course I want to go touch a brain with you” because really, is there any other response one could even give? It was so. cool. and I touched a spinal cord as well. Check that off my list of lifetime wants.
*I toured a physics lab and learned that this universe is different than its mirror image because odd-dimensional universes like our own can be either left-handed or right-handed. If you’ve ever studied vectors you’ll remember the Right Hand Rule. You can use it to see how this handedness thing all works out.
*I looked at an otter penis under a microscope. This was in my Intro to Archaeology class. Apparently otters have actual bones in their penises. I was so full of not knowing.
*I learned that the human brain has cannabanoid receptors which are directly activated by marijuana. However, THC looks nothing like the neurotransmittrs that the receptors are made for, except for perhaps a long carbon chain. The endocannabanoids produced naturally by the body include anandamide, named after the Sanskrit word for “bliss,” which is one of the chemicals in chocolate. So neurochemically speaking chocolate = coffee + pot (sort of). And I learned all this while eating chocolate nibs (which are 100% roasted cacao and smell so. good.) in Wheeler Auditorium provided to me by a professor who had previously shown the class pictures of himself grinning in front of a giant wall of marijuana growing by the side of the road in India and who we’re pretty certain has tried most of the drugs he’s teaching us about.
Aaaaaaand that’s pretty much it. Now excuse me, It’s almost 2 in the morning so I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.