My student B. is sitting next to me, waiting as I check the polynomial she has just factored.

“Oh . . . there’s my neighbor.  Her husband just died.  But she looks happy,” B. says, looking out the dining room window at a large woman with thinning hair, laughing out loud as she walks down the sidewalk.

“She has three sons.  So . . . there is no shortage of men or anything.”

I shoot her a quizzical look, she continues.

“I mean, I know it’s different . . . you know what I mean.  I’m just trying to look at the bright side of things.  One less mouth to feed.”

Now my quizzical look turns to comical dismay.  Sleep-deprived thirteen year olds say the darnedest things.

“Balloons and banjos.  And sunflowers.  That’s what I want at my funeral,” she says.

Now I smile at her, pass her solution back to her and tear a small piece off a sheet of our scratch paper.

“I’m going to write that down,” I say.

“What?  As if you’re going to need that information any time soon?”

“No . . . because I like it and I want to remember it.  Balloons . . . and banjos . . .”

“And sunflowers,” she adds, “although it doesn’t fit.”

“Right. It’s not alliterative like the other two.  Do you know what alliteration is?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.  And sunflowers.”  I finish writing the phrase, fold the paper into fourths and put it in my back pocket.

“Now try sixty-four x squared minus ninety-six x plus thirty-six.”

I remember a moment in the fall of 1998 very well. I was running through the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, running alone that afternoon. The sun was setting, and its golden glow bathed the chaparral and me in its slow warmth, welcome after another fast and hot day in the Inland Empire. I followed the trail towards a ridge line passing from south to north, blood surging in my veins and endorphins spreading in my brain, the smell of sage and dust filling my lungs. As I reached the ridge line, I slowed to notice the sun resting on the horizon to my left- a puddle of gold and blood pooling just before disappearing- then caught a glimpse of the full moon peaking up over the horizon to my right. I stopped and took some moments to absorb the view in both directions. I thought about my unique position between the gravitational fields of the moon and the sun, the pull strongest when they are in opposition at the full moon, surely affecting our bodies as the pull is affecting the tides and the water tables on earth. I wondered how many people across the planet would be thinking the same things that day, when witnessing the same view. Four? Four thousand? How many people think about these things? The wind picked up and whipped the stray hairs that had managed to free themselves from my ponytail, pushed them into my face.

Three years later, I relived this moment. I was reading The Sheltering Sky while studying in Fes, Morocco. I lay in the cool shade of my small room in the student villa, the baking sunlight entering my shuttered window, heating lines down my back as I lay on my bed with the book. The story floated along, barely keeping my attention, when I came across the following passage:

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

I stopped to re-read the passage once or twice more, then stopped reading entirely and remembered that afternoon in the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains. I have plenty of abstract memories, but that one specific memory was reinvigorated by the passage. Paul Bowles’ words managed to turn an abstract memory of a run in the hills and the sun setting and the moon rising into one of those specific memories, complete with the smell, the feel, the sounds of the place and time. So many other memories will be just as the passage describes- remembered once or twice, perhaps not with much specificity. And even other memories will fade, perhaps never again be recalled.

I wonder if some day I’ll be a ninety one year old grandmother with not much else happening in my cranium but the replaying of a short loop of two or three memories that I recount, repeatedly, to my loved ones when they come to see me. My dear grandmother who passed away this summer was one such grandmother. In her last years of life, our dialogues narrowed from simple discussion down to monologues in which she would tell me the same stories, one after the other. There was the time, about ten years prior, in which she had told her pastor at church that she thanked the lord that she still had good eyesight, that some of her marbles were still working. Her pastor said to her, “Mary, all of your marbles are working.”  This amused her immensely.  Her memory of this particular story and the eventual incessant recounting of it had the sad irony of a homeless man in a tattered business suit.

Then, there was the time when she was in a beauty contest when she was eight years old. She and another girl were finalists, and they both won half the award . . . or something like that. The girl had beautiful blonde hair, my grandmother had beautiful hazel eyes. I wonder sometimes if this memory was actually a dream she had when she was a child which, as her senility set in, became a memory for her. I also wonder what else may have happened in her conversation with her pastor besides the two-sentence exchange. I wonder if they really spoke of “working marbles” or, more likely, of “having marbles.”

By the time she was telling these stories, it was too late to ask her about the facts. Perhaps this is one compelling reason to write now: the stories and memories will be more completely told, will speak for me if the day arrives when all I have left to say are the same few sentences describing an afternoon on a forgotten trail in forgotten mountains with the sun and the moon and the wind.

We do not believe in your god

You are not our elders

Many of your ‘morals’ are our ’sins’

But we believe in and support your freedom to believe what you believe and to live how you wish to live

All we ask in return is the same magnanimity, the same goodwill

Keep your noses out of our uteruses and homes

Out of our loved ones’ private lives and relationships

Keep your threats off of our president

We don’t want your ‘morals,’ we don’t want your lifestyle

We have come to our own ‘morals’ with careful analyses of lifetimes of evidence

We are happy with our ethical codes and happy to live in a country whose constitution guarantees us the right to follow them

We believe in individual freedom, not taking freedom away

We believe in love, not bigotry and hatred

We believe in peace, not war

We believe in unity, not division

And we believe that if you keep trying to foist your beliefs on the rest of us, you are a political campaign and not a church and therefore should be taxed, like the rest of us

May the Catholic Church, Focus on the Family, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints stop their ideological tyranny

May these churches and organizations engage instead in the Christ-like behavior of helping those who are suffering, of providing community and resources for those in need

And may we all enjoy the freedoms guaranteed by our founding constitution and so bravely defended for generations

Sincerely,

The Liberated

Everywhere, USA

We wend through the mountains, skirting ponderosa pines and lichen-covered, hollowed-bowl-weathered boulders. We inhale deeply of the vanilla forest and try to imagine the conditions that brought us all- animate or not- here. Cataclysmic explosions and glacial grindings. Deafening sounds, to be sure, preceded this humming silence. Pine cones inserted by prior walkers peek out of rock face basins, framed artifacts of a tree’s attempt at reproduction reminding us of our squirrel nature.

We are supplied by about 1.5 liters of water between the two of us, but we are not far from a seasonal spring that, according to internet water reports, was flowing “well” two weeks ago. It is at this spring that we plan to each load up with several liters more of water to make today’s 20-mile trek of about 7,000 feet of elevation drop as we circumnavigate Mount San Jacinto and descend into the San Gorgonio pass, leaving the pine forest and ending in a kind of post-biomic, pre-apocalyptic über-desert through which flows much wind, no water, and the 10 freeway.

We pass over a few narrow, verdant bends in the trail that must accommodate snowmelt in the late winter and early spring, or, during years more moist than this record-breaking dry year, might even flow with water into the summer months. Today, they are shady, dry, yet grinning with green. The air during the few moments of stepping over these places brings a comforting wash over my face and up my nostrils that transports me to the small valleys that serve as cold air sinks on my favorite Griffith park hikes when I am heading out after sunset, a view of the city grid and all the little veins of white and red lights, humans trapped in metal boxes trying to become free. It is at these moments that I am grateful to be in the hills and not in a cage somewhere. This air transports me to evening springtime runs in my suburban childhood neighborhood, passing that sunken bend on the main road where some teenager a half-decade or so prior had killed himself while driving drunk and where there was still a potted plant leaning against the implicated telephone pole, which his mother still maintained. I often ran there- grateful then in that thick, cool air- to be uncaged. This air also transports me to my own bathroom, wet laundry hanging from the shower rod and the half-light of the day outside making its way down the airshaft and into the white and green tiled coolness, a retreat within a retreat. As the evaporated water lingers in the perpetual twilight, I am reminded that we are always caged.

At one such lovely spot on the trail, M.B. stops, checks his map, and declares this dry and unproviding- if climatically comforting- stream bed to be the stream that flowed two weeks ago. Without seeming too concerned, he proposes heading back the ten miles that we have already covered yesterday evening and so far this morning to get water from the nearest reliable source. In a quick moment my brain situates me somewhere in the mountains, dry granite beneath my feet and increasingly sunny, blue skies above my head, surrounded on all sides by forest and no water. Caged by my reliance on water. I’m already thirsty. Glancing at the ¼ liter of water through the blue plastic of my bottle, and in spite of my thirst, the idea of retreating is rather disagreeable to me. Regret for not having filled my water containers to capacity earlier mixes with an intense desire to transcend any seeping panic. I reject panic and remind myself that I am a runner who has spent much time losing water through perspiration, while engaging in physically strenuous activities. I only ever need water at the end of those activities. This is no different.

I look at M. and say, “I think we should go on. People can survive for up to three days without water. We’re doing a descent, which is easier than it could be. I think we can nurse the water that we have right now. I know I can nurse the water in this bottle for a long time. The human body is capable of amazing things.” This last fact a direct quote, only days old, from D.S., though the context’s dramatic difference served to give me a doubly-wry internal chuckle. Such preservation of perverse humor is necessary in difficult times, even if the humor is lost on our comrades. M. responds with a skeptical glance and agrees to at least continue to see if we might not have reached the right stream bed yet. We turn to continue on, having not cleaned ourselves as we had hoped nor eaten breakfast as we had planned nor obtained the life-giving water we had needed. Solemn, but not defeated, we walk forward, entering a dry 20 miles of mountain trail and aware that it will not be an easy 20 miles, if we ever had that expectation.

I wonder aloud if my disinterest in turning back is a masculine trait that I might be better served to leave at home and a discussion of traveling behavior and masculinity wades along with us as we ascend and descend small hills and wind through the shaded west-facing slope whose contours we are roughly following. I note to myself that we are lucky to be shaded at this time, helping us to preserve water, and a moment later I note that I seem to be breathing rather fast for this mild incline we are climbing- perhaps my body is panicking in spite of my efforts at positive reminders and optimistic expectations? Perhaps I will dehydrate into a state of delirium because I am exhaling all of this water by hyperventilation? I wonder if I have entered a state from which I can’t rescue myself- perhaps the mental panic is the easy part to prevent, but the physical panic is what kills people? Perhaps this was the unfortunate end of C., my once-housemate who perished five years ago due to hypothermia on a hiking trip? What an unfortunate time and place to be exploring survival.

We restate some affirmatives as we walk: it is a descent. It is the north face of the wilderness that we will descend, which is typically the shadier side in this hemisphere. The conditions couldn’t be better for 20 dry miles. If we become desperate, we simply jettison our packs and go and get our water and then return for the packs, well-hydrated. My mind continues to explore levels of desperation, ending in the stories you hear in the news about narrow escapes in the wild or in the rubble after an earthquake where the survivors have been reduced to drinking their own urine to survive and I wonder exactly how we would do that, if we had to. Do we drink our own? Each other’s? This could be a unique introduction to water sports, worthy of causing a keenly precise fetish . . . or vomiting.

We have only traveled about a mile, maybe two, from the dry stream and I am in the forward position as we turn a bend onto one of the most narrow switchbacks we will encounter. At that bend, I catch glimpse of a grouping of red-handled tools- picks, axes, plant-clippers and such. Like Dorothy on her way to Oz, I stop and motion to my friend in surprise. In unison, we continue to walk as our gaze follows the trail down and we both catch site of a grouping of humans now, a few switchbacks down, wearing orange hardhats. Synchronously, our gaze continues on and we both see the grouping of one gallon water jugs on a rock not far from the trail workers. Relief descends upon us as we verbally acknowledge our opportunity to ask for a bit to help us on our way. The goddess Anahita has responded, naturally. We walk towards them, unaware of just how lucky we are.

We talk to the men, “Trail Gorillas” with the Pacific Crest Trail Association, volunteer workers maintaining the trail. They invite us to their water, or, even better, to the water and food and other beverages at their pack-animal supplied spike camp only a mile away AND to all of those things at their motorized-vehicle supplied base camp four miles away. As we haven’t had breakfast yet, we opt for a long stop at the spike camp and eat breakfast with Carol, gladly drinking her orange juice and both of us gratefully taking about three liters of water. We still have at least 18 miles to go, but it is still shaded and cool in the forest and 3 liters is more than none.

Three miles later, we meet up with Hattie and Al at the base camp and the friendly older couple quickly make us sandwiches filled with veggies and no meat (kids, these days!) and offer us melon and cookies and soda. We snack and hear more about becoming PCTA volunteers and then head out. Not even a half-mile away, we are clearly entering the descent as the terrain begins to change into dry grasses and sparse foliage. The sun is intense as a glimmering Caprisun appears on the trail. M. picks it up and sticks it in his pack. I already only have 2 liters of water left, but, again, 2 is more than none.

We see numerous brown-grass and rock bluffs filling our field of view as we gaze down and see, very far below us, the valley floor leading straight north from Mount San Jacinto, towards the 10 freeway, which we cannot see yet because of the bluffs. It is a path along that valley floor that we will eventually follow out of this wilderness in order to enter the San Gorgonio wilderness. Between us and the floor, we realize, are many miles of trail. What we don’t realize is how circuitous those miles of trail will be. Feeling slightly dehydrated already, I am already convinced that things may have gotten very bad had we not found those PCTA volunteers.

A few hours later, we seem to be no closer to the valley floor. We have walked a number of miles in unrelenting sunshine and heat- the only shade to be had is by sidling up to a large, heat-emitting boulder, if it is casting a shadow near the trail. My water is already running low and yet I feel like we’ve walked 20 miles since the dry stream. The valley floor almost seems further than when we first saw it. We are on the contour of a new bluff, but we seem to be hiking along at one elevation, skirting these minor peaks, even sometimes increasing our elevation. Both of my feet and both shoulders are aching, and every parched lip-lick seems followed, on cue, by a swing UPhill. Like the pack animals we saw at the spike camp, I’m beginning to feel broken. I am the trail’s bitch. I’m lucky to be alive, as what is now severe discomfort due to lack of water would have been dangerous and utterly debilitating delirium. In my current state, I am at least present enough to realize the need to continue, regardless of how slowly or painfully. There is a spigot of water, our source list tells us, in that never-nearing valley.

At one point, I see a bright blue insect, either a dragonfly or a damselfly, flying across the trail. Surely it is well out of range of the still water in which it was spawned- or else it was a hallucination. It disappears behind some boulders. Not much later, M. and I both see a blue mylar star of David balloon enter our view from the far left, bouncing and floating up the valley, heading straight for the trail in front of us. We joke about catching it and tying it to our packs to get some helium-assist with the pack weight when, shockingly, it gets stuck on the trail. The wind knocks it around as we continue walking until it finally continues on its path, when we are not even fifty meters away from where it had been. It heads up the valley, towards the hills that spat us onto our current coordinates. As there is little chance of anyone being in the valley below, the origin of this balloon is impossible to guess.

I don’t know how many hours after meeting with the base camp we finally reach the valley floor, but we arrive at sunset. Perhaps it was 7 hours, in total, of descent. We quickly set to filtering, drinking, bathing, and eating. We share the Caprisun. Having avoided sharing with M. my many broken thoughts from the last few hours, I now share two of them with him: First, this trail must be named the Seventh Circle of Hell. I should join the PCTA and donate money for the appropriate signage OR creating a better route. He agrees that is was the most brutal section so far. I hope it will be the most brutal he encounters, because it is hard to imagine worse. Second, I can’t continue. Another day of such hot and dry conditions sounds like a sure recipe for collapse. I don’t want to slow him down, so I should bail now, when the bailing is easy. We are only five miles or so from the 10 freeway and my phone is in my pack. A dry, still and hot night, punctuated by blazing meteorites, ensues.

We wake at first light, pack up and begin the trudge through the loose sand desert at sunrise. We are soon hearing, along with seeing, the 10 freeway. Next come freeway debris like an old television set and then, under the train and freeway bridges, a make-shift living room, complete with two couches and various household items laying around. We continue to walk, then stop and have breakfast in the non-shade of the tallest bush we can see, after which we part ways. M.’s colorful prayer flags on his pack bob up into sight now and then as he walks off into the barren landscape, heading for the sloping hills leading to the mountains that are home to the tallest peak in southern California. I continue on the road in the forsaken town off of the freeway, called West Palm Springs Village. On a broken asphalt road I head towards an intersection through which a car passes every few minutes. What is here is a mystery to me, but I find one answer at some sort of automotive shop where I sit on my pack in the box of shade defined on the sand by the complex’s cinderblock and wrought-iron fence. It is there that I wait for my good friend W. and fend off offers of water or soft drinks or snacks or rides. If the trail was a taste of hell, the generosity of the people turns out to be anything but. May we all show such kindness and receive such when we are in need.

Many well-wishes to my friend M. on his journey! To Canada!

Tonight I attended a panel discussion in which I could not get the space to phrase some simple questions. This is not to say that I feel the space was not allowed me, nor anyone else, but that there were, at all the wrong moments (for my little question(s)), many other people wishing to share commentary. And so it was that I was not able to ask my questions of the esteemed panel comprised of Phyllis Jackson, Judith Halberstam, Yong Soon Min, Amelia Jones, and Jennifer Doyle. While my questions remain, I now have- at least- the ability to better articulate the ruminatory peregrinations that my mind made during the volleyed commentary between panelists and audience members alike.

My primary question is: How can we (who label ourselves feminists, or more particularly, radical feminists) show everyone else that feminism is The Answer? I know, I know: the last two words of that last sentence will turn off many critical, educated postmodern theorists simply by implying a unified anything. I posit that we can sidestep that problem by allowing the radical, liberatory definition of feminism that I have learned from studying bell hooks which is, simply, that feminism is for Everybody (for the whole, unified entirety of humanity- Everybody!!) The definition of feminism in this case implies that it is a universal solution to a universal problem: oppression (which we may also call patriarchy). Liberation from oppression: feminism crumbling the walls of patriarchy. How do we show all of society that the feminist rejection of hierarchy and oppression, whether it be on the basis of race, sex, class, nationality, sexuality, physical ability, etc., is to everyone’s benefit? How do we show that even those amongst us who appear the most privileged have the benefit of a healthier society and a greater ability to express their true selves in a feminist context?

Professor Doyle referred to writing by Audre Lorde in which she exhorts those that are meeting, perhaps policy-making, to look around at each other and note who is missing. In any organization, who is missing that will clearly not be representing themselves? Who must we represent in our conversations? Professor Jackson made a great point: younger feminists were missing from the panel. I would add that older feminists (older than 60) were also missing from the panel. The question I really wanted to raise was . . . where were the men? This is, of course, tied to my conclusion that (obviously) mainstream society is not aware that feminism is for everybody, but more importantly: why didn’t anyone bring up the lack of 1) male-created feminist art in the WACK! exhibit and 2) the possible damage that may be done to feminism when it is represented in such a public way as simplistically “for, by, and about women” and 3) the panel’s lack of male members.

This concerns me because I work with young people, aged 12-18 years old. I teach them in the classroom, but I also work with them in an activist context, as the faculty advisor to the campus gay-straight alliance. Our GSA has explored the liberatory benefits to all people when we educate the campus on Transgender Day of Remembrance, National Coming Out Day, etc. The GSA members know that anti-racist work is directly tied to anti-homophobic work and anti-sexist work. We’re still working on class issues, but they are seeing the connections. I have used the word feminism once with the GSA students. When I did, the hint of snickers and sideways glances from some of the students indicated to me that for these children, feminism is the real “f” word. Feminism, to them, conjures what the anti-feminist backlash has intended for it to conjure: angry, white, queer women yelling about outdated concerns. I’m quite sure that this is as far as the young people who have not been radicalized into really learning about feminism go. They have not learned that feminism is an academic lens that deconstructs oppression of all sorts. They have not learned that, in the process of making women and men equal, all sexes benefit and that this equality-producing-universal-benefit is true in terms of all other (apparent) binaries (race, class, etc.) With my young students, I avoid using the word “feminism” just as I avoid using the word “anarchism.” The media messages regarding these terms are too strongly negative for me to approach them directly. Therefore, I have been challenged to articulate around the terms . . . which, in fact, is a very effective way to teach lasting knowledge.

These young people can make the intellectual leap from anti-homophobic work to anti-racist work. My impression is that they are not able to make the intellectual leap from feminism as the outdated and angry to feminism as the utterly relevant and inclusive. Professor Halberstam raised the question of the pieces in the exhibit that represent the female body in a selfless way- as object. She described them as disarming, as unexpectedly political. [I was not taking notes: this is me paraphrasing what she said (corrections welcome!)] She pointed out that these pieces used a patriarchal expectation of women as the medium for feminist expression. This was intriguing as Professor Halberstam described the pieces, but also intriguing to me because this is not how feminism is represented in mainstream media, which is where my students have learned anything they may know about feminism. What my students have learned is the image of reactionary feminism. Feminism that has had ENOUGH! of patriarchal, sexist bullshit and is ready to say something about it. What Professor Halberstam described were pieces that could be described as a kind of evocative feminism . . . by hooking a crochet needle (if you will) through one part sympathy and one part fury and one part identification and one part sadness, a feminist might be made. This is not the feminism we see in mainstream media.

In fact, this is not the kind of activism we ever see in the media, because it’s not the form that activism most often takes. For every anti-war or anti-Bush demonstration I go to, I have the choice of myriad contingents to join. All but one of them intend to hold many signs and to be vocal. The one group that I have never (yet) chosen to join is the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. While I am affiliated with the group, I have not walked with the group in silence at a large demonstration nor sat in quiet meditation off to one side. When making this decision, the question I always ask myself is: how long can I be angry? Is this the time to reject reaction and to NOT just do something, but to sit there? Until now, I’ve decided that my daily life is the peaceful activism of intentional community and cultivated compassion and that the demonstrations are the time to speak up and protest loudly against the white supremacist capitalist [imperialist] patriarchy that is literally in the way of every beautiful possibility on the planet. To be sure, there are ways to subvert that power structure (what I do when I find a place of compassion inside myself or when my community consenses on a decision after much discussion.) However, these subversions are lost in the onslaught of media images of gyrating hipsters listening to their iPods in a false reality of materialistic bliss. What I am protesting is that denial of a voice for our subversive collectives in an age when product consumption is identity and representation is reserved for the highest bidder. At the same time, I am living one alternative and sometimes documenting such.

This may be where the schizophrenic requirement to be at the center and also in the margins, as a few people mentioned during the panel / audience discussion, arises: a movement requires visibility and representation, but is at the same time so much more than what most people will ever see and could ever try to represent. Perhaps this is where our imperative, those who would call ourselves feminists, arises. We must represent ourselves. I consider myself a radical feminist, and my questions may serve to represent not only me, but perhaps other radical feminists: Where were the men tonight on the panel, and how can we get a widespread embrace of feminism as a present solution rather than as a historic event?

“Diana-LAEV”

I pause, realize that she has long left that hospital room and is now deceased, and delete the entry. The millisecond of the cellular phone’s processor losing the number happens, the phone screen mopped up by a sopping digital rag. The completion sees pixels fading into the center of the screen, similar to when a text message has been sent. Only this time, a trace of Diana has vanished. That’s when I realize that this is just the beginning. My friend L.A. has a book of hand-written and typed poetry of Diana’s. She wrote some of the poems when she was in college, in the sixties. The most recent one was written in July of last year. The other night I leafed through the binder, identifying with some lines of poetry and finding others quaintly amusing. I didn’t know that Diana wrote poetry. For now, we have this artifact to prove that she did. To represent her thoughts and hopes. To paint a picture of who she was. Yet this binder will not last forever. Just as my cellular phone entry disappeared into the ether, so will the poetry binder meet its end. And another piece of Diana will vanish. Like that. Her friends will forget details of times spent together. Her students will forget things that she taught. Of course, these people will take a part of Diana with them throughout their whole lives, until they die. But they will die. And with them, so will those pieces of Diana.

In June I will leave the school where I teach. The traces of my existence will slowly fade until none of the students at the school will be aware that I was ever there. This is okay. What I’m more concerned about are the seeds that I can only hope I have planted in the minds of my students.

I know that the voice that speaks through each of us is an ancient voice. Whenever we speak with someone of an older generation, what they share with us has been shaped by their conversations with those of older generations and older generations and older generations back to the beginning of human time. No person has existed without communicating with a person of the generation before them. In this way, we each speak the knowledge of the first humans capable of speech . . . and of those that followed. And, in this way, we each have ancient wisdom to share with the children on the planet. What I have shared with my students has been one part a fleeting snapshot of the state of chemistry and physics and another part a window into a vast reservoir of thought and creativity. I hope that the seeds that have been planted were those that will serve us all best to be carried into the future.

It’s similar to the blood of our ancestors flowing through us and into our children. Life, itself, is a message we are given and that we pass along. Richard Dawkins refers to this in his book River Out of Eden (which, once upon a time, my high school biology teacher assigned (thank you, Mr. Gabler)). The sanctity of (all) life is most apparent when we consider the large numbers of beings that were not successful in reproducing. So many streams of our river have wandered off to dwindle and then evaporate away. Yet we are all here (and all living creatures are here) because our ancestors were on the successful branch(es) of the river of life which, as I’ve mentioned, we may pass on to our children, if we have children.

Regarding this, some may say that the biological urge to reproduce is what makes our species successful; that it’s a good thing. I’ve been of the opinion lately that the queering of the population, leading to fewer reproductive and to more adoptive choices, is the best thing for us now. It doesn’t seem biologically positive to populate until we are barely holding onto this planet, worried for our future and squeezed into oblivion. Right now is the perfect time to make non-reproductive unions and welcome children that we may not have spoken life into, but whom we can speak wisdom to.

I can still hear Diana’s words in my mind. I thank her for the coded wisdom she has passed to me in her life anecdotes and her fears about death and her self-damnation for the cancer that took her life. Her parents, grandmother and her teachers have spoken to me in her voice. I bow to them all and those that came before them for having sent the messages that I have received and begun to decode.

Teaching physics is like programming. The teacher sets up a system where if something occurs, then the student has learned that something else shall occur and so on until the “correct” answer is obtained by the physics student.

Once the program is established, the teacher throws a multitude of case examples at the student to see if the program is robust.

Watching a classroom of physics students work together to dissect a problem and synthesize an answer is as euphoric as watching a program you have written consistently give the desired output.

Classroom-spanning shouts containing the words “x-naught” and “mu” and debates over force vector addition and frames of reference are like seeing the DOS prompt blinkblinkblink and then, line by line, output all of the expected information. Ecstasy.

My friend L. [feminine principle] insists that she has not one, but seven, clitorises. Upon sensing my skepticism, she elaborates: she and D. [masculine principle] passionately copulate, upon occasion (when he shows interest.)  These seven clitorises make the act explosively satisfying. Upon sensing my skepticism still yet, and in spite of sensing my disgust, she begins to disrobe in order to show me her mighty parts. They are suddenly filling my field of view, seven “clitorises” in a vertical line, large plastic light-up buttons of different colors, alternately glowing and fading, dominating her vulva.

Fascinating, indeed. I must agree.

Wake up. Roll over. Dilapidated building, empty but for one tenant as the remaining units are gutted for remodeling. Shaded courtyard, unkempt with fallen leaves from the shade tree and broken concrete, maze made of sections of fence. I can’t find my way back out immediately, and a low-level panic begins to roll in. As I am finally walking away from the complex, I remember that N. used to live there. And to think- I almost lived there.

Walk down the street, see F.B. In high school he was a nerd. He seems more interesting today. We begin to talk, and after some time a bus arrives. Only it’s a diner. And so many people pour out of it, I’m beginning to wonder . . . D.G., K.K., people whose names I don’t remember. D.G. and I decide to make a congo line. Some people join us, others are busy talking.

Wake up. Get on my bicycle.

Dark street, temperature suddenly drops as humidity rises and Orion blazes out of the deep black sky. The universe sends a greeting more than a million years ago and here I am, receiving it. Hello, old friend! Long time, no see. Betelgeuse is a pinpoint ruby, refracting a moving light source, strobing at the cosmic disco with a red filter over the source. Orion’s gushing shoulder injury. Or sparkling brooch. My retina absorb its scarlet treasures, savored photons firing my neurons.

The freewheel clicks away.

Get home. Roll over. Wake up.

Last summer, I was given a ticket by a poor excuse for a civil servant in San Francisco. I was very upset. In response, I wrote the following letter. The San Francisco court’s response is posted below my letter.

********

August 30^th, 2006

To Whom it May Concern at the Superior Court of California in San Francisco,

I am sending this check of $114.97, corresponding to citation number MXXXXXXXXN, because I have no other option, nor apparent recourse to question this fine, available to me. I am writing this letter to you at the San Francisco MTA, the San Francisco Guardian and Mayor Newsom’s office because the circumstances causing the imposition of this fine, which I and my friend both received, were unfair and highly discouraging of visitors to your otherwise fine city.

My friend and I were in San Francisco for the San Francisco marathon in late July. I live in Los Angeles, and my friend that I traveled to San Francisco with lives in Long Beach. While we both have traveled to San Francisco many times, we are not very familiar with the public transit system in that city. We usually ride bicycles when in San Francisco.

On the particular day that we received our fines, we had taken the Muni from our friend’s house to the Embarcadero station in order to pick up our race numbers for the race the next day. Upon re-entering the station the way we had exited (as far as we knew, the only entrance,) we found all of the turnstiles closed to accepting money. There were bits of metal disallowing the insertion of the coins we had just changed from our bills. There were no directions posted on the turnstiles about how one could go about paying her money and then use the Muni to get where she needed to go. We were both perplexed. We saw that there were people downstairs, who had somehow paid their money to ride the Muni. We also saw that there were two people in police uniforms on the platform below, just as another passenger walked past us and used the wheelchair door to go downstairs, avoiding the turnstiles. We quickly decided to do the same and approach the officers for direction on how to pay our money in order to ride the Muni.

As an aside, I was raised to look up to police officers and consider them the authority figures to approach when in trouble or, in this case, when you need some guidance for familiarizing oneself with a foreign transportation system. They are supposed to protect and to serve. As an adult, I now know that this image of police officers is a mythology, but in this case my friend and I both earnestly believed that a simple good-natured request for direction would be harmless. I imagined it would, at least, not bother the officers as much as screaming from upstairs for some directions, which appeared to be our only other option.

So, we descended the stairs, coins in hand, and approached the officers, only to receive about twenty minutes of belittling and rude behavior from one officer, named K. Randall, serial number 21 (according to my citation.) The other officer remained silent. We received no help in learning how we could have paid our money to approach the platform until after being issued the fines. Ostensibly, we were punished for not paying money before approaching the platform. However, we were really punished for being tourists in San Francisco and not being familiar with the fact that there is more than one entrance to the station or that, when in doubt about what to do if the turnstiles are out of commission, one must scan all of the notices on the operator’s kiosk to find one that explains what to do in that situation.

To be most honest, this whole situation couldn’t have seemed more like a trap to extort money from tourists. Here was the Muni station closest to the race depot on the day before the race, and the stairs entering the station lead directly to turnstiles that will not accept money. Then, at the bottom of the stairs past those turnstiles (and not at the bottom of the stairs with functioning turnstiles,) there are two police officers barking to those descending, “Do you have your ticket?” The citations issued are for no small change, yet small enough that it would be ludicrous to take time off from work and get oneself to San Francisco for a court date to contest it, which is the only listed option that we have.

I’ve always been a fan of San Francisco for so many reasons, but this experience has left me with a negative view of San Francisco police officers and a decreased interest to travel to the city again. If this is how police officers are trained to handle tourists and the process for violation contestation is set up to exclude recourse for tourists, I’d rather forgo the many hours of ruminating the injustice of this situation, the egregious treatment from Officer Randall, and not spend the valuable work time I have had to dedicate to writing this letter.

I request that our fines be overturned and that the apparent system of hiring officers in order to gouge money from people in the city in order to pay those officers’ wages be closely examined. It seems like a negative system, from the perspective of one that has been exploited by that system.

Sincerely,

A. Velorucion

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October 25, 2006

IN RE: CITATION NO: CMXXXXXXXXN

Please be advised that Commissioner G. Rosen-Park reviewed your citation, and the matter has been dismissed. Therefore, the matter is now closed and no further proceedings are necessary. You will be receiving [sic] refund of $114.97 within eight weeks. Please retain this letter for your record.

N. Gabriel,

Deputy Clerk

Lately my attention, ever so protected from distraction so that I may create beauty and life in spite of the ugliness and death that one may see so often in the news, in other people, in the air . . . has been drawn into the ugliness. My attention has been taken, despite myself, as I increasingly cannot ignore the fact that my tax dollars and my nation of citizenry are being used to destroy those values that I hold dear and reinforce those patterns that destroy life.

It is easy, in this patriarchal, homophobic, philosophically intolerant, over-consumptive time and place where intellectualism is vilified and war is waged to dismiss someone like me and my views. I am a young queer woman who chooses humility- to ride a bicycle and eat low on the food “chain,” to aspire to follow the eightfold path of Buddhist teachings- rather than accept the dominant culture of immediate gratification interwoven with Death with a capital “D.” I am a Feminist with a capital “F,” militant without being violent. That is to say, I believe all men and all women should be free to be who they dream to be, regardless of whether a man will be able to support a family being that person or a woman will be conventionally beautiful as that person. We should all have the freedom of realizing self-actualization. That is feminism.

I am also a scientist that doesn’t take myself too seriously, and a teacher that desires to share a healthy and peaceful planet with my students rather than just knowledge. For all of these reasons, it is clear that I don’t support George W. Bush or his regime and I never have- I did not vote for him in 2000 and, when in his first few months in office he reneged on the Kyoto protocol, I had already had enough. Now that affront to the rest of the planet is forgotten in a slew of affronts and outright war crimes and human rights crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration. But I’m just an angry feminist queer, right?

Think Again.

I grew up in a highly conservative household. I was raised on evangelical Christianity, Republicanism, and Focus On the Family readings. I was a “Young Republican” in early high school, later a self-defined “Libertarian” (thank you, Ayn Rand.) I’m a Daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve heard all of the arguments about all of the controversial issues a conservative can make. I’m not categorically in opposition to all of them. But I AM categorically in opposition to leadership the likes of Bush and all of the politicians in D.C. that are supporting him. And I will be in the streets, along with thousands in LA and as yet untold numbers in over 175 places throughout the United States on October 5^th, protesting Bush and the course he has taken this nation.

I remember the time when my father signed me up with the Daughters of the American Revolution. He had spent parts of his free time for the last decade or so doing intense genealogical research on his (and my mother’s) family, eventually discovering that someone in our ancestry fought in the American Revolution. This is the only criterion for becoming a member of the Sons or Daughters of the American Revolution. So he sent the evidence in and suddenly he and I were members of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution (but my mother wasn’t, because it wasn’t her ancestor that fought.) I was in college. I quickly heard from friends that the Daughters of the American Revolution have an unfortunate history of racism and nationalism.

As part of my joining the Daughters of the American revolution, my father sent the Daughters my email address, so I would get periodic Southern California Daughters of the American Revolution email updates about gatherings and whatnot. Well, one of those emails had a homophobic, nationalist and militaristic joke in it, which implied that French soldiers are all gay because they aren’t as interested in war-mongering as American soldiers apparently are. I was so disgusted by the email that I deleted it. And then I immediately deleted it from my trash box. And then I kicked myself because I had just lost my chance to write a scathing reply to the violent homophobe that had sent it and everyone else on the list. Soon after that, I was graduated from college and I lost that email address. I no longer receive emails from the Daughters of the American Revolution that insult other people and my intelligence. Good riddance.

I am, however- still and forever, because I can’t change my ancestry- a Daughter of the American Revolution. As such, and as an American citizen generally, I will demonstrate on October 5^th as part of the World Can’t Wait- Drive Out the Bush Regime! demonstration. I will demonstrate against the Bush regime for taking the nation that my ancestor fought to liberate from empire and that subsequent ancestors worked their entire lives- in factories, in offices, in fields, in homes, and even in the military- to create. They created the wealth of this country and upheld the early ideals of this country and served this country in whatever ways they knew how. My father’s ancestors have served this country since its inception and my mother’s ancestors have served this country since the early 20^th century. I will demonstrate on October 5^th in all of their names.

I understand that this country’s wealth has been created first on the backs of slaves from Africa and forever on the backs of those with the least monetary wealth and more recently on the backs of people in developing countries, but I also recognize that many Americans today and many Americans in the past didn’t realize these scaled power structures, repeated from international dynamics to class dynamics and race dynamics, etc. It is in the idealized America that my ancestors placed their faith, and it is the Bush Regime’s erasure of that America and worldwide endangerment of America and Americans that I will protest.

On October 5^th, with respect for the ideals with which this nation was conceived, such as democratic representation and division of powers and the agency of the people that are governed to demand justice and a government that reflects their best interests, I will demonstrate. The zeitgeist producing this nation and its founding ideals are clearly described in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I recognize that every government is established by idealists, truly believing that their form of government will lead to a peaceful and prosperous existence. I also recognize that, while the founders of the United States of America had very clear ideals, shaped by the fire of tyrannical rule by a foreign king, they were also racist and engaged in a genocide of the indigenous peoples on this continent. Our history is a shameful one. I am proud of the ideals, and not proud of the hatred and killing that came alongside those ideals. Even at the beginning of this nation, those that called themselves citizens of the United States did not see the blatant connection between the imperialism they were escaping by declaring their independence and the imperialism they were perpetuating by claiming a land and murdering its people.

The clauses of the Declaration of Independence following the one above are a litany of the abuses suffered by residents of the British colonies under the thumb of the king of Britain. These are the abuses shaping the “absolute despotism” that motivated the colonists to “throw off” the king’s rule and declare themselves an independent nation.

Most of the abuses directly describe the tactics taken up by the Bush regime. More importantly, the arrogant, imperialistic, militaristic and self-interested attitude defining all of them equally describe the Bush regime’s actions. The founders of this nation declared this type of ruler a despot. They used the lessons from the oppression and suffering endured under the king to create a nation where such abuses would not happen again. And yet, before our very eyes, the Bush regime is bucking all of those protective devices against intolerance and despotism- the right to one’s own religion, the separation of powers, the right to privacy and fair trial . . . the list doesn’t end. It is time to throw off this government. This government that not only doesn’t represent most U.S. citizens’ best interests, but doesn’t represent the United States, as a nation’s, best interest as it perpetuates our “addiction to oil” and our military-industrial complex that, while it fattens the pockets of Bush’s CEO friends, places our nation at the top of every list of most despised peoples. We are despised for allowing our government to get so out of hand that the health of the global ecosystem and the life of people all over the planet are ominously at risk, both indirectly through our refusal to take responsibility for the planet’s health or directly, as the targets of our weapons.

As a Daughter of the American Revolution and as an American citizen, both labels conferred upon me not through any particular virtue of my own but by happenstance of my birth, I declare this government despotic and demand that the Bush regime step down and take its program with it. Please join me on October 5^th, in the town or city that you live in, to demand the same. It is our patriotic duty.

The World Can’t Wait- Drive Out the Bush Regime!