the desire to be dissolved

I haven’t forgotten about this little online space — the beginning of fall is always hectic. I have so many things I would like to write about, but recently we have been dealing with disruptions to our day-to-day lives that it makes it impossible to sit here and speak into the internet void. There are about three drafts sitting on my end — beencountry.com hasn’t been forgotten, it’s just been placed on the backburner right now. When you have spent 20+ years juggling… well, everything, you tend to acknowledge when there needs to be a prioritization of particular things that make other things feel like a privilege. Writing feels like a privilege these days — well, writing here, in this area of my own. It doesn’t mean academic writing has stopped… it just feels a little less fulfilling this fall. And it sucks, because I always enjoy the new conversations and interactions I have with freshman students, many who learning to be ‘on their own’ for the first times in their lives. Teaching has always been such a core part of my identity for the last ~5-6 years now, so it feels like I have hit a slump; I am hopeful that it is temporary. We’ll have to stay tuned.

However, I’m in the middle of revising an 80+ page document at this point in time and I am itching to find a moment where I can get back to writing material that feels freeing. It’s hard to sit here, edit, and revise a document that is just a proposal of what you would really like to accomplish in a longer document (the dreaded “Prospectus” haunts me at every given opportunity it can). We also spent much of the end of September and the beginning of October dealing with housing complications, renovations, and picking up the pieces of what’s left after the Airport Fire. I am grateful that we were spared, but driving through the CA-74 after they reopened the highway was wretched to confront. The little house that sat beside the roadside, the one that I got excited to see because it meant that the mountain driving was coming to a conclusion, was gone. I’m not sure how you reconcile after seeing the small little mementos and placeholders that feel like a part of your everyday routine, a staple of what ‘going home’ feels like, has simply vanished.

I am trying to live through the fallout of what has happened in our recent lives and determining what can happen next. I have some writing planned still on addressing the differences between research topics & questions, facilitating thesis statements, committing to unique visual analysis (I’m teaching a film-based class, so it’s always quite nice to have my own expertise come in handy with these things), as well as Beyoncé, Indigenous performances, women sexuality… but we’ll see if they ever make it beyond the pages of my notebook.

I am taking this moment to remind everyone to find a space of peace (I try to find this every single day — some days are successful, others I optimistically commit to the work to pursue it). Rebuild. Remain vigilant. Stay focused. And living in between tragedies — we can always seek out those glimmers, the shimmering possibilities of another world that can collide with this one. I’ll leave what I use as to retain that glimmer in my everyday life at this point; thank you, Joshua Chambers-Letson. Sometimes language is really all we have in order to continue to persevere — after a lifetime of survival, that feels like living.

“This sense of freedom is not located in the future, but in the present. Though ephemeral, when this sense of freedom is generated across the body through performance, the body becomes aware that the rest of the time some thing’s missing, something better than this is possible, and that something must be done. This kind of freedom is not used on or against us, but is something we put to work against those forces that dull and diminish us,making it impossible to even wish for the knowledge of what freedom would feel like. Or at least, it’s something we put to work as we try to survive those forces.” — After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, p. 7