(dys)topia

Good News: I submitted my first chapter draft to my advisor on Tuesday! It has gone through some writing group workshops, which were really helpful, but I know it still needs a lot of work. Still, it is nice to have something solid accomplished. It is called "Rethinking the Industrial Utopia: Factory Work, Alternative Homes, and Class Mobility."

On Tuesday, I also asked one of our girl scouts if she is writing a letter to Santa. She looked at me like I was crazy and said, "I tell my caseworker what I want for Christmas." Moments like this are just surreal for me. My parents did an amazing job at Christmas at my house. They used different handwriting and wrapping paper for Santa's presents, left cookie crumbs, pipes, and even ashy footprints. This is probably why I believed in Santa until I was like, fifteen. Of course, Brian's favorite Christmas memories are of his grandfather getting out his shotgun on Christmas Eve and saying that he is going to shoot Santa. So every family has their Christmas traditions, but bringing in a caseworker changes things.

Today, Brian pulled up to the house and a woman came up asking for a ride since it was raining. Bri said sure, and once she was in the car she started saying how cute he is and asking if he wanted a "date." He said that he is married and she started talking about how his wife will never know. He asked where she wanted dropped off and she said she didn't care; she thought they would just park somewhere. Then she spent the rest of the ride apologizing profusely, which I think is the saddest part. My stomach has hurt ever since he told me the story. I can't even formulate how helpless I feel when I think about the system of sex work that goes on daily in our neighborhood.

Well, sometimes I just need to write about these things before I start my schoolwork! Now I am going to read Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th Century America. AWESOME!

More Food Rants

I just got back from a meeting at St. John's for people serving food at the community meals on Wednesday and Sunday. We talked about how volunteers can foster healthy eating habits through the meals they serve. This was a great idea, because the majority of the churches serve complete crap. I know it is very hard to serve nutritious meals for a large crowd, but Ash and I were pretty pissed off at the women wearing fancy jewelry and saying they can't afford to buy the healthier products. Ashley did a great job of explaining that Franklinton Gardens is happy to provide discounts on their produce, which is awesome even though it would definitely raise my blood pressure even more to see the gardens mark down their already incredibly reasonable prices for the types of churches that serve the meals. As long as it gets to our neighbors, though.

I wanted to say, "look, just serve food that you would want to eat yourself." It is not a hard concept. As a community, we are incredibly picky about the food that we buy and the meat that we eat, but we only serve at street church what we would make at one of our potlucks. Sometimes that means asking for discounts, but places, especially Blues Creek, have always helped us out. I was also slightly annoyed at how many people claimed that poor people would not eat quality food. There is certainly a problem in Franklinton with the quality of food available, but I don't think food tastes are naturally a socioeconomic class issue. Most people I know, myself included, would rather eat junk food than vegetables. Access to good food and education is the key concern.

I sometimes think that a fairly constant sense of moral indignation is how I compensate myself for no longer eating at McDonalds and living in fairly close proximity to crack houses. I don't know how healthy that is. I also know that my views on community meals changed when I moved to Franklinton and developed actual relationships with the people I eat with.

This image is called "Christ of the Breadlines" by Fritz Eichenberg.

Phelps

"The reformer's blood and the student's blood have always had an uncomfortable time of it, together in my veins." -Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (1896)

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Granville thinking of how much I love scones and my life. It is the coffee shop where my writing group met my senior year. Dr. Baker would buy us coffee and we would workshop our poems. All my energy was focused on getting into graduate school and I felt like I was changing the world by going to Amnesty and Women's Emphasis meetings and discussing politics with the other students.

It is five years later, and I still meet with a writing group to workshop our dissertations. In some ways, my life has not changed very much. In other ways, I feel like a completely different person. It is becoming harder and harder to reconcile the work I do in the academy with the material needs of people in my neighborhood. I still believe so strongly in the power of literature to change perspectives and make people more compassionate, and see those social justice oriented meetings I attended as necessary, but am increasingly unsure about how to bridge the gap between Franklinton and the university. So instead, I spend too much time thinking about this instead of writing my dissertation or actually working in the community.

This tension is why I love Phelps, even though I am having such a hard time writing about her in my diss! She was passionate about both literature and social justice, and saw her work as an attempt to create a better society. One line in her most famous work, The Story of Avis (1877), always sticks with me. The female artist visits a tenement house and realizes that she "had to be a little color blind to misery for beauty's sake." It is a line I am still trying to figure out.

In a couple hours I will talk about my graduate school experiences with the English majors at Denison. I hope I can convey that being given time to study and teach is beautiful, but a privilege that should not blind them to the rest of the world. Then I will keep working to figure out Phelps and Franklinton!

Tired

Monday was the last day of the summer reading program at Gladden. My dad came dressed in his vintage baseball uniform and was a huge hit! As I was walking out, my very energetic five year old neighbor J. asked me if I plan to volunteer at the program next year. I told him that I wanted to keep doing the reading program for as long as I lived in Fton and my schedule allowed. He looked at me skeptically and said, "you are going to be very tired."

Going to Gladden once a week does not make me tired. In fact, since I've been off from teaching this summer, I'm not really tired at all. I don't like it! I get so much more done when my schedule is packed. I like going to bed at the end of a busy day and feeling like I've earned a good night's sleep! After reading all day and messing around the house, I'm hardly ever physically tired. I've read about how intellectual labor is often not viewed as real labor since there is usually no material product to show for your work, and I can understand people who hold that view. I am excited to start teaching again! Not that that makes me physically tired, but I feel like I have accomplished more after a class. Of course, the fact that Brian is literarly working sixteen and seventeen hour days also tends to affect how I view labor right now!

Home

It is summer, so the little girls down the street are playing with sidewalk chalk. It is Franklinton, so what they wrote with that chalk is "hookerz go home."

I am working on my dissertation at home now since I am done teaching for the quarter, but it is summer and there are gardens and friends and potlucks and screaming neighbors and a house that needs work, and when I look outside there are homeless men pushing shopping carts and kids writing about prostitution. Using "z" instead of "s." Sigh.

I am going to read now. Or maybe I will grab some sidewalk chalk.

"creepy/sad men driving Mercedes, go home."

1893

1893 was the year of Chicago's World Fair and when Crane self-published "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." It is also the year our house was built. I have been mustering up every ounce of my love for the nineteenth century to deal with the repairs! It really hasn't been too bad, but our gas has been off for almost a week because of a leak. Brian cheerfully saying "just like in the nineteenth century!" every time we have to take a cold shower or try to fix something ourselves sometimes doesn't cut it.

I love our house and I am excited about gradually fixing it up. It is already in pretty good shape, but we have enjoyed making small improvements like creating a downstairs washer/dryer hook up. I am always torn about making cosmetic changes that aren't really necessary because that money could be spent to help many more people. We justified the new washer and dryer because the old one was broken and the energy efficient washers wouldn't make it downstairs. Still, we have made other choices regarding new floors and counters that aren't really necessary.

bell hooks writes about the importance of sharing material possessions and living simply in Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000). She tells the story of when she got a brand new car. She was committed to avoiding luxury items, but she always wanted a new car and got one for herself to celebrate some event. Suddenly, she was more cautious about letting people borrow her car. With her old car, it was not as big of a deal if someone dented or wrecked it, but now it would have much more serious consequences. She realized the danger of luxury and how it can distance us from helping those in need.

I've been thinking about hooks in relationship to our new washer and dryer, probably the biggest luxury item we have purchased in regards to the fact that they were much nicer and more expensive than we really needed, although we are committed to buying energy efficient when possible. I would love to have our friends in the neighborhood use the washer and dryer anytime, but suddenly I am even more reluctant to wash Junior (our homeless friend's) clothes. Granted, Brian and I decided awhile ago that it would be best to wash his clothes at a public cleaner because of some unfortunate findings in his laundry. Still, I wonder what the function of owning a washer and dryer is if not to use it in service of the community.

Kangaroos

Sometimes I'm really worried about how children will fit into our value system.

I know people don't appreciate our Asher/child comparison, but she is all that we are keeping alive right now. Asher has terrible allergies and is basically miserable all summer. The vet put her on a special diet. I explained our eating habits to our vet, and she put her on a fish based diet. Asher refused to eat the fish diet, though. I tried explaining to her that we generally feel less bad for fish than mammals and that there is a higher chance that they are wild caught than that the other meat is fairly treated. I tried mixing it with wet fish food, and she sucked off the wet food and spit the dry food all over the kitchen floor. So I went back to the vet and asked her if there is another option. There is another allergy option, and that is a dog food made entirely up of kangaroo meat. Apparently, dogs in America don't usually eat kangaroos, so it allows them to avoid all possible food allergies they might have developed.

Asher LOVES the kangaroo diet. So basically, Brian and I have turned down about a zillion delicious hot dogs this summer, but our dog is eating characters from Winnie the Pooh.

I'm trying to imagine convincing our future children that they should eat Krema peanut butter because it is local and doesn't have high fructose corn syrup. Or trying to explain why they shouldn't eat at McDonalds. I have a feeling that there are a lot of kangaroos in my future.