Haptic Storm

I grew up in Louisiana.  I lived there for 14 years before moving to another part of Louisiana.  After a few years of moving around, I lived in Las Vegas for 10 years.  In those two places, I grew roots while I lived there.  I felt like I was home.  I shared with the others who lived there dealing with the same road consruction, I smelled the same wildfires, I knew the surrounding areas in a local kind of way…  Like not the "Morehouse Parish is north of Ouachita Parish" kind of knowledge you’d get from a map, but the "Morehouse Parish is where Bastrop is, who sometimes plays my school’s team, and where I was swimming once when a coach asked me if I would be on their swim team and Ouachita Parish is where I live."  THAT kind of knowledge.  That’s roots and I feel it’s important to grow them emotionally, to feel like you’re home, that you have a home, even with all its defects.  It’s also important if you want to be politically involved, to understand certain issues, other people who also live where you do.  I would say it’s good for children to get this feeling too because it teaches them to make strong connections to not only other people, but the earth they live on, the seasons, the different bugs, animals, plants, trees and food associated with a particular area. 

To have no sense of place is I think a certain kind of stress that’s hard to describe.  I’m glad I grew up with a sense of place; I think it’s partly why I connect so strongly with the earth and I would hope to be able to pass this vague sense onto my children.  Growing roots is a way of connecting, of inter-being, of refusing to be the islands this capitalist culture seems to demand that we be.

I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m feeling the need to write this anyway…  As a socialist, I’m pretty disturbed that Orwell tries to make socialism into the same thing as fascism.  No wonder people like my mom think socialism is scary.  I’d say that it is more of a fascist dictatorship with two separate classes: proles and party members where the government holds all the wealth and power.  That’s not socialism!  In a socialist society, *the people* hold all the wealth and power.  What I mean by government is *the people* governing themselves. In a utopian socialist society, there wouldn’t even be any police because everyone would have all their primary needs met- like healthcare, housing, food, education, and clothing.  Anyway, I kind of understand now why people who read 1984 might recoil from the word "socialist" if this is the representation it gets in popular literature. 

OH the pink!  My 6 month old girl has thankfully almost outgrown all the pink infant clothes she was given.  She’s starting to wear some of her brother’s old clothes now and I couldn’t be happier about it.  It’s not so much the color pink per se, as the AMOUNT of it, and the frilly impractical nature of some of the clothes.  It’s also the urgency people seem to place on her "looking like a girl".  At AGE ZERO!!  She’s ZERO YEARS OLD, people.  She is a baby who is learning social skills, motor skills, language skills- she needs to be able to move around without the people she’s bonding with constantly having to worry over a dress staying in place or a dumb bow in her hair.  Why is it so important to people that baby girls wear pink and/or frilly things?  Do we want girls to be display dolls, passive and not participating in life from day one??

She will be expected quite soon enough to wear chemicals on her fingernails, her hair, her face- to look at her now and think about that is really horrifying!  She’s so perfect the way she is.  We all are.  I can’t stand fingernail polish or the other things I will probably have to put on myself when I get a job again.  Ok, that’s all for now.

Giving my little ones naps all the time I spend quite a bit of time thinking about sleep.  I was thinking how sleep is really a common denominator, how whether you’re in the US or in Venezuela or China or Darfur, everyone has to sleep.  To me this puts everyone in the world in a common space almost daily.  Obviously not everyone sleeps at the same time, but if everyone sleeps 8 hours a day, then at any given time, a third of the world is asleep! 

It would be really nice if we could use this space to connect with each other.  I know the logical answer to this, that sleep already serves its purpose by giving our individual psyches and bodies time to heal and work out issues, but it seems there should also be something bigger going on…  something to remind us of our many common denominators like the desire for freedom, family time, food, clothing, shelter.