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On that I was an expert, having gotten straight A’s in Sunday school for years (there were no grades, but I scored myself).
As a child I liked certainty, and order, and clear explanations, even if they tended to involve miracles. But life, of course, can quickly get complicated and human and not at all miraculous. I’d sometimes find myself so lost in a question or a problem that the only solution I could think of was for an older version of myself to walk through a rift in the space-time continuum and let me know what happens.
Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”
as someone who has started many games of Monopoly and finished zero, I know that capitalism is not supposed to be fun.
If you’re pursuing some kind of artistic product—and I think of writing as art—then you’re doing what you love, and your labor is one of love. So, money is good, and money is necessary, and money is that thing that tells you that what you’re doing is not a fool’s errand. But the money is also an albatross, changing your relationship to the art.
didn’t think that we were poor, per se. But after nearly four decades on this planet and a long, nightmarish conversation about “economic anxiety” and the “forgotten working class,” I am willing to entertain the idea that there are many kinds of poverty, that your mortgage can be paid on time and your children can be fed and you can still live in Poor America.
She wore this outfit to funerals and to meetings in which she had to set someone straight. She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”
I actively distrust the suburbs. I especially distrust the sprawling ones, the ones built on top of old rock quarries, the ones where everything is alike in sameness and remoteness and perfection. I have trouble understanding the melting pot when by order of the neighborhood association every ingredient looks identical or you have to squint to see your neighbors.
I had written my editorial for the school paper, emphasis on “paper.” I thought I’d start a conversation on campus between scholarly people with ink-stained fingers or something. I could never have conceived of thousands of people screaming at me online, which is hilarious because that’s what most of the internet is today.
I was too shy to try most fun hairstyles, and it felt like, when it was just cut normally, it didn’t have any of the verve, sheen, or glow of other people’s styles. I now realize that it’s because I wasn’t putting any product in it, products with names like Verve, Sheen, and Glow. I mean, it said it right on the tub of metallic blue gel, but how was I supposed to know?
My hair looked like the kind of hair you give a black Muppet if you haven’t taken enough cultural sensitivity classes and all your materials come from the clearance bin at A.C. Moore.
Is there such a thing as internal validation? I know we’re not supposed to hang our hopes on external validation. “Love yourself!” everyone says. “Or at least like yourself. Tolerate yourself!” But a lot of the time, being told that everyone else—or anyone else—finds worth in you carries more weight than telling yourself that you’re worth it.
I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.
Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?
The thing is, a catastrophic end to the world as we know it sounds like a lame experience. I am not interested in the least. It’s scary, yes, but mostly dumb. And the way we’ve been taught to think about it is so improbable. We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.
All of us have, at some point, logged on and thought, This seems like a good idea! And sometimes that changes when you discover that the internet is actually just other people, and other people, scientists say, are terrible.
Love is political. Church is political. Our friends and family—queer folks, trans folks, straight folks, white folks, black folks, Latinx folks, Asian folks, baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and at least a couple Libertarians, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, questioners, and atheists—are political. This act—daring to say that we believe in each other—is political. Daring to say that we believe in something, anything, is political. Daring to believe that we’ll exist in the future in America is political.
We commonly only sing the first verse of the anthem; it’s comprised of four sentences and three of them are questions. The singer wants confirmation about what is seen, what is perceived, and what it means. And that lack of surety is America most of all.
patriotism, too, is always a question. It’s a concept that has been hijacked and beaten up, sold out and ripped to shreds by those who want it only for its surface rush, and not its arduous roots.
