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EWA 2013

3 May

It’s easy to see why those admitted to Stanford feel that they are chosen.  The school drips with privilege, it hangs off the palm trees and blankets the manicured lawn.  Gorgeous undergraduates whiz by on bikes.  In fact, the campus is so large that when my boss and I asked one of them for directions, they looked at a map and then at us and said, “I’m a freshman,” even though finals aren’t far away.

To attend a conference on such a campus makes me feel like I’ve done something right with my life, even though this school wouldn’t admit me if I begged them.  However, to move from beautiful building to building, to walk down the pathways and to sit in halls and listen to some of the most admired minds in our country is moving; it’s like I’m being sprinkled with some of the shimmering privilege that infuses Stanford’s students.

At first I was annoyed that the Education Writer’s Association conference was being held here.  Last year I got to go to Philadelphia, and I felt cheated out of the opportunity to travel and explore a new city.  All I had to do was hop on-board the Caltrain for 40 minutes; it was all very anticlimactic.

In my mind I grumbled about the long days and the fact my boss was attending, “I’ll have to be ON the whole time,” I said to no one in particular.

Though, after the first day I can already tell that attending this year is more worthwhile than last.   Our system of education (like every industry & institution) is being disrupted at never-seen-before rates because, as Thomas Friedman said, “we live in a hyper-connected world.”

Everyone, teachers, entrepreneurs, journalists, professors are all grasping at straws of prediction, hoping to align themselves with the transformers and future correct.  Hoping that they’ll be able to look back with certainty that they made the right choices; that they helped to transform our most important, antiquated system – the way in which we educate our youth.

Yes, technology is causing this disruption and massive open online courses (MOOCS) mean that people can be in the U.S. and their professor can be in Ireland, but also, people are being expected to compete at a global and not national level.  With this new technology it is clear that teachers and professors need to prepare students for more than just the “average” job, or life because that’s just not enough.

Students need to be prepared to compete in a global marketplace that calls for reinvention and flexibility, and sitting before a blackboard while the teacher drones on and scribbles in chalk clearly isn’t the way to go.

In bathroom stalls of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education are posters with the words, “Want to build your career in education?” and instead of having graduate students talk to teachers they’re invited to hear from entrepreneurs, founders of places like Tioki and Udemy.  New forms of learning are being invented like the Rosetta Stone and Khan Academy, flipping the classroom upside down from kindergarten to college.

Universities are even considering new forms of accreditation that recognize credits from MOOCS, which is an ongoing topic at this year’s conference.  Last year it was regulated to one session.

That’s how quickly everything is changing, and it feels both exhilarating and frightening because throughout most of the twentieth century the U.S. believed it had one of the best systems of education; that everyone wanted to come here to attend our higher intuitions.  If one did so, then there was some guarantee of success, or at least one could believe there was.

Now that doesn’t hold true, and at the K-12 level, U.S. student scores are just globally embarrassing.  The curtain has been pulled back to reveal a broken myth: we are not number one in everything.

Today ended with a documentary of how New Orleans used the devastation of Katrina to transform their school system, meaning their schools were so bad that they needed complete destruction to make space for any kind of positive change, and change did occur.  Most of the schools in New Orleans are charter, children’s test scores are improving and more students are graduating; however, those students who are unable to attend charter schools are doing worse.

And I can’t help but see this documentary as a metaphor for what’s being discussed: how complete destruction can be a good thing, how we can utilize the nontraditional to increase student achievement and how brokenness is an opportunity for transformation.  Also, I can’t help but also see what will never change.

Not every student will get the opportunities that they deserve and some don’t deserve the opportunities they get.  There will always be the dropouts and failures whatever the form and the lucky ones who get to sit on a lawn and kiss at Stanford secure in their glistening privilege, secure as they tell those with less, “I will try to fix you.”

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The Sounds of Yoga and How They Can Heal

5 Feb

For the past week I’ve been in bed, suffering from the flu. Not just the flu, but the stomach flu, which in my opinion, is the worst kind of flu.  I’d like to say that I used this week of bedrest to reflect upon my life, but in truth, I laid there with a mashed-potato brain going over every person I’d been in contact with wondering, “Who was that shit who gave me the flu?”

Considering half my office has been sick, and both my roommates, I came to the conclusion that there was no one of knowing the culprit.  Then I blew my nose and noticed my box of Kleenex was getting empty.  I felt that I had to take matters into my own hands.  I couldn’t take another week of the head cold that was starting to develop, like the flu’s last parting kiss – the final Fuck You.

After much contemplation (because my Dayquiled brain could barely make decisions), I decided to attend a Restorative Sound Healing Yoga workshop.  I was vaguely concerned that I was making the wrong decision.  However, from what I knew of Restorative Yoga I felt that a couple of hours lying on the ground with blankets, listening to soothing music wasn’t the worst thing I could do.

I’m a big believer in natural healing.  Not that I’m entirely for homeopathic treatments, but it makes sense to me that nature can provide solutions, as we are of it.  Often we turn our backs on what Mother Nature has to offer in our own hubris, and I like to lie with her occasionally.  Anyway, who doesn’t want their Mom when they’re ill?  And so, I drug myself to this Sound Healing Yoga workshop.  I figured if I started to feel really bad I could just leave.

At first I was pretty nervous.  My stomach was still talking to me, and I didn’t want to sneeze into the silence; then the instructors starting talking.

“Sound is a powerful healing tool because it is vibrational in nature and everything and everyone has a vibration.  Every organ, every bone, every cell in the body has its own resonant frequency. Together they make up a composite frequency like the instruments of an orchestra. When one organ in the body is out of tune it will affect the whole body, especially since the human body is about 90% water, and water is a great carrier of sound.  That’s why music is such a large part of our lives, and why it’s used in commercials, jingles and to express – our bodies respond to the vibrations and pull them in.  That’s why music can be soothing or it’s opposite.”

Everything they were saying made sense to me.  I had taken some Auditory classes in college and was somewhat familiar with Nada Yoga, or the Yoga of sound.  Nada Yoga had always fascinated me because in Spanish Nada means, “nothing,” and when there is a blank space, it can be filled with anything.  In Nada Yoga this means the unstruck sound that sits deep within us; this is supposed to be our essence, our true, pure sound.

And, hypothetical speaking, if a sound sits deep within us then like all sounds couldn’t it get out of key?

So we were told to take Savasana pose, the final resting pose in Yoga, which was the same horizontal position I had been in all week; except there was a cushion beneath my knees, so my lower back could release, and I was lying on a Yoga mat.  A blanket covered me and another was placed behind my head.  There was even a pillow for my eyes.

“This is supposed to be spa Yoga,” the instructors told us.

One walked around playing singing Tibetan bowls and rainmakers.  Another came back and massaged Aryuvedic oil into my neck.  I was finally able to breathe deeply, which hadn’t been possible all week.

A third instructor struck tuning forks and placed on them on the unseen meridians of my body, and they vibrated all the way from my lower back to the top of my head.  I didn’t cough or sniffle for three hours.  My chapped lips and red nose thanked me, as I rose from the ground, two hours later, feeling much better than I had when I went in.

We are oceans, of water and feeling, and we wave back and forth to one another.  In sickness the tide is low, the water is still, and we want someone, anything to rock us back to health.

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I Hope & Pray For The Stegner

3 Dec

I sit here in the quiet of my empty office on a Friday evening to write my statement of purpose and what I plan to do with this Fellowship.  Like most who sit down to face this task, I am worried that I will not find the right words, or that my words will not be enough to convince you; that my work is mediocre and that I’m not qualified.

However, I’m a big believer in reaching for things that seem beyond reach.  If you evaluate my life, I’m sure you would see this pattern.  A ridiculous belief in what one can do if one just tries, even if it is not successful.

I want this Fellowship because I know my work is not good enough, and needs to be nourished to grow.  My poems need focus, love, time and dedication.  I want to use the fellowship to feed my poems and myself creatively.  I want to walk away with a body of work I can be proud of.

I also want this Fellowship because like most who apply, I didn’t chose this path.  One day sophomore year of High School, while the teacher was speaking of mollusks, I wrote a poem.  It just arrived and told me to write it down and so I did.  That was my beginning.

Also, and probably more importantly, I want to help people liberate their own stories.  I want to show others that poetry is worthy and that it can help them express the things they cannot say but feel.  It is painting with language.  It is breaking open the mind’s structures and creating a mosaic, and I want to become the person who shares this message with others, and makes sure there is always a place for poetry in this twenty-first century world.

Thanksgiving is my favorite

27 Nov

I had a really special Thanksgiving this year, and it’s because I was able to spend it with friends.  Of course, being with family is special too, but there is something really beautiful about a group of people creating their own community, even if it’s just for one night.

I came to San Francisco to make my own life.  I wanted to see what I could create on my own, outside of my comfort zone, and in a space I wasn’t born into.  I thought it was so brave of me to do this on my own, but a lot of my friends here took a bigger leap than me and moved countries, though at first SF did feel very foreign.

The first two years here were challenging.  Everything I built: career, home, job, friends, eventually fell apart.  I almost moved back to Chicago a few times, but I am stubborn, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could create my own happiness, so I just kept rebuilding.

This Thanksgiving I looked at all of the assorted people around the table, and I felt so grateful because I had achieved the goal of building a life that’s entirely my own; one that’s full of kind and interesting people.

And I saw this shared community and experience, everyone at that table had taken a leap, so we sat together and shared our stories and tasted each other’s food, and each seat at that table was our own.

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I’m The One That I Want

17 Nov

Some people live their lives with a brick wall between them and the world, a fortress that they’ve build to protect themselves against others, and a barrier between their truth and others.  Life seems to teach this lesson very early on; that someone gets made fun of, or told no, or told to, ‘stop crying,’ and the first brick is in place.

As a transparent person who accidentally built an absorbent and flexible wall, I am fascinated by those who stand stoic.  When a co-worker or friend confides in me, often my reaction is, “I had no idea,” and that little, evil voice that lives inside all of us whispers, “you should be this way, what’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” is my response because when I am sad my life often begins to fall apart.  People might find me crying in a bathroom, or spending hours on the phone, or having one too many glasses of wine, but the intensity of my own feelings can usurp my logic and calm.  This, of course, is not my reaction to every minor catastrophe; however, when crisis hits, I cannot stop my own visible reactions.

In the past, this has led me down the past of self-criticism, which starts with the words, should and why, “Why am I not the way I should be?”

Recently, I discovered Margaret Cho.  I had heard her name for years but had never seen any of her shows.  After watching her latest, Beautiful, on Netflix, I began to fall down the rabbit hole of YouTube – the one where you stumble blindly from clip to clip, wasting hours of time.

Though, my time was not wasted because I found her show ‘I’m the One I Want,’ which is about her failed sitcom.  Margaret was the first Asian-American woman ever to land a sitcom that was supposed to be based on her life; however, the network spent a lot of money trying to turn her into an image that they though the U.S. could swallow.

They bought her a trainer to help her lose weight, they bought her a coach to make her seem more Asian, and they turned her character into a caricature of her own self – a stereotype of a socially acceptable Asian American woman.  Definitely not a person who referred to herself a faghag and made blow job jokes.

Margaret began to lose her confidence and crumble under the criticism.  She ended up drinking, drugging and sleeping around, and as she said, “it isn’t easy for an Asian person to become an alcoholic, but I achieved it.”

Then she woke up in a piss-filled bed and realized how far she had sunk just because she had lost her sitcom, just because others told her that she was wrong; that she should be something else.

This resonated with me because I have written theoretical essays on the mental prisons of the world ‘SHOULD’, and yet when I am true to my feelings, when I react in a different way than society has told me; that I should always have my mask on; that as a PR person this is part of my job, I spin in a spiral of  self-criticism and regret.

But, as Popeye said, “I am who I am,” (or yam), and I’m a person who lives very close to the heart of life.  This means that my being forces me to be true to myself, and when I’m not, there are always unwanted consequences: breakups, moves, lost friends, a tangible falling apart that calls for me to make changes.

I don’t think that life holds everyone accountable in such an obvious way, but we all suffer consequences when we don’t live our truths.  Yet, we are society that’s always promoting the brain, the power behind our ability to craft our masks.  Being authentic is frightening; people see your pain, your fear and vulnerabilities and all the aspects of you that others might view as weak.

While I don’t believe we should all rip off our masks off (some are in-grown), I do think that people should strive to live more from their heart because this cultivates more authentic happiness; life begins to reflect back passion and love that wouldn’t be reachable in a prison of other’s Shoulds.

Margaret Cho screamed, “I’m the one that I want!” meaning that she’s the person that she wants to be and that it’s the most important person to be; that we can admire and be proud of our own imperfect being if we’re most happy being it.

It all starts within, with us.  If we’re the ones that we want, it doesn’t matter what Shoulds are thrown at us, maybe we shouldn’t be there anyway: with that person, in that job, in that house or country.  Maybe it’s not a criticism but life telling us, you, me, to ask, “Is this feeding my soul, is this driving me crazy?”

Lately, I can’t help but notice that much of my current life is defined by Shoulds.  I’m pushing back against them because I know how difficult it is, and the Shoulds are getting angry because I’m not lying to myself and letting them strap me in, but I’m not exiting the aircraft either.

My legs aren’t moving because they’re split in two, and I know I was meant to hear what Margaret Cho said, to be the person that I want, the others will come, and I must hope that I will find my place where my heart can rest; that I can accept myself as a person who might not be walking down the traditional path of life: marriage between 28-30, kids to follow, settled down into a practical career, a person who never cries in bathrooms.

That I can accept myself as a creative spirit who can live a disruptive life, full of the breadth of human feeling and emotion; that sometimes I send gifts late; that organizing will always be difficult for me, but in return for my syncopated beat, I can make my own song.

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Election Day

6 Nov

Today it’s no surprise that the election is on my mind.  I’m sitting in my cube, trying to ignore the lovely weather, trying to ignore my nails that long to be bitten; for it matters who wins, it sets the tone for our nation, and I want to know how we’ll ring out to the world.

However, since I cannot know that, at least in this moment, I have chosen to remind whoever reads this of how special the right to vote is. I believe we forget this; that unless you’re a white, Christian male blood was shed for you to go the polls today.

Even as I write that sentence it appears surreal to me.  In 2012, it seems incredible that this right wasn’t always given; that it was grabbed at, fought over and stolen; that people martyred themselves so that all citizens could have their voice be heard today – however soft and small.

So, until the sky darkens I will be grateful that I could go to the polls, make my choices and have a say over the structures of my life.

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What I Do When Things Fall Apart

18 Jul

Life can look like an unspooled thread all in knots at your feet, and your whole self becomes consumed looking at the ground.  I know this because there have been times when this has happened to me; when I’ve been stuck in my own unraveling.

After my last break-up I was stuck up in my own knots, and for the first time ever was presented with the desire to just give up and sink down into my own mess.

It wasn’t the loss of this particular boy; I had lost worst, and it wasn’t the fact that we had just moved in together, though that was inconvenient; it was that this wasn’t the first time that things had fallen apart.

They fell apart so entirely because of the apartment, and the dreamed future, but also my career was entwined with “us” too.  I was barely getting by on freelance writing and a part-time job, which was fine if we were spiltting the bills – not otherwise.

Crying in the bathroom at my part-time job I seriously doubted my ability to start all the way over again; to have to harness all that energy up within me and launch myself out into the world, “wasn’t twice enough?”

However, I didn’t have a choice, and so I found solace in what always saves me, my love of reading.

Normally I always escape into the world of fiction, or some autobiography about a person who overcame a challenge far worse than mine, for perspective, but since I had evolved into being a Yogi I turned to Pema Chodron’s ‘When Things Fall Apart.’

That book began to set me straight, and I recommend it to anyone who feels like they’re standing in their own self-created destruction, wondering why it all happened, feeling that there’s nothing left to grip onto; that to put yourself back together one more time is just too much, it’s not.

Pema writes, “I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us…It was all about letting go of everything. p.7”

I repeated that sentence to myself, and instead of cursing the situation I began to see that it occurred because it was time to break the cage that I had placed myself in; time to set off without another and discover what was there for me on my own.

After two remakings it had been healing to insulate myself in another, a person who was kind and didn’t present much of a challenge, but life held more for me, it wasn’t going to let me settle into something comfortable, and I had to reach into what could not be touched by destruction within me; that spirit, that spark we all have; the one that makes hope happen.

And so because I cannot say it better myself, I’d like to leave you with Pema’s words, “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy)”

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This Is What I Come Home To

16 Jul

 

My roommate is Australian and occasionally she returns to her Mother-country; however, she never, ever brings me back the pet Koala that I so want.

She says, “little one, Koalas are mean,” but how can something so cute be mean?

“I don’t know,” I say to my boyfriend, always in response to most of his questions.  He mimics me, and yet, look at what I come home to?

De-clawed, fuzzy and waiting to be named.

Love This – 1950s Definition of Hipster

13 Jul

Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying tow … You can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with “squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.)… it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times, lie does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. … . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.

Caroline Bird Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957

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They Say It’s Your Birthday..

9 Jul

Hello 28, I’ve been waiting for you.  Normally, I’d plan some big celebration, but I’m over all that; the fact that you’ve arrived is causing much gratitude.

Last year it was so important for me to welcome 27.  I hadn’t celebrated a birthday in four years, and I felt like it was time for my own party.

23, I threw a birthday party for myself and no one showed up; 24, I had lived in San Francisco for five days; 25, a friend got married, and 26 the same, so 27 was going to be my year.

This self-celebration went a bit too far and I ended up having to apologize to my friends for jumping into a swimming pool in my underwear and attempting to inappropriately chicken-fight.  While laughable, I felt a lot of shame about it, “that was something I should’ve done at 24,” I thought.

Now, looking back, the fact that I even thought a certain number, a certain year was going to mine seems ridiculous to me; like a narcissistic, immature fantasy of being “fabulous” with no meaning.  It seems like the sort of thing a person who swims in their underwear would say.

I don’t know what shifted over this past year, but I am sure that a lot did.  It’s hard to find the words for it; life just slowly got very quiet.

I reduced my volunteering responsibilities, worked a lot, and saw a handful of friends leave my life; their parting words weren’t kind.  I began to spend a lot of weekends at home by myself, writing, going to Yoga and cooking.

With all the reductions: the less friends, the less responsibilities, it gave me time and space to just sit with myself, and while outwardly lazy, even depressive sloth-like, I began to reflect where I was, how I was being, and if I had been being true to the values that sat inside.

Then I met a boy (or man, right? I am now 28), and we fell in love.

It surprised me.  He lived in a different country, and while I’ve proclaimed I didn’t have a vision in my mind of what I wanted, I learned that I did.  He challenged that, but more importantly, he really saw me; like in that cheesy Avatar kind of way; like where they look at each other and say, “I see you,” and for those who haven’t seen the movie I hope you get what I mean.

Between the quiet and love, I began to peel off another layer of self, scratch away at the lacquer that can pile on.

I know that I still have a journey ahead of me; I know that things might not work out with the boy, there are no guarantees, but I am certain that I am entering a new year reconnected to what I really value.

This past weekend I celebrated a friend’s marriage, cleaned my apartment, read two books, worked and wrote; I want to bring all of that into 28; a year of celebrating others, doing what I love and keeping it clean.

Then next year, I’ll be somewhere writing about how hard it is to say goodbye; how certain years are special, stand out amongst the others, and I hope that 28 will be one of them.

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