i spoke to my sister this afternoon.  it's become a regular ritual for us, this weekly communicae (sp.).  she tells me about her life, i tell her about mine.  i try to slip in almost subliminal hints about where i stand on things, without actually being confrontational.  here is my stance, to wit: i believe in her right to pursue happiness, whether it's with a woman or a man, it really doesn't matter to me.  however, if my sister wants my parents to help her in any way, then she must abide by their rules, even if this runs counter to her desires.  in fact, in a deeper sense, although i, again, believe in her right to pursue happiness, i think that:

1) her idea of "happiness" is often inauthentic, in that it ignores what, for me, would be most fundamental: reconnection with her own children.  for me, i can honestly say that any "relations" would be secondary to the objective of reuniting with my own kids.  i think that the pursuit of relations after establishing that connection would be fine, but until that happened, i think it would be- i don't know how best to put it- ass backwards to go after someone...

2) as i may have mentioned earlier, i believe it is this very pursuit of happiness that is so problematic.  happiness, when it is an escape from responsibility and moral obligation, can only do harm.  what's more, as my sister often forms relations with people who are in similarly dire straits, well, the odds are stacked doubly so against the relationship being stable, and against either party retaining their stance (inevitably one pulls the other down, cheats on, lies, etc.).  people are not themselves unless they have their feet solidly planted on the ground...

***

i have no answers

oftentimes, i feel so frustrated.

there is no easy answer to reside in. life offers such unbridgeable contradictions, and the only thing i can do is straddle them, or swallow them. i love my sister, who is presently incarcerated. her hopes rest primarily on some long distance (in jail, everything is a long distance) relationship with another incarcerated woman in occc. i'm fine with that, and i can see how vital it is to keep some kind of hope for love or relationship alive in a place that smothers you with drudgery and weighs you down with the inescapable self-recriminations and guilt of what you've done... and yet...

i spoke with my mom this evening. she's a born-again christian (or should i say, born once, because she is a late-in-life convert who used to swear off all religion). she considered assisting my sister when she leaves prison, but she cannot countenance a gay relationship. and, in speaking with my mom, i realize that she's right, if not about her views on homosexuality, then about my sister's cyclical spiraling life. my sister has this pattern, a karma, or innen, as my grandma would have called it. she holds to desperate people, she seeks their love, and as neither she nor the object of her affections is stable, ultimately, inevitably, both tumble down further into the quagmire... to my mom, my sister needs to focus on getting her feet on the ground, caring for herself and her family (especially her kids)...

i can't really say with any finality what the right path is. even if such a path exists, it's hard to guide people to it. i'm not good at leading anyone anywhere; i'm actually quite lost myself. the only thing i can do is create a field within myself, an open space, that allows others to find a voice, and perhaps find themselves... i like to think it's like this zen buddhist idea of control: if you want to control cattle, you don't build fences; instead, you open a space for them, and allow them to govern themselves naturally.

***

people just try their best to get by. i suppose i do too. sometimes it would be nice to have some reassurance that we are doing what we're supposed to.

i don't know. i have no answers.

dialogue

i have been reading a book called "strategies that work". it is about how to teach reading comprehension to children. its key point is that reading has less to do with the mechanics of the process, or answering simple comprehension questions, and more to do with the thinking process, the dialogue with the text, if you will, enacted by the reader. in other words, the text is not some dead thing out there with a static message that is transmitted with fidelity into the mind of the accurate reader. rather, the text is like a statement made by a person in a conversation, and to truly "understand" or "comprehend" it, the recipient of that statement (the reader) must respond to it with his/her own thoughts, feelings, inferences, whatever...

i started an experiment with some of my students. i read parts of "wonder" to them. on the first day, i did a lot of talking about what i was thinking about as i read; it's what they call modeling the internal dialogue, or something or other. on the second day, which was yesterday, i read a paragraph to them, and then had them "respond" to the text by writing something on a single post-it. it could be anything, but it was supposed to be a legitimate response to what they had just heard. i told them, emphasized to them, that it was vital that they "turned their brains on" while they were reading. too often, it seems, my students turn reading into some mechanical task, where their mouths move, but their brains flatline. i was encouraging, forcing them to instead be active participants in the dialogue of reading.

it seemed to work. some students wrote their feelings down. some students wrote i wonders, or their personal inferences or predictions...

a rectangle of sky

this morning, i visited my sister over at the women's correctional facility in kailua. it was good to see her. we spoke about everything, and nothing in particular... a lot of things about family. i got some snatches about life in prison, but all i really needed to do was look up at this rectangle of sky above me, surrounded on all sides by dorms and other buildings, to get this sense of bounded desperation.

my sister seemed a lot more self-aware and strong than before. for one thing, she told me she hardly befriended anyone in prison, at least, not to the point of truly opening up with anyone, because she knew that everyone wanted something from her. she said that it was true of the world outside of the prison as well, but within the confines of the prison fences, that desperation and need was so much more close and obvious... she also spoke about how people in prison tend to do the stupidest things (she was definitely not exempt), that, to put it in her words, "the elevator doesn't go all the way up." she mentioned about how one of the girls in the bridge program (a program where a prisoner can go to work in the outside world, and then check in to prison afterwards) didn't return last night; she only had 2 more months to go, but not returning automatically meant that she would get 5 more years. if it was by choice, it was a pretty stupid choice...

i left feeling kind of blah. i love my sister, even though i don't really show it much. i wish things could be back the way it was... the world looks at my sister and probably doesn't see anything special. but there was a time when we were so close, and there was such a beautiful spirit in her, a strong spirit. i can still see it within her, in the way that she is so open with me... but it is confined by these circumstances, by her bad past choices...

"i'll be the judge of that." really? people are not in any role to judge anything... the world is so- opaque. opaque and transparent at the same time. opaque because everyone has a secret something concealed beneath their faces and their circumstances. transparent because everyone has a secret something concealed beneath their faces and their circumstances. it is not something so positive as hope, but it has something ordinary and natural about it, something which i think is essential to being human. if you feel it, and see it, then you can despair when people turn their backs on it, but you can never deny it... yes, that was one impression i had, the lot of us, visitors and prisoners, all sitting on chairs that lined the edges of this blank rectangle of concrete and asphalt... we looked like we were all there, having some sort of large family gathering or something. when you looked at people, speaking about family, crying, smiling, laughing, hugging, you would not know that you were in a prison. it was just people trying to feel a sense of normalcy again.

sleepless eurydice screams to be heard

in some cornered hour.

i pretend not to hear her.

it was so long ago when

she was a part of my life.

i have other concerns now,

that i straddle like a bridge over a heady height.

no time for faces and ties

that i barely remember,

with a vague nostalgia.

i wonder at this, the deadness of me

and the deadness around everything.

this very world

a restless shifting crust

trying to cover up some

burning insubstantial

with dirt and cracks and landfills-

so deep as to almost not exist-

except as accident and catastrophe.

a murmur, like hate, a railing at

inertia and momentum

the way the world resists a will

to start or stop, or even listen:

something

so vague, so tinny and blurred

i can't tell if orpheus sings to calm the harpies

or my sister screams up her furies

to an uncaring ceiling

lost again to shadows.

blah. required field must not be blank.

i just watched "perks of being a wallflower."  good movie...  if not for the "mix tapes," i would've mistook it for a contemporary film (but then again, i'm out of the loop, fashion-wise...  and maybe teenage angst and reflection are passe, and went out with the breakfast club).  i of course kept springboarding off the movie to my own life as a wallflower (movies put things so well; in reality, they just called me a nerd), but of course, in real life, things are so much more watered down that you can't taste the wine.  i had no intense secret, i had no colorful upperclassmen friends, i had no cool mentor teacher... and, while i did have crushes, they were more pathetic than life-altering.  there's a point where your isolation/madness can define you for good or for evil (or, to put it in less stark, high contrast ways: pathos or pathetic).  i think i fell more into the wastelands, or t.s. eliot's the hollow men; in my highest moments, i was the heighty ambiguity and ambivalence of w.b. yeats's irish airman.  i remember so many times when i went off into the wilderness (kipapa gulch, or, later, into snowy graveyards), there was no one who would find me, and no one who would give enough of a shit to write me into some kind of narrative.

i suppose in that sense, and for a certain kind of story, it is your friends who make you.

***

we put together my son's b-day party this weekend.  he's into minecraft, so i tried to make things minecraft-related.  i drew pictures of different things from the game onto post-its, and put the post-its into black balloons.  then, for one of the games, these kids had to grab the balloons and pop them.  there were scores associated with the different post-its, so the team with the most points won a prize.  i think the kids liked it.  i noticed all the kids (and there was a kind of range of ages) were getting into it.  which was the point.

***

at times, i'm not sure if i know where i'm going.  but i try to assure myself that, at least, my heart is in the right place.

resentment

every morning, to wake to the same nightmare.

***

last night, my wife and i talked about resentment.  she had just learned that a classmate (to be specific, someone a couple of years her senior) had passed away.  now, my wife is a very kind person, but upon hearing this news, she was completely unsympathetic; she had no inclination to attend the funeral, despite urges from her friend, who argued that she (my wife) knew the family.  she told a story about how, on the very first day of high school band, this person (who was a senior at the time) offered my wife a seat he had prepared just for her.  after sitting on it for a few moments, the seat fell apart and collapsed, to the accompaniment of sniggers and laughter from this person and his friends...

after the call, my wife spoke about how she felt guilty for not caring about this person's death.  i thought she was being ridiculous.  the man had painted himself as an ass with that thoughtless act committed so long ago in the past, and whether he had changed or done good things in the meantime, in my wife's understanding, he would always be defined by that act.  it had nothing to do with forgiveness.

i cited people in my past, who had done cruel and judgmental things to me, and how, to me, they had boxed themselves with the shit of their actions, and that the onus of responsibility for their actions lied with them, NOT ME, to redeem them.  i was, quite frankly, surprised at the ferocity of my passion on this issue.  there were/are A LOT of people whom i could cite.  like my wife, middle school was quite a cruel time for me.  in many respects, i still haven't moved on from that time.  it has influenced my outlook on people in general.

to wit: i am no longer surprised (or as surprised) when people are assholes.  in fact, in many cases, it is the baseline expectation.  i have learned to recognize a kind of soul, perhaps someone who is weird or outcast by nature, and see in it a kindred spirit.  i have concurrently learned to (by nature) distrust anyone who is "cool" or "together" or "judgmental" (in any of those combinations), without a touch of understanding...