Peas

a 90s' trend

[broodpeas]

25/05.

My downstairs neighbor is a very happy kid. 

Whenever the kid gets home, they say hi to their mom, but it's not your usual "hey", more like a boisterous, full of joy “hello!”. I love listening to that kid saying hello every day when they get from school. It makes me smile, the way that kid is able to transmit that joy— genuinely happy to be home and their parents.

I hear that kid laugh a lot too. On Saturdays, sometimes I hear the entire family discuss their plans as they go downstairs, or when they are back, I can hear them talk about whatever it is they did. They all sound filled with joy. It doesn’t really make me jealous, it’s just a weird thing I’ve grown accustomed to hear, background noise that always makes either smile or just snort. 

My favorite thing about my downstairs neighbors kid is not just how joyous that kid clearly is, it’s how much the parents’ kid work to celebrate whatever thing the kid does.  

About two years ago, on the last day of school, the parents of put up a sign on the door, a banner of sorts to celebrate that the school year ended— the kid was now leaving whatever grade and going to another. It was a homemade banner, nothing fancy or aesthetic. Just a simple good job on finishing the school year message. I remember it included a silly drawing, with also some very big balloons. 

When I first saw it, I thought how amazing it is to celebrate such simple thing. I’d never seen that, parents celebrating the fact their child had done this huge , yet simple, accomplishment —ending the school year— that had nothing to do whether they finished it first place, or whatever. I thought how amazing is to grow up in a place where you are celebrated for things that may look ordinary, but really, they aren’t. 

Sometimes I worry someone or something is going to harm that child. That their pure, genuine joy will be messed with, dimmed down or tampered with. I worry that the kid, who is now almost reaching pre-teens years will change, becoming bitter, angrier. 

*

In one of the jobs that I had, I had to babysit pre-teens, other times actual grumpy teenagers.

At first, I was kind of annoyed of having to do this. But then again, exploitation is fun when you trick yourself into believing there’s a real reason to do this: I convinced myself it would be okay, mainly because I could go outside, walk a bit, take a breather and gather myself. I thought I could isolate myself— really, my ingenuity is what always gets me. 

Anyway. The pre-teens were less than 50 tiny humans, and they were —most of the time— super easy to babysit, as they rarely tried to do any messy crap (or I was oblivious to it all). It was simple, just you know, stand in one location and pay attention to your surroundings. Like being a dog at a mall. Me being me, I didn’t like standing, so I just ended up walking around the perimeter of the park, listening to music, watching the pre-teens. 

Sidenote 1: they weren't tiny. Some were talled than me.

Sidenote 2: one of my favorite playlists came up from those walks. My heart rate and overall health was never better than during those 5 months I spent walking like a hounded animal. I hope I never have to do that again. 

The thing is that, at some point, I stopped looking at the floor and started to actually watch the pre-teens. The youngest ones, they liked to play, a lot. They climbed on trees, yelling and throwing themselves to the ground, some with more bravado than others. Others would chase each other, an endless race of who could catch whom; a few liked playing football with the surly teenagers. All of them, however, would eat their snack really fast, what mattered to them was to get to the park and go to play. 

I felt like a weird natgeo observer, taking into this discovery that all of them had managed to preserve their playfulness. When was the last time I had played for the sake of it? I couldn’t even tell you. I never gave into my urgency to join them in game (a co-worker did and for that, she will always be a special human), but I just loved how happy it made me watching them play, instead of being people intensely aware of the pressures of social hierarchy. It’s not that they didn’t care about that, they did, of course they did, but they were also able to remember they had 35 minutes to put that aside, to ignore the popularity contest, the obligations that come with being in an oppressive environment, that required them to obey, comply. 

At a time, it made me nostalgic. Other days, where my mood was really dark, I caught myself crying over the loss of my playfulness, how it felt as if it had been ripped from me. Most of the time, though, I just walked around, watch them shriek, fight, tumble and get up again, sweaty foreheads and messed up uniforms. I can accept now I got upset when it rained, a personal attack because they couldn’t enjoy their minutes of freedom. 

I think I wrote somewhere that the saddest thing about having a fucked up mental health is that enjoying life becomes this impossible, almost insurmountable task. That it’s so rare to find joy in the world, obsessed as we tend to be with happiness, the idea that happiness is the only thing that will make us whole. Joy, I’ve come to understand, is fleeting, temporal, finite. Mary Oliver wrote a poem about it, about giving into the joy, just for the sake of it, just because in it we may find what will give us peace, what will remind us we are human. Joy is better than happiness.

*

On the last days of May of that year, I was starting to think I needed to quit that job. I was exhausted, and I wanted a change. I didn’t like the work environment (tyrannical with a side of possibly, maybe, witnessing sexual harassment) and the pay was really bad. But I hold onto my decision until the very last day before the June break. That day, my surly, complicated, silly teenagers got in trouble for all agreeing to not go to a supposedly mandatory school field trip. Truth to be told, I didn’t want to go, so I was delighted to sabotage that shit and stay with my angry teenagers. I promised them a fun day: it’d be just us and another colleague, and we could watch the opening game of the Eurocup, watch a movie, listen to (my) music, even order food. Sold out, baby. 

Sidenote: I was good at bribing but I have tyrannical tendencies. I will not be changing this anytime soon.

The surly teenagers all came to school that day. While they worked on their assignments, I worked on mine. I hurried them up, asking them to finish so we could go to the park, come back to order pizza and fried chicken (their choice). As an incentive to hurry up, I bribe them with donuts. It’s one of my favorite days of my life. Yes, they were still sometimes stuck in their fucking phones, scrolling through TikTok and listening to music, but I was able to just be a terrible adult and bribe them to drop their phones and just be present. We watched Independence Day (a few loved it, most found it weird, which granted), they ate their pizzas and fried chicken, and later we watched the game. Later, I sent them off home. It rained before pick up, and I said goodbye to all of them. 

I cried on the way back home. I miss those kids a lot. 

*

Pre-teens have this amazing way to always makes me feel out of place. I love it and hate it. It feeds my insecurities, it also makes me realize how stupid it is to be an adult. The thing I miss the most will always be how prickly, anxious and nervous they make me feel. How good it feels to work hard to earn their attention, especially when no bribing is included.

I’ve always being a fan of making sure that the pre-teens and surly teenagers could get some joy. I told them once that joy is resistance, and one of the angsty teens looked at me and asked me what was he resisting. I said me. 

He later wrote me on a quiz: not answering this quiz is a form of joy, and joy is resisting authoritarianism. I played Rebel Rebel by David Bowie all day after reading that and gave him an A. 

*

I was mindlessly scrolling shit on instagram and I spotted this really cute owl done by someone, and I thought alright, this is a tattoo I could get. I wrote to the tattoo artist who had done the illustration, and got it done on my left calf. As most of my tattoos, it’s black ink. The owl is standing on a branch, looking directly at whoever looks at it. It’s beautiful, one of my favorite tattoos. 

After a few months of getting it done, I finally decided to admit to myself the reason of why I got it. It reminded me of the pre-teens and surly teenagers. A group of them had loved learning about Ancient Greece, about the Greek Gods, and the Trojan War. I told them about Ulysses, how those stories talked about war, betrayal, pain, grief, but also about how to hold a spear, trick Cyclops, get lost in the sea and how to pray. I told them how my first tattoo came from Tennynson’s poem, how it was a sort of prayer for me. They all hated the quizes and all the memory shit I put them through, but they loved discussing the gods of the Olympus. 

The owl is Athena’s animal form. It represents the founder of Athens, and one of the pre-teens had found a video on TikTok that explained the owl could be found in coins. I never told that the owl is typically linked to Athena for her wisdom, bravery and sharpness. My owl tattoo is in honor of those pre-teens and surly teens, the ones who cared about Athena, the ones who fell asleep as I talked endlessly, the ones who got angry at me for being so harsh; the ones who liked to ask me random shit at 7 am. 

Truth is, I wanted to honor them. It’s a reminder of what they meant to me, how much joy I felt whenever I was around them (even when I wanted to stab a pencil in my eye). The owl is a reminder that people can grow up to be shitty, that we all go dark, but shit, once we were joyful, brave and bold, even when our struggles are putting us down. 

*

Grief is strange. It comes and it goes in waves. Grief, I think, is the opposite of joy. It’s as fleeting, intense, it reminds us how vulnerable we all are. 

I’ve come to embrace joy the same way I’ve come to embrace grief, too. To sit with it, quietly, a strange companion to have. I like that is always quiet. The way grief and joy remind that, with time, and a bit of patience, I can be okay. 

[broodpeas]

Random thoughts on parenthood.

Last December, I went to a medical appointment to get my fallopian tubes tied. I've been considering this for months, fed up of the secondary effects the contraceptive implant had on me.

The appointment was easy. The surgery was not. I've never had any surgical procedure done on me before, so the whole experience was just anxious inducing and painful. I am a wimp that cries for their mom and their husband when I’m in pain, and it was quite an experience to realize that surgical scars are as terrifying on me as they are on somebody else. 

On the day of the appointment, my dad called me to ask me how it all went. I think he was shocked by how fast I set up the surgery ("why wait" it's the logic behind almost all of my decisions). During the conversation, my dad asked me —like he did a few weeks prior— if I was sure of my decision. I didn’t even bother to take some seconds to answer: yes, I was sure. No, I would not regret it. Yes, my husband was just fine with my decision. Well, if we get divorced, I still wouldn’t change my mind.  

Side note: I constantly joke with my husband about the chances of us getting a divorce. Hopefully, it will forever remain a joke and never become a reality. Toot-toot, knock on wood. 

A few weeks later, when we were walking back home, I asked my husband if he was okay with the decision I made. He said that yes, that he understood why I did it. I asked him again, unsatisfied with his answer. My husband said that he had wanted to have kids, but the idea or possibility of him giving a potential child of ours a congenital disease eased the whole decision process. We both agreed that this surgery pretty much cleared how the rest of our lives would be: it would just be us.

I told my husband I wanted to take advantage of what that meant for us. That I wanted to do more “us” stuff, worry less about the world and their opinions on parenthood. He walked a few steps in silence and the shrugged, as he always does, with the usual practicality that I'm fond of, and said "sure."

*

I considered, in different stages of my 20’s and early 30’s, having kids. It was a thing that slowly crept up on me, as my relationship with my now husband solidified. It was a decision that was kind of on/off for me.

At some point, I set myself some ground rules. The first was that, no matter how hard it was, I had to accept I would never be 100% sure of the decision. It’s just not possible, the remnant of doubt would always remain. As someone who likes absolutes and definitives, it was very hard to come around this. With time, I think I just trusted that if someone who was already a parent was telling me that you could never be sure, then I had to kind to take their word for it. They were parents. I was not.

The other ground rules pretty much came up after I  realized I wanted to be selfish about my decision— to think of what it would mean for me and me alone having kids. The impact in my life, in my body, if I was ready to really to find a way to navigate that. The way it would most likely change my relationship with my husband, with my family, with the world. If I was willing to accept parenthood as an unpaid job. 

I didn’t really talk much about this with anyone else. Sometimes, briefly, quick comments with my husband. We talked about potential names, only for me to realize that I just didn’t like any fucking name, making me extremely thankful that my cat already had a name when I adopted her. I read a few essays on maternal instinct, settling on the fact that it was a neat trick from the patriarchy so women would give birth. 

Throughout all the years that I thought of me becoming someone’s parent, my mind would always go back to my mom’s experience. My mom had to sacrifice who she was in order to raise us— she raised three very different, extremely difficult human beings on her own, doing it to the best of her ability. She didn’t have a support group or people she could rely on to help her with us. It was her, and her alone. My grandmothers’ experiences were also eerily similar: one gave birth to 8 children and became a widowed when my mom was 15 years old, so she had to raise them all by herself. The other gave birth to 5 children, from 3 different men, none who ever did the least to care about those children until those children became (somewhat angry) adults. Both had to do everything by themselves, the emotional labor, the economical concern, the worry, the worry, the worry. My aunts and cousins, many accepted motherhood as a natural part of their lives as women. A task they must endure, that they needed to fulfill. 

In the midst of it all, I bought a few books on motherhood, all written by feminists. I read essays about pregnancy, about raising children, about the cost of giving birth, about all the things that the world demands from people who, due to a biological thing, can give birth. 

I read the essays, but never got around reading the books. 

*

I’m currently reading Detransition Baby. I picked it up only because I kept finding reasons to not read it (reason was sports romance, I regret nothing). It’s been a tortuous slow reading— the story I thought it was interesting, but the more pages I read, the more it dawns on me that this book is about motherhood. Who gets to be a mother, who gets to be called mother. 

The book, so far, has been pulling the thread on trans women and the way they become mothers. How that motherhood works, the way they help women who are transitioning to find their stride. It’s very, very important —I think— the way the author is incisive about this, that is not sisterhood or friendship. There’s an act of giving, of expectations, of desires, of pride and disappointments, that is specific —again, I think— to motherhood.

I was telling someone early this week that I felt the book wasn’t going anywhere. But the more I think about it, as I read it, the more evident it becomes this book is a powerful exploration on motherhood, starting with the question on who gets to be called mother, who gets to be acknowledge as such. 

*

What tipped the scales on my decision was actually a simple realization: I didn’t want to be anyone’s parent. I don’t care about me experiencing any of that— an apathy that kind of moves in the lines of “why the fuck do I have to give birth?”, and “the world has enough children, so”. 

As time went by, I just constructed a list of weak reasons. Mainly, in case someone dares to ask me. 

Side note: they have— job interviews! My favorite one was when they asked me about this right after they told me if I could take my nose piercing off. I had to bite my tongue to not give them a nasty answer. Instead I said: I have a cat, and it does sound like you’re asking me to change something about myself to get a job. I got offered the job 4 months later. I said no. 

Selfishness: I don’t want to change who I was or how I looked for someone else. I don’t want to share my husband’s attention with anyone else. I am not interested in sacrificing hours and hours of labor -emotional, physical, etc- for someone who is not me. Economical reasons too: children are expensive. I was an expensive child, even though I wasn’t raised with extra curricular activities or stuff like that. I am vividly aware of the way my mom stretched pennies to make money last.

Side note: I was a child who later became an adult with no talents. My parents sniffed this early on, so good on them for not wasting money on me with this. 

Then, you know, your classic global warming reasoning; followed by the internet and the fact that world is a cesspool of terrible things waiting to happen. It doesn’t matter how hard parents work to protect their children— bad shit happens. It happened to me! To my sisters and cousins! The reasons pile on and on. 

Yet, for me, the only valid reason is that I just don’t want to be anyone’s parent. 

*

In King, a song by Florence Welch, there’s a line that goes "I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king". I love that line, so much. It's so powerful, so profound. All the labels society impose on a body that has a uterus are rejected in that single line. All the obligations that are to be expected from such body are pushed away.

I keep coming back to that song because it speaks of the history of the domination of a body assigned female by the fact that it can carry a pregnancy and give birth. The "femaleness" of the body not only creates a set of obligations that must be fulfilled, stripping the body of an identity, turning it instead into a vessel. The line of that song is also tied to anger, to rebellion, to the pushback of Florence refusing precisely to be a vessel, instead choosing to be someone else.  

Her next album, Everybody Scream, was even better. In an interview with the Guardian, weeks before the album was launched, she made public she had an ectopic pregnancy. Welch had a very scary health situation because of this, leaving her devastated. Welch confessed that she’d been mourning the loss of the pregnancy, the possibility of becoming a mother, and the loss her body went through as a result of the miscarriage. The grief fed the anger that has always been present in her past records, except this time, Welch got tired of beating around the bush and wrote the songs and named names. The record is a tale of resilience, healing, rebellion, forgiveness, and anger. 

Florence has always been angry. And she’s never been shy about it. But something about this album wants to punch you in the gut —and it does—, perhaps because Welch accepts it, embraces it, and invites the listener to join her on this. Listening to the album is a very specific experience of collective rage. 

On another interview, Welch states that she had considered motherhood in the past. That King was some sort of omen. In the end, the record leaves you with the bittersweet taste that for some of us, becoming a parent is a possibility we reject, firmly. I was pregnant once, and I got an abortion. I didn’t think of it as a tragic or extraordinary situation. I was pregnant and then, I wasn’t. Simple.

For others, it’s a loss, that they didn’t have time to consider before it’s forced upon them, a unique grief that only someone who has lost a child can understand. 

[broodpeas]

02/05.

My relationship with food has always been particular. 

I like cooking, a lot. Now that I have the time to make recipes, I enjoy it even more. It's fun tinkering with recipes. But when the cooking part is done, and the eating part begins, that's when it's no longer fun for me. 

When I was a kid one of the worst experiences I had to go through was how all the adults around me forced me to eat. My mom and my aunt were the ones who sat next to me, shoving food in me. I hated it. I just didn't know how they could make me eat even though I didn't want to eat. The food didn't taste bad, and if I was hungry, I would eat until I was full. But somehow, the bites that I had weren't enough for the adults. I had to eat it all. 

As I got older, I found ways to stop force feeding. I would ask for smaller portions, for example. Other times I would ask for things that were cooked (so they didn’t have to complain about making “special things”) that I wanted to eat. The usual quip I got was “Is that all you’re going to eat?” Why, yes, it was. Most of the times, I would just wait until they were done and sneak the food to the trash or something like that.

There's a story where I used to bury a beets and potatoes salad my aunt used to make in one of the plants she had in her dining room. It took her a few weeks to realize what was happening and she was not happy. The plant died. My aunt stop having me for dinner. The story amuses my parents and my sisters, but I've grown to hate it. It only reminds how much I hated being forced to eat, even though I never asked to be fed (no one asked me what I wanted to eat, they all assumed I would request candies or sweet stuff), therefore, it made no sense to me why I was being forced to eat things I didn't want to eat in the first place.

When my husband and I go out to eat, usually I'm careful with what I order. He has never, not once, forced me to eat all the things that I order. He does like to take the food to go, usually, he’s the one that ends up eating it. If the portions are small and I have the time to eat, I try to eat almost all of it. I don't like being rushed as I eat. 

Side-note: whenever waitresses or servers come to the table to take the plates away, and they don’t take mine, I always let them know to take it away. I have gotten the “are you sure?”. It makes realize that maybe they don’t appreciate the tip is mandatory in Colombia, otherwise, they would not get it. 

Sometimes, when I order food, and the plate is right in front of me, I dread that I have to eat. It becomes this huge task, having to push the food down my throat, thus feeling full. I went to a wine tasting a few weeks ago with my dad, and I forced myself to not do think about the food. To just eat, focusing on the wine and my dad's conversation and what the sommelier was telling us. I ate all 6 plates: the two entrées, the two main courses and the dessert. I was so full I was sick. But since I had never experienced this, I thought the wine was the one to blame. It wasn't until I puked that I felt physically better. 

It took me a few days to discern the anxiety I was feeling was because somehow my brain connected that full sensation to being forced fed as a child. 

Ever since, I've been extremely picky and careful with food. I only eat when I'm really hungry. I try to avoid heavy meals or if I do, it's just the one meal and the rest of the day, I just don't eat. I don't want to experience the sickness I felt a few weeks ago, and I also don't want to have to go through the dread of forcing myself to eat things I don't want to eat.

I go back to the way I eat, to the way I dreamt to eat when I was a kid. 

*

It's so annoying when people comment on my eating. Actually, no, it's rude. 

One of the few things where I say no is, whenever I visit someone's home and they offer me food and I say no, and they insist that I eat. I don't yield: “no, thank you”. I worry about being rude, or being perceived as a snob, but honestly, somehow my brain is capable of understanding that is not a good price to pay if I have to eat food I don't want nor like.

When my husband offers me to try food he orders, he insists. It's a tense point between us- I always have to remind him I don't want to. He feels hurt, but I don't give in into pleasing him.

I think only my husband is the only person who kind of knows I don't like eating. He has, what in Spanish is called, cabeza de pollo, so he forgets. I don't hold it against him, but he's the only one with whom I have sort of felt comfortable enough to tell him. I don't bother with my parents or my sisters- the first ones think I'm being weird; the latter have their own complications with food. 

Most of the time, when I'm staying with my parents, I make my own food, or I simply tell my mom to ask me about portions. She complies, begrudgingly. 

I grew up hearing that food should not be wasted or thrown away. That I had to eat because there were many people who didn't have access to food. I've had people tell me I would never be loved if I didn't eat food. I've had strangers telling me that being so picky with food is just wrong, which makes me wrong, or just a plain bad person.

I guess I am all of that, then. 

*

In the past few years, my relationship with food has become more tense. 

My weight has fluctuated a lot and I am not an exercise person. I wish I were, but I'm not. The lack of physical activity has seriously impact my weight- and with weight comes the issue of being very aware of the space my body occupies.

I missed the years where my body was so small, it barely held space. I hated people telling me I was too skinny.

Side note: again, another unfortunate comment I heard all my life until I stopped visiting my family and when I do see them, and they comment on how they look, I just have to remind myself I cannot go to jail for murder.

But when my body was small, I was able to not be so aware of myself. I was just skin and bones, literally, and I liked it because that's all I wanted to be. Now that I have muscles and fat in between the skin and the bones, I am enraged that I can't seem to shake them off.

Strangely (or ironically, I’m not sure) as I've gotten older, I've tried to improve my relationship with the way I eat. It obeys, partially, to the desire of trying my best to make the muscles and fat go away. It also obeys to the fact that eating healthy is a good skill to develop, it helps you to stay away from eating animals, instead choosing to eat more plants and grains and other stuff. I try not to restrict myself, I just make sure that if I can scarf down one slice of pizza, then I can scarf down a platter of broccoli and kale.

My doctor warned me about binge eating.

I'm not sure why, since I've never done that. Binge eating sounds like torture.

*

When I was 22 years old (or 23? I don't remember) I got a 6 months internship with a pseudo historian who had a radio program and published historical books. She was -actually, is- very popular and I was very proud of getting that internship.

It was a pid internship. I've never been good with money, and even though I was paid sort of enough, it wasn't enough to have food. I lived with my sister, who also had a job, and she was the one who taught me how to buy food and shit.

I don't think she noticed I wasn't eating, as she was recovering from a painful surgery and the PT was just as horrible and anyway. She had enough shit in her plate and I didn't have it in me to tell her I was barely eating.

I was hungry all the time.

I remember my lunch, during a few weeks, was just two tiny empanadas. It was all I could afford, and also, I didn't like the idea of eating lunch in some random place. Whenever I saw my coworkers eating, I would just feel sick. So, empanadas it was. Sometimes I would go to a shop around the corner, and buy something, but most of the times, I think I just didn't eat.

Side-note: I’ve grown to hate empanadas. I can eat one, but like…I take my sweet ass time. 

I don't remember much, which by the way, comes to prove that when you go through traumatic experiences, your brain is capable of blocking the memories. The only thing I do remember is hunger. I was hungry all the time.

The irony was that when I had food, I didn't want to eat. Part of me was terrified of the food running out. That was not new thing, though, as I grew up in a house where food would run out.

Side-note: my mom would do whatever it takes to make sure we had food, but she was not very good at hiding the fact she -who didn't had a job- had to find a solution. But it's different when someone else sorts the food situation than when you have to sort it out, except you can't. Food insecurity is a perverse form of poverty that most people tend to associate with actual lack of food, when the real issue is you don't have the ways to have the food.

When the internship was over and I came back home, my parents were horrified. They said I didn't look okay, so once I was back home, they were back to the whole hammering about food. 

Since I was just going through a lapse of depression, I just let them do the hammering and I did the eating so I could feel sad all day.

*

My first boyfriend said to me, once, flippantly, that he hated fat people. That he couldn't stand people who had such big guts, so big they couldn't even see their feet or their dicks.

I had never heard someone say anything like that, in public, out loud, in such careless, hateful way. Like, it wasn't a big deal to say you hated someone only because you wee skinny and the other person wasn’t. 

When we broke up, I cried for days. I thought there was something wrong with me and whatever it was, it was my fault. After a few weeks, I just realized I never really liked him.

The other day I stumbled upon one of his social media profiles. He is now one of those leftist progress forward people. The vibes on his profile were "I'm a good person and I stand by what's right”. 

Side-note: On Mastodon, I mainly tweet about baseball or books. Sometimes I admit I’m sad or I complain. I’m not interested in vending machine political opinions— that’s what this blog is for. 

Anyway, I read a few of his tweets in Mastodon, then I just blocked the account. You can and you should change. After all, change it's good, we are meant to change.

Except, I just can't seem to shake off the flippancy of his comment. It was a long time ago, I don’t care about him or who he is or what he’s doing. But that comment, the cruelty of it, the flippancy, the easiness to spew such hateful words. The way it hit me, the days I spent carefully watching what I was eating, begging for his quiet approval so he could like me. So I could be what he wanted. He didn't want a fat person. So, for all those weeks we were together, I wasn't.

*

I am a person of rituals.

Cooking is a ritual. Eating is a task that I have tried to ritualize. It works, most of the times.

My husband eats lunch early. I cook something that is just for him. Sometimes I do eat of what I make, other times I just go for the left overs I made, or I make something entirely from scratch. I don't mind, if I make a lot, then it's leftovers.

When the food is ready, I sit down with the TV on. Sometimes I sit on the sofa, and I eat as I watch a game. My cat goes crazy trying to eat what I’m eating, so it’s always fun to fight for my food. Other times, I sit on the table and I read as I eat. My cat retreats, I think she knows the table is off limits for her whenever we are sitting. 

Small portions, slow eating. I'm home alone most of the day, so I have no one to tell me shit about it. It helps. Even if I don't eat it all, or at the end I just don't eat anything. 

It's just me and I can try, which is enough. 

[broodpeas]

Your rage, my rage.

In The Iliad, Achilles, when he finds out that Patroclus dies, he rips his clothes off, scratching his skin, falling to his knees, ripping his hair off his head. Achilles weeps, howls, his rage startles the gods, scares the men in the battle. The world trembles, it shatters, it scurries away.

Achilles’ rage defines the war. After all, it is his rage that makes him find the sword again, find the killer, and it doesn't end, it doesn't leave him. Even in death, his rage stays with him.

*

Jennifer Saint wrote a book, called Hera. It took me weeks to finish it. I found it unbearable to read, and at the end, I was just desperate to finish it. I was so excited to read it. I have a fascination with the Greek gods, their mythology and cosmology. 

Side note: the same fascination I have for Santería, except perhaps, I am more fearful of Yemayá, and that’s why I don’t fuck around to find out. 

For some reason, of all the gods of the Olympus, Hera has always been a personal favorite. Hidden in a cave, forced to survive, Hera spends eternity living with rage.

The book offers a beautiful what if, it gives the reader the possibility to know the story of Hera. Saint imagines a Hera who never had an option— Zeus always found the way to upend her, to corner her, to diminish her. He rapes her, in the book, he rapes her on the beach. She becomes his wife, bears his children, and seethes at the impunity of his crimes, of his luck. She gives birth to a child she hates and a child that she mourns. After that, Hera accepts she is not Hera, but a wife, a mother. She becomes the god of family, of pregnant women, of birth. She hates it. Saint’s Hera is an enraged woman. 

For the entire fucking book, Hera finds way to be Hera. And every time, every attempt, every chance, she can’t be. All she can be is rage. 

Yet, for all her rage, Hera never makes it. Her rage, that is profound, settles in her, like a second skin, until it becomes her. Alas, Hera is the god of rage. 

Her rage, it consumes her because it can’t consume anything else. Her rage is who she is, and because it’s who she is, somehow, someway, Hera learns to be rage. 

The thing is, the fucked up most amazing thing about the fucking book is that Hera’s rage— she can’t do anything with it, although she tries. Fuck, she really does try, but it never happens. So, she just gives in to it. 

Hera is rage, and that’s it.  

That’s why I fucking hated the book. 

*

I think that women learn rage at an early age. We learn what it is, without naming it, and we learn to live with it, too. 

After Troy is taken, it is the Trojan women who bear the grunt of the vengeance, of the killing, and the pillage, and the rape, and the murder. Of everything that makes men’s rage long lasting, destructive. 

Valid. Natural. 

Men’s rage destroys Troy, it kills Priam, his sons and fellow men, his grandchildren. Men’s rage is what keep Troy’s women becoming the impossible, the unfair, the fucking witnesses of it all. And we only know about their rage because, centuries later, women wrote about it. Of course, it’s fiction— the same way Jennifer Saint reimagines Hera, other authors imagines the rage of the Trojan women. 

On Goodreads, you can find some reviews that say that books about the rage of the Trojan women are not very good books. It’s not a really good story, to read about women’s rage, because women’s rage is not natural. Women’s rage is not valid. Women’s rage, after all, doesn’t exist in our world. 

What are women raging anyway?

Why are women and queer and trans raging for anyway?

Even Taylor Swift wrote a song about it, and for what?

*

A couple of weeks, a few US news sites circulated the news that there’s a website that teaches men how to rape. School of Rape. According to CNN, most of its audience is US based, with many millions visitors. 

Some people I follow online have reposted the news, or video-op-eds against it. They’re those videos where the person —journalist, influencer, regular person who is not shy of standing in front of their phones to speak, wonder what that’s like—states how terrible, horrible, cruel it all is. You know, how it angers them to know this happens. After everything, this? With everything that is happening, this? How is it possible that this happens, still, that there are men doing this with absolute impunity? Why is nothing happening? 

Whenever news like this find me, and op-eds like this find me too, I realize that I don’t feel despair, shock or disappointment. I feel rage. A rage that hums, that settles inside of me, until it doesn’t anymore. 

I don’t care what woman said this, but she said you were meant to do something with your rage. 

Do with your rage what you can, make it productive—of course, it has to serve a purpose, otherwise, what would be the point of it? Rage can fuel you, can give you a sense, a possibility, an action. Rage can do so much. 

Only if it men’s rage, though.

Don’t forget.

Achilles’ rage, Achilles’ wrath, defined the war. Achilles’ rage made him find the sword and kill Hector, drag his body for days and days, in front of the walls of the city that Achilles himself would not live to see burn. 

Hera’s rage lives, as she is a god, an eternal being. It’s all it can do. 

*

Laura Marling has a song called All my Rage. The chorus sings: “now all my rage been gone, I’d leave my rage to the sea and the sun, I’d leave my rage to the sea and the sun.”

When I was in my 20’s, my rage felt like it was eating me alive. Actually, it did. I was so angry, it scared me. I kind of thought what would happen if this rage inside of me came out? Would it implode me? The people around me? Would it do anything? 

As the years went by, I’ve come to understand that maybe Marling is not surrendering her rage. She is just learning to live with it. And I’ve come to realize I, too, have learnt to live with it. To keep it, to guard it, to honor it. To make it the reason to care, even when I don’t want to care, when I wish I didn’t. 

My rage doesn’t need to have a purpose. My rage simply is. 

*

Men’s rage is the reason why there’s a fucking website legitimizing their rage. Giving them reason to validate their rage, presenting it as natural, optimizing it, enriching it. 

Men’s rage exists because men’s rage is the only rage we’ve come to understand. That we’ve dissected, written about, aspired to. It’s the one we envy, the one we want the most.

But what if, for once, for fucking once, we think only of our rage. The one that simmers, that curdles and bitters, the one that boils and then cools, the one that let’s us breath, and eat, and fuck. The one that doesn’t have to be anything but just be. 

Your rage, my rage. 

[broodpeas]

Men's rage, women's rage, everyone's rage.

I wrote once that I was always amused by how men in sports behave. 

It's one of those spaces where, I think, men can get away with a lot of things that maybe, in other spaces, evidently they can't. Which is really fucked up, if we take into consideration how space much men and their needs take.

Last week, the Blue Jays (that's baseball, Toronto's team) were playing against... I can't be bothered to remember. Anyway, the umpire made a call and less than 2 minutes later, the manager (coach) of the Blue Jays came out of the dugout to yell at the umpire. He was red faced, spit coming out of his mouth, index finger in the other's man face, screaming, bursting, anger in full display. And I thought— what a pathetic man. What a sad display of not being in control of your emotions, of not being able to regulate yourself to the point where you can only explode like this. Furthermore, not only to explode, but to do it in public (the Blue Jays ball park was half full and the transmission is available for millions of viewers, you get where I'm heading right?), not for a moment caring on the effect your reaction may have in others. 

A few days later, I was still chewing it, for a bit. Maybe I was being unfair— the umpire had made a decision that was wrong, but it just bothered me so much the way this man just jumped out, hysterical as he could be. I’ve seen other managers do it too. I’ve seen players, only last week, two players (a pitcher and a batter) literally started throwing sad little punches because one looked at the other. 

Side note: if you can’t fight like Aragorn, sit your ass down. 

When I see men displaying their anger in such open, public, explosive way, I react with disdain. I'm not allowed to do the same. I have been severely punished for reacting this way— except the ladle bit. Again, it helped that my aunt was proud. After that, she just told me to chill the fuck down. I never did! I just shoved my emotions and became emotionally stunned. Anyway, as usual, I digress. If anything, what perhaps bothers me is that whenever anyone who is not a man does this, it's immediately called out, censored, criticized, ostracized. The hysterics instead of the valid anger. 

Once, a man I was friends with told me that I was jealous of this.Envious that a man can do that and I couldn’t (he didn’t know I did, didn’t bother to tell him). It took me a while but I just ended up disregarding it. Too freudian. No one in their right mind has penile envy, because we can definitely pee in a bottle, standing, behind a tree. You don’t need a dick for that. 

Side note: this same man also told me women were biologically predispone to become mother. He knew it because he had read it and he had the knowledge. I was so startled by this, I laughed.  

To be fair, I don’t like those outbursts because they are triggers. I don’t like confrontation at all, I don’t like being part of it, witnessing, or being around it. I find it distressing, and I’ve rationalized it’s also a waste of your fucking time. An emotional outburst such as yelling at someone to me is really hard, and I’ve always found exhausting that people, in general, are loud— men especially. However, experience has taught me that people are almost ambivalent towards this. Because we’ve learnt it’s not okay to have such violent outbursts, we censor them, but most of the time, it’s just like a weak thing. It’s more of a “really?”, less of a “it’s wrong!”

If you've seen a football game on TV, every now and then the camera pans to the audience. A player misses a goal, or does something that enrages the audience. The camera then, almost always, swiftly moves to people in the stand. Most of the time, the audience that they focused on are men, who are yelling, cursing, crying. Their emotions are heightened, they are gunpowder ready to find a match to light them up. I have the suspicion that the reason they are so malleable to such display is because men are not usually taught that all emotions are there for a biological reason, as well as a human reason. Humans, we are meant to be taught to do something about all those emotions. Our environment, culture, family, school, you name it, they all gives us directions on how to do that. Or on how not to do that. 

Keep in mind that Kant wrote something in the lines of not trusting your senses because they don't hold the truth, except I'm not talking about your senses, I'm talking about your emotions. It's not that your emotions don't hold the truth, it's just that maybe they explode because they have nowhere else to go. We don’t know this. We just empirically learn, without even knowing it, and the shitshow happens. 

There was a statistical study done about the relation between gender based violence and sports. Every time there's a sports event, you can see the spike of gender based violence, of gender crimes rising. There's, of course, a correlation between the consumption of alcohol and other substances, which can't be ignored. But, what I care to kind of tiptoe around (?), is the fact that emotional explosions such as the ones we see in football stadiums, or the ones I was writing about the Blue Jays is not just fucked up because it's allowed. It's celebrated. It's encouraged, actually. It's part of the booklet on how to perform masculinity. It's a signal of trying to assert power, or dominance, but in reality, it's just the evidence men really need therapy.

Or, maybe, they just need to feel their feels. Like Aragorn did! 

*

One of my favorite jokes is to say rugby is the only real sport. Unlike baseball, that has a component of luck that fascinates, or football that is about money and we are all trying to remember if the game still matters (it doesn’t). Rugby is about strength. Was it in The Banquet where Socrates was yapping about perfect bodies and strength? I can't remember. But I always think that rugby is the embodiment of brute force, of bodies that move with grace, clashing, pushing, shoving. The body grunts, there's blood, there's spit, there's sweat. The body is used as defense, as well as offense. The only way to get a try is by moving the ball through this mass of muscles, that push against yours, that can crack you, and they will crack you. I've seen it.

My favorite rugby player is Portia Woodman-Wickliffe. She was a member of the Black Ferns, NZ's rugby team. I had the chance to watch her final games before she retired. I'd never seen anyone like her! 70 kg, 1.70 metres of pure, absolute strength. Absolute perfection. 

Woodman-Wickliffe moves through the field with the grace of a ballerina, the strength of a bull. She has this way to sneak through the lines, to crush her opponents, to push, push, push forward. She comes from a family of rugby players, her mom tried for the Black Ferns, and she actually started to play very young. She understands the game, understands the beauty of it, how relentless it is, how misunderstood it is. She is currently the top try scorer of the NZ national rugby team. That tells you the player she is. Or was. 

Whenever she plays, I’m always amazed the way opponents try to stop her. This is not just for bravado, that's how rugby works by the way. Yet, whenever someone comes for her, she doesn't hide from it, and she has this way to clash and then move. When the play is done, her face is always, always a bit out of sorts. Woodman-Wickliffe scowls, curses, spits, she heaves, gasping for air— her face rarely loses the focus, it’s like she can mechanically regulate herself without having to have her brain tell her to do so. When women/queer/trans people play ruby, they are allowed to unleash emotions in an unguarded way. Hence, in a way that is usually reserved for men. 

The game, after all, calls for it. It's not that players don't have control, is that they can tap into that, use it as an advantage in a way that in other sports, you can't.

Baseball requires for you to suppress almost everything- the pitcher needs to find a center, which is why they breath in and out before throwing the ball. It's a way to push it, not chase the rabbit. The batter looks at the pitcher, focuses on the ball, and to do that, they need to ignore everything else but that. Other sports have this special tug and pull. But in rugby, you need to be in control. You need to use that to push yourself. To push others.

When the game is on, in rugby, you can tap into your anger, your rage. It's a display of a brutality, one that is not violent. That's the difference and also maybe the reason as to why I like it so fucking much. You can be angry, you can be frustrated, you can feel, it serves a purpose. It's not willy nilly, it's not just because you can't help it.

*

The other day I was doomscrolling I stumbled upon a video of a tennis player being asked his opinion about players being recorded at all times. I don't remember his answer, but I think he was asked this because apparently a female player was caught enraged in a tunnel and that was a whole deal. The obvious was is it was okay to record her fits of rage, to make it public; if it was okay for her to be this angry.

Side note: I would like to mention that I think smashing a tennis racquet seems fun. If you have done this, please let me know. If you’re a man, don’t. 

Serena Williams was always, always critiqued because of this. I grew up watching her play, and I don't remember thinking that she was a violent creature, a hysterical being, for smashing her racquet. I always thought -and mind you, I was like what? 15 years old?- that it was the normal reaction when you play tennis. Later, of course, I understood that her reaction was censored because that was not the way women were suppose to react. That Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal never reacted that way (lmao, okay).

The contrast of Serena William’s rage and men’s rage, it dawns on me, is that I always suspected it was not targeting someone. I still don’t think she wanted to hurt someone or humiliate anyone. Unlike the manager of the Blue Jays or the the players. 

In the end, it's not just about who gets to react this way, it's about where and when. It's about the consequences, or the lack of. It's the encouragement, the praise of it all, the verbal abuse endured by reasons that are illogical (sports are dumb, I love it, but they are dumb). It's the display, glorification of it all, now even more due to social media. It's the constant demand for it, and how normalized it is to argue either to criticize it or reject it entirely.

It's the confirmation we all really need therapy.

[broodpeas]

A silly essay on restorative justice and One Word, Six Letters.

“One word, six letters” is a YA novel written by Iranian-US writer Adib Khorram. The premise of the book is about a high school teenager who yells a slur during public assembly, after being dared by a classmate (by the way, the dare ends up being moot because the teenager never gets what he was promised). So, he is obviously taken to the principal, and the whole disciplinarian measure begins. However, the story doesn't just revolve about this, it also goes about another teenager, who is deeply shaken by the slur. The impact it has on him is bad— toxic masculinity, internal homophobia, self hate, it all takes over him.

I read the book mostly because I like Khorram's writing. This book is a bit different from the ones I've read from him —romance, he does have other YA fiction but I'm not a big fan of the genre—. Anyway, back to the point. Which is, what interested me the most about it was not only the way the author wrote about the way punitive justice works, in a setting outside a criminal court, in order to solve a situation. It was also how Khorram was able to think about restorative justice, by making his character come to terms with what that actually means. How he reacts and then acts, not only on what he's done, but also on what he hasn't done. By the way, unrelated: let’s understand here as react as something that comes from spontaneity and act as a much more thoughtful experience.

First, I want to write a bit on the whole punitive justice side of it all. Foucault has written extensively about punishment, and if you don't know who this bald French man is, I want to say congratulations. He wrote this book, I think, in the 1970s, about how in order to keep the body in shape, in control, we humans have found ways to subject ourselves to this. So, like, take schools. In One Word, Six Letters, when the teenager jumps out to scream -top of his lungs- to the entire assembly the slur, the professors immediately jump into disciplinarian actions: someone takes him out of the place, and push him straight to the principal's office. 

The principal there calls the teenager's parents (his dad shows up and, boy, is that man not happy to be there, lmao) and informs to both, that due to the teenagers’ actions, he is being suspended. To top it all, he will not be allowed to be in classes with his classmates (detention), therefore, he will be isolated. Finally, he is forced to to write a letter to the writer (the reason there was an Assembly was because they had a writer visiting the school) stating he is sorry for what he's done.

So far, standard school behavior. Except for the detention bit, anyone who is Colombia and has gone to schools, we either have been part of this or have seen it happening to others (hello, my fellow school crimes. Mine was smoking in the bathroom. I miss smoking). However, all of this is standard because this is the way to isolate the issue, finding ways to correct it so it can be integrated back into the fold. The teenager is not a person, is an issue that must be either resolved or discarded. The removal of the humanity is essential for punitive justice. 

Foucault wrote about the ways the law is always understood as punitive because they are there to punish- if your actions go against the law (the norm...ality, see what I did there), then you must be punished. He took his sweet time to research on how the bodies are punished to comply (also, unrelated: we actually like this, by the way, which I think is wild). There seems to be an impression that this is the only way we can achieve an orderly society. Since I grew up in a country that has been at war with itself since pretty much its birth, we can all fucking agree to disagree. Anyway, this is the way most justice systems and criminal penal systems/law works.

Over the last 30-something-years, however, there's been an alternative, born from the peace processes and historical memory reconstruction processes or truth commissions that have been born. From Ireland, Rwanda, El Salvador and most recently, Colombia; there have been intense efforts —and progress— into not using traditional punitive justice but to use something called restorative justice. So, basically, what this is almost like a series of steps designed to ensure that truth, forgiveness, compassion and piety remain at the very core. In the case of Colombia, the peace accords of 2016 (its origins come from 2009 though) stated that military and members of the guerrilla groups who, after judicial investigation by a special tribunal, were proven to have part in war crimes or in any sort of violation on international human laws, had to give testimony, telling the truth of what happened. Then, they are asked to ask for forgiveness. 

Here’s a thing important to mention: if found guilty, they will receive jail time, but it would not be under the traditional penal codex, but under a special resolution (shorter time). If you're caught lying, delaying, harming, threatening, or doing any sort of thing that goes against the spirit of restorative justice, you're out. Most of the people involved willingly go into the system, some because duh, less jail time, although duh, the tribunal does kick you out if you fuck them around. Ain’t nobody got time for your mind games, is the best — and coloquial— way to explain how it works.

 Of course, many people are against either restorative justice or special tribunals such as the JEP. Some of those who are against either or both, believe that this is an easy way out from criminals, that it really doesn't do anything for the victims. That this only makes matters worst, and it doesn't help anyone move forward with their lives. I personally find this position respectable, especially if it comes from someone who was directly affected by war. The victims are not a monolith. 

Yet, the JEP tribunal, so far, has made incredible strives to ensure the restorative justice part continues. Despite the opposition, threats, doubts and critics, they’ve done so much to ensure dignity is restored. Dignity to the victims, to their families, to their memories, to their lives and also their death. Restorative justice does not put at the center the person who did the crime. At the very center, what matters is the victim —their dignity, their humanity, their pain—. The most astonishing thing about the peace process, and the tribunal's investigation on war crimes, is that we've seen attempts to bring restorative justice into our daily lives.

Which, I think, is what I loved the most about the book. I don't know if this author knows about restorative justice— from its birth from peace processes/disarming processes or how much it has evolved. But this character goes through the process as someone who has caused deep harm but is also being harmed. He is the two faces of the coin: he inflicts pain (and is forced to come up with a remedy), as well as he is hurt by the way he is isolated, cast aside by his community. His brother, friends, classmates, and adults judge him. Harshly. Fairly so? That depends on how your level of compassion goes. Mine says it was too much. His only solace becomes a kid that says "no homo" every time he opens his mouth (which, by the way, is really cringeworthy as almost all catchphrases uttered by teenagers are). 

Over and over again, the teenager says -to himself- that he is sorry. That he did everything they asked for him to do. He was suspended. He went to detention. He had to live without his phone for days. He wrote the letter to the writer. Why isn’t that enough, though? Why, he asks himself, why is he still treated this way? It's unfair, I think this person thinks, that after everything he is done, he is still the bad guy. That he will always be that. Until shit hit the fans. He realizes that he may have done all of this, but he did it because he had to- not because he was thinking what doing all of that meant. That is the issue with punitive justice. In order to submit the body, the punishment is imposed onto the one causing the crime. There's this phrase in English, "don't make the crime if you can't do the time". You see, he did what he did because he was dared and he wanted something out of it. He did the time without knowing why. Punitive justice doesn't have time for why.

Restorative justice does. The minute this person becomes aware of it (the why!) his reactions become actions. Actions that put at the center truth, compassion, piety and forgiveness. I don't know if you know this, dear interwebz, but did you know that when you cause harm, you're meant to offer apologies or your sorry? You utter the words: I am sorry, to say you feel bad for what you did (but do you? I didn't feel bad when I smacked the fuck out of a girl when I was 10 years old. I refused to say sorry then, too. My professors were FURIOUS. My aunt was proud). In Spanish, we say lo siento. Literally, I feel. But do you? 

The beauty of offering your sorry/apology is that you openly, without a doubt, let the victim make the decision whether to accept them or not. This, of course, means they now hold power. I'm not going to get into that right now (actually, the author explores this too, which makes Byung Hul-Chan On Power essay even more interesting). What matters to me is how the character goes from completing the steps from punitive justice, only to realize that doesn't do shit, to restorative justice that does a lot more. Here’s the thing, though: it doesn't change the fact of what he did, but it does help to make better the pain, the confusion, the anger (whether valid or not, again, that is up to the reader, I think). When he takes it upon himself to think of what his actions has done, to others, but also to himself (!), when he considers that the issue is not that he said that slur, if what that slurs unleashes; when he takes it upon himself to really think of the why of his actions, then the restorative justice pops out. 

Of course, this is fiction. As much as I trust in restorative justice, I am human. And I've hurt people, and people have hurt me too. Most of the time, I am as unforgivable with myself as I am with others. Yet, because I have seen what restorative justice does (to restaure the dignity of the person in pain), I always get back to it. I try to bring it to my daily life, even if I'm not really successful at applying it. And I think this teenager in the book is the same- it's the reason why I liked this book so much. When we stop reacting, when we take the time to reflect on our actions, when we give ourselves a bit of grace, a bit of patience, when we offer instead of assume it's given, then sometimes shit gets more manageable.

Anyway, interwebz. Read One word, Six letters. Or, if your cup of tea is hardcore fight between two systems, The Hunger Games series. And if you really, really need something to fall asleep on, read Foucault.

[broodpeas]

03/04.

My therapist told me I should search for the why.

Instead of what, to wonder about the why. Why am I doing what I'm doing?

The thing I couldn't say is that I don't care about the why, or the what, for that matter. Some days, I don't even think about that. I let the days pass by me, like waves on the shore. Other days, it's a banging noise that wants to be very loud, but I somehow manage to keep it as a background noise. I know it's there. Like a ghost, haunting unrelenting, it's always there.

It used to worry me, that I had all these questions for which I have no answer. Once upon a time, I needed an answer. Somehow, at some point, I settled on the fact that some things will never have an answer and I've accepted, with resignation, that there's nothing I can do about it.

Of course, this hasn't given me any sense of peace or tranquility- it's just the way things are. The way I am. The way it always was.

_______

A few weeks ago I read a romance book (no shock there, if you know me). The protagonist was a young man who was roofied and raped. He got justice, at the end. The story doesn't focus on the justice of it all, it focuses more on how Nick finds himself, how he manages to pick up the pieces of his broken body and spirit, and puts himself together.

It hit me, very hard.

For some reason, my own rape has always been a "situation". I've understood it like this, I mean. A "confusing issue". Something that I've always told myself that it couldn't be rape, because how could it be? Rape doesn't happen to Feminists Like Me. How could it be, if my rapist was a person I had in such high esteem, someone I trusted and loved? How if I never even was able to say no? How, if my body simply gave up, stood there, letting everything happen, and then the next day, when someone questioned me if something happened (something in the lines of "did you finally get together?"), I said no, because I was too embarassed to say that something bad happpened.

Yet, if it quacks...

It's been 10 years. Ten long fucking years of not accepting being a victim (I fucking hate that word, so very fucking much) because it implies -somehow, crazily- to be a survivor.

I have not survived. My body, my fragile, weak, traitorous body, didn't survive what happened. It exists, as an entity that I must feed, must cover, must protect so no one else harms the carcass of it, ever again. I hate that it happened to me. I hate that it's been the 10 years and this is the first time I put it on a page, I turn into words, so it can become a fact. A reality. A thing that happened to me.

My rapist messaged me in 2020. Sent me an email asking me how I was. I thought my revenge is silence.

But by making this public, I know I'm allowing myself to exact a better kind of justice. I didn't survive that, but I was able to find love, companionship, support, understanding. I was able to find someone who loves what was left of my body and protects it, cherishes it, makes sure that it is occupying a space, and never wants it to shrink.

I don't want revenge anymore. I don't want silence anymore.

I put it here, and now it's gone, gone, gone.

___

A book I read last year (another romance novel) had this beautiful explanation of the eucatastrophe.

It comes, of course, from Tolkien, the writer who was able to write an epic story about it. Eucatastrophe is, basically, joy poignant as grief. Admist the grief, we have joy. It comes to us, unexpectedly, turning on the lights of our darkest times.

My life, I think, is an eucatastrophe. I have given up, long time ago, on the possibility that I will ever find a way to live with myself. That the traumas and pains and all the shit that's crushing me down will ever stop.

Instead, I let it simmer inside of me, I let it be who I am. And when joy comes, just like Ada Limón writes, I welcome it. It's always fleeting, short lived, it sometimes overwhelms me, but I don't push it away. I hold on it until it leaves me, and I come back to myself, to the one who only knows two things: profound hate or joy.

My therapist mentioned Tolkien on our last session. We talked about the ring and I said that Bilbo always carried the ring with him, in his pocket. That he managed to live with it, then, he was free from it. What I didn't tell him is that, years later, when Frodo and Bilbo were travelling with the Elves, Bilbo asked about the ring.

Maybe the ring was Bilbo's joy and we just don't want to accept it. Either way, it doesn't matter.

"Joy beyond the walls of grief, poignant as grief". Fucking Tolkien.

___

I quit my job back in August. I thought it was going to be hard being at home, but turns out, it's not.

Some days, of course, I want to walk on the walls because I can't write, I can't read, I feel as if I'm losing my fucking mind. But that's not because I'm unemployed- I'm depressed.

(My therapist doesn't feel I need to be medicated, so either I'm doing therapy wrong or maybe I'm not as bad as I thought.)

Either way, I have found a comfortable routine. My partner joked that I was a trad wife, except we later discusssed how fucked up that term was (folks, let's just say, if someone calls you that, you should really consider make that person cry). So now I'm just an at-home-partner.

(He's having a hard time not using the term wife, and sometimes it slips out of him. It makes him uncomfortable, to call me partner. Especially because in Spanish, the word is genderized. So, we use another word -pareja-).

Anyway, I was writing about my current life of doing nothing.

Most days, I waste oxygen. Almost every day, I have a hard time finding reasons to get up from bed and doing stuff. Still, I get up. I take a bath. I listen to music and do the bed. I feed the cat (who is now howling like her life is over, even though it's not, can anyone explain to me why is this happening?), organize the kitchen, make lunch, do laundry, eat something. Now that baseball is back, I watch baseball. Since football season is on, I also watch football. I watch podcasts on youtube because watching TV series is unbearable to me. If I can't stand sports, I read books. When I can't sleep, I make myself tea. I don't sleep, but the tea is delicious.

I write. Actually, this means I struggle almost every fucking day with the fact I can barely write. There are days where I just sit on my desk, open my laptop and close it again. It feels like the thing I love the most, the thing I need, won't come. Until it does, and I'm able to write about 2,000 words daily. It isn't a lot, and most of the times, it's really bad- then again, my writing has never been good.

I don't want to find a job. I don't want to be productive. I exist, like a sad little ghost, in my apartment, and I walk every room trying to find comfort in the books, the cooking, the sports I watch, the words that won't pour out of me. It's not enough, but the idea of finding a job upsets me.

I don't know how long will my partner accept this, so far, he's really understanding. My parents are a whole different deal. I can taste my mom's disappointment (I'm repeating her mistakes), I can see my dad's confusion. I try not to take them by heart, I tell myself that I'm projecting my own feelings onto them, because I hate myself and blah blah blah...You know the drill.

Thing is, I'm a person who is currently hiding at home. I am in lockdown. It's possible I stay like this forever.

I hope I die soon. One can only hope. Hope is, after all, what's going to kill you.

____

The other day someone in Bluesky wrote that the older they get, the more conservative they become. The person was explaining why it was either re-reading or re-watching something. I can't remember, but it was written in the context of doing some remembering, related to memory, nostalgia.

When I read it, I snorted because... no. We don't become more conservative as we grow old. We just simply settle on the things that gives us comfort or joy. I think that the greatest thing as we let our bodies decay is to simply stop caring.

Who cares if you never read Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra? Who cares if you watched the entire catalogue of movies from a french film director? (What's his fucking name? Truffault? Fuck's sake, that twat, you who I'm referring to) Who gives a fuck about clout?

If all of this makes you happy -what a distasteful word is happy, both in English and Spanish, but for this, I'll allow myself to use it-, then go off. If the things you enjoyed in your teenage years, in your 20s, are the things that still you care the most, for Jane Fonda's life, enjoy it.

I digress of my original point, which was to mention I have been slowly going back to listen to records I used to like a lot. And new artists too. I gotten over the fact I have to have good taste. By the way, "good taste", that's a racist invention, do not fight me on this, I have a philosophy degree that says I'm right. Last week, I remembered how much I loved The Veils. Their albums are so, so good. But I also made a quick playlist with songs from The Animals, The Byrds, The Kinks, The Beach Boys.

(I found a song that I thought it was perfect for my funeral. I thought about making a funeral playlist. I also told myself I need to find life insurance, so no one has to think about burial and cremation and all of that. You should too, dear interwebz).

I listened to some songs from The Beatles. Not my cup of tea, still. I added two of their songs to my music library. I re-listened to my favorite Bruce Springsteen albums too.

Every now and then, the algorithm in Apple Music recommends some albums I have never listened to, or I did, but back then thought I was too stupid to understand. Now, I'm still stupid, but I don't care, so I enjoy it. The Stone Roses debut album, that was February's example.

I think we don't become conservative, we just settle in our skin, because we realize we can't shed it. This is what you got. The cosmic joke that is the human existence gave us this, and what can you do? You either take it or leave it. Or, you know, live in between, in a perpetual state of not thinking too much about it.

___

Just today, it hit me that humans are back on the Moon. I think of Star Trek. I think of 1969, and how once I taught to six graders how amazing and overwhelming it was to think we went to the moon. I think of Whitey on the Moon by Gil Scott Heron.

I think of Jorge Drexler's Polvo de Estrellas. I think of how the world is ending, and we are still capable of being in awe, of our ingenuity.

It's beautiful, really.

[broodpeas]

26/01

Escribí en instagram una pequeña story sobre cosas que me irritan de ver videos de limpieza en tiktok. La dejo aquí sólo para volver a ella, quizás alimentarla de más cosas.

No lavarse las manos al cambiar las bolsas de la basura y reciclables, al sacarlas y dejarlas en el sitio designado de basuras.

No usar guantes diferentes para lavar la loza y limpiar la casa y el baño.

No usar guantes para hacer oficios.

No barrer ni trapear, sólo pasar la aspiradora por pasarla y no pasarla detrás de las puertas, en las esquinas.

No cambiar los tapetes ni las toallas.

No desinfectar el lavaplatos ni la esponja/cepillo de lavar la loza.

No escurrir la loza.

No lavarse las manos al terminar de limpiar.

Prender velas con cosas flamables a los lados o encima.

No saber limpiar y grabarse es de las cosas más extrañas que observo obsesivamente, una y otra vez, todos los días.

*

No tengo rumbo, ni norte. A veces me angustio saberme tan perdida, volviendo a la misma sensación de siempre de ver cómo todo pasa y yo no paso. Me miro en el espejo y no sé quién es esa persona que me mira de vuelta. Me pregunto sobre mi propia muerte, cuándo llegará, si llegará, si puedo vivir seguir viviendo una vida muerta.

Las momias de Agamben me vuelven a la cabeza, esa noción horrorosa de la vida desnuda, un cuerpo que sólo respira por inercia, que no existe. No hay fenómeno que lo atraviese, no hay experiencia que lo pueda tocar para revivir. Paso los días mirando tiktok, tratando de escapar mi propia cabeza y anhelo el poder, un día, no estar.

Qué importa la vida si une al final está muerto.

*

En mi nueva maestría se me ocurrió volver a la idea de la representación y explorar cómo poder crear un currículum de estudio más activo para enseñar afrocolombianidad. Pero quizás lo que quiero explorar es cómo la negritud se diluye en la idea de la mezcla, donde sólo se apropia lo que puede ser exotizado y se reniega, con palabras amables, lo que hace que no seamos blancxs.

Quizás haya también una relación tensa entre la memoria, o el recuerdo, el que se elija que cosas sí existen en el pasado de cada persona que vale la pena ser recordado. Todo lo que se recuerda que atraviesa la identidad de lo que somos o anhelamos ser.

Es sólo una idea.

*

Cada vez que estoy en un puente y siento las vibraciones que producen los buses y los carros y las motos me doy cuenta que mi miedo a las alturas es muy delicado y no sé bien cómo se puede vivir en una ciudad con puentes cuando tengo miedo a las alturas y los puentes y las personas que los atraviesan y que no caminan rápido y que hacen que tenga que estar más tiempo del que quiero estar en un puente.

*

Guardé para ver Cien Años de Soledad cuando tenga el tiempo de leer el libro. Me resisto a releerlo porque mi primera impresión fue tan caótica y tan familiar que me da miedo perderla aunque sospecho que una segunda lectura, más detallada y pausada, puede profundizar más mi buena impresión. Siempre me gustó más García Márquez periodista y por eso mi libro favorito es Noticia de un Secuestro, que leí y releeí tanto que el pobre tomo tiene la portada medio rasgada y las hojas dobladas. El García Márquez novelista me gusta, pero el de CADS es uno en donde el narrador cuenta la historia de una familia que -quiero creer- se parece a la mía.

Encuentro muy curioso que casi todo el mundo con el que hablo acerca de CADS, todes llegamos a la conclusión que la novela encuentra similitud con nuestra historia familiar- abuelos, padres, o algún familiar que es un Aureliano o alguna joda así.

No pasa lo mismo con En Diciembre Llegan Las Brisas, a pesar de que Moreno tiene una experiencia de mujer que es común a muchxs (y así lo discutimos alguna vez en un seminario de Literatura). Quizás esa es la diferencia en el talento de García Márquez y la madurez que pudo lograr y que Moreno no pudo, tan diferentes sus vidas, paralelas al mismo tiempo.

*

El único sueño que recuerdo fue el de hace unas semanas, donde había pedido una pizza deep dish, como las de Chicago, que detesto pero sé que no había nada más que pedir y la ordené ranch con embutidos (una combinación de sabores que, racionalmente, es asquerosa) y cuando la iba a pagar, la voz de mi esposo me despertó y me quejé con él.

No pude volver al sueño. Hace mucho tiempo que no recordaba un sueño.

*

Volví a ver Aída y me pareció increíblemente injusta. Cuando Aída canta a Radamés diciéndole que en Etiopía encontrará montañas verdes y cielos azules, una nueva casa donde será feliz con ella, Radamés se indigna porque ¿cómo puede él abandonar su tierra, sus dioses, su desierto?

Aída fue secuestrada por los egipcios y forzada a la corte real. No era esclava, ni princesa. Era un estorbo, un peón político, que canta o patria mía, porque sabe que nunca volverá a ver las montañas verdes y los cielos azules de su tierra.

El egoísmo de Radamés me indignó profundamente. Ella, que perdió su patria, su tierra, su lengua, sus dioses, su casa, su familia, su gente, ella que está dispuesta a sacrificarse para él; le pide escapar y él se niega. Es condenado a muerte porque su prometida -la princesa egipcia Anmeris- lo escucha y lo denuncia.

Radamés es un cobarde.

[broodpeas]

Books 2024.

Here are the books I've read this year.

The romantic comedies that I still can't believe they were published.

Mr. Wrong Number by Lynn Painter.

Happily ever after by Lynn Painter.

Both books, if I could give them negative stars, I would.

Not like the movies. Kelly Winfrey.

The effort for flawed characters is loable, but that's about it.

One-star romance. Laura Hankin.

One star indeed. The narrator is shrill, and that is a term that as a staunch feminist, I never use in a negative connotation. Until I read this book.

The Fiancé Dilemma. Elena Armas.

I thought the obsession US romcom book clubs have on this author was because she was a good writer. I was wrong. by god, was I wrong.

Kissing Tolstoy. Penny Reid (Novella).

I was happy to see a writer debunking this holy male writer in order to explain a very inappropiate relationship between a professor (a russian, very white, very controlling man) and a student (who loses all agency in this short book). The result is a red flag book.

Love hacked. Penny Reid.

Again, the red flags! So many red flags!!

Ten ways to seduce your boyfriend. Penny Reid.

Right on cue. Falon Ballard.

Till heist do us part. Sara Desai.

Unnecessarily long, with a confusing plot and characters who dilute and are so weak I almost stab my eyes with a fork.

It happened one summer. Tessa Bailey.

The clocky app book section of the internet will tell you this is hot and steamy. I will tell you that the scene where they have sex in a hospital is not only inappropiate (of all the damn places, the place where sick people go to?!), it's just...ew.

To woo and to wed. Martina Writers.

Not only is this book terrible, it's a blatant copy of Bridgerton with a very lazy, terrible approach to Austen.

Lush Lives. Vanessa Lyon.

I never understood the plot of the book nor the characters. Yay for disabled queer love, but it felt I was ticking a list on diversity.

Books that I forgot I'd read until I check my reading apps (I Am Angry I Read Some Of Them).

The Rosie Project. Graeme Simsion.

Do not let men write romcoms.

The Shaadi set-up. Lilie Vale.

I'm not of indian descent, but I'd take offense if I were.

Love and other flights delays (compilation, novella). Denise Williams.

Token. Beverly Kendall.

A crown of ivy and glass. Claire Legrand.

I am an adult person who no longer hates read. Yet, I found myself despising this book so much that the hate lead me to pre-order the following book in this series.

The wedding date. Jazmine Guilroy.

If this author ever does a refund, I'd never accept it because no money can ever give me back the hours I wasted reading this.

The Bridgerton series because come on, this is me.

An offer from a gentleman.

The offer! The cinderella plot and then the attempt to make it a plot twist and failing! I am here for this and I can't wait for the tv series.

To sir Philip, with love.

Eloise, I don't think we was ready for this. She became a therapist, a savior, and a mom in like 3 days. She also lost her agency, which was barely noticeable in the books and I am so ready for the season. This is a fantastic hot mess.

Good romcoms only women and queer people will enjoy.

The roomate fiasco and The fake boyfriend fiasco. Both by Talia Hibbert.

Long live this amazing author who gives us red flags, beige flags, sex toys, consensual relationships, fucked up pasts, therapy and redemption.

Say you'll be mine. Naina Kumar.

The ending felt extremely rushed, but the book is sweet and funny. What a delightful read.

Seven days in june. Tia Williams.

The summer of everything. Julian Winters.

Business Casual. B.K. Borison.

Do you take this man. Denise Williams.

Just like you. Nick Hornby.

Fantastic reads that made me laugh and weep and I couldn't stop reading until I was done.

Words in deep blue. Cath Crowley.

The Dating plan. Sara Desai.

The marriage game. Sara Desai.

Summer romance. Annabel Monaghan.

Past, present, future. Rachel Lynn Salomon.

What a lovely conclusion to a book that I think didn't need a sequel. It's just wonderful reading for a YA audience.

The singles table. Sara Desai.

The thing is this book isn't bad, it's just that the characters needed a few pages to discuss therapy. Like, I was worried about fictional people's mental health.

Technically yours. Denise Williams.

I liked it so much I'll probably read it again.

The Holy Crap This Is So Good books.

We could be so good. Cat Sebastian.

The most beautiful love story I've read in a while. I was invested. I want to believe this isn't just fiction. Queer love!

Funny Story. Emily Henry.

The chokehold Henry has on us is deep and wonderful. Never formulaic, never a dull moment.

Ariadna. Jennifer Saint.

I didn't think a feminist re-telling of one the best greek mytholgy female characters could be so compelling, so human and so stunning.

Hanh Khan Carries On. Uzma Jalaluddin.

This book solidified my belief Jalaluddin is one of the best contemporary romcom writers.

Joan is Okay. Weike Wang.

One of the best books I've read in the past decade of my life. What a writer, what a book, what a heartbreaking story. The pace can feel slow but it's necessary, it's important.

The Rachel Incident. Caroline O'Donough.

Another excellent, remarkable and incredibly joyous book. O'Donough deserves all the praise, because this debut novel really is a punch. Ireland is producing great writers and I'm so glad I stumbled upon those authors.

How to fail at flirting. Denise Williams.

This book is not an award winning book, but it's not about that. I love how she built those characters, how she made the lead find her voice, to find a path for herself, to give herself the chance to be compassionate with herself, to give herself grace and peace, and to trust the world, that is dark and terrible but you still can find good things in it. It's a beautiful book on survival and love.

The Fantasy Section.

Fire and Blood. George R.R. Martin.

I was there for the dragons and I wept for the dragons only.

The Familiar. Leigh Bardugo.

I didn't think Bardugo could write a good book and she slapped me. She shut me up. She really is a fantastic author, who is capable of writing one of the most exciting, magical, heartbreaking and wild books I've read in years. Also, this book is set in Spain! it has spells that I grew up hearing. The research for this book is amazing and it shows. And the love story is just great, they have their revenge and it is fantastic.

A venom dark and sweet. Judy I. Lin.

I knew I needed to wait to read this book because the cover looked promising. It delivered so much more, just so much more. The plot moves nicely, the magic is so delicate and simple, the characters sometimes lose a bit of punch, but overall, I loved reading this book. I just love when a fantasy book is capable to absorb my attention and I can't do anything but read the book. I can't wait to read more from Lin, honestly.

A song of Ash and Moonlight. Claire Legrand.

How is it possible that the same author who wrote that terrible and annoying ass book wrote this one? Whatever Legrand did, I don't care, I just want her to keep writing stories that are human and flawed and filled with mystic, fantasy, betrayal, plot twists and love. This book was an obsessive read, I inhaled it. It's already one of my favorite fantasy books, with Lin and Samantha Shannon's Priory.

Fantastic books I read that were not e-books.

A very large expanse of sea. Tahereh Mafi.

If I could give this author the thanks for writing a book that made my sad mind breath and rest, I could. It's a YA book but I found myself reflected in the lead character: her love for music, her distrust of the world, her disappointment and heartbreak over people who insists on hating something they don't understand. One of the best books I've ever read.

The Island of Missing Trees. Elif Shafak.

I started this book and I was very confused by it. I started I think earlier this year and I put it away. Then, in late november I picked it up and it was worth it. I cried, and I couldn't help but think in my aunt and how much she would've loved this book and this author.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Gabrielle Zevin.

Very Confusing Books.

Prep. Curtis Sittenfeld.

I don't have a rating in this book in my good reads. I just don't know still how I feel about this- it's Sittenfeld's debut novel but it's very different from what I read so far from her. It was a difficult read.

Nothing serious. Emma Medrano.

This book has a story that is difficult to swallow and process. A good debut novel, a very good writer. But it's a difficult, confusing book.

How to read now. Elaine Castillo.

Some of the essays here were too long. It's not a pop culture read and it really is a very academic writing that exists in pop culture. It's very well written, has some really good discussion points, but some things needed editing, as in: just get to the point of what you're saying.

Norah Ephron: The last interview and other conversations.

I love Norah Ephron but some things made me wince and others just let me plain right confused.

Yo soy el monstruo que os habla. Paul B. Preciado.

Why did Preciado gave this speechh? It's great but also...why?

Books I haven't finished because reading is not a competition (and I'm never winning).

Ghosts. Dolly Alderton.

Gengis Khan and the making of the modern world. Jack Weatherford.

Heir. Sabaa Tahir.

Devotions. Mary Oliver.

71 poemas. Emily Dickinson.

There's always this year. On basketball and ascension. Hanif Abourragib.

Doce Césares. Mary Beard.

Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel.

La primera cruzada. Peter Frankopan.

Historia Económica de Colombia. José A. Ocampo (editor).

Disorientation. Elaine Hsieh Chou.

Los papeles de Afganistán. Una historia secreta de la guerra. Craig Whitlock.

Opinions. Roxane Gay.

Green dot. Madeleine Gray.

Bad Taste. Nathalie Olah.

[broodpeas]

6/12

I had a quick thought while I was doing the dishes, thinking about political art. When I first approached the theory on political art, I came to the conclusion that art couldn't be political because it diluted both the political intention and the artistic intention- I thought of them as two different entities or results. However, that conclusion felt too rushed, and it kinda bothered me. But I just couldn't find a way to stand against it, so I wrote down that political art, as much as it tried, would never achieve political impact or change.

Today I thought that maybe that wasn't the intention of necessarily all artists. Art is political because the artist is political: it's a political being. Even if they don't want to, or prefer to believe there is a separation between the two spheres (politics and arts), to produce art is to produce an object that is subjected to an experience that is singular and, at the same time, is connected to a community, to a context, to a myriad of things that ties together to impact the identity of the artist.

This week I've been thinking a lot about a French artist, J. L. David. He painted Napoleon Crossing the Alps, and most famously, The Death of Marat. When Coldpay used Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Leading the People, I read online that many people thought Delacroix was the painter of the French Revolution, but it was actually David who was. His work not only expressed an aesthetic that is linked to that moment in history -by the way, his history, because he was very much alive and involved in the revolution-, he also made a statement through it. It hit me, in the most sumblime way (while washing a wine glass) that David was a political artist who didn't want to make the revolution, he represented the revolution. He was political and he didn't strive to separate his art from his ideas, instead what he wanted was to precisely mix it more, to make it -perhaps- one. The audience would look at his objets d'art and maybe would find themselves compelled to (re)act, but more than to think of the audience, what David was producing was a political representation of (his) ideas and beliefs.

Today, as I was coming back from my sister's house, I also thought about Keith Haring. My sister told me she doesn't think he's a commercial artist, and I think she is right. But I've always thought of Hering as one, and today I realize he -like David- was an extremely political artist. His work, especially his late work, explored an activism for AIDS research, and most of what he produced in those years before he passed away was focused on making a political statement about HIV-AIDS. Unlike David, I believe he did want to force the public, the critics and the art system to do something (keep in mind that what happened to generations of artists who died from AIDS before, during and way after Hering died, is something we barely know anything about), to realize people were dying and nothing was happening. His work didn't cure the disease, but it helped spreading the alarm, the horror, the inaction. It made the audience conscious of the situation.

I think I have something to now explore more the position I wasn't able to answer 4 years ago. First, it's too purist and simple to say that all political art looks to impact and cause profound change. It depends on the intention of the artist. Second, all art is inherently political because we all are political beings- whether we like it or not, we are. Aristotle was -oh dear- right.

__

I can't remember when was the last time I spoke about him. Today, because I felt a bit awkward, I did. Of course, I chose the wrong audience to do it. And, of course, I hid some important facts. My therapist said to me talking was necessary but I don't feel ready. Maybe I'll never be.

I'm glad time has passed. I am someone else, not the happiest, not enough, but I have moved on from that pain.

I found someone who loves me for who I am. I guess that is karma.

__

With all this free time in my hands I am surprised I'm not making plans. I take my grief with me everywhere. Still, I get up. I read. I spend ridiculous amounts of time doomscrolling, something that is kinda new because I didn't allow myself to do it before. I cook and I eat what I cook, and I ask myself how can I make it better for next time. I do the dishes and I clean the crumbs. I play some games on my phone and I even have time to think about things I don't think I've thought about. I'm giving myself space to feel, which is annoying and uncomfortable, but I know I have to do it or I'll never move on from this.

I did tell my busband the other day, when he was done telling me about this horrible accident, that it was a pity it didn't happen to me. I don't think he heard me when I said that.

__

Have I written about ER? Perhaps I will. I'm rewatching it. I'm chewing down some episodes I love, scenes and characters and plot lines I think are just incredible for 1994, 1995 and 1996.

I had to look up the other day what a CBC and chem-7 was. Random, I know, but it had never ocurred to me to look it up until now and I've watched ER a lot of times.

Anyway, a short essay may come.

[comiques]

Some tiny cat paintings for the Giant Robot post-it show.

[mmaisonnnn]

[museiums]

emma (alienmoth)

[achillesinhighheels]

Solange for the Gucci Gift Giving 2024 campaign.

[iamwizzzzz]

[webcomicname]

[veryboringca]

Aime Leon Dore | Jeff Hamilton anniversary leather jacket