Wednesday Night Bourbon

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

A Letter to Young People Just Shy of Voting Age

Dear Young People,

I see you. I see you not just as a result of your bravery this week in walking out and standing up for us, for yourselves. But I see you because I was and still am you.

In November of 2000 I was 17 years old, a senior in High School and had to volunteer as a poll worker as part of our government class on election day. We had spent 8 years as a country under the Clinton administration - problematic though it may have been at times - no one that I held close was actually ready for a republican president, let alone a Bush.

But, like most of my class, I wasn’t yet able to vote. So I sat, and watched the results roll in, confused and concerned, not knowing what would come of it all. I had a voice, but could not exercise it the way our country just had. I felt disempowered sitting on the brink of being able to cast a vote - our fundamental right as American Citizens as so many say. I imagine you might feel the same way. I was pissed we weren’t voting a year later. I was pissed I wasn’t born just a few months earlier. If you feel that way, please know I get it.

(San Francisco Youth protesting in front of City Hall after walking out of class 11/10/16)

In high school, I’d seen our state pass a handful of propositions that directly targeted young people. As a junior it was Prop 21, a gang injunction initiative that labeled three or more young people dressed alike and standing or walking together a gang. I’d seen Prop 227 as a freshman end bilingual education - something I was a direct product of. In middle school it was an end to affirmative action with Prop 209 and Prop 187 directly targeting undocumented families. To whatever extent we’ve replicated that for you, please know I really do get it.

I’m almost twice that age now and I wish I could tell you about everything I felt and everything  I did in the months that followed the 2000 election, and say that I felt the fine balance between disenfranchisement and empowerment you do, but I can’t remember that far back. Sadly all of those feelings have been buried by the time that has since past, and to TBH (that’s short for “to be honest” for any of the elders out there who need translation), whatever I felt then was overshadowed when I started college the following fall and September 11th happened during my first week of classes.

You cannot become apathetic. We did not. The class of 2001, much like the hope I have for the class of 2017, made up for the lack of influence we could have had if we had been of age. In the early years of the George W Administration we organized - certainly not by ourselves, but in community with others - we involved ourselves in a lot of social justice causes and took up issues that were under direct political target.

I’ve seen you already, in the days proceeding, take this on. I’ve seen your peers locally and across the nation stand up. Please. Do. Not.Stop.

Keep going. Take care of yourselves in the process, but do not sit and wait until four years from now when you can seek your voter vengeance. Ask questions, demand answers, continue to stand up. Get information, share information, build community.  Do. Not. Stop.

Please know, the adults around you, we’re here to support you. We love you. We will stand for you, and with you. We have to. It’s one of the best ways for us to take action - to invest in you.

You are our future. I may not be that much older, but you are my future. So come to us, for advice, for mentorship, for general support. Hone your voice, many of us are here to listen, to provide critical friendship when needed, keep you grounded. I say that knowing we need to do the same, because you are already doing the same for us in your actions.

I know this may come from a stranger, but I need you to know I see you, I was you, still am you. I, like many of the adults around you and in your lives, want what is best for you and I want you to be successful. I may not know you, but I love you.

XO

N

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

I’m with Herses- an addendum to Sin Mujeres No Hay Revolución

When I said I was with Her last night. I meant Her. But when I filled out my ballot two weeks ago, I also meant the Herses (to borrow a phrase from RuPaul).

I meant:

Her& London& Jackie& Latifah& Hillary*& Kim& Jane& Nancy& Kamala. *Ronen

I marveled at the number of women on my ballot, from diverse backgrounds (granted I didn’t get to vote for all of those above because of how I’m districted). When I say Her, it’s these hers, it’s the idea of a Her.

It’s reluctant and frustrated. It’s that there have been hers who fought to get this far and there will be hers that can take this even further. Don’t get me wrong, I started that post last night because I was caught up in the romanticism of it all, of a HER as Commander in Chief.

This isn’t some “Oh gee, I suddenly realized I felt this way,” reaction. I’ve felt the push and pull of what HRC represents, both good and bad. The bad is so, so bad. The good is hope and light weight lightning in a bottle. The same shit ass problems will be there tomorrow, but maybe having more Herses in office will add some different perspective, patience, that 200% mom shit Louis CK talked about on Conan.

A photo posted by Niki Mag (@nikimagtotally) on Nov 8, 2016 at 7:11am PST

Maybe.

I will breathe a sigh of relief if we do this tonight y’all, but it will be short lived. Because tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that there will still be work to do.

I didn’t articulate the depth of this in yesterday’s offering. There’s the work we all agree we will have to do. But then there’s the work only some of us see and know, because only some of us have been dealing with it forever.

Not to shit on anyone’s experience today, but I kind of feel like Kanye the night of his first tiff with Taylor Swift as I watch my friends on social media. I didn’t wear white today, or a pantsuit. Someone mentioned it to me and I just kind of spaced on it. Clearly because it didn’t register at the time. Honoring women’s suffrage is deeply important to our country’s history, today in particular. But, y’alls suffrage wasn’t my suffrage. My great grandmother didn’t come here from Cape Verde as a teen and automatically get granted the same rights, especially as a single mother of three during the great depression. My grandfather fought in a war as a Filipino citizen on our behalf and marched through Bataan blindly hoping he could do something for his kids before being granted some American rights years and years later.

I watched brown and black she friends across the country grapple with the same things I did today. I watched white she friends take pride in something so important to their mothers, grandmothers and daughters, bearing not only “I Voted” stickers but the duality of the burdens carried by their she ancestors and the pride and excitement of the future.

But, 2016 feminism is not an aesthetic. I didn’t wear white. I didn’t even wear a blazer. I did wear my Frida Khalo wearing a burka pin. I did wear my “protect your brown girl magic” pin, and I did wear my “Bawse” lipstick, a color collab with a Canadian born-Indian media personality Lilly Singh who promotes female badassery.

I did those things in the hopes of conjuring something deeper and somewhat unconsciously. Being with Herses is about accepting, embracing and fighting for intersectional feminisms, making counter feminisms mainstream. This is the work we need to do. It isn’t just for HRC, or Susan B. Anthony, Or Ida B. Wells (what’s up with them B middle initials tho?) or Shirley Chisholm. We need to be with Her, and Her, and Her, and Her, and Her… and Her…. That is our revolution.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

I’m with Herses- an addendum to Sin Mujeres No Hay Revolución

When I said I was with Her last night. I meant Her. But when I filled out my ballot two weeks ago, I also meant the Herses (to borrow a phrase from RuPaul).

I meant:

Her& London& Jackie& Latifah& Hillary*& Kim& Jane& Nancy& Kamala. *Ronen

I marveled at the number of women on my ballot, from diverse backgrounds (granted I didn’t get to vote for all of those above because of how I’m districted). When I say Her, it’s these hers, it’s the idea of a Her.

It’s reluctant and frustrated. It’s that there have been hers who fought to get this far and there will be hers that can take this even further. Don’t get me wrong, I started that post last night because I was caught up in the romanticism of it all, of a HER as Commander in Chief.

This isn’t some “Oh gee, I suddenly realized I felt this way,” reaction. I’ve felt the push and pull of what HRC represents, both good and bad. The bad is so, so bad. The good is hope and light weight lightning in a bottle. The same shit ass problems will be there tomorrow, but maybe having more Herses in office will add some different perspective, patience, that 200% mom shit Louis CK talked about on Conan.

A photo posted by Niki Mag (@nikimagtotally) on Nov 8, 2016 at 7:11am PST

Maybe.

I will breathe a sigh of relief if we do this tonight y’all, but it will be short lived. Because tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that there will still be work to do.

I didn’t articulate the depth of this in yesterday’s offering. There’s the work we all agree we will have to do. But then there’s the work only some of us see and know, because only some of us have been dealing with it forever.

Not to shit on anyone’s experience today, but I kind of feel like Kanye the night of his first tiff with Taylor Swift as I watch my friends on social media. I didn’t wear white today, or a pantsuit. Someone mentioned it to me and I just kind of spaced on it. Clearly because it didn’t register at the time. Honoring women’s suffrage is deeply important to our country’s history, today in particular. But, y’alls suffrage wasn’t my suffrage. My great grandmother didn’t come here from Cape Verde as a teen and automatically get granted the same rights, especially as a single mother of three during the great depression. My grandfather fought in a war as a Filipino citizen on our behalf and marched through Bataan blindly hoping he could do something for his kids before being granted some American rights years and years later.

I watched brown and black she friends across the country grapple with the same things I did today. I watched white she friends take pride in something so important to their mothers, grandmothers and daughters, bearing not only “I Voted” stickers but the duality of the burdens carried by their she ancestors and the pride and excitement of the future.

But, 2016 feminism is not an aesthetic. I didn’t wear white. I didn’t even wear a blazer. I did wear my Frida Khalo wearing a burka pin. I did wear my “protect your brown girl magic” pin, and I did wear my “Bawse” lipstick, a color collab with a Canadian born-Indian media personality Lilly Singh who promotes female badassery.

I did those things in the hopes of conjuring something deeper and somewhat unconsciously. Being with Herses is about accepting, embracing and fighting for intersectional feminisms, making counter feminisms mainstream. This is the work we need to do. It isn’t just for HRC, or Susan B. Anthony, Or Ida B. Wells (what's up with them B middle initials tho?) or Shirley Chisholm. We need to be with Her, and Her, and Her, and Her, and Her… and Her…. That is our revolution.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Sin Mujeres No Hay Revolución: Being With Her

Woooooooo what a ride it’s been.

I’d love to explain my absence in great detail, but most of you know about it already, and there’s still some bits and pieces that are better off left in the past.

But, to lay some track, I give you two lists.

Things I love:

Smoked Paprika

Icy Hot

Bite Beauty lipsticks

Rose-Gray Colored things (not a metaphor I swear, it might honestly be on it’s way to being a problem how much I love this color…)

Discovering that Sesame Street has an entire curriculum devoted to teaching and supporting children of incarcerated parents while doing research for my new job*

My new job*

* I hesitate to say this, but after 6 years in my previous job - I may be one of the luckiest people you know in that I’m about a month in on a variation of what might be my dream job

Things that happened:

Our Mag Familia mascot and the magical pup that saved all who he came into contact with, Sir Francis Drake passed away (suddenly, quickly, and other applicable adverbs);

My past job and I parted ways after a slightly turbulent breakup;

I had to take an unplanned but mostly appreciated almost 10 day vacation;

During that vacation I spent 3 days being questioned in the jury box and thankfully dismissed from a case where an old Chinese man allegedly assaulted a police officer;

I volunteered at a youth event and got into a yelling match with a 6th grader, she promptly apologized;

I cleansed myself of social media during presidential (and vice presidential) debates;

I missed this orange October run from the Giants on social media;

The Mag Familia got a foster/not foster dog Reggie Jackson aka Lady Regina aka Ms. Regina Jackson, Ms. Jackson if ya nasty (we were destined to be a #fosterfail and ended up keeping her of course

Insert other specifics re: media, pop-culture, election season and there you have it.

Per usual, that was a long lead in to why we’re here today and where I’ve been.

Tomorrow we may be electing our first female president. I’m With Her. This was a difficult conclusion to arrive at. I wasn’t with Her when she ran against Barack. I was with him, as I’ve articulated here before. I wasn’t with Her initially in this race because of crazy shit that was said by Her/Her camp about black and brown folks. I wasn’t with Her initially for all the reasons everyone else has discussed and waxed about for the last year. I was with the old Jewish guy, because he’d stood for brown and black folk more radically than She did, for people more like me than She did. I don’t know, I went to a private liberal arts school in upstate NY - liberal jews were a people I was comfortable with. But now, I can’t not be with Her. I have to be with Her, and that ‘with,’ has gone from a half hearted, “I guess” to a more sincere, authentic, “no, I am.”

There are two parts to this and both have me feeling some kind of way today.

There’s the never, ever, ever the Orange One sentiment. The never, ever, ever a current variations of repubs sentiment. When BSands conceded the nomination, a colleague - a white lady in her 50s who grew up poor a shit, working class from a large family and came to my old office asking if I could believe it, could I believe we were on the brink of maybe having our first female president! I expressed my discomfort with Her.

“Look,” she said to me plainly, “You really think that old guy had a shot? An old white guy amongst a bunch of other not as old white guys? We don’t need any more old white guys! We have someone dynamic, who’s well qualified and could very well be our first female president! Get with the program!”  

I’m going to ask you to reserve any peanut gallery comments for just a moment. Suspend any judgement that might be creeping up.

She wasn’t wrong. She was deeply right, not sure I would have articulated it as succinctly if I tried and knowing there was more to it than that. Since, everyone has articulated why being with Her is so important and why the narratives attached to being with Her require critical consideration.

David Valdes Greenwood summed it up quite clearly in his viral HuffPo piece:

“If you love me and you’re going to vote for Trump, I would like you to look me in the eye and say, “I’m OK with what Trump plans for you.” If you love my daughter, whose growth you have followed with joy, I want you to look her in the eye and say, “I’m OK with how Trump talks about you.”

Maybe dig out our holiday card from last year and, while looking at our smiling faces, practice saying to us: “You are less than me.”

Because that is what your vote for Trump says to my family.”

Being with Her, largely validates me in a way that voting against Her makes me less than. It stirs up some excitement, some pride and some level of Cautious optimism, capital C on Cautious.

A photo posted by Niki Mag (@nikimagtotally) on Nov 7, 2016 at 8:32am PST

It’s kind of a glorious time to be a woman. You might not vibe off of that when you look at the news, or some of mainstream media’s stories, but there seem to be a myriad of ways that women are creating and inventing spaces for expression and experience with relative ease. It’s easy to say that that could be in response to the momentum left over from Her run or as a response to being against the Orange One. Feminism is hot right now.

Yeah, some feminism today is white middle class liberal feminism. When I picture ‘Nasty Women,’ I don’t just picture Her in a pantsuit, or the financially stable career oriented young women I know doing theirs.  I think of young women fighting for reproductive rights, reclaiming handcrafts by needlepointing Beyoncé quotes, wearing fashion of past/present/future but gender fluid, with mixed degrees of body hair and a bold lip. Yes, you’re probably having trouble seeing exactly who I mean, which is fine, because I’m painting a spectrum, but you definitely saw someone independent right? Someone who is both tough and feminine maybe? Someone not taking shit from others, or if she isn’t outwardly speaking out against it, maybe she’s doing something subversive and behind the scenes…. Bet she was white though? First image I came up with was.

For what it’s worth, I do at times, also think of the counter feminisms - the black girls who are from the future/magic, Issa Rae signing to herself in her bathroom, Solange on stage at SNL basically wearing a dreamcatcher on her head singing about the power of her hair - which have clawed their ways out of the internet, and tumblr and onto screen and stage.

Y’all know my hyphen-American ass has some feelings about all of this. I’m deeply proud of my black sistren and their ability to jump out on the scene and be visible. But I’m not sure that visibility = representation = change in a discourse like feminism.

2016 feminism is not an aesthetic, but I wonder if that’s how we’re treating it, or if that’s what it’s become. I certainly described it above in aesthetic terms. As a 30 something hyphen I feel both alienated and empowered by the two feminisms I described above, both of which seem to have gained space because on a national level we’re making space to see and hear more female voices (at least marginally).

I’ve sought out other groups via social media, seeking a place or an hermandad that I could claim. I may have reckoned with a lot of my own hybridity on deeply personal levels, but claiming and belonging still don’t come naturally. So in direct contrast with my idea that feminism is not an aesthetic, it was of course on Instagram that I found a few Latina communities and groups that represent an experience that feels a little closer to home. Maybe it’s the shared language outside of English, or being a proud Chingona, maybe it’s things like the ode to hoop earrings I saw on FB. If I’d found something comparable for our API women by now, I’d be following/trolling/reblogging, bet.

So here I am, November 7th, 2016, marinating on being a woman. Holy hell we’ve been through it this year. Our rights and our persons have been the topic of public conversation in more ways than normal with the election cycle we’ve been subject to. And somehow we’re simultaneously seeing more ways, bolder ones at that, of how femininity/womanhood/feminism is expressed.

I’m nervous, and confused, and excited about the present and the future. I’m disappointed about the past, sure, but if we don’t look ahead… what’s the point? As much as I get frustrated and have been waxing (in personal life) about not being there for eachother, my favorite theme of 2016 being cultivating that black/brown/yellow/white/mocha love, we also have to be here for our selves. Maybe being with Her, is a piece of that and a piece of our necessary revolution.

I’m going to leave you with this clip - full of badasswomanery but also because of the following lyrics:

When it feels like

The world is on your shoulders

And all of the madness

Has got you goin' crazy

It's time to get out

Step out into the street

Where all of the action

Is right there at your feet,

Well

I know a place where we can

Dance the whole night away

Underneath the electric stars

….See y’all under the electric stars.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

What Meditation has Taught Me: I am not, in fact, a hot mess

There’s still a story here that I can’t tell, but what I’m learning is that maybe it’s just that, a story and not a reality. Someday I’ll tell it, hopefully soon.

In June I joined a meditation group specifically for People of Color. I’ve never been good at meditating, tried over and over but never succeeded. Coincidentally, we meet on Wednesdays. I often look around the room after our 30 minute sit each week and am grateful. We were together the night after news about Alton Sterling. We are together mid week, where stress and frustration is often at it’s precipice and I am so, so thankful, for the space and affinity group, and the fact that I am sitting in a room full of black and brown faces.

10 weeks of this regular practice - with lite private practice at home, it’s been invaluable. I mused on my two month marker:

“I'm deeply grateful that it's helped me experience a pretty significant paradigm shift in dealing with the daily/lingering/predictable BS that comes at me every day.

As an imperfect being (and recovering Catholic) it's really helping me when I have to really reach into my spirit in both a spiritual way but also as a survival mechanism.

When we - as people of color, young people with old souls, as women, as intersectional beings et. al. - allow ourselves to be so, we can really be resilient as fuck.”

So here it is, here is what meditation has taught me.

I can sit still for 30 minutes

This spring and summer has worn me down. I feel like a shell of myself sometimes. I’m a weirdo, a stone cold one, I’m goofy and I’m a clown at heart but I’ve felt like a dulled version of who I am. Despite that, the idea of me sitting still for any period of time is like a joke to so many of my kin - blood and otherwise. But I can do it. I need it. For at last 30 minutes a week I can sit and practice mindfulness, or try to, or not at all, but take that 30, brief as it might be and only a fraction of the over 10,000 minutes in a week, for me, and no one else. It’s become a sacred moment that I cannot, and will not give up for anyone else.

A video posted by Niki Mag (@nikimagtotally) on Jul 9, 2016 at 10:06pm PDT

I can get through “this” because everything is impermanent

A lot of what I learned isn’t something I’m necessarily cognizant of in the moment, but as I reflect on things later, it’s clear the tools I’ve developed over the last few weeks have been at play. So much of Buddhist thought is about moments and things passing. At some point, perhaps finally giving in or some form of acceptance, relinquishing control, I heard a favorite teacher and mentor’s voice. It wasn’t just “this too shall pass” as elders often tell us, but a very specific phrase Ms. Furaha used to say to me over and over again. “Let it go Joe.” This might be a little bit of an over simplification, but as desperate as I have been for movement, for change, for the conditions I’d been living through to be different, soon, now, yesterday, I realized that it would change. That though I couldn’t have full control over it all, what I did have was control over how I dealt with it and processed it during those inbetweens.

Breath is everything

I don’t know that I was ever really an indoor, or an outdoor kid to be exact. Y’all know I wasn’t exactly athletic, but there’s one thing that’s critical to me. The Ocean. My people, historically and again on that kin level, are coastal folk. Beach, coastal redwoods, islands, I’ve always fucked with them. So after a spring and summer of the above mentioned and the lather rinse, repeat of my previous posts, I feel serious spring fever. Not during spring. I feel it now, because spring passed, and summer almost gone, and I spent the last few months cooped up inside. My vitamin D levels are probably low, but so was my need for salt water, and air. Meditation and mindfulness, reminds you to breathe. Not just in relationship to concentration during whatever style of practice you do but in grounding yourself, in firing your synapses and bringing them energy. Breath, is also, on a very meta level, what I go to during tough times, not just the act but the fact that it makes one pause, take a beat - ultimately preventing me from doing, or saying something I will regret later. Yes, as we say in group each week, is you can always, come back to your breath.

Loving Kindness and Sympathetic Joy are pretty rad notions

Me, musing on love and kindness and loving kindness can’t be a surprise to you. It’s something I’ve been asking for, trying to bring to my own reality, but also the one we all share and live in together. My hope for it, my need to recreate it and share it as best I can is absolutely tied to the hate being birthed by election season, by current events. So the idea of sending someone, some loving kindness even in the smallest ways should have be a given. The tools of metta meditation specifically, have allowed me in the most heated, hottest moments professionally (because if you haven’t caught on, that’s been the only life I’ve been letting myself live) rather than explode, or say something crazy I’ve caught myself sending loving kindness to the person or thing that triggered it to begin with.

May you learn to love yourself. | May you live with ease. - Simple moments, part of the beat mentioned above, the redirection and paradigm shift I first noticed a few weeks ago.

Sympathetic Joy, or Mudita specifically, has been a different sentiment that I’ve experienced and practiced less. The idea of being genuinely excited and happy for someone and what they are experiencing, with absolutely no self-interest in it all. I hope for it, I look for it and if it arises I feel lucky to have experienced it. As a result I try to celebrate others when and how I can. It’s a necessary component of self care and social responsibility feel I have to my affinity groups, and POCs especially.

I have my shit more together than it feels

Today the discussion that followed our meditation session was about hindrances. Buddha outlined five of them, the one we discussed specifically was aversion - aka, anger, fear, annoyance, etc. etc. etc. The main form we discussed was self-hate. It’s 2016 and I’m a 30 something short, smart, clown and mixed-race woman of color. I know self-hate. Who doesn’t? Childhood, teens, twenties. In college I took all my self-deprecation and hate and flipped it. Turned it into fuel for my ventures in standup and comedy.  There wasn’t a way for me to really understand it then, but that shit fortified me for a lot of future work. My improv skills make navigating crazy shit professionally or operating with a rough template or sketch. But really, it also, getting laughs - which is still in my top priorities in most moments, served as a way that that self-hate dissipated. The last year has been a series of feeling like in word, name, and respect, I am at a peak. Cannot get, be, or do better. But in action, in practice, that’s not the reflection. What could turn into a really deep dark place to head toward, I know I’m the shit, regardless of the outcome of what’s going down. Yeah, vague, still part of the story I can’t tell yet. But for once, there’s a push pull between how I really feel about myself, and the conditions that are keeping me from being rewarded for being so fucking awesome, are out of my control. Tonight I realized, and accept that the days where I feel fat, and crappy and instead of hating my body I’m thinking, this outfit was a bad choice, next time I’ll add a belt, are grown, grown days. Self-hate isn’t a hindrance, it’s not fuel any more either, it just is. Just like stress, just like love, just like happiness.

Meditation has helped me remain resilient, has helped me protect my magic, and hopefully helped how I treat and show care for others during this crazy ass time.

May all beings be peaceful and happy.

May all beings feel safe and protected.

May all beings move through challenges with wisdom and compassion.

May all beings trust and love themselves just as they are.

Also, the Buddha was not just a spiritual teacher and student, but also a scientist, and hella real y’all, so of course I’m fascinated by someone who keeps shit really real.

[in-the-year--3005]

Ghostbusters, an equation:    4 funny women over 30, where the panning shots are of their talented action and not sexualizing their bodies. + 3 women with PhDs, and 1 with an encyclopedic knowledge of New York, who go into business for themselves and help each other get over craving validation from academia; all the while demonstrating that skill, talent, and knowledge can happen outside institutional systems of oppression. + 2 friends who wrote a book together, and the central love story is a platonic love story. + 1 queer artistic genius engineer with keen fashion sense that represents the mad scientist every little girl wanted to be growing up. = Why people in their 30s find themselves spontaneously crying at this movie, and why Ghostbusters is the signal that everything is changing.

Jilly Dreadful (via casaofjules2)

[thatonedood]

4 months.

4 months until you’re released

and i don’t know if this world is ready

           for your presence.

presents await you at home

and so does punishment

unwarranted

           undeserved, but

                       understand

that none of this will make sense

we pray for your safe delivery

for your health and sanity

but all that’s guaranteed

           is insanity.

a calamity of a world

we made for you

i’m sorry.

4 months until you’re with us

you told me you lied to me

because you didn’t trust me

i forgave you.

           wait.

                       no.

                       apology.

                                   is needed.

i’m sorry you couldn’t trust me

trust us

when it was just us

you relied on for just

           trust.

and how could you?

when everyone told you to

shine your light for the world to see

only for your light to be extinguished by

           the darkness of night

i might be tempted to tell you that i can give you

a path where at last

your light is free to

illuminate your beauty

but they don’t care about your beauty.

because if your beauty

is stronger than their power

then you’ll be told you’re ugly

so i know why you didn’t believe me when i told you

your smile brightened my world.

4 months until you’re released

and i wish you could just stay where you are

it’s not that i don’t want you here with me

           with us

                       with love

but what can we do when

love isn’t enough

to shield you from sentences

           from judgment

                       from fences

                                   from bullets

                                               FROM HATE

from me being too late to tell you to

           love yourself

so that you don’t run out

looking for love from people who have nothing

           but hate

but wait.

if you want one person

           one family

                       ONE VILLAGE

we’re here.

i’m here.

           i will always

                       be.

4 months until your release date

at least fate will tell us whether

           god

or the

           earth

has blessed us.

to replenish our souls with wisdom of how

           simple

our world needs to be

you’re feeding me with nourishment

food for thought

fraught with doubt that i’m the right one

to counsel you

           to advise you

                       to guide you

                                   to father you

see, i represent you

but you represent me,

           too.

a reflection of tears welled up

like a small pond

bonded together by randomness

but the weather couldn’t have been more true

to have the sun

shine your light on us

the way you’re meant

           to shine

i pray this isn’t a charade.

4 months until your release date

           we won’t be ready.

we weren’t ready before

and we won’t be ready

           after

all i’m ready for is for love

to be your master

all i’m ready for

is for love to be your master

please

let love

be your master

let love

be your master

love

is the master

love.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Words from my brother who's awaiting his first child to be born. Auntie N loves you Marshawn Draymond Delos.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Woke Brown Bae Goggles - Some Rose Colored Glasses Shit…

What I’m about to say I’m sure is going to piss people off, but I need to take a minute to talk about something I’ve been marinating on for a while.

I don’t buy it. I can’t always get behind it. I worry we do more damage when this happens than help, but it’s part of the circumstances we have to deal with everyday, particularly as people who occupy black and brown bodies. We have to hold our young folks close, encourage, nurture and help them grow into questioning, thoughtful future citizens. But sometimes, maybe in this, we love too much. We love too hard and we forget to keep it real, we forget to create accountability checks and systems and revel in the love instead. I know I’ve written a lot about love, but this week I’m also wondering about balance.

We create and sustain counter narratives to tell black and brown kids they are special, they are unique, that they have talents, and intelligences all their own. We run with and turn truly extraordinary stories into tall tales to keep the momentum going, almost as a means of providing receipts for when we’ve excelled beyond expectation. But we especially do this with black and brown boys who’ll grow into men. We have to, because the cards are so deeply stacked against them.

Somewhere in this journey I wrote about how my parents have always supported my dreams and aspirations but also kept it real. "It's great that you love basketball Nik, but you should really reconsider wanting to go pro. You're a little small and not that good at it." That may seem harsh but it was true and there was love behind it. I needed to practice, work hard and hone any craft I hoped to be successful at was their ultimate message.

Maybe they weren’t wrong. Maybe I’m not exceptional at one thing, and that’s cool. There are plenty of things that I do well, and I’ll take being a jack of all trades/ master of none over having no marketable skill, no desire or passion and just being a potato otherwise.

But even if that wasn’t the case and I was the best, baddest writer, or best 5’ 1’’ female guard to ever play basketball in middle school, I don’t think my theory would apply. My life is a constant reflection, an internal feedback cycle on how I’m giving to others, supporting my peers and being an ally. Yeah, this shit is a struggle sometimes, otherwise it’s second nature.

I’m worried however, that we do damage, to brown and black men who we find exceptional by telling them they are exceptional without a check or balance system, without holding them to high standards in areas where they aren’t as extraordinary.

You’re probably confused, but that’s okay. Here’s an example. Junot Diaz. He writes well. He can spin some story, and it’s great reading. But if we pause for a minute, and consider his last big work, “This is How You Lose Her,” it is a book about cheating, and greasy grimey dudes, many whose stories come directly from Diaz’s experiences.

It was critically acclaimed, on everyone’s reading lists, and ultimately captured a very raw, human part of our lives in a way that people could accept. I won’t say related to, because for certain it wasn’t everyone’s experience, but it was honest. And we accepted that honesty, and praised him for being so human, and in many ways he banked a credit that could serve as a pass later on.

In the case of Diaz, and I’ll borrow something my friend G brought up, there’s some stuff to unpack about how different periods of history have made us brown folk hate ourselves and hate each other and discussing how brown men treat brown women and vice versa is a consequence of that and definitely some shit we need to work out. But if all we’re doing is acknowledging that shit is still fucked up - it’s also superficial.

Now I’m not saying that this is what I did, or what others did, but it seems like Diaz in admitting he’s flawed, that we as humans, but especially brown men, are flawed  - was supposed to be enough of a statement. He did write about it all beautifully and put words to what I’m sure other brothers of ours have had trouble articulating, but what are we praising him for exactly? We’re certainly not praising him for doing right by women of color. We’re certainly not praising him for changing his behavior or supporting others in doing the same. He isn’t the only one we do this with. There are dozens of others, artists, musicians, scholars. Men of color who are woke, or growing in their wokeness who we accept and applaud for having the courage to admit that they’re working on it.

Admitting you are imperfect is not a pass to not try to be or do better. Speaking on an issue, or acknowledging there’s a problem is worth nothing if it’s not followed by some kind of action.

So here’s the particularly blasphemous shit I planned to say. I’m not sure I’m all about Jesse Williams, in light of his BET Awards acceptance speech.

Look - the man is FINE, the speech was beautiful and the following quote from it, has me feeling some kind of way:

“The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander… if you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression, if you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do…”

But then I wonder, maybe, if I’m just wearing my “woke brown bae goggles.”

Jesse Williams has all of the components to meet my much requited “brown dude with hella appropriate swag,” criteria. He’s fine, he’s smart, he’s passionate, he’s actually involved in doing the work he asks us all to do, he’s employed and people generally like him. That may seem pretty basic, but it’s definitely the bare minimum for my needs. That said, I’m a little suspect. Maybe because I’ve fallen victim to “woke brown bae goggles” before. The dude I friend broke up with last summer, and other dudes in my proximity. Spellbound and bamboozeled into seeing only their exceptional magical shit and giving them a pass when they slip up, when they don’t meet those already high expectations, and often at the cost of women of color. But that’s an aside, and my own shit - I’m really not trying to get Gary Dourdained, cause I have certainly loved and given passes to greazy grimey dudes who have a special craft and are often also woke.

I also don’t want to undermine the power of what Jesse said. It’s huge to have someone publically bring to light or express things we so badly want to say out loud. Put names to feelings and wonderings we know are circling in barbershops, behind closed doors. And he’s seemingly doing the work, practicing what he preaches, but still I hesitate.

It’s clearly different with men I come into contact with, that I know, whose numbers I have or whom I have less than 6 degrees of separation with, our sheer proximity to one another makes the sour taste left in my mouth by suspicion that much stronger, and the distrust in intentions that much more of a betrayal.

With celebrities, writers, rappers and others who are generally famous/infamous, it’s all trickier. We hold them in higher regard, we praise them more, especially when they venture not only from being talented and good at their craft, but when they stand up and show just how woke they are. Beyonce making a statement with Formation was as much about the timing, her power and her role in our social landscape as it was something that needed to be heard. We praised her too, for finally saying something - key word finally. But we also criticized her and critiqued her in ways we haven’t and won’t the men. Fame is funny that way. In public discourse it’s practically the rule that critique of women (by other women even - the family is cute as shit and I stan for my Warriors but cough Ayesha Curry cough, I’m looking at you) is fair game. It’s often volatile, and uncalled for, and administered by even our own community members. Maybe I’m wrong, but i feel like women of color especially, rarely get passes. Yes, dominant culture has plenty of fucked up things to say about men of color but I feel like in our own communities, we still hold talented, successful and well-spoken men as precious.

My friend L just asked me if I would carry this analogy to the president. He’s a black man that people of color in particular put on a pedestal. I’ve definitely done it, and often. His pass? His pass isn’t so much a pass, but to some extent part of the job. It’s expected and somewhat understood that trickery, lying through omission and general greazyness is part of the president’s daily duties - am I right? As much as he stands to “represent us” however, the president will never speak for us or relate to us the way we rely on and request artistic types to do just that.

Woke brown brothers like Lin-Manuel Miranda, who - although he’s the child of pretty successful parents - was just a Boriquen kid in New York City, doing his thing, going to public school, who liked rap and wore the same clothes, watched the same movies as the rest of us. He literally went to a college like mine and is only a year or two older, what’s not to relate to? Talented as he may be, truly mastering the art of written word and rhyme in a way not many others can, and we commend him for writing a rap musical about history. He’s a genius, he’s this, he’s that.I’ll give him one thing - he’s the first to do this and that makes it special. But y’all, he took a story that already happened, created some rhyming prose about it, embellishing things here and there to add flavor for sure, and then called his music producing friends to make it happen. Forreal, that shit is hard and I definitely couldn’t do it. But honestly, we’re hype about it because it’s safe. Musicals are safe domain for white folks, and as a brown man, he’s exceptional because he broke boundaries doing this. He can - and in many cases should - get praise from all angles and directions. Maybe we’re hype about it simply because no one had done it yet - not to say that Cam’ron was about to write about the Battle of Alamo, or Common was ready to write about Japanese Internment, but someone had to do it, at some point.

I say all of this like I’m laying in wait, like I’m waiting for the bubble to burst. For these men we’ve decided are remarkable, to somehow show us their darker selves, some deeper truth.

I fear a level of disappointment when that happens. Hoping that they will rise to the occasion in light of a potential truthbomb and have to admit their inevitable vulnerability, their humanity, that maybe they fucked up - they’ll act and be and do differently. They won’t do, or say or be shitty toward others and grow, and change. So many times I’ve seen these men, these woke black and brown men, we love, we hold in such high regard, who are my brothers, my uncles, my friends, family and would be lovers - admit and acknowledge their own flaws, transgressions, growth areas, and even though they don’t necessarily ask for forgiveness, we give it to them. We absolve them of their mistakes. Some may call for us all to be and do better in light of what they’ve learned, but it’s often been only a call. Yeah, I have no evidence to suggest that maybe some of these men have actually done, and are better. But that shit has to radiate outward.

In his speech, Jesse also said:

“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us… The thing is though, that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real…”

Despite not yet meeting my own woke brown bae with hella appropriate swag, or having to raise an exceptional brown/mocha/ecru colored son, I want to see that shit radiate out of my community, flaws and all, not just men- for women of color have their own type of flaws, false or extreme praise and the like. This isn’t some anti-man shit, pro-man woman shit, anti-woman woman shit, it’s just human. I’ma call upon quite a few other essays here on WNB - this is about some shine theory, protecting and cultivating our love, our magic, and still somehow, keeping it real. To truly be exceptional, is to be outstanding. To be outstanding is to truly be and do better.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Love Just Is...

Yesterday, on a random, unprovoked email purge and mission to get my inbox full of 4,900 read emails down to 2000 or less, I came across an email from 2010.

It was from my last long term ex. He’d sent it about 6 months after we’d broken up. It was about how sorry he was for our last interactions. About his inability to love - because he didn’t love himself - he had loved me, but didn’t know how to anymore and that he thought I deserved someone who loved themselves enough that they could love someone else.

I’m paraphrasing. That’s all that needs to be said about him - that email and how I felt about our four years together. IT’s been 6 years and truly, that’s all there is to say. We were together, then we weren’t. It wasn’t a clean break, but we both knew it needed to happen.

But it’s funny that I came across it yesterday.

The last time I wrote - at length, because the amount of energy I expelled putting that post together, dealing with everything life has offered us over the last few weeks has left me a bit depleted - was about love. I’ve been musing on love - and cultivating love, since I started this project. In fact, at one point, I took out a notebook and tried to chronicle the themes of my essays and love came up in different forms. Mostly, however, in grandiose, culture shifting, giving to humanity ways.

On the other end there were posts about self care, self love, but still, they were hypothetical and grand.

Since I last wrote anything, I’ve seen and experienced it, I’ve watched it attempt to overcome so much, and also been gifted love in immediate, tangible ways. But before I wax on what this all means, let me give you a little bit of a travelogue.

Mid May: A pretty significant time of transition started for me. It’s one I can’t yet talk about - not that I’m sure I want to, and if you talk to me regularly you can guess what I’m referring to. In any event it’s been rocky, it’s been frustrating and now I’m in a place of neutral acceptance about it. Don’t worry, it’s not related to health, or my physical well being, so I’m aight.

Late May: I walked my 3rd AFSP Overnight walk, here in my city, with a group of diverse women, including my sister, some family friends/pretend sisters and my former officemate and quickly on the rise to bestie status D, all of whom I’m happy to know and have in my life. Real talk: we were diverse and as a means of creating a roll call since there were so many of us and we wanted to try and stay together we came up with the idea to call out ROYGBIV. We were each assigned a color and when whoever was in front yelled out RAINBOW GO, each of us would take our turn to respond with our assigned color in ROYGBIV order. YELLOW! … The AFSP Out of the Darkness Overnight community remains a community that is full of love, bound together by not only loss, but hope. Walking through streets I’ve walked through before, noticing things I’ve never noticed, scattering while standing at a reststop in a cutty park in Chinatown as rats ran out of nearby bushes like true city kids, I felt the love differently. Carrying with me the love generated by the #Frisco5/500/5000 it was a grueling (those hills on Scott near the Marina though…) but beautiful night.

Later May/Memorial Day Weekend: My family and I walked from their home in Upper Noe over to the Carnaval parade in the Mission district. I took a photo and posted the following on Instragram underneath it after we’d watched a few minutes of Sambistas go by on Folsom and 24th streets:

“There are few days a year I feel as in community as I do during Carnaval weekend here in my city. It’s my favorite day of the year and inevitably has moments that annoy the hell out of me, but I still love it. It’s when you run into friends from past, present and in some cases future. Into family, like we did when we ran into so many middle school folk at once, it’s where my version of my city still lives and breathes no matter how many gentrifiers, cops, and tourists walk along side us. Because this is our space, and we are happy to share it with you.”

We walked over the the festival that took place after the parade a few blocks away and roamed for a while. At some point my parents decided they’d had enough and my sister and I picked a spot, mid festival to wait for her boyfriend. We stood on Harrison Street, between 18th and 19th, in front of the mural depicting the parade itself, truly at the center of it all. We watched people, we chatted a little, we felt at home and neutral. After a few minutes a male voice broke our meditation and screamed out “Look at these gangsta girls!”

My sister and I went stone cold, and kept our posted up, stance ignoring the dude, but within seconds he was in her face trying to hug her. He’s lucky he was actually a kid she’d grown up with, friend of her boyfriend truthfully, and not some random dude because I don’t know what I would have done to him - no I take that back - I don’t know what she would have done to him had he been a stranger, she’s the one to be afraid of. He was drunk, and in a good mood and it spilled over and spread a little into us. The three of us joked around and before we knew it he was calling out to someone else who walked by… a crazy teacher who’d taught at our middle school and recently retired. God it was awkward, but it was still full of love.

Less than 5 minutes later, we ran into a few other middle school folks, my folks since I’m older by 4 years, as a woman in the crowd walking by us and I locked eyes. It was my friend C, with her was our other friend M who I recruited to work for my organization recently and begged her to make a cross country move. We hugged, we chatted and M tapped on a guy’s shoulder who was in their crew, it was A.

Though I hadn’t seen C and M in years, I talked to them often on Facebook, and M and I texted regularly. For A, it had been since middle school graduation, nearly 20 years. We weren’t close at the time, though we’d been a little close at one point as I was dealing with some unrequited crush on him in 7th grade. He turned quickly and hugged me.

He hugged me long, and hard. It didn’t mean anything - truly, but something happened. We said very little as we stood there in this embrace, but the hug spoke volumes and was some kind of love. It said you are loved, we are good, so, so good. We as in all of us, not just A and I but C and M and their families with us, and A’s wife who he introduced me to afterward, and my sister. It said this is family, this is love.

First Week of June: My family and I, including my blonde, former college roommate S, ventured to NYC for the 2nd AFSP Overnight this year. I opted not to walk, but my parents chose NY over our home here in SF and my sister and S decided to join them even though it would only be 2 weeks since our SF walk together. I got to connect with a handful of friends from college in our 6 days there, we got to connect with my sister’s dude’s family, with S’s friends and my sister’s friends. I even got to watch the Warriors whoop the Cavs asses in game 2 of the finals with two friends I consistently texted during this seasons big games.

I loved New York. Though I’d gone to college in NY state, I’d spent time in Brooklyn and Queens and so it still held a special place in my heart. But while there, I learned how far New York and I had drifted apart. That learning may have been soured by a pretty shitty Air BnB situation - something we hesitantly did in looking for a place for 6 of us to stay, near the walk opening ceremony and on the fly- when we found out after being confronted by the landlord that it was an illegal listing and that our host hadn’t paid her rent since February. What a fucking douchebag.

I summed up my trip in a reflection that ultimately, for all of the wonderful and beautiful reasons I loved New York, it also caused me equal amounts of anxiety and brought up tensions I couldn’t really jive with. “You can’t take the Bay out of me, or me out of the Bay,” I realized. For all the love I’d felt, our housing situation, and random annoyances I’d felt just by the tempo and energy of the city, I wasn’t really feeling the love. As we left our Air BnB and headed to the airport we ran into the landlord again. She asked us how our trip had been and if we enjoyed our visit. My mother told her yes, and said we’d been in town for a charity walk. As the landlord asked us what charity and my mother uttered the words “the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention,” she softened and apologized for directing her anger at her tenant - whom she’s in the process of evicting - toward us and my mother apologized for causing her any added stress. She said no, we had no way of knowing, commended us for doing the walk and contributing to such an important cause and after a few more minutes of conversation we were on our way.

I could keep going, week by week, but I won’t, but I’ll mention some quick things.

The tragedy in Orlando and how communities came together in love, because of love, to cope, process and acknowledge how this kind of thing is simply unacceptable.

Random political acts and actions across the country about the 4 million other things happening nationwide.

Venturing to the Nor Cal Pirate Festival (yes, I know, it’s a thing, it’s kind of like a more rugged Ren Faire, but we go every year) on father’s day and chatting with a young single black dad with a toddler and his family.

Deciding to send a best friend across the country a birthday gift for the first time in years, and picking out exactly the right card(s- it was actually too hard to choose just one) and trinkets for her and feeling the excitement and love through text messages.

Riding with the Warriors through an incredible season, and in true Draymond fashion, feeling some kind of way as he took blame for their loss of the championship, something I undoubtedly would do, and did in reflecting on my own behavior at work.

When a mentor/colleague/friend/older brother figure, during a check in said his life was good, real good. He was in love, the romantic sort, and suggested those of us with him just, you know… try it sometime. His excitement, even his ridiculous suggestion being an act of love toward those of us in his company.

Taking a bit of a jump outside of myself, my normal routine and joining a People of Color meditation group which, while I’m a novice, has proven  in two weeks, to be a good outlet, to at least be still, release some of the frantic energy that’s been building and spend time looking inward.

Being able to listen and support friends and colleagues going through it in unplanned and unexpected ways.

I’m sure there have been others I’ve missed. 

I didn’t watch, and I’m struggling to buy into the whole Hamilton hype, but Lin-Manuel Miranda’s TONY acceptance speech (some of y’all know how I feel about the homie Lin, but if you don’t that’s for another post. Let’s just say: suspect as fuck) and the buzz around it got me curious.

I mean, yeah, it was a sonet, and in response to Orlando, news we had just heard about that morning, but when he says the following, I can’t hate.

“We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger.

We rise and fall, and light from dying embers

Remembrances that hope and love last longer.

And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love;

Cannot be killed or swept aside.”

Because love is. It just is. As a refrain in light of Orlando, “Love, is…” has penetrated our social world. But if it just is, why has it been so hard to see and feel and touch.

So much love over the last few weeks. Love needed, love given - unconditionally and unsolicited. I’ve lacked the cognizance to make space for it for so long, to realize that I’ve been lacking the ebb and flow of giving and receiving love. I’ve pushed love away for so long, let so many other emotions and feelings take up space.

Now, and quite suddenly, quiet unknowingly, I’m welcoming it. I’m open to it. And need to accept it in as many forms as it will come.

I’m not really sure what I’m asking of you tonight friends, or what exactly I want to tell you here. Yes, we need more love, to give, receive, but we can’t force it either. How and when don’t matter, why- simply because we are human. Love is love is love… it just is.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

The Frisco Five have Fed SFC

There is a stillness in the air. It's not a calm still, just a quiet. But underneath it is a rumble.

There’s a big one coming. That’s what the news is saying about an earthquake due to hit California any time as the pressure along the San Andreas fault line which runs up and down most of our coast is building.

Berkeley scientists have said that the fault line is “locked and loaded”. But in San Francisco the big one may have already hit.

On Friday, the 6th, a group of 5 people who’d been engaged in a 17 day hunger strike, in response to continued issues with our local police department’s actions toward people of color were taken to the hospital.

For almost 3 weeks, 5 people, all San Francisco natives and longtime residents, sat outside the Mission District police department, in peaceful protest, starving themselves asking that our mayor or chief of police step down.

There’s an echo, throughout the US, around police brutality - we know that right? This isn’t  news to anyone. San Francisco isn’t your Ferguson, but here we’re experiencing the same thing that’s rippled across the nation.

Alex.

Mario.

Amilcar.

Luis.

All men of color, all shot with questionable cause. Our city is raw off of these incidents - so naturally, as our police chief and the force he represents are under ongoing investigation and our mayor too, has had some shady, shady incidents under review - questioning our city’s use of force seems like a natural thing.

Stone strikes stone, makes a spark.

The Frisco Five, as our hunger strikers have come to be known had had enough. It makes sense in our city, full of history, culture, birthplace of ethnic studies, hippies, Ginsberg and Kerouac, black panthers, brown berets and the San Francisco Burrito, (just worth mentioning), that we’d have thinkers and community members willing to make a statement, but this, this felt extreme for 2016.

Sellassie and Equipto, two local rappers.

Ike Pinkston and Maria Cristina Gutierrez, two local educators.

Edwin Lindo, a local education advocate, who was (is still?) running for office.

Edwin admitted it might be political suicide to strike. And y’all give Bay rappers so much shit for being politically oriented, but I don’t see Jay or Kanye or even Kendrick, the most woke one of them all, putting themselves out there (unless you count Killer Mike basically being Bernie’s running mate). Ike and Maria Cristina are known in the community and work directly with kids so you can’t hate on that - and a side note, Maria Cristina is no spring chicken - she’s 66 yo!

In a peaceful, but bold protest the Frisco Five sat, and meditated, and prayed, and read, and entertained a few visitors, awaiting a conversation with the mayor. Mayor Lee would not relent. He showed up at the station on Monday of last week, on his terms, not theirs so no conversation was had. On Tuesday they were wheeled through the streets to city hall, marchers surrounding them and aired their concerns publicly at city hall interrupting a board of supevisor’s meeting.  As the days went by they asked that if anyone wanted to support, they come by with sage smudges and candles as a means of holding vigil and keeping them strong.

Though their bellies may have been empty, their hearts were so, so full. Their love, for our city, for our people, radiated outward, and what we as a community put into supporting them, they reciprocated with their actions. They could not be stopped. Sellassie was taken to the hospital on Wednesday afternoon, but returned to their camp site as soon as possible.

On Friday, it rained. It wasn’t a steady rain, but it was and stayed wet. It was calm, not a storm, just rain. Though the Frisco Five had signed “Do Not Treat” orders, all concerned knew the rain would be nothing but bad for them. Though their love was strong, their bodies and health were clearly compromised and so they packed up, were taken to UCSF and their site cleaned.

But this love, it spread - or maybe that’s the wrong idea. It was always there, and it was ignited in our city, this Black/Brown/Yellow/White/Mocha/Ecru love I’ve talked about… It was set ablaze. And when the Frisco Five could not be there in body, others stepped up.

They took their place at the Mission station.

They marched to city hall, took it over and would not be moved.

The spirit, and love of the Frisco Five would not, could not be moved.

Our people marched, and occupied and called for action. But it didn’t end peacefully, despite all attempts to remain so as City Hall closed at 8 and protesters continued to occupy the space. 33 were arrested, who knows how many were actually hurt. The Frisco Five, was suddenly, potentially becoming the Frisco 50, Frisco 500, Frisco 5000.

On Sunday the Frisco Five ended their hunger strike, but vowed to continue their cause. 20 days without food was enough and they are now under a careful re-feeding plan. In their message to the community their love shined through and certainly makes one pause. I am not that strong. I may suck at eating lately, but even I know how miserable I will be if I don’t eat so tonight I force fed myself a beer and some shitty frozen xiao long bao from Tjs. 20 days without food - that’s when the only thing that will feed you, is strength of the spirit, love of your community.

They called for a general strike on Monday, asking people to demonstrate at city hall, to continue, and not give up, as they wouldn’t, even from behind hospital walls and would back on the street as soon as they were able to.

Resilient as fuck, and determined as hell, we have not stopped, we will not stop.

I can’t and won’t front. I did not march to city hall today, but reported to work, and did my thing in my low level government job. I can make a ton of excuses, remind you of my “destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools” mentality, but that’s bullshit. I just didn’t go, and didn’t have it in me to tell my colleagues and department head that I wouldn’t be in on the first day after my boss transitioned out of our department. But my weak ass non-action today does not speak for where I really stand. It was something that was difficult to pinpoint over the last few weeks, but it became clear after Friday night’s actions.

This weekend, after 20 days of observing, of not having the words to articulate the swirling thoughts I had about not only SFC, but of the human condition, of love, of what it means to be brown in 2016, I finally took to social media with an original thought of my own.

“My spirit is tired. What's going on in my city and in this world is wearing it out a little. But seeing how our city has decided to mobilize after the ‪#‎FriscoFive‬ were hospitalized has also filled my spirit.

It says we are here.

It says we will be heard.

It says we want justice.

It says we have and will continue to cultivate a black/brown/yellow/mocha/buttermilk love for our people. For our city.

Oro en paz - fierro en guerra.”

(”Take Back SF” by Monica Magtoto) 

Today you could hear the helicopters over city hall from my office. All day you could see police stationed outside, on guard, waiting. I haven’t seen anything on the news about today, though if I’m honest I’ve been watching the Warriors game while working on this post. But there were certainly demonstrators - we are all still here.

We are taking back SF, not by force, but by taking up space. This is not a new concept, by my sister constantly reminds me (probably herself as well) to take up space. To not be silenced, pushed aside. Being pushed aside is not an option, I never let that happen. But often, I do allow myself to fade into the back, this act essentially creating space for someone else.

But I can’t and won’t do that now - we can’t and won’t do that. Our love, something we so desperately need as Americans right now - this multicolored, multi-generational, multi-lingual/faith/sex, cross - red vines vs. twizzers, east-west rivalry love - cannot be held back.

Our love is flexible, and will bend and wiggle, as our buildings must to survive an earthquake. It is strong and unstoppable, it is “Gold in peace, iron in war.” There is an alchemist myth that iron could turn into gold under the right conditions. So perhaps, what the Frisco5000 are doing is performing a little alchemy of our own.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

“I walk for...” - Mental Health Awareness Month

12 years ago, right after starting my junior year of college I got a phone call that one of my sister’s best friends had passed away. He didn’t just pass away sadly, he had taken his own life.

Matthew, or Frick as he was known, was one of those too smart for his own good kids - a genius, a creative, strange and wonderful in all the best ways. The first time I met him, I remember thinking, “this kid is a lunatic,” because he’d taken a motor from god-knows what, jerryrigged it to basically create a fan, had made fan blades out of packing tape, and was torturing another friend of theirs with it while sitting on my couch. I’d later learn how I’d misjudged him. He was a dancer, a pianist, loved techno and had the biggest heart for someone his age.

Right before I’d left for school that year he’d wished me well and reminded me “not to do anything [he] wouldn’t do”. I’m positive I gave him the same peculiar look that I’d been giving him for years when he did something strange - not bad, just peculiar - smiled and wished him good luck in school.

His passing was devastating. The circumstances surreally tragic and oddly wrapped in a sense of beauty only he could capture. I was miles away and couldn’t do anything for my sister, my family, their friends, so I walked around Sunset Lake (yeah, my campus had a glorified pond we called a lake) with my friend T and yelled obscenities and cried. He wasn’t the first person I’d lost, or the last I’d lose to suicide, but the experience was tricky. 

Frick had struggled with mental health issues for some time, as do many teens. He was figuring himself out, he’d been put on different medications to manage all that was going on with him and ultimately it was too much for him. I don’t know that I can fully understand what he was going through, though the idea of things being “too much” as a teen doesn’t seem unfamiliar. As we grow, our brains develop and we start to learn who we are there’s no lack of confusion - we’re steeped with internal and external conflicts, pushed and pulled in different ways. Our individual experiences only complicate or put different spins on where we fall within the spectrum of negotiating our own mental health.

In the years since Frick’s passing my sister and their friend group have all dealt with not only coping and grieving and accepting his passing but their own mental and physical states. Some have been more successful than others of course, but many have grown. My own reflection on that time, on my own challenges at that age, and even where I stand now are peppered with the sheer experience of living, of growing older, of living on both coasts, in Hawaii and in my buttermilk yellow-tan skin. Maybe I’m also impacted by the jaded state that comes with age, when we accept that some shit just is what it is, fake it till you make it mentalities. But I’d lie if I say I don’t think about Frick often. That I don’t think about the impact his passing had on my sister, on her best friend H- our chosen sister - both of whom have grown into powerful, intelligent, beautiful women bound together not just by friendship and chosen family but by this shared tragedy. That my parents lost a son of sorts. That I don’t think about Frick’s parents who’ve attempted to fill his loss with writing and baking and who knows what else. My sister has even created a way of coping with her grief that might help others. 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

I say that to you not just because it’s May 3rd.

I say that to you because I’m gearing up for my 3rd American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Out of the Darkness walk later this month and here in my home town.

I say that to you because in all of the writing I’ve been doing here on WNB, in all that is going on in the world, y’all need to be reminded.

We need to remember this as we continue to live in a world that (yes, I’ve said this before and I do not care that I’m repeating myself) tells black and brown kids they ain’t shit, every-fucking-day.

We need to remember this because we continue to live in a world that tells trans and gay kids they ain’t shit. Heaven forbid you’re gay or trans AND a black or brown kid, cause then you’re a double negative.

It’s 2016 and we’re still giving people shit who can’t speak English, evicting people to make a mint off of the nouveau upper middle class, discriminating against people because of their religious beliefs.

And yet…

We stigmatize those who admit they have mental health issues. WE THE ONES CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES TO BE  A THING.

Not a single one of us, if we were to reflect on it for a second, can say we don’t know someone who has or have not directly been impacted by compromised mental health. Yet, we are living, breathing proof that our actions or those of our neighbors, directly contribute to having negative impact on others.

Admittedly - we have a lot of work to do, it doesn’t fall on one fragment of our society, it doesn’t belong to one community, but we have to do it.

3 weeks from now I’ll walk from sundown until… whenever I finish… 18 miles, overnight through the streets I’ve grown up on.

Last year I walked through storms in Boston.

The year before I walked through storms in Seattle where my sister was the keynote speaker and shared her journey with Frick’s passing.

So, this year, if it storms again, I’ll still be there, walking for Frick. For our younger selves that didn’t have the language, perspective or support to figured it out. For the black and brown kids who get told daily that they ain’t worth shit. For the trans folks who get told they don’t matter. For girls that get told they can’t. For you, me and everyone in between. This year means something slightly different to me and it means so much to do it here in my city.

To find out more about the AFSP’s Overnight Walk and all the good work they do click here. I could go on and on about the important work they do, what the walk itself does to people and the community it’s built, but perhaps that’s for another time.

I hope you’ll take some time this month to reflect on what you can do - for yourself, for others, for us all.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

A Prince, a Queen & some Rappers - Instead of a Coachella Rant

Christ. It’s festival season. Fucking festival season. That’s what I was going to write about, fucking Coachella and all its awfulness. The costumery, the fuckery, the fact that festivals, when coming from a city like San Francisco, are something I don’t take lightly (I don’t take costumes lightly either, y’all know that).  And as much as I want to go off about how festival season has become an excuse to appropriate other cultures and a cash cow for taking money from millennials, I can’t.

There were a lot of things I could have written about but opted not to, that’s the case every week. This week it was the election, how watching “Black Girls Rock” gave me all the feels. Shootings. Natural Disasters. And an idea I hadn’t yet fully formulated because of all the buzz on social media lately about Selena, “the Queen of Tejano”, not Gomez, but I said nah, I’ll let that one marinate for a while.

And then this week, we lost Prince.

I didn’t feel any kind of way about it. I didn’t feel any kind of way about losing Bowie a few months ago. The world will feel their loss, and it’s certainly sad to see the greats go, but I didn’t feel triggered.

Then I saw a link, that called out someone on Twitter who’s reflection on celebrities passing left me kind of speechless.

I def wasn’t speechless because Prince wasn’t that person for me. I love him, love his music and I’m lucky enough to share a name with one of his big hits - not that it’s ever a song I want folks saying “Oh! You’re name is Niki?! Like DARLING NIKKI?!” but I’ll take it. I also have a different appreciation of him after seeing Maya Rudolph and Princess perform his hits and B-sides.

I don’t stan for celebrities. I mean there are some I’d be really happy to meet. But I never had celebrity crushes that were real and I don’t wait in line for folks or pay a month’s rent for tickets to see them. So losing one, while a sad thing, is never personal.

And for some, as is the case with Selena, it takes a while to mean something. She was killed when I was in middle school and I hadn’t really caught on to her pop stuff, but I was embedded in a hugely Latino school, so it certainly got around. Her tejano hits were FAR from something I could get into. So as above, so below… It was sad news, but she didn’t stand out as any kind of personal icon, and I wasn’t particularly impacted by her passing.

But with the recent anniversary of her death, and birthday oddly enough - seeing the web go hard on creating content about her - not just because of the lipstick MAC is putting out in her honor mind you, which I am excited about - I started feeling something. It was a slow creep up. Tremendously late, I couldn’t help but feel like “Damn, we really lost someone there, didn’t we?”

I wondered who she would have become. I wondered why, as a 33 year old part-Chicana, I suddenly held her as some kind of image of Latina-ness that I don’t necessarily aspire to, but I admire. More so postmortem than when she was alive, I feel some weird connection. Maybe because of some sentiment like the tweet above, maybe because when I think about celebrities that have really told me about myself through their work, it’s not a whole catalogue, an acting real, but super specific moments, lines, lyrics, sounds. They don’t all belong to one person or group, they’re spread across so much of what I’ve consumed. Maybe it’s part of that comedy mind, picking up bits and pieces from all over the place and weaving together whatever story I’m going to tell. Maybe it’s some sort of fear of commitment, who knows.

This recognition of my appreciation for Selena also came about after we did an ice breaker at work recently. The prompt was to think about happy moments in our life and pick one we would want to relive. A handful of coworkers said they would relive moments and change something about them, do something differently. That’s not how I felt. I immediately went to a moment where I wouldn’t change a thing.

I think we were 19? I was home from college for break and we needed something to do, so my best friend Lalo and I were parked up on top of Billy Goat Hill sitting in his car. We were listening to the Roots ‘Do You Want More?!!!??!’ album, not saying a word, or sharing a thought. I got soaked up in the music, wrapped up in the artistry. I want to say it changed my worldview which evokes stronger emotions than it honestly might have, but that’s the closest description to what I felt that I can come up with.

But I can’t name those other moments. I can name songs that evoked particular emotion at a particular time, but not life altering thoughts or feelings, just that one. So when whatever clicked, that made Selena suddenly stand out was remarkably one of those moments. The moment in Lalo’s car led to a journey with The Roots music that lasts today, my appreciation of them something very much a part of who I am. Likewise, whatever clicked in me while reading all of these things about Selena pulled on my Latinidad and brown womanhood, that while I’m never silent about it, hadn’t really been something I was actively thinking about in the context of other brown women. It’s not that suddenly my perception of her was helping me know myself, but she was helping me develop who I still wish to grow into. .

In a world where people look up to celebrities and media personalities aspiration to be like someone can mean a lot of things. Prince, Bowie and the Roots, teach us about ourselves because of our reactions to their art. Other’s teach us about ourselves as reflections, or mirrors or foreshadows into who we might become.

That said, I’m not positive, but if I were to guess it, some day in the future I might have a Prince moment. Of note in all the news about his passing is how unapologetic he was about himself, his interests, his music. And yes, that’s something I’m learning to be, but it’s certainly something I aspire to master. I really need to order a raspberry beret, I’ve been saying this for years.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Trash Talking: America’s Pastime & the Warriors are 73 - 9

The Golden State Warriors are trying to break an NBA record in a few hours for most regular season wins. They currently tied the record previously held by Chicago Bulls during their 1995-1996 season. They are currently #1 in the conference with 72 wins and only 9 loses all season and people will be watching.

Kobe Bryant will also be playing his last game tonight before he retires. This is the main reason the Lakers’ game will get viewers who aren’t Lakers fans tonight, because the team is currently 56 games behind the Warriors.

Some facts.

 I wanted to play in the WNBA or short lived ABL when I was in middle school. This was part of my awkward tomboy fantasy. In case you didn’t know this, when I call myself a tomboy it’s not because I was good at sports (I wasn’t), it’s not because I understood sports (I didn’t), but it’s mostly because there were so many girly things I didn’t connect with. Yup, traditional gender binary shit, but it was the 80s and 90s so let’s just let it go. This was also during that Bulls season that was also pretty magical to watch, FYI.

In case you didn’t know this I always feel some kind of way about athletes that are in my peer group - age wise. I don’t feel that way about actors, or musicians, I feel that way about baseball players and basketball players and maybe it’s because of how their exorbitant their salaries are these days, all because a dude can throw or hit a ball. I can only think of one other comparison that made me feel something and that’s when I found out that Tina Fey was 25 when she became the head writer of SNL - that made me question my accomplishments. So Kobe, retiring at 37? Ain’t that a luxury. And yet, Tim Duncan still playing with his Grandpa Ass… shame.

I love trash talking.

The last one is probably obvious too. Baseball may be America’s pastime (although now it may be more like snap chatting and vining, I still don’t get what kids are into), but there’s a pretty big subset of us, that no matter how much we love the game, or American sports, the appeal is really the caliber of trash talking we get to do.

I don’t really believe I’m a competitive person. I’m all for games, for rivalries, but if I’m the one competing and I have someone against me that’s just extra when it comes to winning, I might just get out of the way and let you do your thing.

But trash talking, that’s a different beast to me. Trash talking is an extension of comedy, of playing the dozens - that shit black and brown kids do on the school yard trying to outsmartass each other, make a crowd laugh at how clever you are and how far you can go.

I’ve get blocked regularly during baseball season by friends on facebook who could care less about how the Giants make me feel and yet most of my Twitter followers are there for the very same reason. I have a football rivalry going on with one of my best, best friends who’s a Seahawks fan - calling a truce when one team has sucked so hard we can’t even pretend the other won’t slaughter them. But basketball, that’s where I have my biggest hater fest going on. Yeah, the deepest sports sentiment I may have might be my hatred for the Dodgers, but I’m smart enough to not engage with too many people who are Dodgers fans or those of my friends who are fans might just be keeping their mouths shut.

I may have just given you some super basic facts about tonight’s games (The Warriors game starting as I type) but how can you dispute that.

The Warriors are indisputably doing something every game (or NEARLY every game come on 72 and 9) that no one else can. I’ve talked about them being fucking magicians or wizzards on the court, but honestly Steph Curry has been mathematically analyzed. How can you not honor this? I have friends who have zero opinion on basketball and have said the Warriors make them want to watch.

So I find it troublesome when someone wants to deny this. Deny that any other team in the NBA is playing together like this team.

K is an older brother type. He’s imperfect sure, but he’s been hating on the Warriors for a long time. He stans for Lebron and them - I’m still unsure why, he’s not even from Cleveland - and as a professional writer the act of spinning a tale, using words to evoke an emotion, is part of the fuel for his hater ways. Our other friend P gets involved from time to time, he’s not a Warriors fan but a fan of the game (that’s not true, he’s a Knicks fan so I feel for him... He’d like me to point out he’s a Jazz fan as well. This is some leftover thing from Karl Malone and our childhood I presume so I feel for him even worse) and also does some writing, so it adds to the insanity.

K talks about Bron. Bron is not the team. Bron is not a particularly strong leader in my honest opinion. Last season, K went so deep in his love of the Cavs and his shade toward the Warriors that he regrettably started a curse.

Trash talking is an art. Getting someone riled up, the art of arguing, the back and forth is critical.  

When you’re sitting in the stands at a game,  it becomes a common denominator for people who might otherwise have nothing to say to each other. Yeah, that’s a really dismal thing to say, a bond because you hating on the same thing. But it’s true, you find a common dislike, haphazard comment or observation, share it with others, laugh, high five and you have new best friends for a few hours. It’s not always the most articulate of exchanges, but it ties us to one another.

Online, via text, it’s different. You can be a little more careful with what words you chose, with how you amp someone up, put someone down. It happens in rap beef, it happens on blogs, in articles. Sometimes the disconnect and distance between those involved let’s you go in in ways you might not otherwise. In my case, it gives people I know, and don’t know an opportunity to be witty as hell, out smart each other and share a love of something we’re passively participating in as fans.

It started innocently enough in my case. My love of sports has evolved, I have enough in the pocket to pull out something to say, some retort. But K made it too easy. Every time he stepped up to trash the Warriors, it was “roll on a splash brother’s ankle… throw some bows at Draymond... trip Igoudala…” Maybe not every time, maybe not in those words but this was a theme.

And without fail, he’d deliver one of these lines and someone on the other team would get injured. I wish I had kept a running list, but it became a trend. And I in turn was given a wide open door for the best trash talk ever.

Based God, AKA Lil’ B, aka a rapper a lot of you had never heard of, was also on some curse hype. Not intentionally but certainly coincidentally, any team he said he was for, would move on to the next round.

By the time K’s curse started, the Based God thing was all over media and I was set up for one of the best plays that I’m still reaping the benefits of today.

I can’t find the original image. But the moment before this one, before these two landed on the floor, is the moment I found on the internet. In all of my files, on all of my devices I don’t have the original. I only have what I did next, which was photoshop K’s head onto Klay’s body. I posted it and hashtagged it as his cruse.

From there, I had the foundation for argument after argument and continued it through the 2015 playoffs.

My pockets were overflowing with trash to talk. It was easy as the Warriors took last season’s success and ran it over with this season’s ridiculous run. This may be a dumb aside, but I also had in my pocket some opinions and observations not just about how godammed good we were playing, but some basics on team work, on leadership, on how adults interact in group settings that made trash talking too easy. Trash talking is a lesson on the human condition sometimes.

I had held on to the photo. Held on to it all season, waiting. We had jokes and jokes and jokes about about karma and how K was playing with it and this week he said something to me that was so absurd I told P. It was an absurdity that he wanted to hold on to, that was not clear when I told P and the next thing I know we’re launching into a level of trash talking so deep that some folks for sure think we’re talking in a secret language. And the perfect moment to re-submit my photo as trash talk evidence.

P said he couldn’t help it. He loved trashed talking. I said it was half the reason being a fan was so fun. The banter. The witty repartee. It was the community. I’ve been in the let down of the previous two weeks spent with friends I never get to see coming to an end. So I was getting my life as people I liked, loved and didn’t know ping-ponged one liners, memes, youtube videos, and the like across the internet this week.

It served as a distraction when I needed it. It served as a place to channel all the jokes I got that I’ve been suppressing. It even served as a something to do when I was bored - not that I have a lot of time to be bored but more over when I needed something mentally stimulating but not emotionally draining. But also a way to appreciate something I love so much. So, even if Bay Area sports has caused agita and anxiety over the last few years, I am here for it.

Trash talking - it’s America’s pastime.

For the record - we just won this game and broke the record, and Steph Curry just hit achieving 402 3-pointers in a season. Mic. Dropped.

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

On Having No Poker Face

Stop telling women to smile.

It’s a common theme in 2016, that we’re sick of it, that in today’s Taylor Swift girl power Roxann Gay Bad Feminist dichotomy women are harassed - daily in both aggressive and microaggressive ways. One of the most common being when a dude on the street basically says, “Hey baby, why don’t you smile?”

I’m hyper sensitive to it, in that I’m on alert for it, but because of my own makeup, I avoid, ignore, and have so many walls up that I don’t know how often it’s actually said to me. In fact, I’m so hyper aware of it that today while walking with a male coworker when a stranger said hello to us I jerked as we walked past and said to my colleague, “Did he just tell me to smile?!’ He hadn’t, but I’m just trying to say that’s how real it is.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is actually about the opposite of that. Last week, in my week of old friends, not just the wedding I wrote about, but the following week that was filled with other old friends visiting me, spending time in spaces that belong to, came from and are thriving because of SFC Natives - my people - people were noticing me.

I am a goddamned magnetic person. I have a contagious laugh, I captivate a room, I spin so much story. I’m saying this completely absent of ego because we know, in my true, keeping it real fashion, I am also deeply self-deprecating. I make acquaintances easily, I build relationships like my life depended on it and regrettably, I’m one of those poor unfortunate folks who people open up to and tell too much. Real talk this shit is so unfortunate - I ask someone how they’re doing in that super basic pleasantry we are accustomed to, and they tell me they’re getting a divorce. I am working with a client and somehow I find out she recently lost a pregnancy. This might not be just my issue, it may run in my family, but I’d be happy if it happened less.

This trait has also leant to having so, so many friends spread across the country who I’ve become the glue for. Not because I bind them together in a “Let’s all get on this text chain… college meetup in SF!” way, but because I still keep in touch with so many and that’s how they know everyone is doing aight.

So I get noticed. Yes I speak loudly, I dress loudly, I am not shy about what’s going on. I’m an open person. I’m this way to let you know that this is who I am before you can reject me. But, all that said, I’m still noticed when I’m quiet. When I’m missing. And while I know all of these things, I don’t know why I forget this fact.

I forget it, until I’m called out for something. So last week, with all that grounded love, surrounded by my people - different peoples - in different places - I was showing myself and being seen. Or maybe it wasn’t me, but a part of me that I’ve neglected, that’s been ignored, silenced in some kind of way, that I’d forgotten.

What was clear, as I posted and was tagged in pictures on social media, was that I was fucking happy. I was fucking smiling. And people called me out for it. They didn’t say, “WTF ARE YOU DOING SMILING?!” They didn’t say, “YOU REALLY SHOULD SMILE MORE!” They said, “Did you have fun, it looked like you did?... Oh my god, you looked so happy!”

Fuck. I got caught. I mentioned it before, but I should have known how obvious it was that I haven’t been happy that time my coworker asked me if I was excited about anything in my life. I should have known when my insides were telling me, when I had no appetite. But I really only knew now, because someone had called out how different it was to see me smile.

I should have seen it coming, when, after a night of drunken dancing and laughing, and eating shit tons of bbq with my friends visiting last week, J, called me out as we heard last call after parting ways from our buddy S, my sister and her dude. I should have seen it coming, but there had been a lot of love, a lot of whiskey. J basically said, “it was so good to see you let go. It was so good to see you let loose, have a good time, and you need to stop getting in your own way.”

That’s horrible paraphrasing. But that’s the gist of it, or maybe it was more like, “Don’t be weird with guys… You were having a great time… because you were letting go… because you are awesome… and it was so good to see you let go and have a good time!”

Yeah, that seems more accurate.

He was fucking right. Everyone was fucking right. I know that now, because I talked about it last week, I needed my people. I needed space to do, and be, without pretense, without pressure, low stakes, high reward. And I got that. But it’s clear I need to stay on this track. Keep this shit up.

I’ve harped on a lot of this already. Self-care. Worshiping at the temple of comedy. I need to laugh so hard I pee while being my authentic self and not needing to worry too much about the consequences.

I need to fucking smile.

So I have to try and take it where I can get it. Finishing a cup of coffee before it gets cold and savoring every sip. Laughing harder because I snorted while laughing at a joke. 90’s one hit wonders. Dancing. Stupid group text exchanges where you remember a random sight and someone responds with google links to the light up sneakers you saw a Sheik homie rocking at the club last week. Real talk, he was rocking his turban and these bad boys.

I’m not going to fucking smile because you want me to. I need to do it for me.

(this is stuck in my head and it’s driving me nuts - in the best ways possible... )

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Tribes, Kin and Persian EDM

I’m a very tribal person - not just because I have a very 1990’s tribal tattoo on my ankle.

I come from tribes and tribes of people. My father’s family - we’re our own particular type.

We’re opinionated. Loud. If you know us, you know we think we pretty, but we’re also modest. We’re hungry and as my sister pointed out, resilient as hell. Maybe that’s because we’re so damned pretty. We’re entertainers and even the shyest cousins got jokes even if they act like they don’t. We have loud, contagious laughs.

My mother’s family is also a little bit of a tribe, even if they’re a little smaller in number than my father’s. They’re caring, thoughtful and inquisitive. Where my father’s family is pretty, my mother’s family is vain, not in an obnoxious way, but we know how to dress, and we cannot NOT pose for a photo.  Though my father’s family, as Filipinos but moreover as themselves, will make sure you have food and are fed, my mother’s side of the family knows how to throw a family dinner like no others (maybe I’m just jealous I missed Easter with them this year).

But it doesn’t stop there. There are about 10 of us or so that went to school together from Kindergarten through 12th grade, we’re a tribe too.

College came along and I flew across the country right before September 11th. I didn’t know many people, but somehow I found them. I found four or five different types of tribes to belong to that sometimes intersected, sometimes stood alone. Dorm-mates, trapped in the all girls dorm we didn’t really want to be in. Hip-hop heads, Comedy ladies, Rainbow Babies and Yellow Crew.

Rainbow Babies and Yellow Crew aren’t real things. We don’t have T-shirts or anything. We weren’t recognized clubs, just dumb names we gave ourselves based on stupid shit. Rainbow Babies was born out of that episode of America’s Next Top Model where TyTy had the models pose as women of other races…. Y’all remember that shit? We just thought it was so absurd and started talking about rainbow babies and then it became our nickname for each other - might have helped a lot of us were Hapas, really just a coincidence and we didn’t discriminate, we were a rainbow coalition of rainbow babies.

Yellow Crew on the other hand was something a bit deeper. There were about 4 or 5 of us, all mixed, all the same shade of yellow brown skin. We had taken a class together freshman year that very much became a foundation for us, a connector. And then a magnet of sorts for others. Again this little circle of people overlapped with other groups, often included other classmates. It became a center at times.

You now know I’d been feeling all kinds of ways last week, but moreover, in all of the high highs and low lows I’ve been feeling at a loss for some kind of kinship I wasn’t getting elsewhere. I got plenty of kin, but whatever variety I needed I couldn’t just call up on an app, or walk to.

Knowing that I prepped for my other job this weekend - Professional Wedding Guest. In all honesty, I’ve known about this wedding for some time, after 11 years my friends W and S were finally getting married. I’ve texted with the bride a little, mostly because she knew I tried to RSVP but it hadn’t gone through and then lending her an ear to vent. I knew a few friends had RSVP’d and I’d see other folks I’d gone to college with, and would be sharing a room with my friend A as I’d be meeting him after my flight and we’d drive to the wedding an hour away from his hometown.

But, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible. I’ve been distracted. It wasn’t until I was packing my bag on Thursday that it clicked… This was happening. I got on Facebook and posted the following message:

“Dear Friends, Colleagues and Family - I am doing a stupidly planned 48 hour trip back east for a wedding. Truly I'm there from 5pm Friday until 5pm Sunday - flight time excluded. That said, I say this to you because I have every intention of not working, talking about work or worrying about what's happening at work - other than sharing with fellow wedding guests about what I'm up to. Taking this mental cleanse.

I love you all, but if it's about work please hit me up on Tuesday.

In partnership,

N”

As I did that, and realized what was really going on, I got more excited about it because it meant I would be with my tribe. Parts of Yellow Crew and our extended family would be there. Some of us gathered Friday night, we gathered Saturday morning for breakfast, we met up with the groom even, who is like, the last person who wants to be the center of attention. It was clear W was happy to see us, that we were his people and he needed his people.

I should pause for a second because you need to know more about W and S. I met W when he was a prospect visiting our college and I was a freshmen. He was growing out his locks and quit the lacrosse team because they couldn’t find a helmet to fit over them. S and I lived in the same dorm and had a lot of mutual friends. We really didn’t become close until much later. Now, S just completed her residency and matched the week before the wedding. W is a professor at Columbia. S is Iranian. W is black and comes from a long line of Princeton grads (not where I went to college btw. I am not the Ivy type, but it was a school that’s Ivy adjacent). Their cats are named after intellectuals and revolutionaries. No doubt their traditional Persian wedding with carefully curated Rap, R&B, Soul, Funk and Persian EDM would be amazing.

So W needed his people. And all of us gathering in honor of W and S proved to be what I needed too. Other friends, Bamma and his wife D, and our friend K were there, and we spent a lot of time, wandering and eating before the wedding, tarring up the dance floor and scurrying for breakfast the next day.

There were other friends too, people I’d always been friendly with, and several white girls I knew but their names escaped me. Turns out at least two of them were Rachel’s - go figure. But something about us all being together and for this occasion was really meaningful.

I just laid down track hoping you’d catch the subtext there, so let’s see if you did. Not only did I get to spend time with my people, I literally got to spend time, in community with not only people I love, but with a whole crew of black/brown/yellow/mocha people. And not just black/brown/yellow/mocha people, but black/brown/yellow/mocha academics, intellectuals, journalists, philanthropists and entrepreneurs. It felt so good, it was severely lacking, I had really needed my people. My tribe.

By now you know that I am in pretty diverse groups all the time and wouldn’t have it any other way. It wasn’t just that I got to spend time with POCs, but it’s what that does for your psyche as a POC. It’s that I hadn’t been in a space with other POCs without a white person also in the room in some time. Which is not to say that there weren’t white people in the room, there certainly were, but we didn’t have to interact with them unless we opted to. See, here’s the thing, we don’t have a secret white people hating meeting when this happens, we may speak differently, but it’s no different in topic. It’s that in that space, there are things that are simply understood and never need to be explained. Not that we need to explain things, but it’s that it’s not an expectation.  

A friend and mentor, who does equity work here in SF and is by and large the best white ally anyone could ask for and works hard on negotiating his white privilege, supporting others in that sort of critical reflection by pushing and pulling them in a way only he knows how, often has to remind people in the work we do together that there’s something to be said for affinity groups. That is, getting to do work with our own is important for a variety of reasons, but whenever we do affinity groups white people bug out! He always has to remind them that sometimes, white people need to be in white spaces to work out their own white shit. Being an ally, a partner, a collaborator, means reflection on your own self and trying to do that in front of or with those who you’re trying to sympathize with can often be more a burden than support.

So I got to do the work, and I am incredibly grateful for it. Not that there was shit to work on specifically, but maybe that work just meant being, and doing and soaking each other up as we talked shit, debated, danced, took pictures and celebrated the love between our two friends. Congrats S and W, thank you for giving me an opportunity to do the work. 

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

Iron and Gold in Peace and War

(Originally written 3/23/16. Worked late two nights last week, then left town for a 48 hour trip to the east coast. Needless to say, I didn’t get it up given how much was on my mind).

I’m sitting at a table, in an exhibition hall working. I’ve had some technology fails and was kicked out of this space while the hall was closed during some kind of opening ceremony. I sat in the lobby fumbling with two ipads, a bunk hot spot, a laptop and a phone. I think I broke my french press this morning.

I just want to go home. I’m having very first world problems this evening.

There are so, so, many triggers, outside of my first world issues. Or maybe they’re compounded by them

Election season. Entire populations of people in this country living in third world conditions. More killings. More shootings. International terrorist attacks. Our privacy being questioned and Apple being like, ‘Nah’. Dude Phife from A Tribe Called Quest died.

But with those many, many triggers this week there was one thing that added to how heavy I feel and I can’t get over.

This week an article was posted on The Guardian about the death and shooting of Alex Nieto here in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. (Mural below by some homies at the top of Bernal. It’s in a super cutty spot and may have been buffed already. Sad.)

It shouldn’t be a surprise that in this city, in our rapid narrative around gentrification, that San Francisco’s identity and cultural make up, and quirk is weighing in the balance of this change. Not only are we struggling to keep our city residents here because of our out of control housing market but we’re also sweeping the streets of the homeless - many of whom have experienced displacement because of that very thing.

Our local politicians are calling for a state of emergency on this, which others are noting we have limited power to actually impact given how layered and complicated housing has become. It’s a gross situation and comes down to another theme I’ve spoken about or mentioned - our concern and care for one another. Which we really, really don’t. It’s evidenced in how many bodies we’ve laid to rest. It’s evidenced by the fact that we have a lunatic running for president who even my most conservative friend’s are frightened of.

But it’s more complicated than that of course. San Francisco has been a place that’s always attracted weirdos, misfits, outsiders. I’ve mentioned that too - all are welcome, but please respect what’s here.

So this Guardian article, by Rebecca Solnit - calls up ideas that aren’t so foreign to some of us but we haven’t articulated them this strongly. Alex Nieto, was seen, and viewed in a specific way, as a specific character by people who were new to SF and hadn’t taken the time/been given an opportunity to understand our social landscape, our history.

Plainly, and at the beginning of her article Solnit asks:

“Alejandro Nieto was killed by police in the neighbourhood where he spent his whole life. Did he die because a few white newcomers saw him as a menacing outsider?”

What she uncovers and addresses as she writes is that Nieto was a normal dude, wearing Niner gear who was accused of being a Norteño - though it can be assumed that the witnesses (I wrote Whitenesses originally and subconsciously here) didn’t have the language to label him as such and merely called him a banger (again, my language not theirs).  

Though no one can really be clear about what kind of mental state he was in, or what may have triggered him or potentially agitated him that caused people to flag his behavior, he was viewed as a threat.

We spin narratives about the people we cross paths with every day. I’m not sure if I talked about it here, or on one of my other blogs, but when I worked in a high school I wore stupid pointy toed heels because it said “I’m the adult here” to me. It was a stupid way to react to something but I did it. And I still have a tendency to do it - I dress in my best, most professional clothing when things are out of control, when I need to be perceived in a specific way. It’s something I can control, when I feel like there’s not much I can control.

Which is very much how I’m feeling right now but no amount of pressed shirts, polished shoes and statement jewelry could shake the funk, and low and heavy, feeling I’ve had this week. Yeah, yeah, work - whatever, things are still not perfect, but it’s not just that. It’s in the air. There’s a thick layer of fog, not the real kind you expect from us, but the kind that clouds a situation, impairs judgement, confuses people.

So when Solnit’s thesis statement is basically - gentrification killed Alex Nieto, it kind of feels like the moment the fog disappears. Like literally. Everything made more sense. It’s not that this wasn’t such a foreign idea that it didn’t somehow make sense, but yeah. Of course.

I’m not dense. You know that. So we know gentrification isn’t a thing, that can solely commit acts on other people, but it can and does impact everyone here.

Gentrification didn’t just kill Nieto, it’s quickly and seriously changing our city. That we know as well. But if you really, truly, take out the facts and look at what’s left - the spirit, the energy, the ebb and flow of the people.

The narratives spun about the city, google buses, expensive housing, Zucks owning everything, the LGBT community runs rampant converting people. We’re the city of the beats, of large Asian communities where we eat burritos under palm trees, because it’s California afterall. Maybe the narrative is we’re all a bunch of pretentious assholes and native San Franciscans are unicorns.

Yeah, those narratives and the ones like them - are not necessarily all current, but hey you get the point. We’re a city that has always accepted everyone, we’re where people go because we’re crazy. But we’re also a city with a new purpose as a tech hub.

Neither feels authentic. Again, it feels foggy. Maybe it’s the opposite, maybe it’s slicked over and lacquered so you don’t see all the nicks and flaws.

We’re slowed down, weighed down, it is in the air. The city isn’t dying, because natives are not going anywhere, however we’re being brought the hell down.

The question I have, a long with so many others is how or when will we bounce back, or even adapt. Adaptation isn’t just about accepting the new and forgoing the old, but changing together. How or when will this happen?

Our city’s flag, is a Phoenix rising from the Ashes with the motto “Oro en Paz, Fierro in Guerra.” Translated, “Gold in Peace, Iron in War.”

Maybe, then what I’m feeling, or what’s going on in this city, is the smoke. The smoke, before the fire, before the gold becomes iron. I have this shit tattooed on my arm. We need to be more like this, as individuals, as a community. Maybe after it all, that’s when the sky will clear.

Edit: the Mural is still there after we thought it might not last long. Go check it if you can!

[wednesdaynightbourbon]

The Broad City Ladies are Bad

I don’t really love that I want to do some qualifying for this post but I will - I started writing this on the 10th, but was sick, tired and couldn’t get it together so I’m a week behind, I’m also doing little editing to this tonight so my bad. I had qualifiers even in the draft so here goes. 

3/10/16 Qualifiers:

I sat last night with zero inspo for a post. I’ve been sick and work has been hard and all that shit.

There is so much going on in this world, including here in my beloved city, that I could talk about, but I can’t, so I’m saving that. Keeping it for me. To process and reflect and maybe not say anything if I so choose.

I decided to doodle instead. Went to FB and crowd sourced for ideas - or words really, to inspire a doodle.

I doodled after choosing “Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” Which led to badass. Which led to this.

And this morning it hit me. There were other words, and some other badassery I wanted to talk about this week, so now we have this post.

-----

It’s always crazy to me, when life, in whatever way it chooses to, kind of hands your ass to you. I’m not talking about the big stuff necessarily, the like, “Okay, that was real/too real,” moments. When you’re shocked by the honesty of something and suddenly you realize it’s just a fact. Those are the moments I’m talking about, and most of the time I enjoy them, but there are certainly some exceptions.

I haven’t had much of an appetite. Not just in terms of eating, though I’ve failed big time a that this week - cold cheese sandwich for dinner on Wednesday… no bourbon at all - but in terms of consuming anything. A friend at work asked me the other day if I had anything going on that I was excited about. She was genuinely asking and from a place of concern and friendship. And I couldn’t answer right away. I’m going to a wedding of dear friends in a few weeks, another of my soulmate besties will be visiting during his birthday the following week. But I didn’t mention those things. But she was right - I had shit to be excited about, but I wasn’t.

My appreciation for Comedy Central’s ‘Broad City”, was a sort of slow burn situation. When I heard about it I was excited. A female driven comedy with Amy Poehler’s backing. That’s a lot to be excited about. I had some reservations - especially with the acclaim it built before it even really got off the ground. Another show starring white girls in New York… that shit sounded suspect.

I should pause and remind you about my dislike for “Girls”. Not relatable, such a specific elitist perspective, but also -  White people problems (WPPs). So when it came to “Broad City - Yeah... I was worried. I watched the first episode, I don’t even remember what I thought about it. A few episodes in, I had a - shit, this is too much moment. I’d once lamented that there wasn’t enough female driven comedy that was unapologetically real. The ladies of “Broad City” however, were just too much.

People had sung “Girls” praises for being raw. For Lena having the bravery to bare her nekkid self, for showcasing characters talking about real shit that happens to women. I get it. You get some points for effort. But as I watched the first season - feeling like a voyeur trying understand the hype - it felt like there was a filmy coating over the whole thing, that kept me from seeing it clearly. It. Was. Not. Relatable. Which made these raw, too much moments even less appealing.

My too much moment with “Broad City” came quick. They kind of grossed me out. I couldn’t even explain why. But I had asked for this kind of thing a few years ago. I’d stayed over at my comedian friend Christian’s place and we got into a discussion about women doing gross out comedy - not necessarily the comedy equivalent of like gore horror, but the kind of comedy that takes more work than being naturally funny. I don’t exactly know what provoked the convo but he introduced me to a few movies I hadn’t seen - cult classics really - that met that bar and a movie marathon insuded. “House Bunny”. “Sweetest Thing”. This was before the Paul Feig/Melissa McCarthy/ Kristen Wiig era mind you, so they were the only bar we had to measure.

Of course I’d later love what came of the Paul Feig/Melissa McCarthy/ Kristen Wiig, aside from the occasional slow moving plot points, they could do no wrong. They are masters of physical comedy, of adlibbing, of pace.

So one would think that my appreciation for, and comfort to a certain extent, with the scene in “Bridesmaids” where they’re trying on dresses, I’d be fine with the “Broad City” brand of gross. But I wasn’t. I passed on it. My best friends didn’t get why. The first few episodes in some ways still felt like such, WPP shit.

At some point in the last year and a half, I was compelled to give it a go. No one had pushed me to it, it just happened. I still don’t remember when I crossed over into getting it, and into thinking and knowing Abbi and Illana were legit. I wouldn’t go as far as saying they were geniuses, but (It MIGHT be on right now for the week and they MIGHT have just had some dialogue about being ‘lit-ral geniuses’)... definitely doing something fresh and worth watching. I was in my kitchen, binge watching and cooking something, but it clicked.

It had previously felt like an act, like a put on. But as you watched more and more it became clear, they weren’t. It’s just them. The ladies were on Trevor Noah a few weeks ago, and he asked them, if they were setting out to make a different show or if they were just different. Their response was simply it’s who they were. They weren’t moving on and doing anything groundbreaking because they were still following some of the same comedy tropes, just spinning it in their way.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re still gross. But my crossing over into appreciation for them was tied more into feeling like their authenticity and honesty was that sort of ass being handed to me. I certainly haven’t been through most of the things they - but they’re fucking weird unapologetically and unintentionally so - which is sometimes the realest shit you’ll see.

Perhaps that’s what makes them so appealing. You may not be them, or have been through what they have, but you definitely know someone like them. They’re relatable at least in that sense.

So I’m sorry dear friends who I doubted. You’re all diverse, and cover so many different demographic groups, many of whom have slightly strange but somehow understandable crushes on Illana.

And as my best friend who may or may not be one of the people who has an Illana crush pointed out first on his Twitter feed, last week’s call out on Illana’s cultural appropriation was some real meta shit.