Catching Up... Picking Up Where I Left Off

So, school started for me and I quickly became wrapped up in the emotional and intellectual work it entails. This is my excuse for not writing since mid August when I made the promise that I would daily write through my music collection. It took a friend coming to me last night (at the Ani DiFranco concert, which will figure into this again in a moment), asking me why I hadn't written anything since that last entry. As I was explaining that school had been consuming my entire existence, I started to think about what I have been telling myself and others over the past few weeks: I need more in my life than work.

As I was watching and listening to Ani play, I meandered through a triptych of my life. The detours, the contradictions, the hopes, the failures, the enlightening moments and the humiliating ones. They were all there with me last night in the Fargo Theater. As I was leaving the theater I knew it was time to make my life more than my job. More than the university campus. More than the politics and the pent up frustration that has been consuming me. It is time to rethink the promise I made to myself in August. It is time to pick up where I left off. So, here I am, writing. Now I can’t promise I’ll do this every day, but I will delve into my music collection at least once a week.

Listening to Ani: Live and Electronically
Ani’s music has meant so much to me over the years. It was about 16 years ago that she entered my life. It was some time between 1993 and 1994, I think, that I bought my first cassette of Imperfectly. I was living in Santa Cruz and my roommate at the time had that album in her collection. It took one listen and I was hooked. I had to have my own copy. I could not stop listening to it. So I bought it. On cassette. It lived in my headset (one of those clunky cassette headsets that seemed so high-tech at the time). I then bought everything she had out at that point in her career, which included her first album, Ani DiFranco and Not So Soft. Those albums became my new best friends. I didn’t listen to much else for months.

So, I decided to start this dialogue with that holy trinity: Ani DiFranco, Not So Soft, Imperfectly. Seems fitting. Currently, I’m listening to Ani DiFranco. The album takes me immediately back to my time in Santa Cruz. I can smell the ocean as I trace my path home from night school at the local community college. I would take a bus from Aptos (where the community college was located) to my home, which rested a little north of downtown Santa Cruz. The night bus ended its route at the downtown terminal, so I would have to walk the rest of the way. I normally took the route nearest to the ocean. It would be dark and I could smell the ocean as I listened to Ani sing to me about so many things I understood, but didn’t know anybody could say out loud with such conviction.

“i am determined to survive on these shores
i don’t avert my eyes anymore
in a man’s world
i am a woman by birth
and after nineteen times around i have found
they will stop at nothing once they know what you are worth” --Talk to Me Now

I was so timid, so unsure of what I was and what I thought. It was a different time for me. At that point in my life, I rarely felt justified to be… me. I rarely had confidence to stand up for who I was and what I believed. I was only just beginning to understand who I was and what I wanted out of life. And that I could be and do more than even I expected.

That was the beginning for me. The beginning of many things. The world started to look different. I was no longer simply my parents' child. I was this person who could control the life I lived. And it was at that time I was determined to experience as much as I could possibly experience in a lifetime.

So here I sit, sixteen years later, listening to music on a computer and an ipod. My cassette headset is a dinosaur from a strange past. I remember constantly scraping together cash to buy AA batteries to feed my energy hungry cassette player. Now I just connect my ipod to my computer and recharge. Strange. I know this sounds like a silly point, but the technological changes provide a context for the internal changes I have experienced.

I mean, I’m listening to these albums now as a 37-year old sociology professor. I teach about gender and inequality. I do research on trauma and war. I get paid to read and write and talk about things most passionate to my humanity. I have driven and lived all over this country. I have flown to amazing places and met incredible people. I can stand in front of a group of students and talk about ideas and research and my life. When I was that 21-year old girl walking along the ocean with my cumbersome cassette player, I couldn’t imagine being in front of anybody talking about the things in my head or the things that I cared about so dearly.

“i am singing now
because my tear ducts are too tired
and my mind is disconnected
but my heart is wired” --Fire Door

It was about a year after I was introduced to Ani that I was working on the poetry journal published by my community college. One of my poems was accepted. Maybe some day I’ll post it and embarrass myself, but anyway, the point here is that as part of being included in the journal, I had to read my poem at a social event. I was physically sick for days before. I was scared. But I made myself do it. I had to prove to myself that I could get past my fears. As I walked up to read my poem, I was trembling. My mouth was pasty and my heart was about to leap out of my mouth. But after a few words, I felt the rest of the room growing dark and my mind finally returning back into my body. I didn't think about people staring at me. I thought about what I was saying and how important it was for me to speak those words at that moment. With an audience. Even if the poem was not fantastic (as I recall, it was filled with the melodrama and angst of youth). And even though my voice was small and timid.

“i make a good statistic
somebody should study me now
someone’s got to be interested in how i feel
just because i’m here and i’m real” --Fire Door

But as different as I am today, I am still very much the same person. I think of the anxiety in my body that rises with new stressors. I realize how much I have turned silent in this place in which I live and work. As I have gained more responsibility and reached more of my goals, I fall back into fear--the fear of losing all that I gained. Yet that fear is actually keeping me from going further. And I need to go further. I realize how much I am disempowering myself as I try to hold on to something that turns hollow in my compromises. And like the moment when I walked up to that podium to read my poem so many years ago, I need to realize that I have much to gain by moving beyond the corners and crevices in which I hide. I do put myself out there in front of my students, but I can go further. And with more conviction. I have to remember that even at 37 there is still so much out there for me. There is so much left. And I can’t do it silently. Or half-assed.

“I know that it’s not all that it’s made out to be
Let’s show them all how it’s done.
Let’s do it all imperfectly.” --Imperfectly