All of it has always seemed so arbitrary to me,
“Very tired” is the only honest answer to the obligatory politesse of “how are you doing?”
“Very tired and about three weeks from a quiet, controlled, and possibly prolonged freak out about how and whether I can make both a positive impact on the world and continue to pay my bills” is the longer form version that one might offer if the question is indeed sincere.
I spent this weekend in Oakland, partly because I moderated a panel at a conference here as one of my last acts as an employee of the secretive fruit company, partly because I need never try too hard to find a reason to spend a weekend in Oakland.
What is it like to be from the place you live? What is it like to have people constantly assume “no one is really from there, you know?”
I know what it is like to be an immigrant—I have been an immigrant now for longer than I have not. I know what it is like to fear deportation; I know what it is like to fear that I have contributed to displacement.
How do you make a difference without the presumptuousness of believing you are the only one who can?
I learned early on (how) to not get attached to corporate identities. Corporations have no loyalty to their employees though they demand fealty (in addition to your labour) in return for those paychecks. But I have not quite figured out how to detach myself from [my] work; from working; from being useful and productive.
“I cause trouble” is an honest answer to the social nicety / invasive probing of “so what do you do?”
“I am extremely good at building products and teams that make money and burnish reputations” is the longer form version that I might offer if forced / being interviewed.
I do not like talking about myself, which is a strange claim to make when I have written some form of a newsletter for nearly a decade and started blogging back when doing so required knowing your way around an FTP server.
Writing for me is like breathing, sometimes easy and automatic and a thing I can do without really being aware of it and sometimes laboured and painful but always essential to my continued survival.
Why do we behave like creativity is a privilege or a mystery?
Attribution:
Quite the Junkery The world, all of its rock formations
and space missions and presidents and religious phobias and
fashions fossils All of it has always seemed so arbitrary to me,
bc to survive this long into an occupation feels sometimes so
arbitrary to be And then sometimes so divine Who else could
survive but my line It’s true, your Junk won’t save you from a
tsunami, but I’m descended from a group whose culture history
language gods cosmology calendar stories government gait was
capital “O” Obliterated I’ll stop writing this when it stops hap-
pening So when I “get” anything it’s hard to let go Resisting
death for generations, I want to make the opposite of death— from Junk by Tommy Pico [Get the book]