three cheers

ONE

It's said that young people have a very strong sense about many things--what's right and what's wrong, what justice is, what hurt looks like, what loss and joy feel like.

So I have wondered quite a bit about what this culture does to young people as they grow. Does it deaden the nerves? Tighten the skin? Indoctrinate into systemic isolation? Is our culture, if allowed to rage with unmet resistance, good at nothing but kicking, kicking, kicking?

I did not get an answer today, but I got a bizarre twist, when I waited at a bus stop and this young boy bounced away from his Dad and sat next to me, and the first question out of his mouth was, "Are you a boy or a girl?" He is not the first to ask, and I am likely not the first to answer. Even so I never know what to say in these situations; I never have a smart-whip rejoinder lined up that can delight and confound, nor do I have stock radical queer responses to draw out and test on the interrogator. The best I could come up with was, "I don't know, what do you think?", fearing the worst. But he didn't say anything. He just looked at me for a half-second, and smiled a big old grin, and I grinned just as big back at him. Maybe he already had an answer in his head he didn't share. Maybe he thought my non-answer was sufficient. But I think it was something else, something in that smile that suggested conniving, conspiring, mischief, revelling in the uncertainty of gender with no desire to move towards more solid ground. And more, his silence. That was a wonderful sound, his happy, unweighted silence. He didn't know it, but that was probably the most respectful gesture he could have given, and one of the best responses out of a long, long line of interrogators that have crossed into my life. And I get excited thinking about it now, cuz it tells me this: our culture can kick young people into submission, but young people, with the simplest gestures and tools at their disposal, know how to kick the fuck back.

TWO

I got to have three free meals today--one a rockin' picnic with Claudia in the shade of a tree on the Summit Ave median, one support food at the Como neighborhood headquarters (that would be Crescent Moon Pizza, home to the dazzling Afghan pizza) for UMN Meet & Greet volunteers, and one a generous array of refreshments at tonight's Native Inroads reading at the Loft. And the kicker: every single one involved Middle Eastern/West Asian food. Yay for more portions of flatbread!

(I was going to make this a No Greater Joy Than but that honor roll is already chock-full of entries on food--which is to say, all of them are entries on food.)

THREE

I get the use of a laptop for the entirety of the Labor Weekend.

Really. Y'all don't even know (even the ones who think they know me well), can't even comprehend how incredible that is right about now. Just reading that sentence is like sweet music to my ears. "I get the use of a laptop..." Damn.

Thanks JP for the hookup. You sweet.