Magickal Realism

My revolution will not be televised. This is because it’s all online.

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I’m making some productivity changes. They may confuse some, but have faith! It means, ideally, that I can better entertain you in the future.

1. Email

Checking it twice a day only. Filtered the bejesus out of it, so things are sorted into specific folders as they come in. I’ve found companies that cheat this system and flag everything as “urgent.” These are also the people that send a promotional email daily, a hands-down worst practice. In most email responses (there are obvious exceptions for people I rarely see, am interviewing, etc.) I am striving to make email responses 5 sentences or less. Emails that require longer than 5 sentence responses do get dropped to the bottom of my queue, and will likely get responses on weekends.

2. Social media

Also attempting to go on twice daily only (with breaks for Words with Friends.) May cheat, using Bufferapp. I am doing this yes, to promote the book I’m writing, but also to maintain a presence when I’m unable to share immediately. Also, I find a TON of cool stuff worth sharing in my RSS reader – and posting it all at once is really annoying; this helps me pace it out.

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3. Phone

Phone calls must be scheduled. These can not go over 15 minutes, and must happen after 5 pm, or even 8 pm. I am more flexible if you want to use Skype or Google Hangout, but an appointment is still required.

4. Fridays

Friday is now my official reading day. On Fridays, I read. This is time I also use to catch up on forums, read emails, highlight magazines and most especially READ BOOKS.  I allow myself slightly more latitude on social media that day as well.

5. Actual socialization

I am also making it a point to try to do something at least once a week with a friend. Sometimes I need to hunker down, but if I can do a lunch or catch a movie, that’s totally OK.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act comes with some serious red flags.

1. It comes with corporate sponsorship. Corporate sponsors have no business in the legislative process, and yet there they are, ubiquitous as ever. This particular piece of legislation is one more sign that corporate personhood is the worst thing the United States has introduced into law since Prohibition. Prohibition brought about organized crime in the United States. Corporate personhood has legalized crime.

While the link referred above has an extreme tone that undercuts the very points it’s trying to make, it also has an extensive list of the corporations sponsoring SOPA. Highlights include:

CBS NBC Universal Nike Pfizer Inc. (now why would a pharmaceutical giant want free range censorship?) Burberry, Coach, Dolce & Gabanna, Coty Inc., Kate Spade, Revlon CVS , Rite Aid Harley-Davidson Motor Company Reebok Sony Corporation Dow Chemical Company McGraw-Hill Companies Walt Disney Company (no surprise there, they’re the source of nearly all copyright manipulation that has happened in the history of the United States) Wal-Mart Xerox

I would love it if a more expert blogger might delve into the number of “psychological associate” companies included in the list.

2. The proposal violates the 14th Amendment without question. While some argue it violates the 1st Amendment, there is too much wiggle room on that – government enforcement personnel  aren’t PREVENTING you from saying what you need to say, they’re just going to yank your site after you do say something a corporation doesn’t like or after you link to something a corporation doesn’t like. The biggest problem with the amendment is that there is NOT a check-and-balance. This protest is, ultimately, citizens engaging in their end of the check-and-balance system US government relies on.

3. There is actually a proposal for a reasonable alternative, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, that has gone virtually ignored. The key to this is that pressure is not placed on the judicial system to enforce already established copyright protections. Instead, responsibility goes to the International Trade Commission (already set up for this stuff!) and they do an investigation of problematic web sites. It allows for due process and everything!

So, while you protest SOPA by writing to your representatives, you might consider advocating OPEN, if you feel that it protects our intellectual rights the correct way.

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Why SOPA but not the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA?)

It’s worth mentioning that while there is a massive hue and cry over SOPA, there are objectors who have brought up the question about why we are not so vividly protesting President Obama’s shiny new power to retain prisoners indefinitely.

The reasons are actually simple. If you are a judgmental/sanctimonious sort, you will likely see these reasons as a moral failing on a grand scale. I encourage you to check these tendencies if you are blessed to be aware you have them: it’s that very mentality that eventually kills progress on a given cause. Consider this as a way of informing a new potential roadmap for activism.

1. People will act on what is likely to affect them directly. In the book the Information Diet, author Clay A. Johnson rightly points out that US citizens have become so overfed on a diet of confirmation bias and news that in fact does NOT impact their lives in a direct way, that most respond with apathy until there is direct interference. It’s very possible for me to interpose myself between Fat Chic and a determined shopper, to get the message to the shopper of “Hey, you need to do something about this if you want to shop or be entertained.” I do not have the means, however, to directly impose myself between a military official and an unjustly detained prisoner. I have a high likelihood in such a scenario of becoming an indefinitely detained prisoner. This has no appeal.

2. The best activists do it for themselves. (This was pointed out in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.) I am a feminist because I am a woman, and I am continually appalled at the disrespect I am expected to tolerate just because of my gender, for example. When I support causes for groups that I am not a member of, it is because when my personal friends have better lives, we all have more ease in socializing; racism, sexism and homophobia screw with my ability to have a good time with my friends. Ergo, I am a vocal ally and advocate in related causes because the opposition harshes my mellow.

3. Not everyone agrees that the NDAA bill is in the wrong. It’s not necessarily hardcore, let’s-monitor-your-pants Republicans that are supporting it. There’s some serious crap that has gone down with Pakistan, and just as the US depersonalizes people outside the country, the US in turn gets highly depersonalized. That depersonalization is the key to anything from domestic abuse to international terrorism.  Let’s revisit the concept of confirmation bias: when we already have an opinion, we have a tendency to filter out information that doesn’t support it. There is some well-researched information on adding this “indefinite detention” easter egg to the bill on both sides of the issue, but there’s very little out there that gives a whole picture. Obama never advertised himself to be anti-war, but for him to allow himself such an extreme power suggests that there’s much more to the picture than your favorite news source is willing/able to cover.

4. The bill gets revisited annually, because it’s a military budget bill. This does not fix the problem of the human rights violation, but it may be a factor in the low/apathetic response from the citizenship. Also, it does mean that those with loved ones that are detained can keep trying this year, and know they will have a good opportunity to keep trying to get it overturned next year.

5. We the people have been information overloaded into apathy. SOPA is different because it gets between us and what feeds our apathy; by cutting the “drug feed” we are waking people up. There are so many causes that need our attention, and all the clamoring causes a sort of scattered shut-down because so many of us have convinced ourselves the only way to be “good” is to support “all” the causes, while supporting the causes that have the most meaning to us and that affect our own lives the most directly are often cut short of key support because we have convinced ourselves that this is somehow self-serving, on the mistaken and unbalanced theory that ALL self-serving is “bad.”

There is one more thing worth mentioning that links SOPA and the NDAA together: if SOPA were to pass, the ability of the people to speak out against prisoner retention and any other violation of civil rights would be exponentially reduced, reduced to a smaller reach than all citizens had even in the 1960s. Information distribution has changed drastically, and it would be harder to get a message out, organize, or raise awareness. Yes, those of us who have regular Internet access are a privileged class. Poverty in the United States is still, on a comparative scale, some of the most comfortable poverty in the world (this does not mean to imply poverty is EVER comfortable.) We can have fingers shaken at us for simply having this privilege – and some do, using Internet access to do so- but we can also use the tools of our privilege to protect our own rights, making our modems an additional right filed under the “right to bear arms.” Computers and communication can also be used as our tools of self-protection, of protest, and even of dealing with a corrupt government. SOPA, and its protest, is something we can address with the power we have immediately onhand. NDAA is something we have to address leveraging the power that those of us who voted entrusted to someone else.

Therein lies the difference; in SOPA, we have more direct power than we do in the NDAA.

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Note: While this is intended to acknowledge, and to share my personal experiences with racism, I can see where it might also offend. This is not my intention. It is only to bring attention to things we might be ignoring in and amongst ourselves, and it has my attention so clearly I need to think about it.

There has been argument from a certain overclass of which I am part that Martin Luther King Jr. did not merit a national holiday. “George Washington Carver did more the country if they must make a holiday of a black man,” said one woman I knew, sneering in distaste. Her argument was that he did something for everyone, while MLK Jr. only did something for black people.¹

This, as we know, is bullshit.

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Civil rights are for everyone. Just because a group of abusive white men see themselves as victims by having the law take away their “rights” to have victims does not mean that it doesn’t ultimately do them good, too. They may not see it that way, but being forced to acknowledge humanity in any class, race, gender and variations of all of that is a giant step that makes a lot of people who are accustomed to getting their way without question feel obsolete. The very root of this stuff is from people needing to feel important, and there are a lot of men and women in the world who have become accustomed to having it done for them. This DIY of self-importance is a new and often rattling concept. (Self-important falls in a spectrum from healthy to pejorative.)

We are all racist. I’ve spent some time thinking and reading about institutional racism. I am not an expert, but I have made an effort to inform myself. I agree that our institutions ARE racist – black and Native American students in Minneapolis are suspended at a disproportionately high rate in contrast to their peers. Our prison populations are over packed with people of color, and even those who have the financial means are often unable to leverage the same appeals systems that white money can. At this point, I think that the banks are equal opportunity exploiters, but I daresay that given the opportunity such as that presented with the current Somali financial crisis,  they will do a special screw-over on people of color. Oh yes, there’s a problem, and it’s pervasive. I’m not sure who declared President Obama’s election the “end of racism.” It’s not. I’m still not sure that wasn’t said in jest – racism is an endemic part of US American self-identity, and don’t preen too much Canadians, I’ve caught some of you at it, too.

Here’s the other part of it: while our institutions are indeed racist, the races that they are racist toward are ALSO racist. I have heard the argument that institutional racism means it’s a one way, monogamous deal. That’s crap. People of color do some hating on the side and right out front, too. I’ve had “cracker bitch,” yelled at me a few times (and that’s the only epithet I’ve had hurled at me from that arena I’m willing to print), not for something I did (that was apparent to me, anyway) but for a)dating men of color b)for showing up to shop in a black neighborhood and c)for showing up white in my own mixed neighborhood. I have encountered women of color who automatically assume because I’m a woman of no color that a)I am automatically afraid of them and b)that I automatically hate them. The women that have attempted to intimidate me when I’m waiting at a bus stop and minding my own business have been confused and annoyed when I don’t respond as they expect. I have had men of various nationalities and color approach me and outright demand sex from me, on the assumption that a fat white woman will naturally be eager for any male attention – and on the assumption that my skin (or my Pagan religion) meant I come without sexual morality. (Just because it’s not YOUR morality does not mean it’s not moral.) Certainly there’s some misogyny mixed in there, too, but all the same, I’ve had some crap dished to me because of my white skin – because that was the only real information that the person doing the dishing had about me in those moments. This is not about whether my suffering is proportional to the daily pressure that people of color endure – we all know it’s not – but it is present, and can be a factor in my endangerment, too.

I’ve said some stupid shit in my day – there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know was racist until I got the hell out of Indiana, and I’m only glad that people chose to gently educate me instead of throttle me Homer Simpson-style. I’m sure I still say stupid shit. I am part of a racist culture, and I am racist.  I’m truly grateful Mrs. Keene in the 7th grade had me read Cry the Beloved Country; South Africa’s situation forced me to take a look at what went on in my own country, so when the clue-stick appeared in early adulthood, I usually took it as blessing rather than a beating.

But Martin Luther King Jr. did lay out a vision, and every day of my life I am putting energy into the vision that his children, and their children, and everyone’s children “will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Civil rights are ONE way to get individuals like you and me  to look for the content of another person’s character. To know any person, to make an effort to know any person, before you engage, assume or judge, is a powerful and sacred act. It changes what you decide about sex – the content of the character of a same sex couple marrying can bring happiness and stability into a chaotic world; it changes how you see single parenthood; it changes how you see the elderly because you take time to know their stories. It changes how you see race, as you learn to see the person. The way we consume media and live our lives ultimately reinforces racism as we see only pictures that we judge and snark at, without ever truly seeing the person below. We depersonalize celebrities so we may stick them in our confirmation loops, and thus we never see them, only what we want to see in them; often that comes with justification and practice at hating.

Perhaps, as a ritual, it might be worth seeking out someone else’s story today. Listen to someone talking on the bus; read something at the Experience Project; even watch something from one of the nationality channels on cable access. Leave your “I” out of it – don’t relate yourself or inject yourself or make yourself a character. Just listen, read or watch that other experience. Today is not about your story – it is about hearing another person’s story.

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There was also MLK’s consorting with criminals that was brought up, but given that a)he was a reverend and holy man and b)the situation he was in at the time, I think that this is in no way evidence of his corruption. I heard a recording of him from when he spoke in Mankato, Minnesota – there’s no doubt in my mind that the Holy Spirit, however you may see the Holy Spirit (I’m Wiccan, so very different from most people, but I believe in it) was with him.

There were really only three things on my list last year, and I’m surprised to say I achieved all of them.

The best known was to get my book finished. While it’s not finished, it’s on contract, which was much farther than I expected to be by now. While I am progressing at a consciously slow pace, I AM progressing.

The other two were integrated/related:

From 2007 – 2010 I have been plagued by illness. A cold would give way to a flu, which would give way to a persistent cough. The week before my father died in 2009, one illness actually rendered me temporarily deaf.  Related to that, I wanted to spend more time using my gym membership, and Mike and I moved around finances so I could have one in lieu of relying on the seasonal nature of Minneapolis community ed. (I still highly recommend community ed as an affordable way to enhance your life and achieve your goals.) I was part of the cycle where I would get started on a fitness program, and then get struck ill and struck hard enough I had to stop. I could rarely make it through a six week course of water aerobics and make all six weeks.

What I stated at the beginning of 2011 was that I wanted to spend “as much time as humanly possible at the Y” and to “do something about my constant health problems.”

I did not have a specific plan for either, but it ended up working out for the better.

Mike changed his work schedule so that he comes home in time for me to go to group classes at the Y at 5 pm.  In the summer, after reading that Pilates and Yoga had the best long-term results for fitness, I took the evening Pilates course on Tuesdays. Right now my gym schedule is M-W water aerobics, Th pilates, and F on the treadmill. I try to leave weekends open for my own sake.

While I’ve never suffered joint pain outside of areas where I’ve broken bones, and I actually don’t have the back pain common to most North Americans, I have noticed a greater sense of ease in my body after taking Pilates. I’m also no longer collapsing and thinking “I’m gonna die!!!!!” during class. (All bets may be off for that should someone introduce me to this Reformer I keep hearing so much about.)

I also read up a bit on how colds persist, and talked to another writer who swears by Airborne and raising the core body temperature. I’m raising my core temp at least 4 days a week, now, so that’s covered. The reading about how viruses live mostly in your nose and throat led to two new things, one of which I had previously resisted:

1)I now use a neti pot 1 – 2x a day. Salt is cheap and easy to obtain, and while I worry a little bit about damaging my olfactory nerves,  there’s relatively little evidence of people experiencing damage after long term, proper use.

2)I have a “health cocktail” that I’m especially quick to use when I’m having a hives breakout: 1 tsp of baking soda in an 8 ounce glass of water, with a bit of lime juice and stevia tincture added to ease it going down. This has also turned out to be a great stomach-settler, and tastes way better than Alka-Seltzer.

I still take a zinc supplement, and when a cold does sneak up on me, now that I’m resistant to using sage, I often use coltsfoot and lemon verbena. I take very small doses of kava kava when I’m anxious. I also discovered, thanks to Mike’s ketogenic diet adventure last summer, that if I eat the “full fat” version of foods, from dairy to meat to chips, I eat LESS of them and ultimately consume less calories than I do if I eat the “reduced fat” versions. Since I am still following intuitive eating¹  it seems to make sense. The “full fat” is actually more natural than the “no fat” approach, and I still think that using eating as a way to feel morally superior is fucked up.

The end result? I have brushed by colds in the last half of the year, but nothing has taken me out of the running for more than a day, and most days I was still able to get up and go to the gym. I also seem to have very reduced allergic reactions. I’ve also invested in a cool air humidifier, which when used in concert with my air filter, has more or less ended the nightly asthma attack that would wake me up coughing.

So all around, it’s been a big improvement.

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contrary to popular belief it is NOT eating whatever the hell you want – there is behavior change attached

Resolutions as currently established sound like a failure formula. The system seems good – to “improve’ yourself – but when you look closely, it’s really another system of self-punishment that often winds up preventing the very behaviors that you want to instill. The self-forgiving approach – and let’s face it, the prospect of my ass strapped in an international flight seat for seven hours – got me to get better about my gym habit, and now it’s firmly established. I don’t feel right unless I’ve been to the Y at least 4 days a week.  I also did not attach results to the goals. I want to have the habit, and I want to detach from results.

So, in 2012, these are the habits I want to establish:

Getting up at 6 am, ideally daily. This will take practice, fail a few times, and take some self-persuasion that getting up early can be fun. I never really slept past 8 am as a teenager or in college, and the late sleeping now is a combination of making up for years of much needed sleep deprivation, meds (most of which I no longer need/take as I get a better handle on my allergies) and possibly just making up for lost childhood by sleeping through an awesome adulthood. Even 7 am would be OK. This does mean enforcing upon myself a 10 pm bedtime at least 3 times a week. This is mostly about keeping up with my writing and blogging schedule, including the Artist’s Way work. This is the year I really need to start producing articles for anthologies, annuals and the like. Going dancing every other week. No drinking, especially if I’m by myself. I can go back to DDPP, sure, but I also may go to one or two bars with dance floors where I feel comfortable safe. Several times through my twenties I took a look around at my life and thought resentfully, “I thought there’d be dancing.” The best way for me to get that is to just go, go alone, and not let the usual social entrapment (well intended, not conscious, or founded in insecurities I don’t share)  snare me from it. Use my museum memberships to their fullest capacity. I’m a member of the Walker and MIA this year. I’m going to really make it a point to be more involved in both. This means lots of artist’s dates, which is good, because I’ll need them with the work I’m doing. Be more visual. Share more photos of my life and experiences; I still take the photos, but I realize I rarely share them. You may not see immediate results of this – I do need to tag the daylights out of flickr, but thanks to changes on the site the greasemonkey scripts that made this easy to do in less than a decade sometimes just don’t work anymore. With this photo sharing, I also need to use more words about why I took the photo. Get face to face time with friends once a week, if not more. This will take some work and planning, but I know I can do it. I need to respond to the question about whether my introversion goes in phases. It does, and it’s complex enough to merit a blog post since I’m exactly halfway between an introvert and an extrovert. Cut down email/Facebook/Twitter to no more than twice a day. (OK, probably a little more checking for Twitter.) I can corral most stuff to Tweetdeck, which allows me to backtrack on Facebook and LinkedIn; and learning to ignore fresh email as I work through my Google tasks will be tough for me. I’d love it if Google had an “email closed” version that could a)save and email and b)work outside of my  browser. It would really help me focus better, since I do like adding tasks directly from my email. Chat messages do go straight to my phone now, so any chat you send me is essentially the same as calling me, but probably faster. Also, TV on weekends only. That’s my best way of keeping up with the work I have at hand, and allows me to feel productive at a relaxed pace. Oddly, I can sense my stress levels increasing when I’m on a regular TV diet – but in concentrated bursts, it’s relaxing, rather than stressful.

I recently read in the Happiness Project about the statement “You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want.” I’m not sure I’m willing to believe that – but is that denial, or does it just offend my somewhat childlike sense that all things are possible?  I do know I can’t do everything all at once – but I’m hoping that these changes, making sure I expend energy on what I do want, will make it possible for me to do one hell of a lot.

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