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17 Sep

We Don’t Need Another Hero, And Certainly Not One Who Cries All The Time

Here’s my worry about going to Africa to see the Born HIV Free project in action: that I’m going to start crying the moment that I arrive, and just not stop. And that I am then going to feel guilty about crying, and that I’ll then cry about that.

I fly to Lesotho on Saturday. I was supposed to go to Napa Valley, first, to hang out with some lovely women and discuss things like life lists and dreams and pixie dust and to drink wine and be light-hearted, and for some reason, some ironic reason or some absurd reason, that – that beautiful little oasis of self-indulgence – was grounding me, was helping me keep my emotional wits about me. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because they are opposing poles on the same fuzzy dreamscape, whereupon I live a life in which I get to do things like spend weekends in Napa and also go and support humanitarian projects in Africa and I wanted to see them reconciled.  Because these things, these actually very real things, are, however different, nonetheless connected, inasmuch as they both have everything to do with this, this thing that I do here, on this page that you are reading.

But things changed, and I’m not going to Napa Valley first, and it hit me this afternoon as I was pushing aside the pretty dresses in my closet to see what clothes might be appropriate for visiting orphanages in Lesotho – what does one wear to visit hospitals and orphanages in Lesotho? – that I had really been relying upon the whole idea of Napa Valley – the Mighty Summit – as a buffer against the soul-rattling hugeness of the journey to Africa. Or maybe not a buffer – a transitional zone.

27 Aug

Buffy Only Fought Vampires

I like to think that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t take things for granted. I know how fortunate I am to have the life that I have; I know, too, that the terms and conditions of that life include no guarantees against frustration and sadness and pain and loss. I know, even the most difficult moments, that I have much to be grateful for, that I lead a life that is, for the most part, what the old philosophers might have called choiceworthy. I know that it is choice, largely, that defines my fortune and privilege: I am fortunate enough and privileged enough to be able to choose, to some not insignificant degree, my path and all of its little detours, to choose my pace and my direction, to choose to linger over or to pass by the myriad distractions of life, to gaze into the gloom or to seek out the sunlight. I am lucky, I know this.

It is also a characteristic of this good fortune, this privilege, that I am vulnerable to frustration and sadness (and, possibly, to depression; I’ll reflect upon this further someday) when I am forced to confront my limitations, when I look down this path or the other and see no way around a certain obstacle – some figurative bog or rock or troll-ridden bridge – and have to stop, give up, go a different way. That’s the very definition of privilege, I think – the luxury of getting pissy about being thwarted. Not that those who are less privilege don’t get frustrated at the obstacles that they are forced to confront – it’s just that, I think, the fortunate are more likely to put their hands on their hips and stamp their feet and say that shouldn’t be there, how dare that be there? and collapse to the ground in a resentful huff.

Or something like that.