Dinner conversation

Had dinner tonight with a few people in Chinatown. A few things KB said made us kind of nod in recognition:

You're not organizing if at the end of it, you're burnt out.

If you don't have education, if you don't have a right hand, you can find people who do. They can fill that role. If you're too smart, it shuts everyone out.

There are two models: one is to "empower" people you think are stupid or incapable, play god. Give them "power." The other is to "unleash" people's true power. To organize the undocumented, women, un-educated. The ones everyone looks down on. Which is organizing?

Things to think about...

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Japanese Class in NYC - first lesson!!!!!!!!!!!!

(It's been a while since my last post! I have just begun my first job in NYC!!! Teaching after-school classes in Japanese Language and Anime Culture in a inner-city high school in dowtown manhattan! Welcome to the first installment...) "You better have a leg in it," said N__ when she heard how many students I had in my Japanese class: over 30. I had to ask what that meant, but I wasn't feeling any kind of ominous energy from the students who had signed up for after-school Japanese Language Club. What I mean is: Who signs up to stay at school for 3 extra hours unless they really want to be there??? After trying (and failing) to set up a DVD for the first hour, waiting for the students to trickle in, and being herded into a corner by a Student Government meeting, I began class. The first order of the day was to break up into groups and brainstorm what the students expected of each other, of themselves, and of me as a teacher. Many of them said the same things: for the t

obaachan

something came over me just now, as i finished writing holiday cards to ppl in japan. my grandmother is in a private hospital, blowing all her decades of savings in the high-income ward where she was placed when she collapsed from diabetes complications. she cycles in an out of good health according to my mother, who flies back and forth between DC and nagoya in the final months of her 30-year employment at the world bank. my mom bikes back and forth from the hospital to the little wooden row-house (長屋) that survived air-raids during WWII, virtually untouched since that time. back and forth in and out up and down how to break free of this incessant cycle of death and rebirth? only through struggle...

postcard poetry: here are some of my favorite postcards that i've sent to people so far 1

providence can be a brutal city, just like any other. in this glass box I watched the ocean fall in sheets outside computer clusters, braid inside the gutters. umbrellas made no difference. this is the version i actually ended up using: Providence can be and has been just as brutal as any other city in the country, but i was safe and desperately warm within the glass cage, watching the Atlantic fall in sheets, watching the acid rain braid itself into the gut- ters, wringing words like fair- trade coffee from my strained eyeballs to stain the imaginary page on my computer screen.

speach tree

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