it happens all at once

it happens all at once; Halloween (first in 4 years), the Giants won the World Series for the first time in half a century, the election, critical mass, and Day of the Dead. All of these things I do not participate in. For all of these things I was negligent, absent, tardy. I am sick again; some nebulous ailment which fills my head with fog, my body with fatigue, and separates me from the world. I make the hour plus commute on foot and train to San Francisco to arrive at work in North Beach, sweaty, pale. I announce "I feel like shit" and they tell me to go home. I go home. This being sick makes me a fully selfish person, unable to see out from my mind's eye, I am a citizen of my cave-mind, throbbing muscles and inflamed lymph nodes. It is a country of one and the borders are closed.

Last weekend I managed to DJ my first DJ set at a dive bar in Oakland (without headphones, forgot to bring an adaptor), interview for a radio apprenticeship, and work at the farmers market, after which I started to feel really ill. The radio apprenticeship was for KPFA, a public radio station that came into being as a venue to "promote cultural diversity and pluralistic community expression" and "contribute to a lasting understanding between individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors." Coming into this interview I should have considered that more seriously and prepared myself better, but I learned from this mistake. I learned my lesson.

"What do you think about the statement that white women have benefited more from affirmative action than African Americans?" I sit before a panel of African American radio workers, at least one of which who lived through the civil rights movement and I am frozen. I repeat the question out loud, slowly, completely unaware as to how I will answer it. "Or how do you feel about affirmative action in general?" Now, sitting here, I know how I'd answer those questions. Then, I didn't. I could say - look at the criminal justice system in America - look at the disproportionate number of African Americans in prison, facing the death penalty, wrongly accused of crimes they did not commit, or look at the number of African Americans who have fallen victim - at the number who have died by police brutality. You do not have to look very far. Oscar Grant's rally was just last weekend. Certainly we have come a long way, but this country is far from perfect. Another question they threw out was "How can you be an ally to an African American?" Of course these are all the kinds of questions I should be able to answer if I'm going to work at a radio station like KPFA. I would have liked to answer honestly: "As a white person I can safely say that I will never understand what it feels like to be in your shoes. That's first and foremost. I will never know what it means to be black in America - that's how I approach it. I try to be an ally by getting as close as I can to understanding what that means, by keeping my eyes and ears open, by listening." And even that sounds trite. I hope that over the next year I can develop a good answer for both of those questions. Not just in words, but in my life. So that if I'm still in the Bay Area and I go back to interview for that apprenticeship I can answer them with confidence. I'm embarrassed at how I wasn't able to provide thorough answers. I never want to be stumped like that again.

For now, though. I have only one battle. This sickness. I will kill it with sleep, tea, honey. I will not go to work this week. I will try to find a free clinic - there's one in the Mission I will call tomorrow. I will see if I can get signed onto Medicare. If I have to I will pay the big bucks and see an expensive dr. I will get this taken care of. Then I will go back to those big questions. And the other big questions - like - why am I here? What do I really want to be doing with myself? Because I think maybe the answers have shifted into working with an NGO or doing something to help people - provide for the homeless or people that have no health insurance, or kids in the foster system, or farmers providing organic food. I want to do something meaningful, and if I can't pull that off with my camera, then I want to do it in some other way.