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Up Early

I just woke up too early. I’ve slept in four time zones in the past week, so my body is probably trying to do right by me. Tonight I’ll sleep in another time zone, whatever Chicago is.

Time zones are something I want to think about here with y’all for a second. The idea of time zones amazes me. Generally being able to identify that the sun moves across the planet, I get that. But to say there is a line, and on this side of the line it is 3:30, on this side it’s 4:30, that amazes me. Feels like playing with time.

Sometimes when something bad happens, I want to run west for a do-over, try that hour again. I can do better.

And we change time twice a year. Many countries in the world don’t do this, they just acknowledge that darkness and light can shift around in the hours. But we say: now we jump forward in time. Ok and Now we jump backward in time.

Mass time travel, just by all believing it.

I time travel a lot, and I think it’s starting to wear on me. Little changes, I move usually one to three hours at a time. But I do it a LOT. I used to sleep through these leaps, but lately I have had a complex relationship with sleep. Like right now, I would love to be asleep, but I woke up writing, and had to get out of bed to put it somewhere.

Time and money are so similar right now. No bail-out, new bail-out, let’s move some money from here to there. My friend Shea says it’s union-busting.

So my next step is to look through the various deadlines and to-do lists and see if there isn’t something useful to be written. I keep a list of topics to blog about, and sometimes I never make it to those things. Here’s a recent few samples:

– Obama-nut-cutting and Obama-seat-buying: not a good year for the Jesse Jacksons, eh?

– Beyonce’s latest album I Am…Sasha Fierce gives space to her alter ego, her stage-singer self, much like Mariah Carey did with her Emancipation of Mimi. In my head resides this other singer self who behaves and sings like if Marilyn Monroe and Aretha Franklin had a love child and only let her listen to Bjork, Radiohead, Woody Guthrie and Etta James. Maybe I should give her a name?

– Recently while sitting in a restaurant, a very very fat man at the next table got up to leave, and he had a piece of bacon stuck on his bottom. It was a moment of tragicomedy that made me giggle as I’m socialized to do, and want to cry and want to hug him. I felt the fatness of him like it was my own body, I wondered what would be the best approach, the least painful approach to tell him. The bacon fell off. The moment passed.

– When I wake up, my hair is sticking directly up from the center of my head. I didn’t think much of this until I was recently home and saw some baby pics, where my hair is sticking up like I am a recently-electrocuted baby, a mohawk’s 4-month-old dream. What’s that about?

– My sister Autumn said to me about child-rearing that our current norm is to raise children in a “Victorian” model in the home, then send them off to Company-Town model schools. In the home it’s about discipline, punishment, disconnecting the child from us as soon as possible (crying in the dark in their own rooms after months of being surrounded by mama’s beating heart). At the schools its chipping away at the original, unique, INDIVIDUAL child; shaping them to be docile, cogs in whatever factory or industry wheel is turning nearby. This is a large component of Grace Lee Boggs work/analysis as well. We raise our children to aim for jobs, mindless, unsatisfying, powerless jobs. We don’t raise them to be a part of community, of righteous, useful, survival based work. With the globalization of unfair labor practices by U.S. companies, and now the recession, it leaves a generation unprepared. It’s not too late, but we have to realize where the problem begins. This is long to be a bullet point but eh. I’m still awake.

And to close out with, a health check-in…there goes the little fear in the belly again – it’s like a little unhealthy self who has been happily in charge, and know that the more I point at her the less control she can exist:

It is time to admit that with all my travels and deadline based living, I have slipped into a sneaky comfort with Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Burger King. Specifically the double chocolaty chip frappacino (which my computer tells me isn’t even a real word), and whatever the sausage-egg-and-cheese thing is on the breakfast menu of the Evil Burger Empire places. They are dependable and familiar, no matter where in the country/world I am. Other than that…oh one other thing – Cheese-Its. Cheeze-Its? I have become a bit of a Cheeze-It vacuum. To place my food habits along a drug continuum, these are my crack.

Then I eat salads, drink hella water, eat around others in a healthy way. But these have become my sneaky traveling vices.

So. Having admitted that, I would like to cease and desist with fast food, even/especially while traveling. Manifestation begins with naming the thing I want to manifest, right?

I take off tonight for a board meeting in Chicago. Wish me luck!!