Bus tickets

I attend these diversity dialogues. And I am the worst dialoguer. Mainly because I am not the girl to describe-the-problem. Going over and over stuff and exploring feelings over and over is just not me. I went to a psychologist once for many months and was annoyed that I had suspended my disbelief in the process and found that psychologists are trained to describe-the-problem using variables from a pathologising formulaic book that rarely gets updated (DSM). I can think of a few other examples of books that rarely get updated. Problem describers.

I love The Dreaming. A part of the dialogue is imagining what the world would look like without that problem. People try to imagine the world, smell it, breathe it, see it. They are so tentative, so hesitant, so bound to reality. People of privilege often don’t know words like ‘the Geni coefficient’ or ‘the Copper T’. I don’t mean to use these obscure terms, I hate people who try to baffle others and I rephrase if another opportunity presents itself. The Dreaming is an enthralling dialogue moment, full of surprise and intrigue, horror and joy.

I would prefer to discuss brainstormed crazy ideas’ acceptance problems.

Problems like why people have such insane magical thinking loops. Why do people have magical thinking that says, We will bring up our male children to not abuse girls. I want to scream, Can’t you see it’s a loop? How? What are the steps? Specifically. And, don’t point to the few good men. There are more and more abusers. So many. They are there. They have been there. They will be there. It’s magical thinking to think that all those girls will never be exposed to an abuser, or many abusers. Prepare for that abuse.

Problems like why people think that the olden days were better. Better for whom? For men to imagine that their property was being transferred to their rightful heirs (more magical thinking, women can turn any man who walks past into baby-daddy). If people want to do something different, it is because those olden-day cultural elements are not working. The cultural elements have to go. The internet is going to change the world, stop trying to turn it off. We know possibilities we could never imagine before. The rabbit is out of the hat. The days are over of girls in home-economics class learning how to spend time quietly in the kitchen, out of sight, and supporting the metabolic functions of men. The internet is a door out of the kitchen. Contraception is a door out of the kitchen. I love the story of the Japanese woman earning her own money, having her own flat, and asked if she would marry, ‘Why? I would have to add cleaning up after a man to my day’.

Problems like fear of what the neighbours would think. Mommy and Daddy never worried about what the neighbours would think. Mommy parented how she believed. Not peer-pressure parenting, rather independent-thinking parenting. Mommy and Daddy never gave me a curfew, they reasoned with me that the reality of the world is that my friends would be going home at 11. And then, I would not have a support group, a lift home, a place to sleep. And they told me that if I got pregnant, arrested for drugs, whatever, I would have to take the consequences myself. I was accountable. They never wrote notes for me to the school, or checked my homework, or drove me places. They gave me money for bus tickets and would knock on my bedroom door and check how things were going. I don’t remember when it started, but it was well on its way when I was 11. My sister called it ‘neglect’, I think, and I called it ‘brilliant parenting’.

Gaming out ideas. Spitballing. I said these words once, and the person snorted and said, Don’t speak American. Words create a way of thinking. We don’t have a word for it, so people just describe-the-problem. I often do brainstorms and I have tried to set the topic of ‘What do you think we should do about….’. And all I get back is describing-the-problem. 

Way-out ideas about solving-the-problem are ‘disruptive’, and you get shamed back into your homogenous shaving, giggling, teetering, cooking, birthing, baking, blowjobbing.

To an extent, Mommy gave herself back her life with bus tickets. I am glad.