a wolf angel is not a good angel

I found my sketching pencils and my Conté crayons. Still missing most of my pastels, though.

I think I am going to make stained glass for some of my windows. I have a 1m square window in my bedroom, and a huge window in my living room, and I just need to figure out what kind of designs they need. I think floral-ish for my living room and geometric (I have a half-baked idea in mind) for my bedroom, but I’m open to other ideas. (Like: a triptych for my living room? Etc.)

All items are from memory, and not checked up.

5 items in my fridge:

• milk
• eggs
• caramel
• mustard
• pesto

5 items in my closet (different closets):

• unpacked boxes of books and cds (office)
• broken toilet (hall)
• carry-on suitcase (bedroom)
• winter coats (living room)
• most of my unpacked books (linen)

5 items in my car:

• 2 light coats (that match skirts but aren’t suits really)
• tracks for winter
• wiper fluid
• many boxes of stuff that I was too lazy to cart upstairs
• plastic flowers

5 items in my purses:

• ipod and headphones
• lipgloss
• cuticle cream
• pencils
• income tax refund (Quebec)

5 things in my head:

• must clean/hate cleaning
• want to bake/too lazy
• must cart boxes up/too lazy
• want to do creativeish stuff (from arty stuff to redesigning my template/too lazy
• hey, I’ll watch Angel!

via SB

Since someone is coming to drop off art, and then other people are coming to look at it with me, I need to clean up. I started around 8:15 this morning, and I take more breaks than I do work. My bathroom is clean (including the toilet), and my kitchen is cleanish, but I have all these other places, like my staircase, and my living room, and my office (my bedroom is terrible too, but that has a door). I need a better way to clean, bearing in mind that I hate cleaning more than anything else at all. (I do not mind: laundry, dishes, and cleaning the toilet.)

I found a bunch of postcards with some of the art stuff I carted over from my parents’ house. Anyone who would like one, please email me your address (wolfangel [at] gmail dotcom). I know I had lots of addresses once: assume I’ve lost them.

Do laundry.
Finish cleaning kitchen so it is usable.
Pick up all my arty stuff from my parents’ house.

(Weekend: get art-I-am-considering-purchasing delivered, make art, hang the art that I own but is sitting on floors.)

Maybe writing it down means I’ll actually do some of it. Maybe.

Chanukah gifts from last year, and birthday gifts from this year, and possibly Chanukah for next year as well, all tied up in art! Yay art! (Pieces being brought over Saturday and picked up Tuesday.) I need to start saving money to use for art. And doing art, too. But I feel so very incapable of it right now.

It’s been blogged about a lot lately — what counts as cultural appropriation, what does not. The most I ever do is make Indian(ish) or Mexican(ish) meals at home, or go to a wider variety of ethnic restaurants. Sure, I count Indian food as my favourite kind of meal but that’s probably as close as I get.

I used to make dreamcatchers, and someone told me that you can’t sell them, if you’re not Native, no one will buy them, and I said I only wanted to make them as gifts, and that’s all I ever did. Was that appropriation? Yes, and no: everyone knew, at least in principle, what they were for, and everyone put them around their beds, but we’re none of us Native — but none of us pretended to be. I don’t know, but in the end, I’ve got worse sins to atone for.

Lots of people, I found out eventually, are fascinated by Judaism. Maybe because it’s only a little Other but still often fairly unknown, because you can’t look at someone and see if they’re Jewish (or if they’re not): I don’t really know. I went to Jewish school, and even when I finished up elementary school in a public school, it was almost all Jewish. I grew up mostly around Jews.

There was this thread at Feministe about what it means to be Jewish. People also talked about having Jewish background, and feeling related to it, and Happy Feminist (whose paternal grandmother was Jewish) said something interesting:

My sense of connection to Jewish history and culture is not at all rational. We didn’t do a lot of culturally or religiously Jewish things when I was growing up but my Dad insisted that I learn Jewish history, from ancient times through the present, and we talked about Jewish religious belief and Jewish history constantly. My father’s efforts to make sure I knew “my heritage” definitely took. I have always felt that my family’s emphasis on the written word and our liberal/progressive political orientation were a result of our Jewish roots. Although those values aren’t unique to Judaism or universal within Judaism, I still think those values came into my life through my grandmother’s religion and her family’s experience as an outsider/minority group.
In my real life, I never ever mention this amorphous “sense of connection” because I can’t really justify it rationally, and it seems sort of silly and sentimental and presumptuous. But it’s a strong feeling I have nonetheless.

This is, actually, one of the most rational not-brought-up-Jewish-but-feel-connected relationships I ever heard of. I get irritated by the people who never were related to anything Jewish but had one great-grandparent Jewish, or a great-aunt killed in the Holocaust, and thus feel (without doing anything to learn about what it means) they are just as Jewish, cause, hey, Hitler would’ve killed them.

First off: Hitler doesn’t get to actually define who is Jewish. That’s sick. (Generally, I’m with the group that gives people room for self-definition, but there needs to be some standard of reasonable.)

Sure, HF wasn’t brought up Jewish, and her blog makes it clear she’s Christian. But her family studied the religion, and the history, and did it as “this is where you come from”. She grew up with it — not in the same way I did, obviously, but still she grew up with it. (And probably more thoughtfully than my family grew up with it, since we took it for granted and discussed other things. Not all families do this, but mine did.)

Last night I went through the exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (it’s free Wed nights — if you’re in Montreal at all, I strongly recommend this exhibition), where they have a Brian Jungen exhbition. He is half-Swiss and half Native — he’s a member of the Dunne-za, which are in northern and inland BC.

His work touches on cultural appropriation a lot — his masks, which were absolutely stupendous, are Haida-inspired . . . but he’s not Haida. He made whale skeletons out of patio chairs (the masks are made out of Nike shoes), talking sticks out of carved baseball bats . . . which one is natural, which one isn’t, what is real about ethnicity and what is fake and made up, borrowed, re-appropriated?

And that’s the question: what does it mean, culture or ethnicity? Is Yiddish part of my culture? Perhaps my paternal grandparents spoke it, or perhaps my maternal great- or great-great-grandparents did, but I didn’t, I only know a few words. I’ve never eaten gefilte fish. (And as I am not Sephardic, I’m not bothering with Ladino or anything else.) At what point do things become a common culture, and when are they still Othered? At what point are you stealing things, ignoring the reality of an entire culture for the easy cool of a patterned shawl. You can’t learn a culture even by travelling there unless you really spend time living there — not in the place where all the other middle-class 20-somethings backpack because it’s “more authentic than a hotel” (it isn’t, you’re just as surrounded by tourists, just tourists who prize poor-looking authenticity instead of fake-authenticity, like hotels and Disney[1]).

[1] I like Disney, though mostly because it doesn’t pretend to be anything but fake.

Lucy responded to my last post on the topic, and I’d like to continue responding, both to her and to some of the comments that were left there.

From Lucy:

I have a friend who worked at McDonald’s while training to be a nurse. One day she was working on drive-thru and a woman came through and showed my friend the scars and fresh cuts on her arms. I don’t remember what she said, but it was a definite cry for help.
My friend told me about it later, as part of the explanation for why she didn’t want to work in a psych ward, wanting me to agree with her that this woman was a freak.

If you think that this makes someone a freak, then absolutely you shouldn’t work on a psych ward. And as much as the world would be better if everyone were totally understanding, they’re not. And it’s nice to see that someone knows themself well enough to decide not to work on a psych ward in these situations.

I haven’t ever self-injured enough to cause lasting marks, but the impulse makes perfect sense to me. I’ve felt miserable and worthless enough that physical pain strong enough to make me focus on its source would have been a blessed relief from the fog of self-hatred and self-destructive thoughts churning in my head. Not to mention the comfort from having my outside match the inside for a change. Ultimately, though, I was always too scared of anyone being able to see what was hidden inside, so I stuck to carving reversible welts into my skin with my fingernails.

I know I wrote a lot about this in my series of however many posts — but it was a bit over a year ago. So I’m going to re-cover some ground, and also leave stuff out, but the earlier posts are all linked in my series here.

Eventually, everything got mixed up together. The pain as punishment, as what I deserved, the pain as a way of focussing on something else (it was a remarkably effective study technique, the best I ever found — though I stopped using it as one), the pain as a way of not focussing on the other pain. I can’t say what was or was not the reason at any time. (When I have urges now — and I still do — it is almost always a punishment one, though sometimes a distract-from-other-pain one.)

I’m not always sure how to describe it: how it felt then, how it feels now? How it felt then: if I kept hurting myself, I wouldn’t need to kill myself. I had no other way to deal with the pain. It felt like — it was — the only way I could cope. It’s hard to remember that now, because I do have other ways I can cope, though none quite so effective, many with fewer side effects. (Ignoring the scars, if you keep punishing yourself and calling it punishment, you’re telling yourself you deserve pain. Not that I don’t believe I do, but I know it’s unhealthy.)

I waver about how to talk about this. I don’t want to make it sound like an issue that haunts my every moment: it isn’t. I don’t want to make it sound like something that I did 10 years ago and that no longer matters: it isn’t. Things feel too desperate sounding, or too casual. I believe (I know) that this saved my life, at the time. I also believe (know) that it caused a lot of harm in so doing.

From Phantom Scribbler:

It’s good for me to remember that not everyone who self-injures does so as a weapon to hurt those around them. Perhaps my mother is the only one who ever thought to use it in such a fashion.

I don’t think many people use it as a weapon to hurt people. I think some people use it to manipulate people, especially if they are otherwise powerless. And, like any manipulation, it’s cruel and horrible — and, in its own way, a cry for help. (But not to get help from your *children*. I mean, really: it’s one thing to use it as manipulation against an adult, that’s cruel, but also understandable in ways. But against a child? That strikes me as abusive.)

On the other hand, it almost inevitably hurts other people, if you hurt yourself. Whether that’s the intent or not, it still has that effect. I think the balance to take is usually that it’s unfair to force someone to stop — “don’t do it anymore or I will X” is just another form of manipulation — but also unfair to force someone else to watch or be involved.

But mostly it’s control (as Shelley said in my earlier post): control over how much you hurt and when, control over what kind of pain you feel, control over your body. It’s a way of speaking if you don’t know how else to speak, even if the words are only to yourself. It’s punishment too, punishing yourself for being not good enough or not happy enough or just not enough.

Missing: Matilda, who ran out when I opened the front door, then hid in some small garden so efficiently that I couldn’t find her. The back door is open, if she decides it is a good place to enter — normally she hates the back balcony. I am worried, because this is a busyish area (though not at night) and there are lots of other animals around.

Not missing: the tomato plant my neighbour just gave me! Tomatoes and strawberries and raspberries! I love being on the top floor with a south-facing balcony (= Montreal west)

I wear sleeveless stuff a lot, and mostly I don’t think about it. Maybe sometimes the first time I wear short sleeves in front of someone, or whatever, but mostly I’m used to it, though I have no idea what other people think.

I realise I have one friend I have never worn short sleeves in front of — the timing’s been off. And also that I do not want to talk about it. I do not know I will be asked. It’s sometimes hard to say. One of my neighbours is a nurse. Another neighbour is an art therapist who works with teens. I have caught them looking at my arm instead of my face. (It’s like the looking at the boobs, but over to the side a bit. And more covert.) They’ve never asked, obviously, and I never say anything.

I regret the scars, sometimes. And othertimes, I’m glad they’re there. I touch them, for comfort, and they feel like pain, and they feel like I am, for this brief moment, safe.