The Pistachio Girl

I'm that kid that car sick every single time I boarded the back seat of my parents' mini van to drive the 45 minutes to my grandparents' apartment on the south shore of Boston. Every.single.time. When I was real young, I remember my father pulling over three lanes of traffic on the southeast expressway, masshole drivers with heavy elbows on their horns, so that I could open the door and puke amidst shredded tire pieces and cigarette butts. My grandfather was always ready for my with chalky pink canadian mints, my face flushed and sweaty as my sisters walked ahead, complaining of another trip made longer by a nausea no amount of drama bean (what I called "granma bean" until I was 11 because I really thought it was made for traveling to grandma's house and misheard my mother's pronunciation) could quell.

Because of this, it's amazing I ever even had an impetus to travel. I sort of accidentally began studying German in high school (a long story that has to do with a cross-state move and school transfers) and just as circumstantially ended up in a German club (I later found out that our young and eager teacher recruited for lunchtime meetings all of us who seemed friendless and wayward). And so I was bit by the travel bug at 16.

So armed with gum, mints, gingerale, and a healthy supply of Nirvana and Alanis CD's for my walkman (remember those, kids?) I boarded my first transnational flight. While my friends around me read and napped, I could do neither, the pulse of nausea beating like a drum in the back of my throat. So I took to people-watching--limited in possibility from the strapping of my airplane seat. And maybe because I watched her, on and off for seven hours, she is sticky in my memory.

And by she, I mean not her physical body. I actually don't remember much about what she looked like. But I remember her movements. She had what looked like an exam book balanced on her right knee (the knee farthest from me), and her left hand poised as if she were a statue holding a small globe. In her left hand were pistachio, something I had never seen anyone eat before. With her palm full of nuts, I watched as she moved with the single stroke of her thumb a nut. Upwards to the tips of her middle and pointer fingers. There, she would press the nut between her two fingers and her thumb, spreading her two fingers apart gently in the breaking of the shell. Then, meat loosened, she would bring her hand to her mouth, fingers and thumb in delivery. She would then use her fingers to push the shell back into her palm, simultaneously sweeping her thumb in search of a fresh pistachio.

And this was done absent-mindedly as she turned pages with her other hand.

And I thought, "That's what I want to look like when I eat."

On Thursday morning, I boarded a megabus, one of a dozen this year, and took my seven hour trip to Chicago. I remembered this woman, and her one-handed tricks, and bought a bag of dry-roasted pistachios at the gas station stop. I briefly thought, "How many Weight Watchers points are these?" but the points left me as a doled out quarters from the bottom of my purse and payed the cashier. Something tells me the salty memories are worth the over-draft.

Shedding a Bit of Bitch

I am kind of a bitch. And I try as hard as I can to do self-reflection but we live in a culture where women judging other women is a regular pass time. Here's the most recent example of this in my life:

I was shooting the shit with the program coordinator at a local nonprofit where I regularly volunteer. Because I'm in once a week, I've found myself pretty friendly with several of the staff and opened up recently about my weight watchers stint. When I was in last week, the program coordinator mentioned this to another staff member because she, too, is doing the online program. I'll call this staff member Ellen.

Ellen is approaching 60 and has been doing nonprofit work for 30+ years. She's born and raised in the midwest and identifies as a lesbian with a working class lifestyle/budget. She was thrilled to find out she and I could "talk points" and strategize, particularly in relationship to budget-friendly options. She's only six weeks in. As she's talking about all of the "switches" she has made in the past six weeks (which is weight watcher's lingo for not actually changing much about how you eat, just compensating with synthetic, processed low-cal alternatives) she mentioned how floored she was to find out the point values in her current eating habits. A McDonald's double cheeseburger is 2/3 of our daily points. A McDonald's cinnamon thingy is half. She says, "So I'm not doing that any more! I lost 4 pounds a week when I started for the first two weeks." She assured me that the weight loss has evened out to more like a pound and a half/week but she was glowing with this revelation. I notice her khaki pants gaping where her belt was cinched a hole tighter.

I have not had this kind of success. I'm not even sure I'm losing weight just yet. So I'm immediately jealous. Then jealousy turns to anger and anger to bitchiness (which I kept internal). I thought to myself, as Ellen is suggesting this brand of bread that is only "1 point a slice", "I'm not going to do that. I don't even eat bread that much. And I don't go to McDonald's. And I don't drink soda or coffee drinks with calories. Why does she get to lose all the weight? And why is she surprised about McDonald's food?" I think, somehow, that I am more deserving than Ellen.

When she asked me if I had anything I was working on in particular, something I was trying to swap or avoid, I said, honestly, "alcohol." She raised her eyebrows. I felt like jumping to my own defense but thought better of it. I just shrugged my shoulders.

Then yesterday, I made one of my go-to meals that I've been making since late college. Peanut tempeh stir-fry with rice noodles and lots of frozen veggies. I plugged my recipe (and I actually measured my ingredients as I put them into the peanut sauce, since usually I just eyeball and taste test) into the online point calculator. The recipe, in the bowlful amount that I ate (and I often eat two helpings) was almost half my points. And I thought, well, it's not a McDonald's hamburger.....

All this to say, if the weight loss doesn't work, perhaps I'll shed a bit of bitch and remember the complicated (class) politics of women's consumption. And be a bit more mindful of a mouthful.

Is Weight-Loss Self-Absorbed? Wait...Is this blog self-absorbed?

The answer the latter question could very well be yes. The answer to the former I am still wrestling with, as a feminist, as a scholar, as a buddhist-christian-queer-antiracist-socialist.

One of the things that I'm very concerned about is Arizona's ban on Ethnic Studies and their corresponding immigration battles. I teach about this stuff, particularly in my class on American women writers, where we begin with slave narratives and end with Chicana feminist thought, wrestling with ideas of citizenship and belonging and their relationship to a feminist social justice project. My students surprise me with their insights and their varying relationships to activism and history.

Last week I had students read an interview with a black feminist scholar, Evelyn Hammonds, about growing up in the Jim Crow South and pursuing a science degree at MIT in the late 1970's. In a critical writing response, I asked students to make connections to Harriet Jacobs' Life of a Slave Girl and the idea that withholding education is a tool of oppression.

I was surprised to find that many of my students did not know what the Jim Crow Laws were.

That afternoon, intimidators with gun holsters disrupted a peaceful vigil held to recognize the death Trayvon Martin.

The next morning, racist graffiti was scrawled on the side of our campus Black Cultural Center, a building that arose out of student activism and a push of Black Studies (now called African and African American Studies) in the 1970's.

Meetings were held. Undergraduate student orgs representing students of color created a response and faculty and instructors like myself stood in support.

The next morning, we marched from the Hale Center to the Alumnae House to interrupt a meeting of the Board of Trustees. Afterward there was a sit-in, followed by news of more racist graffiti.

As I was marching with students and faculty, I felt the pinching in my groin and the tightness in my tail bone gradually release. There was a dull pain in my walk but it was overshadowed by the energy of the group's movement--the anger, the frustration, the sadness. And I thought, does it matter that my body is here?

I don't have a thoughtful way to end this blog except to say that I think it did, that it does. I'm reminded of the political philosophy of Stokely Carmichael, who understood that white bodies carried privilege that bodies of color did not. So when he became a founding member of SNCC, he encouraged white student leaders to travel to the Jim Crow South because their presence would garner media representation that the local black organizing was not receiving. These white bodies were meant not to be leaders but to listen and engage. To be present.

And I understand today that there are limitations to the work that SNCC was able to do. And I also understand that we live in a different media culture than Stokely Carmichael but I also know that white privilege still exists. And if I can use it for anti-racist organizing, I will.

But I can't do it unless my brain is working. My body is moving. And I am able to stand/sit/write/speak in solidarity.

Please sign this petition--no need to be a student at my University.