Every Skinny Tree:
(y)our stories
...(a)poetic exhibit(ic)
April 1-April 30
featuring poetry by
Abigail Jimenez
http://skinnytree.berkeleyblogs.com/
Art Walk:: April 10 Good Friday
Reading:: April 17 6-8p
@ Makeda Coffee
78th and Greenwood (just behind Gorgeous George's)
per the Mistress Matisse column in the Seattle Stranger (I have altered the text:: I have substituted the word "church" for the word "sex", and taken liberties with the last few lines about her life as a dominatrix...so look out, and let your imagination run wild--this is not a metaphor:
"Let's (not) go crazy"
"Saying this is not going to endear me to my sisters in the industry, but there are a lot of crazy chicks doing church work. After much observation, I've formed a hypothesis about why some church workers become crazy and some don't. Some of them were unstable before they got into the game, but some of them had their lives go off the rails because they made one big mistake: They had no exoskeleton.
What does that mean? It means that in the amorphous world of church work, you do not have the social guidance of the dominant culture telling you how to structure the hours and days of your life. And that's fine--if you can create and adhere to your own framework, regulating for yourself how you spend your time. If there are no schedules or deadlines, then often the dull duties that make life run smoothly get blown off. It's hard to maintain emotional equilibrium when your power gets shut off because you forgot to pay the bill, mice infest the garbage you didn't take out, and the toilet overflows. The more stressed you get, the less able to deal with responsibilities you become, and pretty soon you're living in a motel on Aurora Avenue. That's the extreme end of things, of course. But it happens.
Church work is also a world that rewards highly stylized, artificial behavior. It can be fun to play the church kitten. But you need time as your everyday self, too, or you get off-balance and forget how to interact with people when you're not wearing high heels.
Thus, your exoskeleton is something outside the flexible-to-a-fault underbelly of church work. It's something you're emotionally invested in that requires you to keep order in your world, and something where you are your truest self. It can be another job you're passionate about, or school, or a serious and active commitment to an art. (Note the keywords on that last one: serious and active. As in: You're accountable to other people for making something happen on a schedule. Sitting in bars talking about the masterpiece you're going to create won't keep you sane.)
Sometimes a partner can be an anchor, if he/she has a well-structured life and you're committed to matching him/her. And sometimes the responsibility of parenthood keeps people focused in a blurry world--but don't count on it. Too often, I have seen parents take kids with them into la vida loca. You're supposed to provide stability for your child, not vice versa.
I've used all these systems to define my days, and I've seen other successful church workers do likewise. Over time, I've learned to create my own stand-alone structures in an unstructured world. I have my little routines I'm very firm about, and sometimes people kid me about them. They think it's because I'm a church worker that I'm so wedded to my ways. They don't realize that me discipl(in)ing myself is what enables me to play at discipl(in)ing others."
It is coming up on my 29th birthday (3-2-1!) and i recently read in a book by Dita Von Teese that the best way to feel good about yourself is to like yourself and secondary to that are red nailpolish and red lipstick. Then Molly the chocohotti recommended that I figure out my best feature and emphasize accordingly. so I when my sister and I were in California, to visit my grandfather in the hospital, I bought mascara, some giant earrings and am trying to use the letter I appropriately. I have also decided, although I may change my mind, that tattoos are a good idea because there are some things so deeply written in your skin that you may need to write over them or add to them so that you will remember where you have been and where you are going. There is this funny thing about Hagar in Genesis: she is preggers in the wilderness having run away from her abusive, albeit misunderstood, mistress. The Holy Spirit finds her out there and asks her
exactly that
where are you coming from and where are you going?
and she is just organized enough, which is to say sane enough, to tell the truth.
so today when I thought about using a good friend as my therapist, and then chemicals began running through my veins and I began to shake and clench my fists around the steering wheel and hate on both of us. In the end, I told him I was just agitated, and not to take it personally because I didn't really mean it about him... I think I just needed to get organized enough to tell the truth. And I think I am now, organized enough, and I think it would be helpful for you to know it too:
Sometimes I just need to look at you for a little longer, to take in your face because it grounds me. And not just yours, not just his face, but any and every face willing to really look back at my own and maybe wonder why I still have acne at 29, or why I'm turning red when I explain lex orendi, lex credendi to a fellow seminarian. Your face is part of my routine now, your face, his face, her face. I love to see your face, I lurv it, I luff it... in fact it is even better when you shave your goddam beard and I can put my face right on yours--that shit is the chronic! I can't get enough of it, I'm high on it and I need it, like hookers need a day off, like pastors need a sabbatical, like baristas need a shot or two everyday
and don't tell me you don't understand because I think you get it or are getting it, because I am getting it. Even though Freud would say we were supposed to learn this as infants or Lewis would say we will never learn it, I am getting it the fuck down and you are too and it makes my skin crawl and I itch for it when I am deprived.
Even right now, there is a tiny person, this small girl with brown curly hair having a cookie with her daddy at the other end of the cafe and she is staring at me, reading my face and I know she is and her daddy isn't even trying to stop her because he thinks I am obliviously just typing away.
He thinks all I can see is that his daughter dropped her cookie on the floor, and he turned beet red, and somehow it was supposed to be his fault that it happened.
But it wasn't. It was just gravity and distraction and lilliputian elbows and a grimy cafe floor and nobody's fault so I turned my face toward her worried eyes as he walked away to buy another cookie. And she caught me smiling right at her, right at her. And she seemed to perk right up because she knew, even though he didn't, that its nobody's fault.
because my face was just organized enough to tell her so.
