Synonyms for Exhausted
The one that makes no sense which makes sense for right now
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Where have I been? A bit exhausted. A tad overwhelmed. A writer much better than I has already put this into words so I encourage you to go read him instead.
What else? I’m now the old person in a handful of undergrad Latino Studies courses and most of my time is spent sifting through Latinx census data and racialization theories. This was a bit of a rash decision after several glasses of wine and a late application sent the following day begging UIC to take me. “You’ll get three whole years of tuition outta me,” I basically said, telling them that their Museum Studies program was the ultimate goal. “Three whole years of me doing passionate work while exhausted by everything else going on around me.” Exhausted I say, not really knowing if that’s the correct term because somehow my ambitions are still keeping me afloat and I know that’s not the case for most.
Maybe instead we say: living in so much fear and uncertainty that this seemed like the last time I will ever be able to do this and maybe, just maybe, I’ll become something from it and maybe I can make myself proud and can help change the way we do things in this country and in cultural institutions and without that completely jam packed calendar then I have too much time for thinking and we all know what happens when someone is left with their own thoughts for too long and once someone told me that they knew they were depressed when they stopped doing what they love and while I haven’t quite gotten there yet I feel like I’m walking a thin line and at least by working my way through a stack of textbooks and three essays and a manuscript and my day job I don’t have to think so hard about these things and, well, I guess maybe this is exhaustion mixed with fear mixed with trying to work from a place of love and a place of hope and a with vision of who I can be and what this world can become for my children and my community and for everyone that comes after me.
So yeah. I guess exhaustion works.
Tools and Weapons
I only want to talk about Lovecraft Country for the foreseeable future.
Valeria Luselli has been the source of a lot of inspiration lately.
Because it’s basically fall and I require a well thought out soundtrack for my brooding autumn walks, I’ve been revisiting this playlist from three years ago. 10/10 would recommend for pining over someone/shaking fists at existence/getting into some late night feels.
I revisited Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters and it remains a perfect album. I also finally listened to the new Waxahacthee and I’m so unbelievably late to this party. This album is wonderful.
While we’re talking about music: I miss writing about it, the act of searching for it, I miss really taking the time to consume it. I miss being in places where I’m hearing something new for the first time and a fellow music aficionado begins to tell me how that artists’ last two albums were much better. I miss the act of being in music venues and (ugh I hate this word) vibing. I miss being in New York City bodegas and hearing an Aventura song and being compelled to dance my way to the register. I miss record stores in Mexico City and bonding with cute shaggy haired boys over the latest Fever Ray track. I miss dancing in Beauty Bar on Friday nights and the collective excitement that happens when a Kendrick Lamar song comes on. I miss going on dates in loud places and that moment of intimacy shared as we lean in close to hear each other. Sure, music is a wonderful solitary act; my Bose Quietcomfort headphones are one of my most prized possessions for this very reason yet, at its core, music is a shared experience. I don’t think I’ve properly mourned those moments of music consumption.
One of my favorite classes this semester is Latinos and Sound, a sound studies course in which we consider cultural markers in auditory experiences. We dissect the machismo heard in catcalls, the longing of home in a Los Tigres del Norte song, the first sounds of Latin American revolutions, and even the sounds of detention centers along the border. The concept of sound, of music, has taken on a vastly new meaning for me in the last five weeks. So many moments in my history directly correlate to a sound, a bit of music, or a piece of dialogue that completely changed the way I saw someone. From the sound of wine being poured into plastic cups (Iowa City, 2008), the bass rumbling from the back of an ex’s Lincoln Town Car (Urbandale, 2005), cat calls in a new city (Chicago, 2009); so much of my life can be traced back to moments of sound.
This reminds me of the time I gathered my Iowa City friends together to tell them that I was moving to Chicago. “I’m going to be a music journalist,” I told them, “I’m going to write for Pitchfork and the Rolling Stone and go to concerts every night and it’s going to be amazing.” Even this announcement, the thought of it now a bit laughable given how quickly I ran away from freelance life, was created because of all the auditory experiences that I had collected up to that moment. Maybe I’m still writing about music, and searching for it, and consuming it but maybe music just has a new definition to me.
Since the passing of RBG on Friday I’ve done a lot of thinking about what character from a dystopian novel I would be. This is a silly thought process (it’s not Katniss Everdeen) and I definitely wouldn’t suggest it (although it might be Lauren Olamina) and there’s maybe a way around this (Julia is also definitely a contender) so please check your registration and figure out your plan to vote. Because let’s face it, I’d be a terrible handmaid and all the other options in that series don’t sound great either.
Finally, it feels silly to hit the publish button on this without mentioning Breonna Taylor and the fact that we have (yet again) let murderers walk free. I think the largest frustration for me, and I’m assuming for many, is that we’re no longer surprised. This is just part of the system now. This part, this whole dismantling the systems of oppression part, goes far beyond just voting in November.
Off to fight another day,
C