Hi

bikes are quiet- if the zombies react to loud noises, they won’t hear you on a bike the way they might hear you in a car. bikes don’t need gas, meaning you won’t be stranded if you run out. bikes are much, much easier to maintain than a car- there’s no computer that can short out, no fiddly engine bits that could kill you if you mess with them wrong. you can learn how to maintain a bike with a couple weeks’ worth of classes. almost every adult knows how to ride a bike, and without cars on the road, it’d be much safer to do. 

what i’m saying is

 wikipedia’s sappho page:

One of my best friends, a girl I have known since I was like 16, is a “sex worker”.  She was abandoned by her father and abused by her unstable mother.  She has multiple learning disabilities, processing difficulties, and executive dysfunction.  She has never received proper treatment or diagnosis other than being labeled with a form of Autism in early elementary school.  

She is the single mother of a child conceive by the man who, when she was fresh out of HS, essentially kidnapped her to the other side of the country and pimped her out to support his crack habit, all while starving and beating her almost to death.  

She risked her life to leave, only to be left completely dependent on her still-abusive mother (who not only starves and degrades her, but also refuses to allow her to see a psychologist because the mother “doesnt believe in mental illness” and considers people on psych medication to be “drug addicts”).  

Her mother also refuses to get her the testing that would possibly entitle to her to some sort of social security disability benefits, job placement programs, and other resources for the disabled.  Her mom also regularly steals her meager WIC checks and food stamps allowances as ‘rent’. She’s going through all sorts of programs and on all sorts of waiting lists trying to do the right thing and get into a work placement program and she’s being strangled by red tape and bureaucracy.   

She is the strongest woman I know but she is also, in every sense of the word, a vulnerable person.  

In order to provide for her son, she has resorted back to ‘sex work’.   She doesn’t talk about it much.  In fact, the only thing she’s said since taking it back up took my breath away.  

We had just finished painting Halloween pumpkins with her little son. The baby decided he was hungry, and attempted to open a fresh bag of cereal that we’d just picked up from the store.  He wound up breaking the bag open, and everything spilled out over the yard.  The cereal all spilled out, and some eggs were ruined; maybe 6 dollars worth of food.  We were cleaning it up and she broke down crying. “He doesn’t get it.” She kept saying, over and over. “He doesn’t get what I had to do for this.”

There’s nothing empowering about a mentally disabled abuse survivor sobbing on her front lawn over a single broken bag of groceries because it means she’ll have to be raped again, sooner than expected, to keep herself and her child alive.  

by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014           

When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.

He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.

At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.

For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.

My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).

Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.

Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.

Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.