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Gardening

The best part of having been doing this work for as long as I have is that the work is very much like planting seeds. It takes a long time for things to take root in peoples lives, to grow and then to bloom. Last night we were short a worker, and the others were so busy with clients they couldn’t get dinner completely cleaned up before they had to go lead group. I stayed in the basement wiping tables and clearing away a few left behind plates and cups, thinking about the time I spent as a young waitress. Looking through the kitchen door, I noticed suds leaking from the sink and spreading across the floor, so I texted the Pastor. Everyone had gone upstairs to group except one trans girl who is so paranoid she will only sleep inside on the rare nights it is so cold that we stay open. She was sound asleep with her face on the table next to her half eaten salad. I finished cleaning, but I figured I would let her sleep until we closed, so I sat back down. At the front door a fligh...
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Spring Begins

I got a text the other day. It was just one word from an unknown number, but it had a familiarity to it that set off the familiar chain of flight or fight responses. Calm down, I told myself, it reminds you of the Asshole but it could be anyone. I refocused, went about my day, but ever since then there has been just a little bit of extra alertness. This morning, after months of silence, a text that’s definitely from the Asshole showed up. I know about trauma - my graduate work was on trauma at a time when new thinking was transforming the concept. Hell, my day-to-day work is all trauma all the time. Yet I’m startled when these few sentences send me plummeting to the bottom of an empty elevator shaft. The last time I saw the Asshole, they were just back from a few months out of the country. They showed up not just at my front door but in my bedroom early in the morning. I was getting dressed to go marshal a march and then they started trying to stop me from going because they thoug...
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ACT UP's 39th (edited)

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Today was the protest in Observation of ACT UP's 39th anniversay. I joined in 1990, so it's "only" been 35 years for me, but still hard to imagine that it has been that long. It's a protest about money for AIDS and healthcare, not warfare, a perennial theme, but it also has a theme of remembering Mark Milano. I pushed for a civil disobedience in honor of Mark, who did so much of it in his lifetime, and Ryan ran with that, so there was a plan to block 6th ave with banners at the very end. We started out at the AIDS memorial, an oddly shaped spot where the microphones tend to be set up so that anyone sitting is either behind them on the stone benches or too far away on the park benches closer to 7th Ave. The beginning of these things is always a lot of greeting and mingling, with activists you see all the time and some you see more rarely. Banners are hung, t-shirts get sold, and the speeches begin. I was half-heartedly following along on the planning chat ...
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sexism then and now

I was at work when Dr. C, who did both of my spine surgeries called. He had shown my MRI to another neurosurgeon, the ominous sounding “Director of Complex Spinal Surgery,” and now I have to go see him. I don’t want more spinal surgery, complex or not, so I was not in the best mood as I hammered out the grant due the next day. After work, I was standing in Walgreens pondering the floor soap and wishing they had less toxic options. I was thinking about the news of Cesar Chavez’ assaults on women and girls spreading across the Internet and press and remembering the bitterness with which my mother told me about how the male leadership of SDS treated the female members at Columbia in the late ‘60s. My mom had a lot of stories like that, about being a young organist and being chased around the organ by a predatory man, about the man she invited home who raped her and left her to have an illegal abortion. She had less blatant stories of sexism too, about how as a female journalist she...
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One more fucking thing

On my way to get yet another MRI, this time with contrast, I encounter Karlo, one of my middle eastern neighbors. “Someone broke into my apartment yesterday,” he says .“My window overlooks the roof of a garage and they pretended to be construction workers and hopped the fence and got on the roof of the garage. From there, they somehow opened my locked double-hung window, they didn’t even break the glass They took a bunch of cash. We called the police and they came and took a report and dusted for fingerprints. They told us not to keep much cash in the house. They looked at the building’s cameras and there were two guys, one was wearing a white sweater.” “That sounds hard to keep clean,” I say, “If you are climbing on roofs and jumping fences.” “They had their faces covered,” he says. “The fingerprints might be more useful,” I say. “If they have ever been arrested before, their fingerprints will be in the system”. When I get to Union Square, I am waiting with a much old...
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Breast Cancer Family

I’m doctored out. The super specialization of American medical training means that you can wind up with a snowballing number of doctors and appointments as each one sends you to somebody else. Today is Dr Park, the breast surgeon who took over for Dr Cait who actually did my surgery a couple of years ago, slicing what looked like the smile of a smiley face along the bottom of my left nipple so skillfully that now you would not know anything had happened. This is a major contrast to the procedure I had in 2003 at St Vincent’s, where Dr Axelrod, a well-known breast surgeon, decided to operate without anesthesia because my liver enzymes were high on the day of the procedure. They had me lie with my arms outstretched like jesus on the cross, and tied them down, and then covered my eyes with something that resembled a pillowcase so I couldn’t see. She used local pain medication, but I could still feel the pulling and the prodding, and then sharp pain when she ventured beyond ...
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Erik's Swearing In

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Today was Erik Bottcher’s swearing in as State Senator. There’s a cold wind blowing and it’s a little hard to be enthusiastic about another one of these events in a single weekend, but Erik has volunteered in the kitchen at New Alt, and watched the clients perform at Craft Your Truth, and we have a thing where I text him upcoming demos and he shows up when he can. I put on another dress, my ankles freezing with every wintery gust, and head to the Museum of Natural History. For this event we were let in through the staff entrance on 77th St. and walked through an exhibit about American Indians to get to the auditorium. Looking at the displays as I passed, I thought about the controversy that is raging about the provenance of these and so many other artifacts, and whether they should be returned to the societies they were taken from. The program hadn’t started yet, so Erik and I shared a quick laugh about how he was chatting so much during Brad’s event he missed himself being in...
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