Zimmerman, DMX to Fight...Really, Can We Just Not? No, seriously.

You've probably heard by now that George Zimmerman and DMX are set to fight.

You know George Zimmerman? The guy who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager walking in his own neighborhood? Who then went free for six weeks before finally being arrested, was tried and ultimately acquitted last year? Whose lawyer took an ice cream selfie with his kids after the court victory? Yeah, that George Zimmerman.

Oh, and DMX. AKA Earl Simmons, popular rapper in the 1990s and early 2000s of It's Dark and Hell is Hot fame? Super classy? Yeah, him.

They're gonna fight. It will be a "celebrity boxing match" backed by celebrity boxing promoter and crappy person of the year Damon Feldman.

Originally, Zimmerman wanted to fight Kanye West, pretty much because he's a bigger deal right now and it would guarantee more viewers. But oh well, he'll have to settle for Dark Man X. 

I know what you're thinking. "Wait, all I have to do is murder someone, and I get to be considered a 'celebrity?' How long before I get to be on Dancing with the Stars?" You're probably also thinking, "Why didn't someone come up with this sooner! What a great way to finally exact justice and bring peace, reconciliation, and understanding when the legal system failed us! Finally! Thank you Black Jesus!" But in all of this, I have one question:

Can we just not? And by that I mean, can we, collectively, agree not to watch?

I know, I know. Horror fascination goes a really long way. And who doesn't kinda want to see Zimmerman get the shit beat out of him? Totally understandable. But here's the thing...well, aside from the fact that Zimmerman is trained in six martial arts, increasing the chance that he could be pretty formidable in the ring...

By tuning in to the detestable circus that will be this match, we are putting money in Zimmerman's pockets. Yes, yes, he will supposedly be donating proceeds to charity, though The Daily Beast's Dean Obiedallah worries about which one exactly. But even if the money does go toward philanthropy, Zimmerman will still be reaping the benefits of exposure and buzz which will most likely line his pockets in the end.

Still, both opponents will undoubtedly be paid well for the fight, but only because its sponsors can reasonably assume that it will attract a helluva lot of viewers. Well, let's prove them wrong. Let's not watch. Let's send the message that we will not be participants in the travesty that is George Zimmerman's continued pop culture relevance.

Guys, Zimmerman is trying to capitalize on having murdered an unarmed teenager and inspiring one of the biggest outcries against racial violence and injustice in recent history. So if we watch, not only will he have gotten away with it, but essentially, he'll be getting paid for it.

So. Can we not?

As nice as it might be to see that man get knocked down a few times, how satisfying would it really be? It would be on Zimmerman's terms after all, since he called for the fight. And it won't give Trayvon Martin's parents back their son. It won't end prejudice or racial profiling either.

Trayvon Martin's murder was shameful, tragic, and wounding - wounding to our nation, our progress, and to what we, as a country, have the potential to be. Zimmerman's acquittal was salt in the wound. 

This fight turns a recent tragedy and injustice into an all-out freak show. It is indecent to continue to validate Zimmerman and his attention-seeking antics. It is indecent to confirm to the fight's sponsors that this venture is anything better than depraved. 

Let's make them sorry for even giving it a second thought, and maybe next time, instead of giving their money to a murderer, they'll use it to fund education and community programs that will help make tragedies like this a thing of the past.  

The Zimmerman/DMX celebrity boxing match: Please, for the love of all that is decent and right...Don't. Watch.                                    

2014, A New Verse

I'm obsessed with the idea of the universe.

I'm obsessed with the fact that the atoms and particles that comprise our bodies and dirt and clouds and all the galaxies are traceable to the same materials that were present in the Big Bang.

And as we lean into a new year, I turn over the idea that all this unquantifiable spectacle, experience, and possibilty burst from one singular beginning.

I've been musing on the "universe," the word in particular, and I've been wondering how it came to mean what it means. As I wondered, I thought wouldn't it be nice if uni meaning "one," linked with verse meant "one song?" Wouldn't it be nice if we, as part of the universe, are all part of one collective song? One on-going vibration, one harmony, one rhythm?

I know it all sounds so precious and conspicuously poetic but wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it really be nice if, even at our most desperate - if, in our chronic folly, our habitual fear, our cyclical violence, and our historical shame - that we could know that these are only brief moments of dissonance in an all-encompassing song that is more beautiful and perfect than we can ever know?  And that, even though in the life of a universe a moment can span eras, this dissonace can, at some point, arc and resolve back into harmony, back into grace?

Well I finally looked up the etymology of the word "universe." It comes from the Latin unus or "one" and  versus meaning "turn." One turn.

Like one revolution.

Or maybe, one opportunity.

Or one collective fate.

One collective song.

Here's to 2014, a new verse.

Being 30, Being an Artist, and Dog Poop

In a few months I'll be 30. I'm not freaking out about it or anything; that'd be silly.

But I have to say, it does feel kind of like a deadline, like I need to accomplish certain accomplishments before the three-o rolls around. And I don't mean the familiar accomplishments that so many in my peer group have reached by 30. For instance, I have no desire to buy a house or have baby at this particular juncture. God knows I don't need to add property taxes and spit up to the mix juuuust yet. No, instead of these hallmarks, I find myself substituting the need to achieve arbitrary and rather quotidian feats - ones that are probably pretty inconsequential, but have become high priority in my mind, what with the deadline fast approaching. 

For example (and this is an embarrassing admission here, so be gentle): I've realized that I don't actually know for sure whether the Trojan War actually happened, or if its half-gods/half-men are all just part of an epic poem that Homer made up to pass the time and impart some lessons. I know! I should know that by now. I must have missed that day in high school. 

Regardless, I now feel very strongly that this is something I should know before I'm 30. If I don't know this basic piece of information by the time I'm 30, I have surely failed at life in some way. It has become a matter of critical importance. Also, how have I never read Their Eyes Were Watching God?! Thirty is coming! Houses and 401ks can wait, but if that book is going to get read it's now or never. And the word crepuscular. I should know what that word means by now and be able to confidently use it in a sentence.

Baby Boomers and Gen Xers like to disparage us Millennials for our tendency to delay the traditional mile markers of adulthood. But not only has the paradigm of adulthood for my generation shifted (major recessions have a cute way of doing that), the elements that the old paradigm involves - a house, some kids, and long-term employment with a single company - was never one with which I was aligned anyway. 

Well, I do have a graduate degree, which is something that quite a few of those in my peer group have earned by 30. But because my advanced, nay, my terminal degree is in the arts, I am not as well-positioned for income-stability as peers who got degrees in, say, accounting, or dentistry, or even education. I do have a career. It's one that I love and wouldn't trade for the sweetest retirement package in all the land. As an actor in Chicago's thriving theatre community and burgeoning film scene I am never short on professional and artistic challenge, growth, and comradery. Larger society, however, does not tend to validate acting (or any of the arts, let's be real) as a legit and grown-up career choice, and neither does the economy. So being an actor anywhere - even one with an MFA - doesn't exactly lend itself to raking in the kind of dough that puts a down payment on a house. Nor does the actor lifestyle tend to lend itself to the rearing of children. So for now, for my love of and commitment to my life in the arts, I'm happy to let those supposed milestones wait.

Still. It's hard to deny the sneaking suspicion that I'm doing something wrong when I see others my same age move ever more decisively into lives with stability and plan-able futures. And I can't help but wonder if I should have studied business or IT instead - if the life that fields like those allow would help me feel more validated, more grown-up, more economically powerful, more worthy of 30. 

The year I finished grad school the economy was about as warm as Lake Michigan in January, and my first day-job, taken out of desperation, was at a daycare center...for dogs. I can say decisively that I do not miss waking up just shy of 5am for minimum wage so that well-off people who studied business and IT can have someone look after their dogs while they're at work. Still, having a job at all was more than a lot of the country had at the time.

One cold, rainy November afternoon, it was my turn to empty all the trashcans in the dog runs - trashcans filled with dozens and dozens of plastic baggies full of dog poop. Here's what you do: You get a large, black, industrial strength garbage bag and you empty the trashcans full of dog poop baggies into that large industrial bag which, when full, goes into the dumpster. After awhile though, all that dog poop starts to get heavy, and even though I'd try to carry it as far from my physical body as possible, it wouldn't be long before it would get so heavy that the only thing I could do was heave it over my back and get on with it. 

That cold afternoon, as I was schlepping the industrial size bag of dog poop, it occurred to me that I have a terminal degree - the highest degree my field has to offer. It occurred to me that I, a master of fine art, having consumed many thousands of dollars worth of education, with all of my smarts and ambition, was walking along outside, in the cold November rain, giant bag of dog poop slung over my shoulder, in a pair of cheap rain boots bought specifically for this purpose. 

In that moment, the absurdity of life overwhelmed me so greatly that I couldn't help but let my grimaced face give way to laughter. And then such humility overcame me, and I felt...grateful. I felt grateful for the ability to work, and the ability to strive and hope. I felt grateful for my life's lack of convention, and for the failures that increase my hunger for triumph, and for each leap and stumble down such a tricky and unpredictable path as I have chosen, as I cruise in high gear toward 30... Not that I was suddenly enjoying carrying dog poop or anything, that was still totally gross. But humility made the bag a little lighter and the day a little warmer.

I have come to wear this unfettered, if uncertain time in my life as a badge of courage - as proof of a right of passage that any artist with something interesting to say must endure. With 30 coming, I'm letting go of the rubric of adulthood which, really, is as arbitrary as my need to know the meaning and proper usage of the word effulgent. My path is my path, with all its art and glory and folly - house and dental plan or no. 

The only trappings I need in order to welcome 30 are gratitude and love. (...And maybe a used copy of Langston Hughes' collected works. I really should have read that by now).

Fun with Blackface!

"Just say no" to blackface. 

To those guys who went as dead Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman for Halloween: 

       Congratulations! You're white people! That means that you benefit from a level of social privilege that allows you to appropriate just about everything that's super cool about being black except actually being black, which you probably don't want anyway. You probably know all the lyrics to all the Kanye West and all the Jay-Z, and maybe you even casually use the n-word in conversations with your friends. You're definitely not racist. You probably have at least one black friend to prove it, and s/he never even calls you out on your use of the n-word which is further proof that it's totes okay for you to say it - to black people, to white people, to Filipino people, whomever! You don't really give a shit about Martin Luther King day except that it might score you a day off of work, and you think America has really come along way since slavery what with the black president and black scholarships and the NBA and stuff. In fact, you probably don't see color at all. Congrats on that.

       Maybe you live and work around black and other non-white people, or maybe you don't. Regardless, you don't really identify with the social ills suffered by many non-whites in America. You know, those ills caused by the persistence of the internalized and institutionalized racist ideologies that have defined this country's history since always? You don't spend to much time thinking about those. Besides, you think we should get over it already; pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. In your willful ignorance innocence, you don't recognize that so much black suffering is rooted in a long-standing, brutal history of inequity and hate over which our foremothers and fathers had no control and from which they and their offspring were never made whole.

       But it's totally cool, guys. After all, it's 2013. The Civil Rights Act was signed 49 whole years ago. That's almost 50! And Trayvon Martin's killer was acquitted almost four months ago. That's, like, almost 120 days ago. His parents are definitely finished mourning by now. We should just put the past behind us. It's time. We should really learn to just take a joke. You're not racist; you were just being clever in a political yet Halloween-y kind of way. Besides, you didn't personally own slaves, or deny black people housing and jobs, and you didn't personally kill Trayvon Martin or acquit Zimmerman either. You are not at all involved in these sad and horrifying legacies.

       Excepts, dudes....you are. Like it or not, you're involved; we all are. We are the inheritors of a long, complex, and largely shameful history in regards to race and equality. We share it, you see. So while you may think that you are simply being funny by wearing blackface (by the way, wtf is wrong with you?) and pretending to be a slain black teenager and his killer (your smiling faces make me want to vomit), you are conjuring and associating yourself with hundreds of years of shame and guilt wrought by the actions of your legit-racist forebears. It's embarrassing, really. For you, not for me.

       For me, it's hurtful. It's a reminder of the pain and humiliation that so many before me endured, and that the repercussions of hate and fear continue to affect millions of people in this country. It's a reminder that, though that hate and fear has diminished a bit and we've made significant strides toward greater equality, we have not yet reached the promised land - not black people, not brown people, not undocumented people, not women people, not gay people, not old people, and not disabled people. But also? Not white people. 

       You may think you're there, but you're not. Hell, you probably think you invented the promised land, but let me tell you dudes, we are ONE country. Collectively, we are only as strong as our weakest and most disenfranchised citizens. The lack of agency that they are denied detracts from our collective ability to be the economic and cultural powerhouse that this country could be if everyone really did have a fair and equal shake. But by making light of our country's legacy of inequality (and, ahem, murder), you, in your own tiny, stupid way, are delaying our collective progress to a better day - one that would even benefit thoughtless, undeserving, punk-ass, little you.

       There's no way we're making it to the promised land except together, dudes. So cut out the bullshit, get your life, and come on.

P.S. You too, Julianne and you idiot girls on Twitter.

This Virtual Life: When the Real World Isn't Enough

Obnoxious? Yeah. But maybe they have a point.

I'm no luddite, but all this technology is starting to worry me. 

      Well, maybe it's not so much the technology that's worrisome, but rather the ways in which we are allowing the digital and virtual worlds to shape almost every aspect of our non-virtual lives. 

       This weekend, I was at the aquarium with my husband and step-daughter. During our visit we saw a half-hour dolphin show during which the several young children seated around us - no more than four or five years old - used their parents' phones to video and photograph the entire program. The entire program. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that these kids didn't put their devices down for any part of the show. Even hours after leaving the aquarium, the more I thought about it, the more unsettled I felt. 

       I get it; the endless capabilities of our mobile devices are often a very welcome distraction. They pass the time when we're riding buses or standing in lines. When we're in a pinch and just need our idle kids to be still for a few minutes, a game-loaded mobile device can be a saving grace. But at the dolphin show, we were being barraged with entertainment, and not just any entertainment - real, live, jumping, swimming, flipper-waving entertainment. I mean, we were in an aquarium; we were literally surrounded by thousands of exotic sea creatures, and not only that! We were in a water arena watching trained sea animals do tricks! Tricks! With lights and sound! Even as an adult, I found the show pretty darn entertaining. As a child on a field trip, I remember finding a similar show downright magical. I don't think I could have been more rapt unless one of the seals in the show were to waddle up to me and strike up a conversation about his personal friendship with Flipper.

       But it seems that seeing trained sea animals do tricks in a building filled with the most exotic creatures of the deep only garners a "meh" on the entertainment scale for today's five-year-olds. Somehow, the experience was not sufficiently amusing without the added novelty of digital documentation. It was impossible for the kids in our vicinity to just sit and have the (already thoroughly entertaining) experience. At five, they couldn't help but translate the actual experience into a virtual experience, even as the actual experience was taking place right in front of them. I fear that this behavior is becoming the norm for children because it has already become the norm for us adults.

       My anxiety about this new cultural standard is nothing new. It seems like every futuristic movie since 2001: A Space Odyssey has posed similar concerns, featuring some disaster where computers have become too smart, too powerful, and end up usurping all of humanity. On a smaller scale, I find myself wondering why virtual life has taken on the degree of importance it has particularly in the minutia of our daily lives. Acclaimed comedian Louis CK expounds beautifully and hilariously on the toxicity of hyper-connectivity and how it keeps children from developing empathy. Meanwhile, kids use PS3s to wage virtual wars while parents plant virtual gardens. We post about our babies, about our food, about cats, about sunsets and plans and haircuts. In one way, virtual platforms give us the opportunity to "experience" what we otherwise might not experience, and to share what we want - from the mundane to the remarkable - with whom we want. But in another way, these platforms can create the illusion that our actual experiences aren't valid until they are digitized, documented, and uploaded - aren't meaningful until they are "liked." I'm all for the virtual world acting as a compliment to the actual one, but, in our minds and in our behavior, virtual is no longer simply augmenting actual; it's replacing it.

       This long decline into an increasingly binary life is distressing, and I find that it is also keeping me from experiencing wonder. Remember when you wanted to know something, but in order to find out, you had to go the library and find a book or an article about it? And if you couldn't do that, we just had to wonder about it until you could go ask your teacher. You had to turn it over in your mind, you had to mull and theorize, you had to imagine. Well, no need for any of that nonsense anymore. Just whip out your smartphone, fire up your Wikipedia app and boom: detailed descriptions, histories, timelines, and images. On one hand, great! With so much access to so much information, we as a species are more capable than ever of betterment, advancement, and efficiency. But when so much of these new capabilities are expended on Candy Crush, what is that efficiency worth when it robs us of the moments that connect us to our humanity - to people and events and the real, actual, tangible world? 

       Our obsession with the virtual world is robbing us of those moments. It's hard to have coffee with a friend without having her set her phone on the table next to her chai and pausing the conversation at every text alert. It's hard, apparently, for people to not fall into open manholes because they are texting while walking. And let's not even get started on the widespread and remarkably homicidal habit of texting while driving.

       I miss the days when the real world was enough - when there was nothing to do while riding the bus but ride the bus, or maybe read a book, or steal glances at an interesting-looking stranger, and wonder, based on their shoes, what kind of person they are. I miss the days when we noticed things that weren't backlit and search-engine-optimized. I miss the days when it was possible to wonder about things. And unless we protect them, those real experiences will continue to diminish until nothing real - not even a dolphin show in a building filled with exotic sea creatures - will be enough on its own.

Dear House of Representatives, You need a spanking.

Image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Dear House of Representatives,

You need a spanking. 

     You are acting like a petulant, spoiled little brat that is throwing a tantrum because you're not getting your way. Back in the day, do you know what my mother did when I acted like that in public? She would pull me aside, look me in my pouty little face and say quietly but oh so intensely, "Do I need to embarrass you?" And those six words were always enough to make me shut up and behave myself, because I knew that if I didn't, I was going to get a spanking, it was going to hurt, and everyone was going to see.

     House, you are not only long overdue for your public spanking, but even without it, you are somehow managing to embarrass yourselves. Do you think anyone in the American public views your political hissy fit as representative of what the American People want? Do you think we view your so-called showdown as anything other than obstructionist, uncooperative, and detrimental to the already-struggling US economy? I vote that when you're through causing the government to shutdown, your pay be docked and distributed to those now on furlough, thanks to you, to make up for their lost income.

     House, it's time to take a cue from Walter White and finally be honest with yourselves. A) You lost. Even the Supreme Court said so. Pack it in, and move on. B) You don't care about the welfare of the American people; you never did. You don't even really care about the survival of your precious, yet quickly-evaporating American middle class. All you care about, all you have ever cared about, you scrum of depraved lunatics, is keeping this president from succeeding. That's all. That has been your one, true, thinly-veiled goal.

     I don't care how conservative or liberal you are, but I know that if, before Obamacare, you couldn't get health insurance because of your diabetes, your lupus, or your bipolar disorder, and now you can, you are now better off. And you can thank this president and his administration for that. And I know that if your newly graduated 22 year-old is having trouble finding a decent full-time job with benefits in this crap-tastic economy, you can thank the big scary black guy in the White House for making sure that she can stay on your insurance for four more potentially life-saving years.

     Hey House, it's time to get your collective heads out of your collective rear ends. Because while you continue to get paid to flail around, hold your breath, and wail on the floor of Capitol Hill, you're cutting into the pay and well-being of thousands of simple public servants who are just trying to pay their mortgages, pay down credit cards, and get their kids through school. If that means anything to you. Which, we've established, it doesn't. All because - and let's be real - you're uncomfortable, probably for some reasons on which I could speculate, with the man in the White House who, despite your temper tantrum, and your insistence that he's some terrorist-Muslim-communist uber-villain amalgam, is just trying to get. Things. Done.

     Do we, the American people, need to embarrass you? Because, come mid-term elections, we so will.

Babies and the Web

Photo courtesy of thelmagazine.com

I was in college before social media culture took hold.

I'm grateful for that because it meant that not only were my peers and I of an age to approach online media with some level of maturity (because doesn't being a 13-year old on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter sound like the nightmare to end all nightmares?), but it also meant that I was the one in control of my online presence. I have had the ability to curate almost all online content that pertains to me, my life, and my image, save for content on websites related to public work or functions in which I've been involved, and a few random, untagged photos taken by friends.

Now, however, there is a whole generation of people who have yet to cut their first tooth, but are already the subject of a considerable amount of online content that, in many cases, starts with their birth. This is content over which they have no control because, well, they don't know what the internet - or their foot for that matter - is. Their parents and relatives have uploaded it to the web well before the subjects of that content are capable of having any say over the dissemination of their image or activities, or any understanding of the implications of one's online presence.

Okay. The feelings that parents, especially new ones, have about the arrival of their children into the world often go beyond the confines linguistic expression. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to have some understanding of the impulse to share such meaningful events in one's life as those related to one's children. In the past, the images related to those events were shared in photo albums (the gargantuan three-ring binder kind, not the Flickr kind), in home videos (VHS, holla!), or, if you're from the 60's, carousel slide projectors. We poured over physically tangible versions these images while visiting with friends, at family reunions, or in private moments of nostalgia. Today, we upload them to the web, where they can be viewed and "liked" kind of whenever, and even though privacy settings give us the illusion that we can control who sees these images, I think Edward Snowden has recently proved that we're not so in control of that sort of thing as we'd like to believe.

Don't get me wrong; in my few years on Facebook, I've uploaded many photos, I greatly enjoy Instagram, and I've "liked" the hell out of plenty of baby pictures posted by my friends. I even rushed to post a picture of my own young niece the day she was born, overcome with emotion and joy as I was. But then I had another thought...and I decided to take the picture down. That other thought was the idea that this tiny baby, completely unaware of the world and how it works, will someday gain an understanding of both herself and the world to a far greater extent than I ever will. And as she gains that understanding, I wondered if it's fair to her to begin to create her online-presence before she even has the wherewithal to ponder it and what it means. Suddenly it seemed that, while a family photo here and candid shots there are one thing, full galleries of sometimes very intimate moments digitized, uploaded to the nebulas of cyberspace, and broadcast to literally hundreds of "friends" - some of whom I only sorta know - was another.

It's my niece's life, after all. Not mine. And not her mother's or her father's either. We, her family, are merely the custodians of her life until she's big and strong, and aware enough to make her own choices. Do we really have the right to "share" her life to such extents and on such a scale as the world wide web? I ponder this question sincerely, and not just rhetorically.

I love seeing pictures of my friends' babies. If you post an album of your baby online, I will probably click through and "like" every, single, adorable one of them. But I also greatly admire the restraint I've witnessed in some young parents I know. They upload and share images of their children as anyone would, but they do so selectively, thoughtfully, and frankly not with the greatest frequency. I appreciate their reserve not because I don't want to see pictures of their babies (because I do!), but because I recognize it as a courtesy to their children. Who will grow up to be adults. And whose preferences about their own online presence are a long way from being known.