Hurt Me Daddy, for I Have Blogged

  I think today in therapy I did a lot of what the kiddos call "inner child healing." I honestly think I turned out a person who doesn't suck. It's a time in history when it feels harder and harder to stand by one's principles. Not only that but the ability to give a nuanced "no thanks, that's not for me" rather than railing against a situation. But also deliberately picking what I will and won't support. That 12-year-old me was ok and right. Everything does suck and the world kept being unfair and not ok. But then I started reading about all the civil conflicts going on and I really think it's more important than ever to have repair, conflict mediation and reconciliation skills inside of, for and by marginalized people communities. I saw what tore us apart just before and during early panny. And I don't want to do it anymore. I want better solutions but with strong boundaries that honor harm done and don't pretend that something neve...

Possibly just LGBTQ things, but I guess the hardest part of healing in adulthood is realizing that the circumstances around which you were raised weren't "normal." Relative privilege in my case? Yeah. Emotionally stable? Not really. I also think the only child thing, combined with some level of parentification, was really hard for me. Whereas most peers my age had ye olde "ethnic babysitting" model (which yeah, that's also parentification but it's also a lot of peer interaction)...my few family members my age weren't in the US. So it was a scant number of parents' friends' kids who were like siblings and that also brought with it, well, I guess some of the joys of siblinghood. But then the situation went back to isolated on a whim. 💁 Anyway now I'm a standup comedian.

Wanted to come here to talk about the fact that diasporic Jewish experiences are disparate things. Not all of us resonate with coming from relative generational wealth, for example if you had turn-of-the century immigrant relatives to the US who were able to build up some wealth. Not all of us resonate with Yiddish language or culture. If that was at all spoken in my family it would've been extensively spoken by great-grandparent and older generations.  Not all of us resonate with diaspora-ism as a positive experience. So many of ours knew persecution and deportation. I don't feel comfortable with people idealizing shtetls and harsh conditions. Not all of us resonate with thriving Yiddish culture in general, because a lot of our relatives' mandate was to assimilate into their home country, and assimilation and religious erasure under political causes was always the goal. Love that we have workers' rights now, but remember what Jewish people sacrificed for universality a...

Has anyone else absolutely lost the joy to do any of what they used to do creatively pre-pandemic? I'm now finding myself mostly leaving another dance realm because my body just doesn't feel like it's working the same way anymore, and I don't want to be a weird delulu middle aged person who is trying to battle kids in their 20s. Battling is specific to the genre I perform and while I know it's part of our, and more largely, street/BIPoC urban dance history, it really isn't my thing. I guess I could even bring up some pseudo-academic point about how marginalized people getting pitted against each other as our ticket to excellence is fucked. And part of our internalized oppression. But maybe that should be obvious? I dunno. In fact, now that the dances I do have little cultural or contextual valence in the sense of being anchored in some international cultures, I feel like it's all less significant. The work I do is now rooted mostly in USA LGBTQ and sex work...

Twin seeds, planted in one long planter. Soon, a large landmass would stand between us. I wish I hadn't absorbed, from somewhere, that only the coasts mattered. And here we are. So much between us, including life & water under the bridge. I miss New York but I'm not built to root there. Just to visit. I think there was a time in my life when going there could've propelled me. They would've "gotten" what I was doing. But that was a small window of time. Now it's over. So much similar between us but so many parts of us different. And yet so much in common too. It feels like long ago but hey, obvious why we were pretty much "The Crayons" together. The queers in the 'burbs claw in the dark to find each other. Our absurd reads, endless summers and maybe the mystery trousers left in my trunk. Beach days, then you moved out right after we graduated. Things got tangible quickly. We did grownup things at 18 in a state where you didn't have to...

Man, I wish I had both more pride in and just more application of myself to making music. Since elementary school I've sung, plucked, played hit slapped some kind of instrument in my hands feeling like a weird drooling chaos muppet but I feel like it's just because I had immigrant parents and that's what they force you to do. I like music-making as a creative, wild child,"be-in" kind of activity but I wish I had more actual pride and art and seriousness in it. Even when I did cultural shit I just felt like I was slapping stuff neurospicily for fun and hobbies, not to bring nuance or culture or infotainment awareness or betterment anywhere (which is guess at least in relationship to folk cultures I suppose is relevant, it's a part of life, not some hoity toity people onstage who go to universities for music like my stepfamilies, not that they are hoity-toity). Like for me music is just a way of chaotically moving through the world, but I don't feel like I b...

Throughout my entire life I have struggled with the concept that there are parasocially people who connect with my art as a creation and extension of who I am as a human. And throughout my previous career, I definitely struggled with anything adjacent to a “fan,” because mostly it was leering men off the internet and that just made no sense to me on a series of levels—I wasn’t making art for them, no matter how cultural, and no matter what sexytime baggage they brought to the situation. I’ve always had the attitude of “not my problem,” because people do have their own life baggage. So subsequently, parasocial relationships now are still hard, too, because it’s just weird for me when I haven’t built a connection with a person in meatspace. I can accept that maybe my creative work resonated with them, but it’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that they’d want to connect with me as a person because of my creative work; and it’s not because I think my creative work sucks. Just connect...