Plane Tickets, Poetry and Me

Hello friends,

So as most of you hopefully know by now, I'm living on the East Coast. The summers are humid and miserable. The winters are biting and cold. Autumn is absolutely gorgeous for like two week. Spring is... nothing to write home about, I guess.

It's pretty good overall. I got a job at a dining hall within a month of moving here. I finally earned my honarary-Bagelry employee status by becoming a baker at the local equivalent a few months later. I've met some amazing people and seen some pretty cool stuff.

Cool kid Hans put these on himself. #adventuretime

A photo posted by Danny (@acelessthan3) on Jul 11, 2016 at 2:09pm PDT

Not going to lie, it was tough for a little bit there. Ethan and I spent a good three months sleeping on a slowly failing air mattress until we got our taxes done and I bought a futon.

Still haven't managed to see an Atlantic sunrise, but there's still plenty of time for that.

At the same time, I miss my BellingHome and the familiar coastal grey of the PNW. I even got a tattoo of a Douglas Fir pinecone to remind me of my roots.

A photo posted by Danny (@acelessthan3) on Aug 15, 2016 at 6:38am PDT

But after a year, it's time to go home at least for a visit. I know my mom could probably use the hug.

Right now plans are to fly out sometime in the first half of January when my dining hall job is on winter break and while I'm already starting to save up what I can, I'm just going to put it out there that if anyone would like to help, you can send me money via paypal here: paypal.me/acelessthan3

I'm also starting to apply to grad schools because I still like the idea of actually doing physical therapy (gotta get them letters after my name, yo) and like that whole process is expensive.

But I refuse ask for money for nothing. So if you send me at least $2, message me a mailing address (text, Facebook, other miscellaneous social media) and I'll send you a copy of a poem. And if you send $10 or more, I'll write a poem just for you.

Again, that's paypal.me/acelessthan3 send me money and I'll send you poetry and together we'll send me back to the shadows of dormant volcanoes.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Dual Life of Danny; or Facing a Privilege of Knowledge

As most of you know by now, I'm an English Lit/Kinesiology double major. A lot of you also probably know that I consider myself a heArtist, an activist from the heart, with a decent working knowledge of gender/queer/racial theory and praxis.

I often find I introduce myself with: "and I prefer he/him/his or they/them/theirs pronouns."

I question the use of race and ethnicity in any kind of survey format.

I cringe when someone uses "sex" and "gender" interchangeably.

Rather than calling myself a feminist, I say that I work on feminist projects because I think that with many of the postmodern influences within contemporary, third-wave feminism it's very hard to "be a feminist."

In short, I'm a bit of a queer who questions institutionalized systems, even those bureaucracies that I work for.

Being a Kinesiology major then has proven somewhat ironic at times as I constantly feel as if I have to question authority and what I'm learning. Kinesiology as a generally health-related field is biased against me in many ways. I'm generalizing, but it in part instills the kind of institutional behaviors and thought processes that I spend most of the rest of my time fighting to educate people about.

Let me give an example: most of my kinese-peers are fairly athletic, or at least active. We're constantly studying the human body, how it works, how to make using it more efficient, how to fix it when something goes wrong. So it wouldn't be uncommon to hear someone make a comment about a person needing to find the right diet/exercise program to lose weight and be happy. While it is true that changes to behavior can lead to changes in mood, the assumption that they have to happen in order to be happy is fat-shaming. But in many ways it's built into our field of study because from a clinical perspective to be obese is something that needs to be fixed.

I'm always working to be very careful to frame my arguments in ways that are sensitive to people of different body types and even catch myself before I outright agree with any claim that would denigrate another person's body. But the bias is there. It infuriates me when people don't take care of their bodies, when they are lazy and inactive and only eat junk and then complain about feeling like shit.

I constantly have to remind myself though that there are institutional pressures that affect these kinds of things in so many ways. Race, class, geographic location, education, all these areas I experience as privilege allow me the time to eat pretty damn well and make the free time to work out, part of privilege is access.

Talking with a friend before class the other today I had to explain what asexuality is and how it's different from most people's colloquial conception of it, and while he was open to the concept it was so foreign to him that he barely had words to respond to me. Part of privilege is being so normal the sometimes if you're outside of that normal there aren't even words for you.

This is the field I'm going into right now.

And I recognize that I will face similar conversations and thoughts in any field I go into. The fact that the discourse of the field itself is often part of the problem drives me crazy though, just a little, because it often marginalizes or erases any recognition of the kinds of privileges and oppressions concurrently at work in favor of the stripped-down facts.

How do I do this without removing the humanity?

The Postcard Poems

So I'm working on this series of poems I'm calling the Postcard Poems.

So far they're mostly silly little love poems for my boyfran with no particular significance to anyone else. But I'm putting them on postcards and sending them to him. Some of them have custom, one of a kind art by me. Some of them will be on postcards I found in a shoebox at one of the local used bookstores. Some of them will be blank except for the writing.

I guess, think of it like a kind of extended letter.

At the same time though, much as I love my boyfriend, I don't want to limit myself to subjects of love, cuddling, sex, the future, empty beds, and film studies and literary theory (common interests and you can only talk about love/sex so much).

Which means I need to send more postcards. 

Which means I need to write more poetry to put on postcards.

Which means I need more subjects and ideas to focus on.

Let me put this another way:

Hey, I think I know you.

And this is crazy.

But message me your address.

And get a postcard maybe.

Owl Eyes

"Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye," said the poet William Stafford. "You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all... It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there."


I came across part of this quote on the Free Will Astrology blog. It reminded me of a practice I learned about this summer called Owl Eyes. It's an awareness game from the Wilderness Awareness School that builds on the experiences of naturalists and indigenous peoples from the world over. Using Owl Eyes means expanding your vision, utilizing your peripherals broadening your view rather than having a sharp focus. It's contrasted with Eagle Eyes or predatory vision.


You know that tingling feeling when you know someone is watching you? That's the Eagle Eyes. Owl Eyes are a softer kind of vision. Rather than needle-like focus on any one object, you're absorbing the bigger picture.


I'm drawing this analogy from Stafford's quote because in many respects poetry is like that. If you get too caught up in details you can miss the meaning. At the same time, I challenge this quote. As a literary critic, to not take a conscientious look at a text and truly interact with it is tantamount to ignoring it.


Let me return for a moment to the outdoors. Another game I've learned through students of the WAS is the art of Fox Walking. To Fox Walk is to move silently. Instead of each step sliding over the ground (imagine one of those scenes from a Charlie Brown Christmas Special where everyone is dancing), each movement is precisely up and down. Each step is controlled and balanced so that you can stop at any time. You place your foot with care, ghosting into crinkly leaves and crackly twigs without a sound. You center your weight over each foot before moving the next.


Now imagine trying to practice this Fox Walking while looking at the world with Owl Eyes. It's hard to do. If you're focused on broadening your vision, you can't pay as close attention to where you're stepping. And you focus on each step you take, it's difficult to keep a broader awareness of what you're seeing around you. It takes a lot of practice to do these at the same time, so lacking that, what is a budding naturalist to do?


Divide, conquer and imitate the animals.


Every few steps stop, just for a second, and look around. Open your ears and listen. Smell and taste the air. Feel your entire physical being with all your senses.


The same goes with poetry. If all you do is look slant at the words on the page, you miss the stories that aren't hiding. If you only take things at face value, you miss the nuance of metaphor. Feel the poem. What kind of visceral, gut reaction does it invoke?


Learning to look at something out of the corner of your eye is learning to pay a new kind of attention. To direct your focus without actually having to focus directly.