Category: Personal

Personal · School · Work

Just a few updates

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There is a lot on my mind as of late, which is why my activity has slowed to a crawl here. First of all, writing reviews isn’t my forte no matter how much I wish it was. I have drafts and notes, but the writing is the part that gets me. Secondly, the book ennui bug has hit me bad. I’m reading multiple books at once, but they’re all failing to hold my attention. And thirdly, there’s school. 

Photo by Wallace Chuck

Yesterday – 29 August 2023 – was my first class, an introduction to the graduate world in the form of Research Methods Theories (cue canned applause here). While exciting, it’s been almost twenty years since I’ve strolled into a classroom. And given that it’s an online class, it’ll probably be another twenty years before I do so. 

While my passion for Mexican American Studies is more a personal one than a professional one, I think it will help me out in that sphere as well. While everyone who introduced themselves last night seemed to already have their path figured out, I also have to remember that I’m in a classroom with people almost half my age. They’re building careers, not supplementing one.

There is some anxiety here, which was somewhat eased by the book required for the course – The Latinx Guide to Graduate School – but there are somethings that may always hang over my head. And while I know it’s never too late to go back to school, that dread of being well into adulthood sitting alongside those who are just entering makes me feel, well, old. Not that I know more than they do – my 11-year-old  probably knows more than I do. It’s just the feeling of not belonging somewhere. 

That said, this is my one and only class this year because being away from school this long has to have some effect on me. Maybe Fall ‘24 I’ll find that bravery and enlist for 6 hours!

Aside from that, I am also taking the reins of an abandoned book blog at work – The Rare Book Club, which highlights the department’s rare book collections. While I haven’t started posting yet, I am trying to cook up an idea that makes the blog feel more like me (minus the profanity). 

My current inspirations for this plan are:

Alongside all this, I’m also trying to re-find my voice. I started writing poetry, loosely within the pages of my bullet journal. So here’s looking forward to new material.

Personal

Quietly Queer

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Ashcroft, Oriel Frankie. People standing and holding blue and white banner. December 2, 2020. Pexels.

When A Stranger Hurts You

“It’s protected by free speech,” they told us. “If his sticky-notes came down, they all had to come down.” Fortunately for us, this news came to us after we had taken down the Pride Month display. His sticky-notes, while forever a part of our growing LGBTQIA+ collection, will never see the light of day until someone chooses to see them. 

“Had he come at it from an angle of respect, I may have not seen it as hate speech,” I said. Three students (or a single student visiting us three times) had written they identified as straight. This is a valid approach to our display, and I saw no reason to take them down. Straight people, like white people, tend to impose and center themselves in conversations where they’re not the main topic. They claim exclusion when the whole world tends to revolve around them – figuratively, of course.

“Except he didn’t. He came at it with hate already in his heart. You can disagree with “the movement” while still being respectful,” I shook my head. “Instead, he chose to “identify” as a bigot and called the LGBTQIA+ community a cult.”

I hate that word. Community. When you’re an outlier, it’s easy to clump people together. To see one as a monolith for the entirety. But I’ve seen several people disaffected with the people who gave them nothing but love and turned on them. Kelly Cadigan’s slow entry to the alt right earlier this year showed this, and several openly homosexual men have bashed transwomen in order to save their own skin and peace of mind. We are not them. I am one of you.

My only regret is not listening to the boy. Instead, I wrote him off as a lost cause. 

When A Friend Hurts You

“What are you reading?” a friend asked when entering my office. 

Continue reading “Quietly Queer” →
Personal

The Incident During Pride Month

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What Happened:

Looking at him, I would say he was about 18 or 19 but, these days, anyone under the age of 30 looks like a child to me. He seemed nervous, yeah. A small lilt in his voice betrays the confidence he hoped to portray. Smug smile. Beady eyes. The dude obviously listens to Shapiro or Crowder while wanking – exclaims, “Fuck me Joe Rogan!” when he orgasms. All these thoughts ran through my head with all the things I wish I could say to him. But cooler heads always prevail if your job is on the line. This kid wanted a reaction. And instead of giving him the one he expected, I spoke to him with a bit of frustration but mostly in the same tone I would have given my son. Fatherly disappointment. 

We are often told to love our enemy. But what if our enemy would rather see us dead?

Maladaptive Daydream:

“You look different,” I say, taking a seat across from them. “Didn’t this place collapse when we parted ways last time?”

A smirk spreads across their face as they set down their coffee cup onto the table. “You’re mistaking me for a higher power. I’m afraid they’re gone and now it’s only me.”

They have short dark hair, a shimmer of red peeks from beneath in the same way blue glimmers off grackle or blackbird feathers. Something just beneath the surface. Their piercing eyes – blue? gray? – look into mine.

“You’re older than I remember,” I say. 

“I could say the same about you.” They produce a black tote bag from under the table and pull a journal out, pen slipped onto the cover, which they take out before opening to the page they left off on. “I’ve been going over your history since we last departed. You have a kid now and you identify as queer openly because bisexual didn’t suit you and pomosexual just confused people? How are those things going for you?”

“As well as you would assume,” I reply. “I’m sorry, but your name?”

“You knew me by another name, but you resurrected me as someone else,” they say. “I think you can call me Evelin.”

“Why did you come back?”

“You tell me.”

What Should Have Happened:

I play the incident over again in my head. The way he stood there, proud of his hate. “Bigot and proud of it,” he had written on the sticky note. He called it free speech, but free speech doesn’t hide behind closed doors. He’s scared, though only I could guess.

I imagined my skull ring – given to me by a man who possibly loved me more than he should have – digging into his skin, I imagined chasing him into the stairwell and pushing him over. I imagine hurting him the way it hurt me to see what he wrote, to know that deep inside he would rather see us dead than see us at all. 

Still, another part of me wished I could muster the strength to tell him to sit down. Because we are a college of ideas, even if we don’t agree with them. Hiding behind hurtful language and disrespect isn’t the route he should have taken. Free speech is discourse, not hiding behind a computer screen spouting out lie after lie. It’s not calling for the eradication of trangender people in the echo chamber of hate you have erected for yourself. 

It’s not about name calling and spreading misinformation. 

It’s not about claiming bigot and making it your own like it was a slur. 

Evelin:

They came to me in a dream. A fiction I made up to hide behind and seek comfort. They have been known by a few names. Neve. Jane. Blaspheme. An alias. 

And do you often refer to yourself as a woman?

I don’t often refer to myself as anyone, actually.

But you’ve used a female moniker in the past.

I have gone by many names in the past. A couple were female, yes.

“So you’re finally putting it together?”

Photo credits:

Personal · Poetry Break

“Whatever Happened to the Coffee Love Guy?”

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by Guillermo Corona

Faces in the crowd
cast in shadow. Lone
light shining upon an
open mic. Nerves gathered,
sweat glistening on anxious brow–
we come together not to bury,
but to praise this noble art. 

Tea-stained pages, rimmed with coffee
mark the passage of time
from home cook meals to library
meeting rooms to a new wave–
una nueva onda, a night of readings
with friends and family
y familias.

We are grandmothers y abuelas,
compadres and instant friends.
¿Si no hablamos ahora, who will?
We are the voices of generations
new and long since past,
whispers and echoes both, 
cracking on an open mic.

Somos amadores, we are coffee drinkers,
dunking pan dulce in our cups
while trading words and waxing poetic
philosophies like it was going out of style.

Memory is a funny thing, ain’t it? I was sitting at my desk the other day when one just wiggled into the space between thoughts. It’s one of the last nights I hung around with the “coffee love guy.”

We both attended one of Amado’s Nueva Onda Poetry readings at the Dustin Michael Sekula Memorial Library. He had recited – upon popular request – the poem in question, “Coffee Love.” I don’t know what it was about that poem that was a crowd pleaser, but those of us who knew the man knew him for that poem. It’s the only one that stuck in my memory, though I’m sure he read others.

“Whatever happened to that guy?” I wondered before pushing the thought aside, trying to focus on my work.

Memories, however, won’t be ignore.

The question hung in my head until I wrote down what would later be the title of this poem – “Whatever Happened to the Coffee Love Guy?” – into my bullet journal. I scribbled a few lines, trying to remember the conversation we had. Nothing stuck.

I tried writing a poem about loss – and I did – but I didn’t want to just focus on losing people. I wanted to remember someone, or rather the feelings I had two decades ago when I first took the stage at Amado’s little cafe and read for the first time.

And when I had those bare bones laid out, I started filling them in. Mixing in the words into English and Spanish – my broken Spanish. I flipped back to the page I wrote down my question and thought, “Now that’s a title I could use.”

I still haven’t answered my question, though. And maybe it will remain a mystery. I might bump into him one day, or maybe that last night was our last conversation. But if you’re reading this, man, how’s it been?

Personal

Unspoken Goodbyes

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Describe the last difficult “goodbye” you said.

It’s 2018 and I am lying on the living room couch listening to my son and nephew playing on the Xbox in my bedroom. It’s a hot South Texas day in August and my only thoughts are getting as much rest as possible after the tumultuous Summer Reading Program we had at the public library. It was the first program I ran as acting-supervisor of the department, as the children’s supervisor had left before summer began. There were some hopes that I’d take the title before Autumn Programming began, though I know there was a slim chance I’d even be their second or third choice for the position. Maybe their fourth? Possibly their fifth. 

A black moth lands on the front screen door. Memory makes it the size palm of my hand, but it might have been much smaller, though still bigger than most moths that flutter around during the day. 

I call out to the boys to come see the moth while snapping a picture with my phone for my Instagram. “The invasion starts tonight,” I typed and hit post. It is August 9, 2018.

Continue reading “Unspoken Goodbyes” →
Personal

Revisions

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Getting back into the groove of things isn’t easy. Especially after taking a long hiatus. A hiatus that I figured would last indefinitely. Last Thursday, I participated in the Latine Heritage Month reading at the library. Yes, that library. The one I used to work at. 

And two weeks before that, I participated at an open mic at Moonbeans. Though, if I’m honest, I wasn’t going to partake in that reading (more on that later, possibly another post). 

At both readings, I read something I had written with V in mind. (This poem, actually.) As you can see, the poem didn’t age well. Which is a problem with adding pop culture references in your works. (Note: This isn’t always the case, however. There are plenty of beautifully, wittily written poems that drop random references that have aged wonderfully. Well, I’m sure there are, anyway.)

During the Moonbeans reading, I noted what wasn’t working with the poem. Keep in mind, this version is a Frankensteined creation of two poems smashed together. Something I had composed for a Love & Chocolate reading held a few years ago. 

For the reading at Sekula, I omitted most of the first point. And noted that my father had passed a few months after writing the piece.

While doing so, I remembered something a creative writing professor told me. How the editing process is never truly done, even after publishing. Writers always think of new ways their works could have been better. And maybe that’s what I’ll do. Sit down and read my “best of” poems and contemplate how to “correct” them. 

Because outside of that one poem, I haven’t written poetry in a long while. And outside of these rough-draft, journal-entry type blog posts, I haven’t really written anything either. 

Once a fixture—a staple—within the local poetry scene, I bowed out and took a seat. While the conflict that led to the decision was only partially to blame, things had changed by then. I’d become a father, took down a real job, and began focusing my attention on them. Coupled with the fact that my relationship with Jeanna began, poetry readings didn’t seem as important. 

But performance is a drug not easily shaken. Standing at the mic, reading to a roomful of strangers or friends, just felt right. Like a missing limb or an old confidante.

Photo by Heorhii Heorhiichuk