Can I get a stapler?

The next time you walk to your office supply closet and grab three extra packs of post-it notes, and a color coded pack of paper clips, please remember your lesser siblings in academia.

            Tired of schlepping my stapler from home, passively resisting buying another, forlorn for the days of corporate office supplies, and frustrated by even putting this much thought into locating a flippin’ stapler on a community college campus, I walk into the English Education Office.

            “Hi Sue^*, is this a good time?” Sue looks at me, disgruntled that I have interrupted her perpetual conversation with the other administrative coordinator.

            “Of course Kate,” she mocks. “What do you need?”

            “Well, if it isn’t too much, I was wondering if I could get a stapler –“
            “Don’t you have one? Didn’t I already give you one?”

            “Ah, no actually," I retreat. "I just stopped schlepping my one from home, and I thought if there was an extra –"
            “Well, I normally only provide for the full time staff.”

            Sue: One. Kate: Zero.

            “Oh yes,” my part-time self, who teaches just as potent classes, grovels, “but I was wondering if there was any chance that there was an extra stapler around.”

            “Normally I give the lecturers one stapler and they leave it on the desk and share,” Sue assesses my contracted gold standard.

            “Oh I see,” I bite my words and slip them through my teeth, “but I am not in this building. I am in the other building and the kids have been having difficulty. There’s no stapler in the classroom, or in the library -"
            “I don’t furnish the library. Are you going to leave the stapler there? I don’t think I have any.”

            “Oh no, no,” I  plea to the officiator of office supplies and quickly redirect my supplicant ways, “ I just wondered if there was an extra one; I have bought all the other supplies I use, and I thought if there were one laying around, you know John,” the history adjunct that she adores because he is a full fledged government employ who graces the campus, “doesn’t have a stapler either and we share an office. So he needs one, too.”
            Sue’s hand, not on the locked supply cabinet, turns.

             “I mean, we would share one.”

            “Oh, for the two of you to share in the office?”

            “Yes.”

            “Well, I’ll look but I doubt I have, oh, well: Here. I have one,” Sue reaches the stapler out to me but clearly has not decided to let it go.

            “I will carry it with me to and from class.”

            “You should mark it. With the Language Department,” she demonstrates where for my half employed intelligence.

            “Oh, I will. Good idea.”

            “Here’s the box.”

            “Thank you.

            “You should keep it.”
            “Would you like me to return it in the box?”
            “Yes.”

            I walk back to my office, not bothering to turn on the lights as one is almost out, and it courts apoplectic headaches. Sitting at my desk, I wonder if there will ever be a time when education is revered, even if only by the world of academia, or will this fight for hierarchy continue through common areas and course schedules, through rumor mills and re-structured salary scales?  But, it’s ten minutes to class: it doesn’t matter. Teachers never do it for the money, but we do appreciate the staplers.

*Of course, that is not Sue’s real name.

An unfinished thought from a baffled female

"I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised, and, in fact, a little terrified, when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening." ––Sue Monk Kidd  

 _____________________________________________

   

   "You slut" slung out of the fifteen year old boy’s mouth across the school classroom.

     My first thought: I don't think I have ever been called a slut. (I was more a prude than promiscuous in high school)

     My second thought: What does being easy have to do with taking away his laptop?

     Nothing, of course, but what a revealing statement of our society, or at least of this environ, and yes, this was on Kaua`i. I was, in his eyes, being a “bitch” (something I have been called quite a bit) but his insult flung to slut: “a dirty slovenly, woman.”

     Perhaps I am over-sensitized as I am reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and meeting girlfriends to see a premiere screening of Miss Representation this evening, yes, on Kaua`i too.  But I doubt it. It sure seemed to me that this knee-jerk insult speaks of a dangerous time for women. A time when what was sacred has been destroyed and what is sexual has been diminished to easy and exploitable.

     I have been told to “be more feminine” and that I am “too cute.” I have been told to be "stronger" and that my strength makes me "intimidating" to men. I have been told to jump and stay still at the same time: It’s pretty tricky to keep up with being a woman.

     As I sit in the coffee-shop to write, I overhear a newspaper read aloud:

            “Uncle asks how do you not get a girl pregnant. Get it. Like he would get a girl pregnant, how can other men not and ….. ok, nevermind.”

            I don’t strain to hear where that voice trails off to.

            Get: purchasable, snareable, controllable. Get a girl, then get her pregnant. It is saddening to me…now here comes when I could say “In 2011” but haven’t people been saying that (or not saying that in fear) for eons. That in this day and in this age things should have changed?

            There is a picture circulating on facebook, of a man holding a honu (turtle) underwater and the positioning is such that it looks like he is entering the turtle from behind. Has the sexual aggression, personal submission, and appreciation for the sacred, for the feminine (which resides in both male and female) become extinct? No barriers of species or society, neverminding morality. Anything goes, and in turn, much is lost.

            The aggressive superiority of one over another, whether your own masculine side over your own feminine, or flower over fauna, rich over poor, this struggle, is strangling us in ways we dare not bring to the light. Our world, from the discarded trees to occupied streets, is screaming for us to return to the simple ways, a softer way of living. Yet, if we leave these immature tendrils, a young boy who parrots his parents, or the loud drum of the media, the fear, the ignorance, the whatever - unlabeled seeds still grow, left to raise themselves and proliferate by their own devices.

A Woman is Not a Potted Plant

A woman is not a potted plant
her roots bound
to the confines
of her house

a woman is not
a potted plant
her leaves trimmed
to the contours
of her sex

a woman is not
a potted plant
her branches
espaliered
against the fences
of her race
her country
her mother
her man
her trained blossom
turning this way
and
that
to follow
the sun
of whoever feeds
and waters
her

a woman
is wilderness
unbounded
holding the future
between each breath
walking the earth
only because
she is free
and not creeper vine
or tree

Nor even honeysuckle
or bee.

~Alice Walker

Adopt the Creative

When I am writing, there is a lot of not writing that happens: warm the coffee, drink more water, find a better background song, stretch, sit, stretch, search for a quote, walk the dog, and then, sometimes a freight train of words come pouring out of me; their cadence undeterred by being caught or not.

Sometimes, I just write a lot of crap.

Like now.

An impossible chapter. I would spit at it, if I didn’t have to clean my computer screen.

I open Deena Metzger’s Writing for Your Life:

            An adoption agent is coming to your house to interview you on your capacity to adopt the creative…Why do you want the creative in your house? What do you know about caring for it? How will you provide for it? (41)

How will I provide for it? I was asking it how it would provide for me. There’s the rub. Sometimes, the savior we pray for needs our humility and our care in order to “save” us, which is of course us saving ourselves.

            How and what will you feed it? Where will you house it?

            What? These are all things I was expecting from it! You mean you want me, me to care for it? To love it? To sit still and stare it lovingly in the eye, bow my head, and thank it for even walking in my front door, and here take my favorite pillow.

            Oh, yes. Yes. To dance with the divine is to give your very best silverware, the ripest mango, your misplaced modifiers, your gutter balls, your foul play, and the sweetest tears, from which you thank the One for receiving your gifts, effective and attempted. As you empty you are filled. You are full.

            Please excuse me; it’s feeding time.

Q & A

“I always thought about teaching,” says my new friend Byron as I sit in Java Kai, taking a break from writing.

“Oh, yeah?”  I smile at Byron. He is easily in his 60’s, healthy, and wearing his freshly laundered Saturday t-shirt, coffee in one hand, Ipad in front of him. “What did you want to teach?”

“Well, I have a masters in Political Science, and I thought I could teach at the college, too.”

“Is that what you – did?”

“I was a financial analyst in Iowa, now I am here, retired.”

I smile, “I think the college kids would really benefit from someone teaching them something they loved.”

Byron smiles, and hesitates.

“What?” I offer.

“Well, what do you do when they ask you a question you don’t know the answer to? That’s what I am afraid of; kids today know so much.”

“I was just writing about that,” I honestly respond.  “I tell them, ‘I don’t know.’ And some of them are shocked, but they aren’t tapping into the other 95% of things I do know. So there is one thing I don’t know.  I just tell them I don’t know, but I will find out the answer by next class. Or at least try to.”

“Yeah, but if I was a kid today, I wouldn’t want to have me as a student.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t ask the questions I wanted answers to because I knew the teachers didn’t know and I didn’t want to embarrass them. But today -”

Answer the Call

Phone calls are not events as they used to be. You are no longer restricted to the length of the phone cord. There is no phone chair or table, especially designated for the occasion of communication. Now, it is texts between traffic lights, status updates in the midst of a good meal, and phone calls under palm trees to busy streets abroad.

“Did you get my calls?”

“You mean when I called you?” I offered to my beloved friend visiting from O`ahu, whom I thought had misarranged his words.

“No, when I called you.”

“You mean when we called to have you come visit on Kaua`i two years ago,” I smiled, little miss know-it-all.

“Noooo. When I called you and invited you to O`ahu, last year.”

    How was it, between email, cell phones, facebook, twitter, and even the coconut wireless I had missed that call? “No,” I stammered, “No, I didn’t get your calls.”

    It can be like that. We get the horoscope updates or the latest baseball scores. But when a dear one calls to say hello, when they are really saying they are lonely, we cannot hear them over our laundry machine. When our partner calls to say they don’t want to cook dinner, we cannot hear their vulnerable request for nurturing as we huff and puff about yet another thing we need to do - dinner. Sometimes calls for love sound like demands because if we are called to give we are called to receive. Sometimes that call for love, comes from within, and so very often receives a busy signal.