Perhaps you think that you can say words like this because no one followed you home on your bicycle when you were fourteen years old. Red car. Windows down. Spring flowers blurring the heart-wrenching view. Terror creeping into your chest so that you pedaled faster up that hill than ever in your life. Engine revving, speeding, going ahead, slamming on brakes, circling back around to further stalk you. Balding man inside with sick look and even more sickening movements with his hand.

Your only thought? Will I be raped today?

Perhaps you think that you can use this slur because your mother, your sister, your brother or your father never told you that women are humans, just like you, not objects that you climb on and conquer.

Your only thought? Words don’t matter.

Perhaps you were reading the same book I’m reading now, about a servant in Iceland in 1828 who helped murder one of the many masters she’d had in her life, one of the many masters who gave her, poor, destitute, orphaned Agnes, the choice between rape or being thrown out in the snow.

Your only thought? Was there ever a time, ever a place, when women didn’t have to succumb to this? 

Perhaps your friends think it’s funny, first because you had the guts to speak in front of God and everyone, including your middle-aged, female teacher, second because you’ve said phrases like this before, because you and they have followed in the footsteps of senators, congressmen, movie producers, directors, actors, anchormen, and, God bless us all, the president of the United States who is recorded on tape using words like the ones you said in class today.

Your only thought? These words bring power. 

Perhaps you weren’t paying attention in history class, or when we read The Good Braider last semester, or when all the women started openly accusing all the men who have now been fired: perhaps you didn’t notice that harassment, assault, groping, and USING WORDS LIKE THAT are weapons. Weapons of slave masters who have kept black women at the lowest rung of our society’s ladder. Weapons of war to prevent any possibility of peace, because we all know that if women were in charge, they would bring peace. Weapons of corporations and politics, to keep men, self-absorbed, thieving, abusive men, in control of every last woman’s fate from the beginning of time until this day.

Your only thought? If they can say these words, so can I.

Perhaps you didn’t see how many hours I cried last night over your words. How I crept home to my three daughters who have to face a world that hasn’t changed much in all of history, with men like you, boys like you, not even having enough respect to keep those words to yourself in a classroom. A classroom where you have been my student for eighteen months, where Malala came to share her ever-loving, peaceful wisdom, where I wrote you that postcard to share with you all of your strengths, where my words don’t matter, because you have found your weapon.

Your only thought? I’m the showman today.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, you will find a different way to entertain your friends. You will look into the eyes of every girl, every woman that you have ever or will ever meet, and see the humanity in them. You will grow into a kind young man who listens to the words of Viola, raped and left to die in the sand of southern Sudan, Malala, shot by the Taliban, of the victims of sexual assault who lost jobs, lost friends, lost respect, and realize that you could just. Use. Different. Words.

Your only thought? Today is the day that I become the kind of man I want to be.

 

it isn’t the view

it’s what the view represents:

everything i want

cookie season starts

with ginger, too much frosting

and a group of friends

just bring us some peace

for this holiday season

so simple, so hard

until impeachment

these flags will stay at half mast

for our torn country

super moon Christmas

can’t bring childhood back home

even with colors

mushroom gravy brunch

followed by long Wash Park walk:

way to win Sunday

some people go out

but i’d rather have cat love

and soft pajamas

two-headed kitty

sharing milk and ear-licking

the kittens’ night cap

In this asynchronous environment, I have managed to log on every day of every class for eight and a half years. Even when I went camping, and I had to drive fifteen miles each way to the public library in the small town to work on their dial-up Internet crap computers. Even when I was dead-sick with the stomach flu in bed and Bruce had to bring me the laptop. Even when I was in the process of moving to Spain, where I found WiFi hotspots in the airports, in McDonald’s (once we arrived), in the dark hollows of hope that this pathetically-paying job offered me.

So, Ashleigh with an -l-e-i-g-h, from the Office of Dispute Management, I do not need an email reminding me of the repercussions; of the staff handbook; of the possibility of my “solicitation schedule” being disrupted.

I do not need your solicitations. I am not a prostitute, though you treat me like one. Truth is, like everything else in this low-paying, work-to-bones economy our country has set forth for us to stampede through, I didn’t have a class for four months. No extra pay. No vacation fund. No back-to-back classes like I had in years past. So when one started?

I forgot. I simply forgot. It was my daughter’s thirteenth birthday party, and we were swimming in a hotel pool and ordering pizza and arguing with the front desk about double charges and pretending our lives were different lives, if only for a weekend. It was my middle child’s thirteenth birthday, the child I have who adapts to every situation such as, “Mythili, your birthday is tomorrow, and is an ice cream cake OK, and brownies for this weekend?” (because honestly I hate baking cakes), and her easy and immediate response? “Yes, Mama,” before dashing out of the room.

I forgot. Because I have six extra people living in my house and two jobs at the one job I already have, where I’m supposed to be a teacher and a teacher coach, and I mostly suck at both.

Ashleigh, head of the Office of Dispute Management, I have a dispute. I think, that with fifteen years of teaching experience and more than a master’s degree and eight years at your company, I should be paid more than $1300 for a six-week course. I should be guaranteed a course whenever a student registers. I should have some point of human contact, besides generic “no-reply” emails that I have received for all these years, to ask questions about what to do when my students make every excuse in the book, when my students threaten to sue me, when my students display a level of incompetency that makes me question our entire society.

Because you know what, Ashleigh? This is the first “human” email chain I have participated in since I was hired in January 2009.

I would like a little humanity, rather than a vague threat of losing this fake job. I would like to put a face to a name, Ashleigh. I would like, for this time in my life where every moment feels like a failure, to think that, after eight years and not a single lapse in logging on, you could just. Fucking. Trust. Me.

It won’t happen again. Just like it never happened before.

There is no dispute. There is no management. There is no office. There is just a screen, the divider and diviner of our lives, bringing us closer and tearing us farther apart with each and every day.

Would you agree? Or would you dispute it?