The End of 30

What I did with my year:
- went to Ghana with my mom
- met the Vice President of Ghana
- met the Asantehene
- had dinner at home of a former President in Ghana
- taught Spanish
- participated in Morning Meeting and got to know my students
- co-planned an all school Day of the Dead Celebration
- was invited to show paintings at the C Art Gallery and The Phinney Ridge Center
- lead literature circle for the fourth grade
- got my black belt in Taekwondo
- published my first collection of poetry
- wrote my first novel (an hour and half at time)
- performed my first paid feature as a poet
- showed my art at 619 Western during the big 1st Thur Art Walk
- hosted 3 Red Couch Galleries
- raised enough money to go on a spiritual journey
- sold some books
- fell in love with Powell's bookstore
- spent weekends in Portland
- had a lot of good times with friends and family
- had a damn good year

The MIM with M2

Despite being sleep deprived, nervous, and generally grumpy, M2, my mom's good friend managed to coax me out of the house to go to the MIM. The MIM stands for Musical Instrument Museum. Located in Phoenix, the museum is brand new, enormous and jam packed with awesomeness. It makes the EMP, Seattle's music museum, look like a Jimi Hendrix broom closet.

The MIM showcases traditional and contemporary musical instruments from around the world. Each country has a display, or in the case of huge countries like China, several displays, organized by geographic regions and types of instruments. There are drums of all shapes and sizes made from every imaginable material, violins, guitars, sitars, lutes, harps, didgeridoos, and some instruments I'd never even seen before interspersed with costumes traditionally worn during concerts, special ceremonies or important events. Centered in every display is a flat screen TV that plays short performances on a loop. When you enter the museum, you're given a wireless headphone set that links you in to each display as you pass.

I spent several hours wandering around marveling at the beauty and difference from culture to culture, but after awhile I began to see unlikely similarities, like how the Korean folk singing sounds a lot like something they do in Mauritania. It was absolutely phenomenal, this sense of the inter-connectivity between different music, as if providing evidence for the thesis that there is a universal spirit that is the springboard of all our creative endeavors.

And though I saw a lot, visited the exhibits of various continents as well as the mechanical music room filled with player pianos, and the celebrity donation room with John Lennon's piano and Santana's guitar, I barely scraped the surface. There is a theater devoted to showcasing fabulous music and an on-site facility that rehabs broken instruments. It's the kind of place you could spend several days. Next time I'm AZ I probably will.

OLLIELAND: A Novel

For those of you who have been wondering about that novel I've been working on...well I finished the second draft last week and I'm shopping for an agent! It's called OLLIELAND. It's 352 pages. And I'm really excited about it. The following is a little sneak peek blurb:

Set in Madison, Wisconsin, OLLIELAND chronicles the senior year of 17 year old artist and afro-punk Olivia (Ollie) Johnson. Raised in the shadows of her mainstream, well adjusted siblings, Ollie is content to be nobody, especially at school. But when her parents go through a very public divorce and her mother enters into a relationship with a woman, Ollie is stripped of her anonymity. Attacked for her differences, celebrated for her talent, and forced into uncomfortable confrontations with friends and foes alike, Ollie must find her voice and figure out how to survive. The choices she makes will test the boundaries of her friendships and force her to assert her independence. Ollie must also come to terms with the reinvention of her family, all the while figuring out the next phase of her life, and pursuing romance with local rock star Wally X.

Few YA books have Afro-American protagonists, and those few are familiar tropes--slave-narrative period pieces or portraits of inner-city youth. Ollie isn’t a “Talented Tenth” Atlanta debutant in designer jeans, nor is she an impoverished teen mom. She’s not an athlete, nor college bound and definitely not a victim. Armed with a strong sense of self, impeccable taste in music, and an irreverent wit, Ollie is a spunky, engaging character, whose struggles with identity, family, love and friendship will resonate with readers of all ages.

Crazy AZ

This state is nuts. Every time I turn on the news there is something even more insane happening. Last time I was here they passed some radical crime prevention legislation allowing licensed gun owners to take their guns into restaurants ostensibly to prevent criminals from stealing them while their having dinner. Did I mention all it takes to get a concealed weapons permit in this state is to be over 21, have proof of US citizenship, and not be a convicted felon (though if you are if you get it expunged you're still a viable candidate).

And then there was the time they thought it might be a good idea to find out where illegal immigrants are living and cut their electricity off. Now if that happened in Seattle, it would be bad, but here especially during the last few days of 115 degree heat, it could be fatal. That one didn't go through fortunately, but everyday these crazy conservatives seem to come up with more and more extreme measures to separate "us from them". I just want to remind them that unless they are Native American, many of their ancestors were illegal immigrants too. What shocks me...besides the fact that these lunatics actually keep getting voted into office...is their appalling lack of compassion. Let's cut medical care. If an illegal immigrant gets ill or hurt, they shouldn't be allowed medical treatment....where is the humanity in that? I mean why do people come to this country anyway? Mostly in search of opportunity, to help their families, to earn a decent living, or in some case to escape persecution...sounds kind of like why all those pilgrims came and founded this country in the first place. We are a nation of immigrants.

And now there is SB1070, one of the most bigoted, aggressively anti-immigrant legislation to be passed yet. I skimmed through it (more than I can say for most of the so-called journalist reporting on it) and the gist is that they want to make it "really" illegal for illegal immigrants to reside in AZ. It's redundant to say the least and inhumane on multiple levels. I was happy to hear that before this goes into effect tomorrow, US District Judge Susan Bolton went through and blocked the most egregious parts, not that it will actually change anything as our local law enforcement official have sworn to do whatever they can to persecute illegal immigrants, regardless of what the law says. While it's nice to visit, I can't say I'll be sad to leave this state.

Rachel Maddow as Fake President Obama Addresses the Nation on BP Oil Spill

I woke up this morning to sound of some jackass on NPR saying...well the cap is leaking, but it's nothing we should worry about. I would laugh if it weren't so deeply sad and disturbing. Don't worry? People if you aren't worried then you haven't been paying attention. I can't help but think about that part in An Inconvenient Truth where Al Gore breaks it down and says basically we are basically living out a very bad science experiment where between depleting our natural resources and polluting whatever is left, there is no telling what our lives are going look like...what this planet is going to be able to endure before rebelling against us. When I stop to think about it all, it's quite terrifying. Between the recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti and the storms and this oil spill that is so epic we should probably coin another term for it like enormous oil disaster, I can't help feel like we are on the verge of some apocalyptic event that will forever change the face of this planet and may just be the happening to extinct us all. I don't want to be a dinosaur.

Obama, I voted for you. I don't regret it. In fact I know you've really done some amazing things, but this time take a note from Rachel Maddow please. Now is not the time for diplomatic bipartisan compromise...it is the time for radical action. I didn't vote for you out of any delusion that you are particularly radical, but hey...desperate times call for desperate measures. Now is the time for some drastic action. Please.

-a concerned citizen

Lost in the Desert

Yesterday I got sun burnt for the second time in my life. I went for a walk at 6:30am. The sun had barely come up. It hadn't even burnt off the clouds yet, but after a walk and a swim, I came home to discover I was peeling. Gross! While I am usually a sun person, I am kind of missing the rain and the lush green of Seattle. Moreover in addition to missing my friends, I miss the familiarity of my city. I've been visiting Tempe several times a year since my mom moved here 3 years ago, but still everyday here is a scavenger hunt.

My mom is recovering well, and she is walking for short periods of time as well as enduring intensive physical therapy that requires her to be in a leg moving machine for at least 6 hours daily, which means she is not able to really leave the house yet. So if we need groceries or if errands need to be run, I have to drive.

I have discovered several things about this area. 1: It's totally flat here and there are no real landmarks to orient me, so at any given moment I have no idea what direction I'm headed in. 2:Everything looks the same. Drive 6 blocks in any direction and I guarantee you will find an intersection with a CVS and a Walgreen's on the corner unless you are in a residential neighborhood which is nothing more than a hive of white walled houses with pink rock lawns. Throw in a few cacti and some citrus fruit bearing trees and that describes the monotonous beauty of Tempe, Phoenix, Mesa, and Chandler, all of which have no discernible boundaries to my knowledge. 3: In order to alleviate any light pollution there are very few street lights, which means night here is actually really dark and very good for obscuring street signs. So when I'm not at home hanging out with my mom, I am probably lost trying not piss everybody off with my ultra slow granny driving.

Each time I go out there trying to find my way, I am reminded that I am not the first, nor the last to come to the desert and get a little disoriented. Kathianne always says Jesus should be the great example, not the great exception and as I think about his 40 days and 40 nights, I am grateful for air conditioning and that finding the Red Robin to get my mom a hamburger has thus far been my most difficult challenge. It could be worse. Maybe it takes getting a little lost to really bring clarity to exactly what it is you're trying to find. That's the hope anyway...