The World Seems Surreal...

[shadowkat]

This week has been borderline odd...as if I'm somehow detached watching it unfold and thinking, whoa...oh nasty world with such screwy people in it. Want to do an interesting exercise? Walk down a street and imagine what is going through the heads of everyone you see: what they are thinking, feeling, based on body language, clothing, and other indicators. Interesting experience - did that about a few weeks back. It makes you very aware of how we affect one another, yet are oblivious to each other and the affect we have. I can't help but wonder sometimes if we were all a little less self-absorbed, into our own issues, if the world would be a better place?

It's also been borderline depressing week. I've passed at least four people begging for money, normal occurrence in NYC, but lately more pronounced than usual. One poor lady was outside my brownstone on Tuesday morning. Very large woman. Dark skinned. Normal clothes or non-descripit at any rate since I can't quite remember anything beyond a black sweater, t-shirt, and long skirt. Her timing couldn't have been better - it was just a few hours after I returned from the interview with the big *shiny* corporation in it's new *under-construction* digs just across from the tip of Manhattan, where I'd dressed in the *attitude* suit. Black dot-strip. Neat. So here I was, thankfully in more appropriate clothes - torn t-shirt, shorts, sandles off to to get a toothbrush and some food for lunch and this large woman stops me. Her breath smells a little of beer, I think, could be wrong. It could just be the sour-sweet smell of sweat, which to me smells like stale beer. She's shoving papers about a bus ride to Atlantic City in my face. Papers that make no sense, telling me that she plans to be on this bus, she's just passing through and needs to sleep or sweep my stoop? I can't quite make out what she's saying for a while. The first words out of her mouth, disturb me greatly, "I'm a good black person not a bad black person". I'd been walking past her, minding my own business, mind focused on the interview and other crap, but that got my attention, and well she was bigger than me - so able to get in my face. (I'm a big person, so when I say bigger than me - imagine someone like Adam Baldwin). She isn't mean about it. Not confrontational. No, that would have been different. She's almost childlike. She talks like you would expect a five year old to talk. I stammer something about "why would I think that?" taken completely aback. Which in turn surprises her a bit. As if you can determine good or bad based on the color of someone's skin. Please. But the mere fact she said it - means that people actually think this. Someone out there is actually stupid and ignorant enough to think they can judge someone's character based on appearance? More evidence that I live in a world that is insane. This poor lady, who could barely put an intelligent sentence together, was begging for work - she wanted to sweep my stoop for cash - I politely explained that I didn't own the building, was a renter, and couldn't employ her. I have no idea why she needed the money or what it had to do with her bus trip to Atlantic City - she wasn't exactly articulate. But I did feel this overwhelming sense of guilt and pain that I could do nothing to help.

It's a feeling that has stayed with me on and off the past two days. Even while I was busy figuring out how to organize the Citizens Union files. That actually required brain power - since the files were in a compelete and total mess and the people working there hadn't a clue what they had. I actually managed to straighten out almost an entire filing cabinet - impressing the office manager. At any rate on the way home, three people begging for nickles, dimes, pennies for the homeless showed up on the subway and I hunted for loose change - dropping it in their taped up containers. Not sure they were for real or not, not sure I care at this point. That's the problem with living in the world, you aren't always sure what is real and what is a performance. Sincerity seems to have gotten lost in the midst of all the marketing.

To distract myself - I find myself commenting on fanfic or fic writing enterprises, after I declared I wouldn't. Bad me. It's fun in a way...analyzing a fictional character's actions. Easier than dealing with the real and not always understandable actions of the friends and strangers that surround us. But the real world doesn't go away while we distract ourselves from it - it's always there waiting for us.
And the only way I can affect that world or change it for good or ill - is I suppose to continue to inter-act with it, even if sometimes I'd prefer to stay in my nice little bed.

Comments

[deevalish.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling. Overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of the not caring. The enormity of the problem that is the root of it. The lonely little ant feeling of "Who am I to change anything? And where does one even begin?"

What you are doing is the best thing to be done. Do your best and that's all that can be asked. When I was 14, I came across a homeless couple who were begging for change. they were seated together on the sidewalk with a dog. They had no shoes. Their clothes were filthy. Something about them just struck me. I had just started working at an after school job and made about $5 an hour. I gave htem everything that I had at that moment, which was $7. They were so happy to get that. But afterward I thought, "What will they do the next day? And the next?" I was overwhelmed with the sense of helplessness.

[rahael.livejournal.com]

Oh! That story is so sad!

this reminds me of an experience i had in dc years ago

[(Anonymous)]

I was out of college but still living in the Washington, DC, suburbs, which would put this in the late 1970s. I was walking down the street in downtown DC thinking about the stuff I had to do, & realized there was something I was forgetting. So I snapped my fingers a few times to try to jog my memory...& a middle-aged black man who was nearby asked me what I wanted. Confused, I said, nothing, I was just trying to remember something. He said, oh--I thought you wanted me to do something for you.

I was totally taken aback. I think I physically recoiled. I said in a shocked tone, no, you call a dog that way, I'd never do that to a person. He looked like he appreciated that but was still mistrustful. And we each walked off.

Now, this was in the late '70s. After Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the whole Black Power movement. And before so many of those gains got rolled back under the Reagan administration. Yet this black man apparently believed that when a white person, even a woman (I know, that shouldn't matter...just like race shouldn't) half his age, snapped their fingers, he had to ask them what they wanted from him.

It really changed how I thought about race relations. I'd been raised in a nice liberal family & hadn't seen any of the stuff I'd read about in Invisible Man, Black Like Me, & Black Boy in real life. I suppose I still hadn't actually seen it, but the man's reaction reflected his experience back at me. And it's all about your individual experience & how it depends on the way other people--usually those in the group w/more power--categorize you. The people in that group can all too easily spend our entire lives oblivious to the experience of the groups that are discriminated against, even if they don't do anything personally to contribute to that discrimination. If I go to see an apartment, I could be shown around it & decide whether to take it without ever knowing that 1/2 hour ago someone else came by to see it & was told it was already taken, or if I flag down the 1st cab that goes by, I won't see how many cabs don't stop for the person down the block, all because of their race. Is this my fault? No, but I benefit from it anyway, even if I never recognize the benefit or don't want it.

"As if you can determine good or bad based on the color of someone's skin. Please. But the mere fact she said it - means that people actually think this. Someone out there is actually stupid and ignorant enough to think they can judge someone's character based on appearance? More evidence that I live in a world that is insane."

Yeah, it happens all the time, & yeah, it is insane. Think about this: It used to be even worse. This is the less insane world.

--anom