I just got back from having my spirit lifted and brain exercised by an environmental activist named Julia Butterfly Hill... I couldn't focus on my anthropology reading, because everything it said fit so interestingly with everything she said tonight that I'd read one sentence and then sit and think for ten minutes.

So. I started flipping through my notebook that I carry with me everywhere and randomly write in, and found a couple of old things that I can't believe I never posted...

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aug 14 01

I think freedom, for me, is a dangling carrot. And while I want to think that the pursuit of that carrot is leading me toward some greater place than I would choose as a destination myself, it seems like those who are truly wise find that carrot the greatest end there is. What good has ever come from mental slavery, whether the master be another person or your own sense of warped responsibility?

I'm sitting here at a table at Great Harvest Bakery, eating a raspberry muffin, because I couldn't stay at the newspaper. There was no work for me to do there, just as there's nothing for me to do in Spokane, or in my life as it is now...

Freedom. Freedom from confines imposed upon me by the well-meaning but clueless, and from the guilt that makes me work to live up their expectations at the expense of all I know I'm supposed to do. Freedom from a city too big to be personal and too small to have personality. Freedom from too many hours spent in a sterile void of buying and selling, hours spent in relentless pursuit of an impossible dream--"enough money." Freedom from guilt imposed by the morality of people who aren't me, and freedom from the hypocrisy of anger at those who act against my morals. Freedom hovers close, and then hops away, again and again...

I want to go to college. I want my driver's license. I want to escape Spokane. I want to escape sexual guilt. I want to escape my father. I want to escape everything but myself--but I want to escape me, too.

I don't know whether my faith is strong enough to endure a lifetime's worth of attacks on it. I suspect that's what separates great men and women from the well-meaning ones.

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aug 14 '01 (an hour or so later)

Riding the public transportation in Spokane is eye-opening for anyone who's willing to really watch what's going on around them. Our transit system is a piece of shit, and totally, utterly impossible for most people to rely on. As a result, the only people who use it are those who have no other choice.

A middle class white girl from the suburbs like myself, even if she did live beneath the poverty level for most of her life, as I did, is never going to feel ok when she people-watches on an STA bus. And she shouldn't. Watching a cranked-up, chainsmoking 14-year-old pregnant girl in a dirty wifebeater cuddle with a man in his 40's, also dressed in filthy clothes and with facial disfigurements should not make you think that the mask of middle-class bliss Spokane wears is OK. It should ellicit a realization that you judge people--that you're disgusted by love between two people who don't have a whole lot else going for them.