Escapist

award winning author

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:56:22 -0400

award winning author

The Commencement Address

Sun, 12 May 2013 07:11:49 -0400

Some people have asked to read the commencement address I delivered this morning to the 2013 graduates of Butler University. So here it is.

My own commencement speaker, who shall remain nameless, began with a lame joke about how these speeches only come in two varieties: Short and bad. This raised my expectations, and then he went onto speak for 26 minutes, so I’m just going to tell you now: 12 minutes flat, 11:45 if you don’t laugh.

Congratulations to all of you here today, and I do mean all of you—parents, families, friends, professors, coaches. Every single person in Hinkle today has given something to make this moment possible for the class of 2013—well, except for me. I really just showed up and put on the robe.

But special congratulations to you graduates. Before we get to the Life Advice You’ll Soon Forget portion of the program, I want to engage in a time-honored tradition of American commencement addresses: Stealing from other commencement addresses, in this case one by the children’s television host Fred Rogers. Think, if you will, of some of the people who helped get you to today, people who’ve loved you and without whose care and generosity you might not have found yourself here, graduating from Butler, or watching someone you love graduate, or seeing your students graduate. Think for one minute of those who have loved you up into this day. I’ll keep the time.

(1 minute of silence)

Those people are so proud of you today.

We will return to those people soon, but first I have to deliver terrible news, which is that you are all going to die. This is another time-honored tradition of American celebration, the Raining on the Parade. I remember when I got married, the priest devoted most of his homily to telling me how challenging and laborious marriage would be, and I kept thinking, “Well, sure, but can’t we talk about that, like, TOMORROW?” But no, it simply cannot wait. You are going to die. Also everything you ever make and think and experience will be washed away by the sands of time, and the Sun will blow up and no one will remember Cleopatra ruling Egypt or Crick and Watson untangling the structure of DNA or Ptolemy fathoming the stars or even that improbably wonderful Gonzaga game.

So that’s unfortunate.

But I would argue that it’s good to be aware of temporariness when you are thinking about what you want to do with your life. The whole idea of this commencement speech is that I’m supposed to offer you some thoughts on how you might live a good life out there in the so-called Real World, which by the way I assure you is no more or less real than the one in which you have so far found yourselves. But I can’t give any advice about how to live a good life unless and until we establish what constitutes a good life. Of course, that’s much of what you’ve been up to for the past four years, and I’m not going to swoop in here at the end with any interesting revelations. I would just note that the default assumption is that the point of human life is to be as successful as possible, to acquire lots of fame or glory or money as defined by quantifiable metrics: number of twitter followers, or facebook friends, or dollars in one’s 401k.

This is the hero’s journey, right? The hero starts out with no money and ends up with a lot of it, or starts out an ugly duckling and becomes a beautiful swan, or starts out an awwkard girl and becomes a vampire mother, or grows up an orphan living under the staircase and then becomes the wizard who saves the world. We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

And here is the good news nested inside the bad: Many of you, most of you, are about to make that journey. You will go from being the best-informed, most engaged students at one of the finest universities around to being the person who brings coffee to people, or a Steak n Shake waiter, as I once was. Whether you’re a basketball player or a pharmacist or a software designer, you’re about to be a rookie. Your parents’ long-asked questions—what exactly does one DO with a degree in anthropology—will become a matter of sudden and profound relevance. Your student loans will come due and you will need a very good answer for why exactly you went to college, which answer you will have a hard time coming by as you sit at your job, provided you are lucky enough to find a job, and suffer the indignity of people calling you by the wrong name or, if you are forced to wear a name tag, people calling you by the right name too often.

That is the true hero’s errand—strength to weakness. And because you went to college, you will be more alive to the experience, better able to contextualize it and maybe even find the joy and wonder hidden amid the dehumanizing drudgery. For example, when I was a data entry professional, I would often call to mind William Faulkner’s brilliant letter of resignation from the United States Postal Service, which went:

As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation. William Faulkner.

Having read that letter in a Faulkner biography in college had nothing to do with my job typing numbers into a database, but it was still profoundly useful to me. Education provides context and comfort and access, no matter the relationship between your field of study and your post-collegiate life.

But still, you are probably going to be a nobody for a while. You are going to make that journey from strength to weakness, and while it won’t be an easy trip, it is a heroic one. For in learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk. And for the rest of your life, if you are able to remember your hero’s journey from college grad to underling, you will be less of a jerk. You will tip well. You will empathize. You will be a mentor, and a generous one. In short, you will become like the people you imagined in silence a few minutes ago.

Let me submit to you that this is the actual definition of a good life. You want to be the kind of person who other people—people who may not even born yet—will think about in their own silences years from now at their own commencements. I am going to hazard a guess that relatively few of us closed our eyes and thought of all the work and love that Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber put into making this moment possible for us. We may be taught that the people to admire and emulate are actors and musicians and sports heroes and professionally famous people, but when we look at the people who have helped us, the people who actually change actual lives, relatively few of them are publicly celebrated. We do not think of the money they had, but of their generosity. We do not think of how beautiful or powerful they were, but how willing they were to sacrifice for us—so willing, at times, that we might not have even noticed that they were making sacrifices.

So with that in mind, I’d like to share a few pieces of what I believe to be rock solid advice about proper adulthood or whatever:

First, do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven’t already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can’t eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions.

Also, you may have heard that it is better to burn out than it is to fade away. That is ridiculous. It is much better to fade away. Always. Fade. Away.

Keep reading. Specifically, read my books, ideally in hardcover. But also keep reading other books. You have probably figured out by now that education is not really about grades or getting a job; it’s primarily about becoming a more aware and engaged observer of the universe. If that ends with college, you’re rather wasting your one and only known chance at consciousness.

Also a word about the Internet: Old people like myself are terrified by their ignorance of it, which you can and should use to your advantage by saying things at your job like, “You don’t have a tumblr? Oh you should really have a tumblr. I can set you up with that.”

Try not to worry so much about what you are going to do with your life. You are already doing what you are going to do with your life, and judging by your gownedness, you’re doing all right.

On that topic, there are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. Your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told College Me that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would’ve been like, “That is not a word, and it never should be.”

And lastly, be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy. A couple years after I graduated from college, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with four friends, one of whom was this Kuwaiti guy named Hassan, and when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hassan lost touch with his family, who lived on the border, for six weeks. He responded to this stress by watching cable news coverage of the war 24 hours a day. So the only way to hang out with Hassan was to sit on the couch with him, and so one day we were watching the news and the anchor was like, “We’re getting new footage from the city of Baghdad,” and a camera panned across a house that had a huge hole in one wall covered by a piece of plywood. On the plywood was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spraypaint, and as the news anchor talked about the anger on the Arab street or whatever, Hassan started laughing for the first time in several weeks.

“What’s so funny?” I asked him.

“The graffiti,” he said.

“What’s funny about it?”

“It says, Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.”

For the rest of your life, you are going to have a choice about how to read graffiti in a language you do not know, and you will have a choice about how to read the actions and intonations of the people you meet. I would encourage you as often as possible to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility, the possibility that the lives and experiences of others are as complex and unpredictable as your own, that other people—be they family or strangers, near or far—are not simply one thing or the other—not simply good or evil or wise or ignorant—but that they like you contain multitudes, to borrow a phrase from the great Walt Whitman.

This is difficult to do—it is difficult to remember that people with lives different and distant from your own even celebrate birthdays, let alone with gifts of graffitied plywood. You will always be stuck inside of your body, with your consciousness, seeing through the world through your own eyes, but the gift and challenge of your education is to see others as they see themselves, to grapple with this mean and crazy and beautiful world in all its baffling complexity. We haven’t left you with the easiest path, I know, but I have every confidence in you, and I wish you a very happy graduation, despite the circumstances.

lizthefangirl: willisthatyou: “…because in the end this was...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:03:37 -0400

lizthefangirl:

willisthatyou:

“…because in the end this was never the great love story of Tessa and Will (though they have a great love) or Tessa and Jem (though they have a great love) or even Will and Jem (though they have a great love) but the love of Tessa, Will and Jem. The three of them. When Tessa and Will kiss on the stairs at the Institute, they hear the violin: that symbolized Jem. When Tessa and Jem kiss at the end, Will is very much present for both of them: it is no dishonor to his memory, but rather the greatest thing they could have done for him: the thing he would have wished for above all other things, that the two people he loved most in the world would be happy when he was gone. They are and will always be, a triad.” - Cassandra Clare (x)

Art by Cassandra Jean (x)

iM CRYING SO HARD ST OP IT

ipayrenttothedunya: nooroscience: First one is me The dress...

Sat, 04 May 2013 15:20:22 -0400

ipayrenttothedunya:

nooroscience:

First one is me

The dress one is my life (but for skirts and my abaya).

"1. Kids don’t drop out of school, they’re pushed out because the knowledge is not meaningful. 2...."

Sat, 04 May 2013 15:17:25 -0400

“

1. Kids don’t drop out of school, they’re pushed out because the knowledge is not meaningful.

2. Activism is not about convenience. I cannot be antiracist all day and then go home at 5 o’clock, put my feet up and be a bigot.

3. As a white person you can walk away when you get tired about talking about white privilege. A person of colour cannot walk away.

4. I can speak English. The gift of 200 years of colonialism: you come out of your mother’s womb speaking English.

5. I had an arranged marriage. I arranged it myself.

6. Language is not neutral. Language is political.

7. The Sharia Hysteria: if you want it you’re a Neanderthal, if you don’t want it you are a liberal.

8. Muslims do not have a monopoly on oppressing women.

9. I don’t get offended anymore. If I’m continually insulted I am frozen into inaction.

10. If I am the standard and you are different from me then I have the power.

11. When you get tired of anti-racism and social justice, remember those who cannot walk away. You’ve got to stand with them.

12. I don’t mind being an immigrant. But my children were born here — their imagination of home begins and end in Canada. I can go home to Pakistan but this is home to my children.

13. Pakistan has been colonized for 200 years but the colonizers went home. They left behind their cronies to watch over us.

14. I didn’t know I was being a feminist until I came here a week ago. I thought I was just a woman who liked to fight.

15. We have to fight together. We have been marginalized and oppressed and if we’re not careful we’re going to marginalize and oppress someone else.

16. Everyone wants to save the muslim woman. Some want to put the hijab on me and save me; some want to take hijab off me and save me; some want to bomb us and save me. Just give me a break man! I can save myself! I don’t need Western imperialism to save me or Western feminism riding on the coattails of Western imperialism to save me. I can save myself.

17. Just because we are doing social justice does not mean we are socially just.

18. We [immigrants and refugees] don’t come here to live in poverty. We don’t come for the weather and we don’t come for the food – we bring the food! We come for the democracy.

19. To hurt someone is to sin. To watch someone else get hurt and do nothing is a greater sin.

20. If you are a man you can be a feminist – if you are a man you
must be a feminist because if you’re not, you’re part of the problem.

21. I wish all I had to worry about was [my son’s] baggy pants and who he dates. I have to worry if he’s going to get arrested, if he’s playing basketball, out with his Black and Arab friends. This is part of mothering for black mothers, aboriginal mothers, and now it is true for Muslim mothers.

”

- Quotes by Uzma Shakir - Muslim woman and feminist. (via mehreenkasana)

fuckyeahfeminists: misandristscum: ppgfreak85: One of the...

Sat, 04 May 2013 15:14:28 -0400

fuckyeahfeminists:

misandristscum:

ppgfreak85:

One of the BEST ad campaigns about representation I have seen.

Everyone has a backbone. Use yours.

you know what i really like about this, is that it shuts the “it’s not offensive, it just means [alternate definition]” crowd right the fuck down. good.

language matters.

GUISE

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:09:01 -0400

GUISE

BREAKING BENJAMIN IS GONNA MAKE MOAR MUSIC

MY LIFE IS COMPLETE

Photo

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:45:03 -0400

Photo

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 10:00:54 -0400

"She laughs, and the sound of it crinkles in my chest like a candy wrapper in a quiet room. I want..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:28:31 -0400

“She laughs, and the sound of it crinkles in my chest like a candy wrapper in a quiet room. I want more.”

- Elissa Janine Hoole, Kiss The Morning Star (via anditslove)

Vivre Sa Vie-1962

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:50:03 -0400

Vivre Sa Vie-1962

StopHatingYourBody: Why I am against Autism Speaks (and you should be, too!)

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:59:26 -0400

StopHatingYourBody: Why I am against Autism Speaks (and you should be, too!):

goldenheartedrose:

(TW: Ableism) Autism Speaks is the most well-known autism charity. They have the most media coverage and are endorsed by many celebrities, but this certainly does not make them a good organization.

Autism Speaks does not have a single autistic member on their board.

…

theillspirit: ihibbu: THIS IS A LIVE BABY, BORN WITHOUT THE...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:51:04 -0400

theillspirit:

ihibbu:

THIS IS A LIVE BABY, BORN WITHOUT THE MOTHER’S “WATER” BEING BROKEN FIRST! ♥

It’s a newborn, still in the sac. It’s was an amazing opportunity to see something so rare. Like a glimpse of what it’s like “on the inside”. Hope you all appreciate it as much a
s I do. I can’t believe how squished up they are, inside of it! Amazing!

Giving birth with the amniotic sac intact is called a “veiled birth.” It is very rare but it is possible. It is less painful because the water cushions the baby’s head, meaning less bruising for both of you. Don’t worry about the baby drowning, he or she will not take a first breath until he/she hits the air for the first time, and the placenta will continue to provide oxygen until that happens.”

subhaanAllah

So…. how do you get out the sac?

Do you just like

Idk

Pop it?

Or something

salemdylann: Okay, I have less than 100 followers, but this...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:30:12 -0400

salemdylann:

Okay, I have less than 100 followers, but this seriously needs to get out there!
Please reblog this and get this seen by more than 2 people…
I am so angry right now that I started crying. I honestly can’t believe what I was reading..
Not only are they completely racist to the point that it is disgusting, but they are also homophobic and apparently feel no remorse.
What’s worse is that they have over 1,000 followers
Please go on their Instagram and report them and get this shit removed!
Instagram.com/asiansareugly

sexxxisbeautiful: kiskolee: THIS. simply put and simply...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:26:58 -0400

sexxxisbeautiful:

kiskolee:

THIS.

simply put and simply true.

She Wants The D(awah): It’s bizarre to me that we build these huge extravagant masajid and...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:24:11 -0400

She Wants The D(awah): It’s bizarre to me that we build these huge extravagant masajid and...:

samirathejerk:

It’s bizarre to me that we build these huge extravagant masajid and invest millions of dollars in them yet have a limit on how many families we can aid a year because community/masjid funds are short.

It’s bizarre to me that we can have funds for an unnecessary clock towering over the ka’aba but…

Muhafiz, In Custody (dir. Ismail Merchant, 1993)

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:22:25 -0400

Muhafiz, In Custody (dir. Ismail Merchant, 1993)

Photo

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:19:57 -0400

theillspirit: sonofthemountains: princessofsomalia: queeniman:...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:50:03 -0400

theillspirit:

sonofthemountains:

princessofsomalia:

queeniman:

flawedscript:

Not many Shia, Muslims like to search the “Shia” tag because not only are we constantly bombarded with hate on our personal blogs but the very last thing we want to see is more hate on these tags.

I think it’s really pathetic that these people have devoted their time to make these tumblrs to post nothing but hate, disrespect, falsehood, and even make very anti-semitic remarks, all while still having the audacity to call us Shia Hateful, Evil, and Satanic…

Last time I checked, We the Shia are the ones being slaughtered and mascaraed in places like Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Pakistan, and even Indonesia. Not to mention, mistreated in Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan where we are stripped away of all rights and we have NO choice but to hide our beliefs out of fear of being kicked out of our homes or even being slaughtered in the streets in front of family and neighbors…

Then when Shia’s finally decide to speak up about the Shia genocide and the injustice, it’s followed by bunch of bullshit about how we should “Get Over It” and how we should “Focus on being One Ummah” which is so damn easy for you to say especially since you’re NOT the one who’s in constant fear of your life…

Sick of this Shit…

I LITERALLY CANNOT BREATHE HAMDA IS ON HERE

I can’t breathe but u have to admit that was funny. like imagine people stomping in formation and using whips. epic.

They mock this. They have a lack of faith and humanity. These fools find it funny. Their souls are not even worth cursing because they have reached a point where la3nat is not even necessary. They spread hate and I can only hope that they are not in any position where their mothers are raped and brothers are killed for their identities.

People suffering and dying in the world for their beliefs and not a single word of condemnation or remorse. All they can do is say ‘i can’t breathe’ from laughter? Stop breathing then, permanently, may you choke, insha’Allah.

"I was raped by four men in one evening. I got drunk and tried to say no. What did my predators do?..."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:43:00 -0400

“I was raped by four men in one evening. I got drunk and tried to say no. What did my predators do? They told me to drink more. They shoved a bottle in my face and told me to keep drinking. Drink till I was drunk enough to fuck them. I blacked out. They urinated on me. They assaulted me. They shoved foreign objects in my body, anally and vaginally. They took videos. I was just 16 years old. The video was sent around my entire school, and I was bullied every single day of my senior year of high school. I lost all of my friends. I was physically and verbally abused by peers and people I once called friends. Someone tried to set me on fire in the hallway during passing period. Nobody sympathized with me. Nobody cared about the fact that because of these events, I was trying to kill myself every single day. I was cutting myself, making myself puke, showering upwards of fifteen times a day because I felt filthy. I was scratching and peeling the skin off of my body because I was dirty. I looked at myself like I deserved what I got. The world saw me as dirty, so I began to see myself that way, too. My rapists were praised by my peers for their deed. I never had a voice. When I first learned about the Steubenville incident going to trial, I was overjoyed. Because Jane Doe’s story was my story, and if anyone deserved justice, it was her. She would get the justice I never got. She would change the tide of the rape culture movement. Despite the horrific events that occurred, I knew that the justice served would help ease her pain. But she didn’t get justice, and now she has to witness this news coverage, favoring and sympathizing with her attackers. Pain is not an accurate word to describe what she is feeling right now. Pain is the simplest term you could use. As a rape victim and an aspiring journalist, I am disgusted with the way this case was reported on. Jane Doe’s rapists deserve their suffering in prison. They deserve more. They do not deserve to be sympathized with. They made their stupid decision, and they deserve whatever consequences come their way. If you don’t want to be labeled as a rapist, don’t fucking rape.”

- Anonymous comment left on the CNN petition demanding they apologize for sympathizing with the Steubenville rapists (via driesvanno-youdidnt)