herbiecarvajal

[herbiecarvajal]

Going - physically - to work for the first time in 2 1/2 years. does it feel different? that’s a question that understates the sensation of doing something you’ve done thousands of times while feeling like you’ve never done it before. the dual transformations of pandemic and postpartum - in addition to, well, gender transition - have left no trace of the old world or the old self. I feel like a time traveler going back to meet a past self I am deeply friendly to and allied with, but utterly estranged from.

[herbiecarvajal]

I rode vehicularly, without a child on my bike, taking the lane, for the first time in a long time yesterday. I’ve been rushing back and forth between home and the hospital where my oldest kid is interred with a mystery fever that finally seems to be getting better.

I was 24 when I started riding everywhere in Los Angeles. I’m 37 now. In between, there have been a million reasons to stop riding and start driving like a normal person. For instance: I made enough money to afford to drive and park. I had a bunch of kids. My eyes got worse and my legs got slower. I kept riding everywhere.

My enthusiasm for this way of life hasn’t really waned. I rode pregnant and I rode sick and I rode in the rain and I rode in the heat. When I was too pregnant to ride a bike I took Metro to a bunch of my ultrasound appointments and got true joy out of telling the people at Cedars that I did not need parking validated for my ginormous twin pregnant self, thanks very much. I love the silent camaraderie of the bus. and I love moving through chilly wind on a bike. and I love being free in my body on foot in the city.

But also, I feel sad that so much time has passed and this city is still so shitty to bike in. As someone who was once at the center of the bike movement I have to ask myself how much of that is my fault. To some extent, I put my weight behind efforts that ultimately proved futile at making meaningful change. People still die on bikes and on foot in this city at shameful, chart topping rates.

I think about how much better it could have been. If we would have done the things advocates wanted way back in 2015, hell 2010. We could have made our streets slow, bikeable, walkable. We could have built human first architecture with less parking. We could have built more housing. We could have invested in better buses. It all could have happened years ago and I could be riding with less cortisol and riding my kids more places. We didn’t do those things ultimately because some people named Paul, Gil, Tom, Mitch, and Eric, et al, refused to do them. So here I am, warrioring it out with cars, for the thousandth time.

I think about the last 13 years and the next 13 years. I’ll be 50 in 13 years. My kids will be teens. I hope these streets change because I, frankly, don’t want my kids riding like this, and also because I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to ride like this when I’m 50.

[herbiecarvajal]

Off Campus

Bubble is not an apt metaphor For our groomed lawns, worn staircases, And busy printers. Today, running the bike trail From Claremont and First to Central and Foothill, Then Route 66 back to campus, I leap gravel And think, this is what they call the real world. Its a place I've rarely been. Here, a dead end Appeases no protests. Cars sit impatient at A broken traffic light. A man in a collared shirt Meanders downhill on an old bike. I trudge past Empty drive thrus and bent outdated signs... And the air isn't clear today; I smell exhaust, Dodging cars on Foothill where there's no sidewalk I envision my death after tripping into the road. I make a left on Mills, and in the new quiet Of floating frisbees I wonder what value there is In the unintuitive but ultimately comprehensible. 05.05.2006

(I feel like this holds up pretty well in covid times)

[herbiecarvajal]

I Can’t Deal with Instagram

Why am I mad at Instagram? For all the same reasons I’m mad at Facebook: because that company is so undeserving of the incredible power it wields. Abuse, fake news, and willful propaganda on its platform gave us Trump and Duterte, and the genocide of the Rohingya, among many other contemporary horrors I’m sure I don’t know about. It sold our data to Cambridge Analytica, constantly abused our privacy, and made a shit ton of money doing it. Oh, and it made me personally pretty depressed and lonely while sucking up a bunch of my time. Instagram’s not better for me. Instagram makes me feel just as shitty. And as every corner of Instagram is being ever more purposefully monetized, it’s become more clear than ever that my attention is just as much a commodity on Instagram as it was on Facebook. If the consequences of all of our eyeballs being on Facebook was a degraded civil society and a handful of autocrats, what will the consequences of Instagram be? My answer is that I just hatefully clicked through all the celebrity and brand accounts I followed back when Instagram seemed innocent and light and fun; I clicked on them so I could unfollow them all.

I’ve been off social media for about a year, and in that time Instagram has only tightened its grip on all of our attention, has only become more obligatory for brands and individuals alike. No one seems to mind that its trajectory is just like Facebook’s, and that it’s... owned by Facebook! I think everyone knows what Facebook did and will continue to do with its power, but everyone carries on with Instagram nonetheless.

We all choose who we want to have dealings with, and I mean to make those choices deliberately. I dunno. I feel crazy sometimes. I feel as I felt as a young vegan in 2002, when most people laughed at me for abstaining from something that everyone seemed to just think was a pleasure. I steeled myself against their laughter and the bad soy milk of the time. It’s often unfun to think that mainstream pleasures are actually immoral sources of suffering. On the other hand, the alternative’s worse: cooperating with something you know is wrong; enriching bad actors who you know will cause harm. The world is not so black and white for me now... but I still want to see it very clearly. So if you want to get in touch with me, write me a letter or an email or a text, because I can’t deal with Facebook or Instagram. 

[herbiecarvajal]

Letter to my State Representatives in Support of SB827

To State Senator Ben Allen and Assemblymember Richard Bloom: I am writing you as my representatives in the state government to ask for your support for a badly needed reform in the form of SB827. For too long, local zoning has acted to exclude people from desirable neighborhoods of all sorts, including central locations in cities and transit-rich areas. Investments in transit are undercut by NIMBYism which prevents building the density that would support transit usage. I am extremely concerned about the affordability crisis in our region. I am afraid that the Los Angeles that I grew up in will become like New York City or San Francisco - a city that is no longer a vibrant mix of different classes of people making their way in the world, and that is rather a playground for the very rich. This possibility saddens me, but seeing bold action on the part of the state brings me hope. As SB827 works its way through the legislative process, I hope you will work to strengthen the bill in ways that make it even more progressive. In particular, because the bill would result in an instant increase in the value of the land around transit, I would like to see some of that value captured and funneled into programs to assist renters and the homeless. (See here, also). I know you have both been leaders pushing our state forward. Please continue to do so here. Inaction is no longer an option as the affordability crisis sweeps family after family away. We can no longer allow wealthy local governments to put a cap on the housing growth that is needed in our region. Thank you in advance for your work on this most important issue. Herbie

[herbiecarvajal]

When your friends throw you an amazing baby shower, part 2!

[herbiecarvajal]

When your friends throw you an amazing baby shower!

[herbiecarvajal]

WOW A DUMBO OCTOPUS IS MY NEW FAVORITE CREATURE.

Watch live: exploring the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico

What lives in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico? Over the next several weeks, you’ll be able to watch dives in real time to find out.

This dumbo octopus was observed in a previous Okeanos Explorer expedition to the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: NOAA

From November 29 to December 21, the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer will be exploring throughout the Gulf of Mexico, including in some areas that are being considered for possible expansion of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. Researchers will use the remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer to get up close to the deep-sea ecosystems that make this ocean basin so unique.

The Gulf of Mexico contains a wide range of habitats and interesting geological features ranging from brine pools to coral gardens and canyons to mud volcanoes. It also contains significant submerged cultural heritage sites that have yet to be explored.

But it’s not just scientists who will be able to experience these amazing sites! Okeanos Explorer is equipped with real-time broadband satellite communications that provide the ship with telepresence – meaning the videos and photos collected with ROVs can be shared on the internet in real time. Scientists on shore, teachers, students, and you can watch the dives as they happen!

Tune in from November 29 to December 21 to watch the dives:

Known as “America’s Ship for Ocean Exploration,” Okeanos is the only federally-funded U.S. ship specifically assigned to systematically explore our largely unknown ocean for the purpose of discovery and advancement of knowledge. The Okeanos crew – and all the scientists joining via video feed in exploration command centers around the country – is out in the Gulf of Mexico with the specific mission of finding out what’s out there.

The research team is sure to come across some spectacular sights, so don’t miss out! The expedition will be livestreamed from November 29 to December 21 via the YouTube video above, and on the Okeanos Explorer website. 

Plus, visit the expedition webpage for a mission plan, background essays, and an Ocean Explorer Expedition Education Module that includes an expedition purpose, standards-based lessons, interactive multimedia activities for students, career connections, and much more!

The ROVs Seirios and Deep Discoverer are prepared for deployment on the aft deck of NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer. Photo: NOAA

[herbiecarvajal]

Crime Against Nature

In 2016, this year of gay marriage in every state of the US, it feels too easy for queers to forget their history. We take for granted that we can have families, be partners to one another, be parents. It feels too easy to forget that very recently, our lives and our love were not only illegal but under constant threat of vigilante violence. The smallest of expressions of queer love could be enough to beget severe repercussions. (It's easy to forget that this is still a reality for many of us today).

These poems will teach you the injustices and sufferings that Minnie Bruce Pratt, who should be one of our most dearly held queer elders, faced in the 70s and 80s. Courts and judges and laws validating the rough man at the gas station who calls you dyke. The community turning against you for your sexual desires, and for expressing them without fear. And commingled with these sufferings, the dyke bars, the community, the fearlessness, the pleasures of the sex itself.

These poems are really beautiful. And this work seems like it is not widely read, not nearly enough. The constant turn to empathy here reminds me of Rankine's Citizen. The everyday folk remind me of Frost.

There's more to say: about bodies and ancestry and parenthood and how history lives in the landscape, and in us.

It's been a long time since I opened a book of poetry and read it front to back, but these poems, raw and rich, compelled me through them.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1713640613

[herbiecarvajal]

Reflections on ‘Youth’ by JM Coetzee

How to tell the story of a life? Life is: books, art, sex, moving, school and institutions, and the interior life: fear of ignominy, hierarchies of learning (pure math over applied math; scorning the authors that authors you admire disdain), the feeling of belonging or lack thereof. Is the narrator aware of the limits of "his" 3rd person main character? The narrowness of some of that character's views on life and women and art? Are we meant to take John's analyses at face value? Or is Youth a self knowing allegory of a maturity that seems full but is actually only part? John contemplates the greatest art but is still as lost as one can be about how to live. However narrow and single-minded John's worldview, the novel is a reminder that worldviews are tended, like plants in a garden. They're planted with art and reading and teachings of all kinds and fertilized with experience. I can look down on John for being overly deterministic and foolish about both poetry and women; and yet I admire him for actively tending to coherent theories about any part of the world, and giving real import to what his working theories say about his own life. This kind of interior moral life which is all wrapped up in an artistic life - it's familiar to me. And my own tendency is toward nihilistic chaos to soothe me from even trying to be moral or be an artist. When I reflect quietly, I don't believe in nihilism. When I flip the channels and swiftly scroll through the feeds, I let it run me.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1515765361

[herbiecarvajal]

Caroline

Caroline has wild blonde hair and sharp blue eyes. She’s six years old. She is visiting. When she sits at our piano, she straightens her back and sets her fingers in place above the keys, like a concert pianist making deliberate motions in perfect silence. She loosens her tiny vertebrae. Is she about to play a Bach sonatina? Then she bangs her flat hand on a cluster of keys and I remember: she’s a crazy kid, not a musical savant. Now she’s making cacophonous, percussive, dissonant sounds. But that moment of perfect entitlement before the instrument had savant levels of genius in its performance. 

Caroline wants to know why I am wearing boy clothes. She stops jumping on the bed to ask me this. After she sticks the landing from the bed to the floor, there’s another moment of stillness. She looks at me with perfect repose and attention, the way a painter looks at a canvas.

[herbiecarvajal]

Finally, the behemoth list that formed the basis of our dance party. These were the "requests" given to the DJ (shout out to Anthony from Red Shoe) who decided what ultimately played and in what order. The order here is a helpful guide if you want to play oldies first and keep like with like. In the end, probably 90% of what played at our wedding came from this list.

[herbiecarvajal]

Music by which to eat delicious food (in our case, the delicious food of Jennie Cooks).

[herbiecarvajal]

To celebrate the death of Rdio, my official adoption of Spotify, and the completion of *all wedding planning ever,* I would like to share the playlists we used at our wedding. It'd make me happy if they were of use to anybody else for a dinner party or a multigenerational dance party! This first one is what played during our cocktail hour. We actually just used the cross-fade setting on Spotify and played this in order.

[herbiecarvajal]

Nine Haiku on Haim

1 

They’re from the Valley,

hang with Kesha, love Canters,

steal from Cheesecake Factory.

2

“If it gets rough it’s 

time to get rough” is all a

rock lyric should be.

3

I dream they ask me

to hear different arrangements

they are trying out.

4 

I obsess about:

if I might’ve ate next to

Este at Two Boots.

5

Synths... Phoenix... hard rock,

Wilson Phillips... percussion,

long hair... triangles.

6

If Haim could meet 

any artist? They’d meet Prince.

Listen to more Prince.

7

In the moment when

Prince, Bowie, Stevie,

are more than mortal,

8

in performance: when 

a person is a vessel

for transcendence, for feeling -

9

in that moment, we

have long needed three rough

girls from the Valley.

[herbiecarvajal]

Is Danielle a lesbian?

[herbiecarvajal]

It’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t know the Sheryl Crow song “All I Wanna Do” (Is Have Some Fun). I belted this song at the top of my lungs in the backseat of a minivan. “This ain’t no disco / ain’t no country club either. This is LA.” That’s right! This is LA, I thought, 10 years old. That song felt carefree, light, PG, a song you could sing with your parents but that also had enough of an element of mystery and cool. When I heard “until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard," I thought of sleepover parties and the mix of achievement, transgression, bonding, and bodily exhaustion I felt when I actually did stay up all night with my friends. That chorus, “all I wanna do is have some fun," is an exceedingly reasonable anthem for a child.

Okay. Flash forward twenty years. Here’s the second verse of “All I Wanna Do”:

I like a good beer buzz early in the morning And Billy likes to peel the labels from his bottle of Bud He shreds them on the bar then he lights every match in an oversized pack Letting each one burn down to this thick fingers before blowing and cushing them out He watches the bottles of Bud as they spin on the floor

This song is about low-down, unemployed, day-drinking alcoholism.

When I was a kid and I memorized these lyrics, I had no concept of such a thing. And the brilliance of this song is that it works regardless. The perfect sing-song cadence of the verses, the tangible objects and vivid scene (car wash, matches, thick fingers), and the shameless exuberance of the chorus were all that 10-year old me needed. Now, 30 year old me is amazed by a whole ‘nother level of meaning. Not only is this song about alcoholism, it’s goes directly to the saddest, loneliest parts of alcoholism. Sheryl and Billy don’t know anything about one another, she openly declares that he’s “plain ugly,” and they are each other’s only company in an otherwise empty bar. They watch other people go to work while they occupy themselves with some no doubt fulfilling and meaningful activities: sitting around, peeling labels off of bottles, and lighting and blowing out matches. 

At the exact same time the song is defiant about identifying and celebrating something that is easy to forget about addiction: its carefree center. Yes - there is a great pleasure and a childlike freedom in buzzing in the morning and playing with whatever objects are within reach. We (in polite society, anywhere outside of, say, MTV spring break) rarely talk about it because it’s repugnant to celebrate this state without some acknowledgment of all the sad destruction that comes with it. This carefreedom is the same thing that destroys families and careers. But there it is. And this song is about that very uncomfortable reality. It’s actually a contemplation of something very dark and dangerous, but it’s narrated from the exact moment when you get to forget how dark and dangerous it is and just enjoy the high.

(Cherry on top, this song is also perfect: its infectious verses, shout out loud chorus, bridge that seems to launch us into another world: “Otherwise the bar is ours / the day and the night and the car wash too / the matches and the buds and the clean and dirty cars / THE SUN AND THE MOON!”)

I’m looking forward to hearing songs and consuming movies and art — any kind of work that offers multiple levels of appreciation — with my kids. They’ll hear it on one level, and I’ll hear it on another. When they grow up and have more experiences, they can have this kind of moment of recognition and wonder that utterly transforms the work.