Here are some of my post-Trump writings, brought over from facebook:

November 9, 2016

Where to even start? I’ve experienced grief and intense worry, but never before in this combination so deeply rooted in my body. I passed a woman who was walking down University Avenue full-out weeping. I talked to a middle school student who is bemused by the (over?)reactions of her classmates, who feel that the world is ending. How can I be reassuring here and still authentic? She’s telling jokes to lighten the situation, and I can’t laugh with her. What I did was define some specific worries of mine while letting her know that I do believe she will be all right.

I remember Reagan’s election and the starts of all our recent wars as times when it felt to me like the world was ending–and it didn’t, but the costs of those have been weighty and lasting.
Still, I’ve been enormously heartened by the energy and enthusiasm that I’ve seen in the past few days from volunteers and among my friends: The pair of teenage sisters who showed up to phone bank, holding hands for courage; the father searching for a Hillary button for his young daughter, she of the hand scooter and pink helmet; those of you who made sure that your children understood your passion for this country, as expressed through your vote.

A bit weepy myself this morning, I was at Yali’s Cafe choking up over the eponymous Yali as he rang up customers, pulled espressos, and chatted up patrons with philosophical shrugs and charismatic smiles. I’ve been watching him do this on and off for–what?–fifteen years now? Slinging his tall, agile self around the cafe, turning his chair around backwards to sit on, leaning his elbow on a table to listen an applicant for barista. Radiating warmth and extroversion and supreme entrepreneurial joy.

Only now he’s not so agile. Earlier this year (or late 2015?) he was in a catastrophic car accident in Israel, where he spent months recovering, his body too broken to travel. Then he was back at the cafe, but sitting at a table with his hands folded in front of him. Later he started moving around the place, slowly, tentatively. Today, he had regain most, though not all of his dynamism. He’s got a kink in his neck that bends his head forward, and that called my attention to a new dusting of gray in his black curls. He’s bulked up, though. Must be lifting weights.

I was there this morning because last night a blast of reality froze my brain and I left my laptop at a students’ house. (His older brother happened to be on campus and met me there to give the computer back to me) It good to be in a familiar public environment Yali was steaming milk and I was scanning his solemn face for that old radiance, and then he turned to someone and the light went on, more slowly but maybe also more brightly than before.

November 11, 2016

So, my first day wearing this sign, not much happened at first. It felt like people were going out of there way to avoid looking at me, although a few middle-aged women gave me warm smiles. Then Raymond and I ran into some people he knows from his church, people I had never met before. The woman read my sign from start to finish, then hugged me and read it out loud for her husband. (They were on their way to to Peet’s with a VA document in hand to get a free coffee for him.)

At the YMCA in downtown Berkeley, a blond woman called out to me and asked to read the sign, then nodded soberly and said, “Thank you.” She talked about how nervous she has been and how worried for friends of hers who are people of color and suffering deeply.

We went swimming, and afterward in the locker room, there was a mother and daughter who I thought might come from the Horn of Africa. The girl screwed up her face looking at my sign, so I stood up straight for her to read. She worked her way through the whole thing slowly, then, finally, smiled. The mother came over to see what was going on. She read the sign too, then said, “That’s nice! Thank you.” The girl said, “I like your drawing of the safety pin.”

I think I’m going to try wearing the sign for a week, then falling back to just the pin. I’ll keep writing about what happens.

November 12, 2016

Working on a personal manifesto for activism in this era. Here’s where I’m starting.
I want to be disciplined in my political speech. Model the kind of civil discourse we would like from our opposition. Boycott mockery and exaggeration. Fact-check rigorously. Expect the same from any source that I re-post. Ask the same of friends.

Some people may not be able right now to do what I am calling for here. Or may make different choices about how to express themselves. This is on the right or the left. I’m going to try not to referee or police or say “people need to…” I *am* going to *ask* people to reconsider.

I am going to fight every day to resist the normalization of Trumpism. The only way that I can do this is by taking personal risks in my “zone of proximal development.” In education, the ZPD is the sweet spot, the goldilocks zone for learning, neither too easy, nor too difficult. This week, it’s wearing a sign that expresses my emotions and invites strangers to interact with me and share their feelings about the state of society.

Fighting the normalization of Trumpism cannot mean going back to the status quo pre-Trump. We deserve a lot better.

Comment: Note about asking people to reconsider their political speech: I want to be mindful about what I ask and when. Asking things of people is a privilege that needs to be earned.

The other night, Raymond and I were sitting around in our “living room,” which consists of our beloved plush brown sofa that we shipped from Pittsburgh to the West Coast, plus a few square feet of surrounding floor space. We’ve each got a folding tray table, supposedly for eating on, but instead we have piled them with our respective messes. We take our meals from plates that we hold in our laps.

Raymond’s pile consists mostly of reading matter. His library books cover topics like social justice, Bach, and how to rebuild civilization in the wake of catastrophic events. Typically, it’s just one of these topics per book, but sometimes there’s an overlap. Resting askew on open copies of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, mingled with an e-reader, a t-shirt, or a moleskine or two, these look ready to slide into a catastrophe of their own, although they never actually fall.

My mess consists of polymer and pulp: clear boxes of paper scraps, smeared and scratched and dotted with acrylic paint. Brightly painted paper scraps stuffed into envelopes and freezer bags.

The more enterprising paper scraps liberate themselves from their boxes and bags. I corral them back from the floor and the sofa cushions but never seem to get the table entirely clear. They congregate around the bottle of liquid matte medium, the perfect glue to compensate for my lack of patience and precision. Unlike the glossy stuff, which crisps up into shards, the matte medium can get all over your fingers and will just peel off when it dries. Other landmarks include pens, scissors, and black trays that used to hold frozen chicken tikka masala. The world’s smallest art studio, my little folding table bustles like a village.

So when Raymond and I sit on the sofa, we are often in several places at once, shipping off through various methods of cultural transport. Raymond picks up the New York Review, and he’s outside the walls of Troy with Mary Beard. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been to the White House with Olivia Pope—and if you’re reading this in 2014, it’s possible that the same is true for you.

On the night in question, however, having caught up with all available episodes of Scandal and anything else worth watching, having even zip-lined over a tropical forest and dangled a few perps out the window on Hawaii 5-0, we were listening to a podcast.

Heckling a podcast, to be exact. The author David Gilbert was reading Steven Polansky’s short story “Leg,” in which a father, helplessly alienated from his wife and son, refuses treatment for his injured and eventually festering limb. As Dad tried to “cauterized” his wound with a scalding-hot towel, we shouted our objections, to no avail. (Olivia never listens to us, either.)

After a few days, he’s unable to walk, and his distracted wife gets around to asking, half-heartedly, whether he might want to go to the doctor. At this point, the crowd—that is, Raymond and I—went wild. We gave up trying to straighten out the characters and started hollering at each other. If your leg ever starts stinking and oozing, nobody around here is going to be asking. Your ass will be at the doctor’s. That’s me with the bad language. “Emergency room,” said Raymond. “Get him to the emergency room.”

And it’s only as I write these words that I realize that this essay is about more than sitting around on the couch. Though there’s been no literal festering, we’ve encountered loved ones who shied from—or bristled at—support that they needed. Unlike the characters in the story, we are blessed with family and friends who are warm, attentive, even vigilant about one another’s well being. Still, we sometimes feel a need to reaffirm our interdependence.

Rolling around on the sofa, howling and laughing, clutching our own uninjured legs, we are also extracting promises from each other. Offering them, too:

I promise not to break your heart with worry. If I need care, I will submit. If you’re the one in trouble, I won’t get distracted. I won’t let you go to ruin. My table may be messy, but you’re a different story.

I am sitting at a black granite topped table in a famous Berkeley coffee shop at the corner of Walnut and Vine. It’s an indoor-outdoor scene here, where the walls are mostly windows and the door is propped wide open. The doorway frames a view of a lush and prideful horse chestnut tree that magnanimously shades the far side of the street. Out on the sidewalk, a man has parked his motorized wheelchair and is holding a bright red plastic cup in his lap. Heavy lidded, he speaks to no one. Eventually, someone drops a couple of bills into the cup. The man with the wheelchair tucks the money inside his jacket. A minute later, without any change in facial expression, he puts the wheelchair into gear (or so it seems) and then drives off at full speed.

At the table next to me sits a woman with a slender, rounded back. She might have stood five feet tall when her back was straight. The strap of her cloth bag has frayed a hole in her red and yellow wool blazer, but I wouldn’t have spotted if I weren’t looking so hard at what’s going on around me. She’s rested her turquoise string bag on the little canvas folding stool that she carries around town. Someone waves at her, a tall, very pregnant woman in a clingy and very stripy dress.

I caught her once, on an AC Transit bus that lurched forward, hurling her toward the back of the bus. I stretched out an arm. Stopping her fall was uncannily easy, like catching a grocery bag full of paper towels. I don’t imagine she’d appreciate my saying so. She shook me off quickly after she got her balance back, and has never given so much as a blink of acknowledgment since.

Once, over the long, boring summer when I was 15, I lay on my bed with the window thrown wide open, just like the door here at Peet’s: no storm barrier, no screen. I was wearing a button-down blouse that had once belonged to my mom. Lime green, with a distressed texture, this blouse buttoned low. It made me look dramatic, mysterious, adult, even sexy. An anomaly—most greens make me look like a ghoul. I had wrestled my impossible thick hair into braids. I had my bed arranged diagonally in one corner, and I lay there imagining that I and my open window, the warm breeze and the underlying rumble of cicadas, were part of some ancient story—or that we would be ancient some day. In some future, people would sit around and imagine these days, the way I liked to imagine life in ancient Greece or Rome.

And I was right—that stuff feels ancient now. Those days before cable and internet and reflexive overscheduling, when it was possible for a young person to have absolutely nothing. Nothing but daydream and breath. This afternoon at Peet’s has that feeling for me too: a moment in history, as mundane as cash registers and coffee cups, and yet resplendent as plastic-sealed packets of madeleines, iPads propped up against plastic water bottles, as straw fedoras and red high tops and bicycles locked to Japanese maples.