Author: mathdreads

When they yell and trample all over your feelings while explaining how sensitive they are, kill them with kindness.

When they invite you then uninvite you, kill them with kindness.

When they repeatedly ask you why you can’t be more like somebody else, kill them with kindness.

When they know they owe you money, but act like they don’t know you, kill them with kindness.

When they are so angry and can’t admit they’re wrong, kill them with kindness.

When they treat you like you’re stupid, kill them with kindness.

When they say your gender makes you less valuable, kill them with kindness.

When they treat you the way they want to be treated rather than the way you want to be treated, kill them with kindness.

Kill them with kindness with as much grace and forgiveness as you can because what you’re actually killing is the vengefulness, anger, and pettiness within yourself that will slowly turn you into one of them.

So the reason I’ve never done illegal drugs is I’d spent about 13 years on prescription phenobarbital since I’d had three mild seizures by the time I was 4. That was back in the 70s, when all patients were over-medicated. My parents emphasized to me how I could die if I mixed other drugs with my meds.

And then, I made a plan to celebrate my 100^th birthday, buying a one-way ticket to Amsterdam or somewhere exotic-sounding to smoke opium in a small, outdoor café on a sunny day and sip green tea.

For now, I’ll just stick to alcohol. But I don’t use it as a drug to help me sleep or to ease my stress. I use daily moderate to strenuous exercise for that. Plus, there are serious consequences associated with alcohol if consumed excessively. My drunk uncles taught me that one.

Christmas Day 1992 was the first time I’d ever been drunk. I was fresh out of college and a Peace Corps Volunteer and homesick and that changed my world…and my hair…and my need to voraciously write everything down.

And then, I discovered food could be used as a drug. Shoveling it down for the temporary feeling of fullness euphoria, which had nothing to do with actual hunger.

And then I returned to the States, bigger than I’d ever been at 158 lbs—yes, I still remember that number—which wasn’t all that big, but for people who had known me before, I looked “stout” as one cousin gently informed me.

And then someone asked me if I was pregnant.

And then, I learned that people had the preconceived notion of life in an African country being one famine and war after another. Why, they marveled at how I could gain weight in “Africa” the first place.

And then, I learned how to swim. Enrolled in a couple of classes at the Y, started swimming four miles a week and stopped engorging myself. I noticed how leisurely one of my sisters, who I lived with at the time, chewed and savored her food.

And then, after having three jobs in six months, I applied for another job. This time to teach ESL in Seoul, South Korea. Another country, another adventure, another learning curve.

I’d read about the xenophobia of Korean culture, but had to laugh out loud when two white guys told my Black roommate and I about how racist Koreans were. My roommate and I bonded in that ironic moment. Imagine, two white guys telling two Black women from the South about racism. I’m sure they meant well. Bless their hearts.

And then in the process of adjusting to yet another new culture, I recreated myself once again. I went from avid swimmer to dedicated hapkido student and beginning rock climber. Even fell madly in love with a Cuban American, who of course was a Gemini, and apparently a drug dealer. Didn’t see that last bit coming.

And then again, I had this biased idea of drug dealers being urban kids who’d dropped out of school and were hanging out on street corners in poor neighborhoods. Not some charismatic, college-educated, ESL tutor who even corrected my grammar, loved to salsa, enjoyed theatre and recited poetry.

And then, the relationship declined from there. I was not exactly sure how stiff the penalty was for possession of illegal drugs in South Korea, but let’s face it, with my hairstyle, people already expected me to do illegal drugs.

And then, I remembered some of Mom’s advice, even half way around the world: you don’t have to be with man even though you love him.

Of course, she’d never said that directly to me, just in general, as a conclusion to a story about someone else’s doomed love life, but I was paying attention. If nothing else, Mom’s a riveting storyteller.

And then, I moved to Denver, CO to officially become a teacher after three years of not being licensed. The Mile-High City with its thin air had me sleeping about ten hours a night just to stockpile enough oxygen for the next day.

And then, I stopped training martial arts and picked up swimming again and added hiking since fourteeners surrounded me. I also took bellydancing and West African dance classes.

And then I started taking guitar lessons for some crazy reason I can’t remember why. All I remember is how tone death I was, never hearing that my guitar was out of tune, but the best moment for me was the first two weeks when I could feel my brain being rewired since my non-dominant left hand was being trained to do something technical. Up until that point, the only technical thing my left hand could do was type.

And then we all prepared ourselves for the technological wrath of the millennium bug. I even spent the night at a friend’s house just so I wouldn’t be by myself at midnight, January 1^st, 2000. The only glitch we discovered was the battery-operated clock had stopped working.

And then the real calamity came later that same year when Al Gore lost the presidential election even though he had more votes. Chalk that up to political math. I scrambled to get an overseas teaching job.

And then I moved to Egypt, where I felt my personality shrink although I never veiled. The only country, so far, where I’ve ever been groped. Promised myself to never live in another country where the local men couldn’t freely fornicate with their own women since that made me too much of a target. Yet, I enjoyed teaching math, traveling around to see the pyramids and temples, and my usual joy, eating the local food.

And then I moved to Mexico, which was the perfect cure! Compared to the attention I’d received in Egypt, I actually felt normal, walking around Monterrey since Mexican men openly frolicked with Mexican women. Ah, what a relief! The person I became, outside of being a math and science teacher, was a drummer and a capoeirista—not that I excelled at either one of those things, but the stress relief was fantastic!

And then I moved to Honduras. That was truly a country where my mother-infused paranoia worked for me as a survival skill. I upped the ante on my paranoia: tinting the windows of my car, fast walking from my car to buildings and vice versa, rinsing produce in bleach water.

Let me explain that last one. Back in late 2003 in the US, bags of prewashed spinach were implicated in an E. coli outbreak. A few days later, bags of prewashed spinach inundated Honduran grocery stores.

And then Barack Obama became the 44^th President of the United States in 2008, effectively ending my 8-year self-imposed exile.

And then I moved to the center of the creative universe in 2009 and have been living happily ever after in Austin, TX.

If someone ever gave out free samples of positivity, I’d surely try it since “free” is my price. Not only that, but I want more positivity in my life. More doors of opportunity to be opened, more creative flow, restfulness, energy and laugh-out-loud moments.

When I was younger, I thought once I figured life out, I’d be perpetually happy. I’d know exactly how to avoid pitfalls by learning from my mistakes. Only challenge is, I’m still making my mistakes.

It’s similar to the time I had the brilliant idea to make a list of the things I needed to get done before I sat down to read. My leisure reading time would start after I’d cross out everything that needed to be done for the day. The more I wrote down, the more there was to do. As a matter of fact, I began to have a list of lists. I started grouping certain activities to cut down on driving around so much on any one particular day.

After a few weeks, I concluded the only way to guarantee at least an hour’s reading time nearly every day was to schedule it since the list was virtually endless. I’d wind down for bed at a certain time, regardless of how far I’d made it on the list, and read for an hour.

Scheduling happiness is a far more challenging task. It involves more than avoiding pitfalls, boring people, junk food, traffic jams, high bills, car repairs, rising rent, illness, lack of money, insomnia, heartbreak and stress. A daily dose of happiness cannot be swallowed like a multivitamin, taken like a medicinal shot of tequila nor added to a morning smoothie to start the day.

Happiness, as I best understand it, is the result of an uncompromised immune system of positivity. Having an uncompromised immune system of positivity doesn’t mean that opportunistic assholes and bullshit don’t cross your path. It means despite the fact that they have, you’re STILL a happy person. A positive immune response allows you to recover from exposure to negativity.

A positive response may occur automatically and naturally for some people, but not if that person is me. I’ve had plenty of negative exposure that flared my temper, where, much after the fact, I thought of many different responses that could have diffused the situation had my mind not been flooded with negative thoughts.

The instant gratification of acting out, usually in the form of very sharp words, have set me back in the long run. At one point, I had a boss who actually strategized to tick me off. He’d counted on my temper worsening the situation during his last attempt. Unfortunately for him, I’d read a wonderful book called Working with You Is Killing Me. Armed with something more productive to do, I reacted empowered to the negative situation in a positive manner. I handled the situation so well that HIS boss complimented my reaction. A few minutes later, she realized that he had lied to her about my performance.

I’ve not faced such a situation again, but I can never vanquish all negatives once and for all. Blissfulness comes and goes. When it’s gone, all I can do about it is breathe and flow. Sit in stunned silence until the initial shock propagates through my nervous system. I breathe and I think. If I’m lucky, I haven’t had my daily exercise yet. Exercising is one of the healthiest ways I boost my positivity along with my breathing. I visualize the extra blood pumping through my vessels driving out the stress.

Whereas others need caffeine to wake up, pills to sleep and whatever else in between to dull the pain, I rely on the breath. Sometimes, it needs to slow down. Other times it needs to speed up. On rare occasions, like when I’m swimming, I need to rhythmically hold it.

Full disclosure: I practice yoga four times a week. Out of all forms of exercise I’ve ever tried from various styles of dancing, martial arts, lifting weights and swimming, the profound, directed breaths I take in yoga are the most useful to combating negativity. They are the free positivity samples.

Next time someone or something stresses you out, don’t hold your breath or huff and puff in anger or count to ten. Breathe. Give your brain the oxygen it needs to think of a positive response.

There is no abracadabra

Hocus pocus

Open sesame

No unsaying things said

Nor undoing things done

Kissing him good-bye

As if it were hello

But it’s really good-bye

It’s really

He’ll never know

Since he’ll be long gone

Before the truth escapes

From her sensuous

Secretive mouth

He’ll never understand

She wasn’t batshit crazy

She was just infused

With HIS crazy sauce

Do all aspects of life

Boil down to

What Mom always said?

Her timeless wisdom

Withstanding technological innovation

Educated fools

Still as predictable

As the day they

Finally stood upright

Getting into as much trouble

As their opposable thumbs

Could grasp

Lackluster people

Wearing down nerves

With their dull words

Coma-inducing

Conversation

Dangerous conservative ideas

Slipping past lethally

While eyes glazed over

Mind on autopilot

What did you say?

My mind wandered off

In self-defense

Sorry

So

You found

THE SOLUTION

The silver bullet

To a complex problem

All that needs to happen

Is for everyone to act

And think narrowly

As you do?

Just say the word

Any word

Work roots

Cast a spell

It’s all fairy tales and lies

Smoke and mirrors

Optical illusions

It only becomes

THE TRUTH

If someone believes it

Nearing college graduation, I knew two things: I didn’t want to enter graduate school nor did I want to get a “real” job; so I joined the Peace Corps as an education volunteer. That amazing experience started my teaching adventures in Tanzania, South Korea, Egypt, Mexico and Honduras. It also opened my eyes to the reality of other women’s lives.

Until I’d taught in developing countries, I’d taken my formal education, reproductive rights and means to make money all for granted. Yet, time and again, those were the three common challenges I saw host country women toil under. An obstruction or lack in any one of those areas was enough to drastically lessen  women’s autonomy, but usually those challenges existed bundled, especially for poor women.

Off and on, I spent eleven years teaching math, science and ESL outside the US prior to moving to Austin, TX in 2009. Although an American citizen from birth, I felt I’d emigrated from another planet. Austin persevered as a liberal island, surrounded by a sea of conservatism where the “separation of church and state” was not as clear as those words implied.

I marveled at how conservatives viewed big government and oversight regulation as plagues on the American way of life, except for in the case of women’s reproductive rights. In this instance, Texas state government bent over backwards, not only to shame and harass women for seeking abortions, but interfere with doctor-patient communication, demand unnecessary facility upgrades for places that provided abortions, and promote false information regarding abortions.

While Texan women’s health care centers were actively being defunded, regardless of the myriad of life-saving services they provided such as mammograms, so-called crisis pregnancy centers received increasingly more funding to continue their mission of dissuading women from seeking abortion care and disseminating medically inaccurate information.

Yet, women have agency, regardless of politics or religion. Freedom of expression guarantees we women have a right to voice not only our experience, but also the solutions we seek as we navigate through life’s challenges. We should not be regarded as perpetual dependents who need patriarchal policies, dictating morals nor blocking access to safe, legal, medical procedures.

The label “feminism” rolls in and out of favor over time. However, its ideology has had staying power. It’s generally accepted that girls should be educated, and women should have the right to vote, drive, and own property. In the US, these phenomena are no more acknowledged as “feminist” than fish acknowledge water. When one visits a country were these rights do not exist, then like a fish out of water, the gasping begins.

Unfortunately, one doesn’t need to go out of the US to discover developing-country quality women’s healthcare. Those conditions are being created in Texas, a state that has one of the largest economies nationally and some suggest would have the 12th largest GDP if it became a sovereign nation.

We must be vigilant and active to safeguard our reproductive rights as citizens of a prosperous, developed nation.