Thursday, February 4, 2010
Cockroaches
I wrote this on the eve of my grandmother's passing, reflecting on the times and how much she meant to me (without me having realized it) in an honest way.
The hidden seams of the city's economic fabric are starting to show. The desperation we all skirt, the third world citizens in the first, are becoming unavoidably visible. The street corners where once four or five idlers waited around looking for work now number twenty or more. Sitting, standing, their faces dark from basking in God's oven all day. In my quartier, there are multiple hand-painted signs even for "plomero," let alone the phone cable peddlers, computer repairmen, lifted auto-parts dealers, all without office or confidence.
Miraculously, it was I that was awarded with a job. I escaped this horrible cycle. (or perhaps entered into a new contract with the devil, putting off my "real life" until I hit 29). While I'd love to pat my cultural background on the back for instilling me with a disciplined ethic to succeed academically, I know the thing that really separates me from the desperate candy sellers, the window wipers and day laborers -- that were once more easily brushed off as if they were some exception to the case of the everyday -- is my class. I will continue increasing my financial stability and entrenching myself as a public entity, rather than a subhuman that hides all too metaphorically in the shadows.
God, to give up everything, knowing that maybe it'll just be your grandchildren that will benefit from risking your life. To go somewhere where you are an absolute necessity to the functioning of an economy, yet the citizens pretend as though you don't and never did exist, a ghost of the capitalist machine...
I'm sorry for this bleeding heart rant. I'd been concerned a lot about class lately because of my underlying sense of self-importance - the idea that I could get a job and that I deserved one for my "hard work" in college. Yet my grandmother was one of those.. that speculated on the goodness of man and her own ability to work hard in the most miserable of conditions. She did it. I grew up with no bronchitis-inducing molds, no nightly swarm of cockroaches, falling into my mouth as I slept. My father was blue collar (technically), and mine will be white. What of it? My grandma has saved me from poverty, yet I can't even speak to her, to thank her. And now she lies on her death bed in a foreign land with foreign children, her mind filled with concerns I can't relate to. How should I call it, the nature of the black cloud? Grief? Guilt? Or is it just the hunger for suffering of a typical person with the means to ruminate. ¶ 2:41 PM
The hidden seams of the city's economic fabric are starting to show. The desperation we all skirt, the third world citizens in the first, are becoming unavoidably visible. The street corners where once four or five idlers waited around looking for work now number twenty or more. Sitting, standing, their faces dark from basking in God's oven all day. In my quartier, there are multiple hand-painted signs even for "plomero," let alone the phone cable peddlers, computer repairmen, lifted auto-parts dealers, all without office or confidence.
Miraculously, it was I that was awarded with a job. I escaped this horrible cycle. (or perhaps entered into a new contract with the devil, putting off my "real life" until I hit 29). While I'd love to pat my cultural background on the back for instilling me with a disciplined ethic to succeed academically, I know the thing that really separates me from the desperate candy sellers, the window wipers and day laborers -- that were once more easily brushed off as if they were some exception to the case of the everyday -- is my class. I will continue increasing my financial stability and entrenching myself as a public entity, rather than a subhuman that hides all too metaphorically in the shadows.
God, to give up everything, knowing that maybe it'll just be your grandchildren that will benefit from risking your life. To go somewhere where you are an absolute necessity to the functioning of an economy, yet the citizens pretend as though you don't and never did exist, a ghost of the capitalist machine...
I'm sorry for this bleeding heart rant. I'd been concerned a lot about class lately because of my underlying sense of self-importance - the idea that I could get a job and that I deserved one for my "hard work" in college. Yet my grandmother was one of those.. that speculated on the goodness of man and her own ability to work hard in the most miserable of conditions. She did it. I grew up with no bronchitis-inducing molds, no nightly swarm of cockroaches, falling into my mouth as I slept. My father was blue collar (technically), and mine will be white. What of it? My grandma has saved me from poverty, yet I can't even speak to her, to thank her. And now she lies on her death bed in a foreign land with foreign children, her mind filled with concerns I can't relate to. How should I call it, the nature of the black cloud? Grief? Guilt? Or is it just the hunger for suffering of a typical person with the means to ruminate. ¶ 2:41 PM
