Friday afternoon, driving west out of Milwaukee, I felt this odd pull. A reluctance to leave. Ironically, after 10 months of living in Riverwest, I was loathe to leave it for 5 days. As I've begun to tiptoe into that world, I find myself almost enchanted by it. Willing and eager to participate. But as with Hampshire college, I was terribly skeptical of the culture of Riverwest. The way it seems to pride itself on counter-culture and anti-consumerism, and yet, most of these kids come from money, and could almost only create this culture as kids from money. The money and the leisure to accept or reject education, drugs, bicycles, cars, organic food, gardening.

While we were in the Dells, we went to a restaurant that left much to be desired. It took over 30 minutes to get there, and after about 10 minutes in the car, the music had gotten stale, and conversationg had drawn to a sleepy lull, and all that was left was the scenery.


Wisconsin scenery amazes me, I think. In The Broken Cord, Michael Dorris aptly describes much of the midwest as possessing a "luxury of far vistas," and I thought about this on the winding, almost-lost drive. It could be that Wisconsin's landscape looks unique because it is familiar to me, or it could be unique. Low hills and black earth and deep forests, this stupid place has captured my love. New England was claustrophobic, and the South unfamiliar. And yet, places like Illinois sometimes make me want to weep with boredom, a feeling similar to the claustrophobia; trapped in the oppenness like trapped within valleys. Too much horizon versus none.

And yet, here is where I've grown up, accostomed to that luxury of space, to that wealth of skyline.

This restaurant that we went to felt like a definition for small-town America. The fancy banquet hall, replete with wood panelled walls, stone fireplace, and a perfectly shaped cowboy hat on the hearth. Local artists' paintings of pastures and flowers, old goats with leathery skin and neatly-belted jeans, and that smell. What is that smell? Cheapy prepared food, home-cookin, a strange stink that reminds me of dinners with grandma; at once familiar and suffocating. All I can think to describe it is "cans." Everything from a box or a can or a plastic bottle.

And yet, in spite of the prime rib special, soaked in salty "au jus," in spite of the orangey cheese spread from the salad bar that I just had to try, it didn't make me despise small-town Wisconsin as it once would have. This place just is. And, as a matter of fact, it's probably a disappearing lifestyle. (Besides the wedding reception in the other room, the only other customers were very old with tremors in their hands.)

Maybe I had to get out of Milwaukee to realize that I'd begun to like it (some of it,) and I still want to travel the states in an effort to better appreciate it. But here I am, very awake at midnight in Wisconsin Dells, writing about, I guess, patriotism. (ick?)

Milwaukee Pride, Pt. 2

But here I am. Here I've been for two years.

I've felt something of a panic stirring inside me for a few months, and although I always feel restless as the seasons change, I guess I've decided to start doing something about it. Because, at the same time that I am making long-term plans to move away, I'm also making short-term plans to understand and perhaps one day appreciate the where and now. (Even when it's the there and then.)

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about one pro of Milwaukee. In almost any other city, I would feel undeserving of starting a craft or a business. Intimidated or excluded, somehow. But Milwaukee, it seems, encourages a DIY mindset. It encourages community-building and local initiatives, or is fertile for them, if not necessarily encouraging. This seems like a response to what seems to me a widespread Midwestern apathy and support for the status quo. Midwestern citizens, those with the gumption, choose to fight the overwhelming mediocrity, in some small pockets.

But still, I don't want to remain here.

Why? Because of a promise I made myself.

One friend said, in a soothing voice when I freaked out about getting "stuck here," that accepting a full-time job isn't getting stuck. It's just taking an important and necessary step, perhaps even in the very direction to get out of here.

Another friend says, would you be any happier somewhere else? Maybe you need to figure out why you have that restless drive in the first place before you can ever be happy in one place or another.

There are a number of social reactions in Milwaukee in response to negative situations. Take for instance the state of segregation in this city. Nationally, Milwaukee is often recognized as the most segregated city in the country, earning it the tag of "hypersegregated." And yet, nowhere else have I seen such a high rate of biracial couples and mixed babies, except maybe in Brazil. Sometimes, especially when the officials claim responsibility for the breaking down of these social barriers, I holler out epithets in the gyst of "hypocrites!" And sometimes I feel all warm and fuzzy and teetering on the edge of pro-Milwaukee feelings.

At this point, though, I'm not sure if my drive to leave is anything more than the promise I made myself. Spending time with people who have chosen Milwaukee over other cities, people who whoop and holler when asked Who loves Milwaukee? Sometimes, I feel a sense of protectiveness for this city, if not quite love. It's true, I do have to examine my own heart before I can ever really be happy anywhere, so why not do that in the silly town I grew up in? After all, I did choose to come back here because I knew gaining a better self-perspective would be hard somewhere as distracting as New York or as insular as Northampton.

But what is also true is that I may never be satisfied until I heed my own wishes. Mostly, I don't want to make a permanent home out of the place where I grew up. Because I want wider horizons than that. It would be too easy to remain, and I don't know that I can learn as much as I want about life if I don't challenge myself, and that includes uprooting and maybe displacing myself. I don't know where I got that idea, but it's the main drive behind my restlessness.


Besides, who wants to raise their kids in the exact streets they grew up on? Too familiar. Too incestual and weird.

Milwaukee Pride?

The interesting thing about hanging out with that group of kids was their Milwaukee pride. The whooping affirmatives when someone would shout Who loves Milwaukee?

It just never occurred to me to appreciate Milwaukee. To prefer it.

I tried to get current and former Milwaukee residents to tell me what Milwaukee means to them. I didn't get many responses. To me, Milwaukee has been an involuntary home, though home for anyone until adulthood is involuntary. Rather, home was Louisiana, and Milwauke was just where I grew up. Home has always been somewhere else. Even if I did feel just as awkward and displaced there as I did here.

How could I call Milwaukee home, I always wondered, if I claim a biracial heritage in a segregated city? How can I feel allegiance for a town that wants to force me to choose, and that discourages ambition? Milwaukee, to me, was a crossroads. If i was unfortunate enough to be raised here, I would reject it and leave as soon as possible.

But here I am. Here I've been for two years.

More on this later.

Bikists

It was weird, sitting outside People's Books on Tuesday. The group started at 7 or so, and ballooned to twice that or more. More chairs, more bikes, more kids, gathered in a circle on the sidewalk; the compliment-gauntlet for anyone who passed by.

I stated thinking about something that stuck with me the rest of the night. Let me give an example. Later on, the group of us, give or take a few, biked down to the lake, taking Lincoln Memorial Drive, and we rode in a ragged formation, taking up a full lane between us all. And part of me felt powerful, as the act of biking does, and biking in a group, being part of a large group, some sort of solidarity, slipping into the rainks of something I respect in many ways. But I question this group membership as well; the power itself of groups frightens me a little as well, and the fact that stereotypes are formed about people when they gather in groups.

Er, what am I trying to say? I enjoyed being part of a group and was wary of its power at the same time.

And further, the odd feeling that emerged right away at the meeting was based on this idea of group stereotyping. We were there, seated in a glob, 15 or 16 kids, and we all appear white. Now, I can't say for certain that any of the other kids were or weren't white, I can only say they looked it. As do I, biracial or no, as does Sarandi, Greek or no. Race radar is an uncertain game, and the United States, in spite of its legacy of the One Drop Rule, is basing race assignment more and more on appearance.

And I wondered, sitting there, I can guess how we look, a group of white-lookin kids parked outside an independent bookstore, flanked by a forest of bicycles; but what would we look like if we were 15 or 16 black kids, or Muslim kids, or Korean kids? What revolution would they attribute to us, what sinister thoughts?

So at the same time that I liked these kids, liked being lost in, if only temporarily, a like-minded group, I'm uncomfortable allying myself to a group. I like individuals. I am much more comfortable with 1 person than I am with 10.

Conclusion? Who knows.

In other news, I've stopped taking birth control. Hmm.

More thoughts on race and money

Yesterday was one of those days when I kept thinking about sitting down to write, kept planning to get some thoughts out of my head, but kept avoiding it through action. I could write, or I could get to work on time; I could write, or I could eat lunch with my co-workers; I could write, or I could go for this bike ride and meet all these new people and go skinny dipping and get caught by the police. Right. So all those thoughts that seemed so important yesterday have now lost some of their import, and now I can't quite conjure them.

After coffee, I was unlocking my bike and saw this blonde-headed, thick-legged boy ride up and lock his bike on the next rack. And that face was so familiar, and it turned out to be fucking Andy Zahn. I saw him Sunday at Locust Street Days, swaggering down the street with a barrel-chested dog, and thought God, he put on some poundage. I wonder if that means he's stopped using drugs, or if he's just gotten more slovenly. He still looks like Andy, and it puzzles me that I thought I was so in love. I wonder, has he grown up? I hope I have.

One of the things that I wanted to think more about were food stamps. Working at the Co-Op, I've come in contact with a handful of people with the Quest card - Food Stamps now come in the form of a credit card. And I was a little surprised at first at how comfortable they were in handing me this card. When Dad suggested that I apply for food stamps, I was angry. Because not being able to pay for groceries always seemed like something shameful. Like some sort of failure.

But now that I see these kids, a lot of them my age, a lot of them struggling to balance doing what they love with bills and babies and just sometimes not able to make ends meet, somehow now the stigma is, if not gone, at least lessened. Why is that? Was my grounding in middle class values so strong? Evidently. I wonder, though, if I were working in a regular grocery store, and was coming across minorities with food stamps, as I must have accepted the stereotype, would I have come to this conclusion so quickly? I can't help but to racialize class.

And what really got me thinking was when one of my customers handed me his Quest card, and a co-volunteer asked "So-and-So, do you have your Quest card now?" and another volunteer said "yeah, I have get around to getting one of my own." And the way he said it seemed, well, like food stamps are a right of passage or an entitlement or entry into an underground, hip kind of demographic. Like (White) Starving Artists Power!

Sometimes I wonder if my racializing everything that I encounter isn't some kind of disease.

Mad as a Hatter

I keep trying to get away from this book - Anthropology of an American Girl - but there's something addictive about it. I think about putting it down, returning it to the library, but each night, I pick it up, can't help but read more.

I blame this book for my present madness. People ask, how have you been, and all I can answer is restless. Mad as a hatter. But this book is not promoting the restlessness per se. This girl, constructing herself, is lost in the swirl of her own thoughts; introspective and self-aware, but innocent, ignorant to the outside forces. Knowledgeable but blind.

I've read books that make me think, but often they are political, racial, cultural. This one is strictly, painfully, personal. Waifish white East Coaster, and she's forcing me to think about romance, sanity, my self-structuring. And while this girl, Evie, represents my coiled self, I alternate reading the one with Henry and June, and Anais, well, she stirs the longing to uncoil, madly, into sensuality. Indulgence.