babylon

There’s been a lot of prattling of late about wasting talent and intellect because I royally cocked up 2 semesters in a row and dropped out of summer school 4 credits from graduating college to work in a restaurant.

It’s not all that bad, though, really.

Brains get tired and need a break. I’ve been feigning adulthood a few hours a day in exchange for money and contributing to society or something.

I’ve also been lying under my fan reading Bukowski and thinking about starting writing and drawing and dancing again.

This morning I exploded into my brother’s room reciting this poem from scene 1 episode 6 of Mad Men (called “Babylon”) and then spent all day thinking about blogging it.

In this episode, Midge cajoles Don into going to a beatnik bar with her hippie friends by swearing to “wear a skirt and nothing else.”

Legs.

While Don and Midge’s defensive arty friend passive aggressively fight, a little cutie in ballet shoes recites this poem and then takes off her top upon request. I’m thinking of doing this poem in public, but with all of my clothes on. Enjoy.

a blonde, beatnik Lola

Last night
I dreamed
of making love to Fidel Castro
in a king sized bed at the Waldorf Astoria.
VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN, he roared as he vanquished
my dress.
Outside the window, Nikita Kruschev
watched us,
plucking
a chicken.

“Take off your top,” someone yelled, so she did.

QUEREMOS PAZ: viva la revolución

Since the winter of 2010 began thawing into an Arab Spring, I’ve been obsessed with constructing the person I’d like to be and the world in which I’d like to live. A gigantic part of those constructs has to do with the food I feed myself and my friends and family, as well as the effect its cultivation has on this planet. If you treat the earth with loving kindness, it will bestow unto you all the things that are good in the world. I believe that filling bellies is a manifestation of love, and that there is no more powerful rebellion than to love one another. Enter radical homemaking, which is, according to Shannon Hayes who coined the term, “[choosing] to make family, community, social justice and the health of the planet the governing principles of [life].”

Until the Arab Spring, I was somewhat indifferent towards organized social justice. I believed that loving one another should be enough civil disobedience to be the change that I wish to see in the world. And then a vegetable vendor in Tunisia had his cart confiscated by corrupt officials and he set himself on fire, sparking solidarity protests across the country that spread wildly throughout the Middle East and North Africa. When #Egypt started trending on Twitter I started paying more attention to the news.

I’m a pretty stoic for an idealistic twenty-one year old girl, but when I heard the NPR interview with Ahdaf Soueif when she told the stories of Egyptian women trying to delay labour until their children could be born into a better Egypt and then naming them Hurriyya and Thaura after freedom and revolution, I sat in my car and cried like a baby in the grocery store parking lot because I’d never heard of a love so beautiful, nor had I realized how important the environment is.

And then there was SlutWalk, the young Western feminists’ version of setting themselves on fire to protest corruption in the form of a Toronto cop telling some college ladies that if they didn’t want raped, they shouldn’t dress like sluts. The linguist and rebel in me were all about reclaiming the word slut, but much like Rebecca Traister wrote in her New York Times article, my initial stream-of-conscious reactions were that it doesn’t help anything to just cannonball into stereotypes in “protest” of them; that there’s nothing wrong with being a slag, but dressing like a whore on purpose and expecting to not be objectified is just retarded; and the inability to disagree that wearing clothes is a good way to not be objectified. I mean, of course women have the right to not be accosted when they go out, but dressing like women who are TRYING to get accosted is an extremely shoddy way to protest objectification. Especially since there was nothing satirical about it. On that note, I also don’t see anything wrong with prostitution as long as the prostitute wants to be fucking for money.

And with that, I realized I was a closet feminist, that all anyone really needs is love, jobs, dessert, and locally grown vegetables, and that as soon as everyone just elects me benevolent overlord, those Egyptian mothers could finally bear their Freedoms and Revolutions into a world worthy of such optimistically named futures. Duh.

an identiy crisis:

So I mentioned I’ve been working on a massive project. I was meant to design 2 websites for a class, which I did, but my topic spun out of control (as they’ll do), and I never quite finished the site, not that I have my own web space in which to show off my mad HTML skillz anyway, so I’ll be posting the content I generated (images and text) here in installments, but presented in the default code for this blog’s theme.

I give you part 1 of “Meanwhile, Back in the Kitchen:”

“I’m so sick of the false dichotomies being set up everywhere I turn—bad vegan, bad feminist, bad human. I realize I say this from a position of considerable privilege, but get off the cross and improve your own little corner of the planet without getting your half-assed agenda all over the rest of us. –Vegan Burnout“

I want to preserve my own tomatoes.

Everything begins and ends with dirt. If you want good dirt, you have to grow it yourself.

I might be a “clumsy young feminist”.

It all started in Egypt.

There’s a connection between food politics, social justice, ecological friendship, and the way we perform our identities, regardless of which boxes you check on demographic surveys.

It’s starting to dawn on me that I am the immediate future.

I imagine that most young ladies – at least the ones who, like me, spent their childhoods reading books in which every main character turns out to be the heroine – fancy themselves as strong female characters. You know, the “[h]oly grail of pop culture, embodiment of all that is empowerment, role model and inspiration for viewers of all genders, proof that women do not need to be shoehorned into stereotypical roles, but can instead spread their wings and fly free,” as defined by s. e. smith on Tiger Beatdown.

The problem is that there are only so many versions of the strong female character from which a girl can choose. There will always be something wrong with the way women are portrayed in the media and in real life. There will always be something wrong with the way we perform our own identities. And there is something wrong with whatever your idea of a lady looks like, does, or believes in.

None of that matters because the lady is a trope, anyway.

We’re all tropes no matter what we do, and everything is in conflict with feminist progress depending on how you look at it, so just have good intentions, be kind to everyone and embrace the identity you’ve constructed for yourself.

a little leg

I’ve been on hiatus. Moping and writing and realigning with the universe and all that. Mostly, though, I’ve been working on a really fanfuckintastic project that I’ve been waiting to finish before I start blogging. But I can’t quite contain myself anymore so here’re some hints:

And there’s this other blog I’ve just started cos I’m clearly managing the two I’ve got going on over here so well.

I’m super excited about this project, and it’s absolutely massive, so I’ll drop some more hints: feminism, tomatoes, Mad Men, tropes, revolution.

*straightens skirt, sashays out*

It all started in Egypt. . .

I may or may not have an unhealthy obsession with Molotov Cocktails and/or revolutions and/or riots. Regardless, I’m pretty stoked about the imagery I constructed in this haiku. Please leave me criticisms.

Cheers, darling.
by Cherise Benton

Sometimes bridges just
need to be set on fire.
Molotov cocktails

for you, dearest, and
for me, too. A toast to mark
our last kiss goodbye.

I lit the candle
and dropped the match between us,
smiled at the flames.

photoshop

Poetic used to be a thing I waxed on a regular basis. And then I guess I smashed into real life for a while and ran out of beauty. Or something like that. Well now I’m safe and sound back in academia where I belong, and despite refusing to participate in fall, the world has returned to its previous thoroughly lovely state and all I want to do is scribble sweet nothings about it all.

Cliché.
by Cherise Benton

After spending an afternoon in front
of a computer making photographs more
perfect than real life, as
I drove down the street eating
a chocolate chip cookie, a
metallic silver balloon
floated up into a September-blue sky,
mingled with cotton candy clouds that were
gently threatening rain, and
simply went higher. Silver lining,
I thought, and, this is better than real life.
I should take a picture.
But I did not. I suppose I don’t always
have to wrap the present in nostalgia.
Sometimes I should just let things be.

snapshot of a beautiful life

fro. grass. sun. flower. happiness.

A while ago I wrote a post about taking pictures of  your life when it’s beautiful and full of cupcakes and sunshine. Mine has been lately, but I’ve been neglecting the nostalgia collection, so here’s a poem about the impromptu vegetarian dinner & drunken fire dancing party my lovely friends allowed me to throw in their yard the other day in celebration of my vacation week. That night was my favourite, much better than real life, so I hunted some pictures and Instagramed them to make them feel as magical as I did while my friends sat around a fire drinking cheap wine and eating raw vegetables dipped in smoky baba ganoush and veggie burgers stuffed with piergoi because I asked them to share my vacation bliss with me.

“vino patito & pierogi sandwiches”
[a true story. by Cherise Benton.]

Sit in the grass
and watch the bottles melt.
The stars exist
to confirm your happiness.
The future is in the bottom
of your coffee cup.
There’s a kitten in the palm of your hand.