My Adult Transitional Object.

Her name is Grandma. She came to live with me/us about 14 months ago. I never thought I would form such an attachment to a cat, but she is the most hilariously docile, sweet-personalitied thing ever. All along I was a cat person. And now I am officially that crazy woman who talks to her cat as if the cat is a tiny child.

Awakening.

Last night I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. in order to get up and write.

I am writing a book.  I plan on working on my book for an hour every morning, rain or shine, dead or nimble brained.  The tentative title of my book is called "Dinner with 80 Million People".  So far that title beat out "Cosmic Fikir".  Well, because the book is not just about fikir.  And I've decided that fikir does not even have to be the focal point.

I will not now tell you what it is about.  Suffices to convey that it is a memoirette with a little bit of love and adventure and serendipity and sorrow and agony.  A bunch of juicy existential crap.

Something happened to me that I don't think has happened to anyone else.  If you want to know what it is, you can read my book.

In a few weeks I turn 37.  I plan on having my book finished, revised, edited, polished and published at the very latest by the time I turn 40.

My boyfriend encouraged me to write on my book for an hour every day.  He wrote a book one time.  An academic magnum opus about migrants.  There is a copy of it in the Library of Congress and you can also find it on Amazon.  He is kind of awesome like that.

Partly owed to the few glasses of wine I had last night, I was in an extremely deep slumber when my alarm screamed this morning.   After I stopped the alarm, I turned upside down on my bed, feet at the headboard, and just lay there.  Groggy.  My mind a black ocean.  Everything inside me wanted to close my eyes again and sink back into an unconscious state.  I felt I needed sleep like one deeply longs for love.  After about 12 minutes, I got up and crept around the house, visiting the bathroom, the coffee maker, my cat, and hitting the lights.

My book got a slight workover, mostly in the form of correcting and rearranging a few things I had previously written.  More importantly, however, this morning was spent, in all seriousness, with a great deal of gratitude for my life and circumstances.  After I sat at my computer for about an hour, my son awoke and tiptoed into the living room of my tiny apartment.  He looked so cute.  Still in pajamas, he scrunched himself onto our soft, green couch.  I put a blanket on him and kissed him many times.

By the time we left the house in order to go to school and work, we were both clean, had clean clothes, we had slept warmly all night, we had breakfast, the dishes were clean, laundry from the washing a few days ago was still fresh, all bills were paid, I had lunch for work, he had a snack for school.  We got into my car that works - with heat!  We drove off to confront our daily responsibilities.   Having arrived at his school, we parted with declarations of love and an exchange of hugs and kisses.

The past 8 months of being out on my own and forcibly, like most of the world, taking care of everything administrative, logistical, physical, critically necessary to exist...  Finding success in self-sufficiency, being educated enough to find a job that easily pays my bills even if I barely have any money leftover, has been a godsend.

Days of good fortune.

Where Are You, Immigration Reform?

Below's an eensy beentsy, teensy weeny article I wrote yesterday for my work.  Because 1.)  I have nothing else to post here momentarily, and 2.) I know, I just know, Dear Reader, that YOU want to know what happened to immigration reform.

In this climate of paralyzed government, bitter political infighting, widespread domestic economic fears, and unrelenting international crisis particularly in Syria, immigration reform, an issue at front and center as recently as this past summer, seems to have gotten lost.  Comprehensive immigration reform has been an objective of the immigrant community, advocates, and pro-immigrant organizations for a long time now, like for over a decade.  In 2004, I began immigration-related work.  My boss at the time swore up and down, left and right, in circular fashion, in figure eights, that immigration reform was imminently around the corner.  Many years and many failed attempts at passing meaningful laws like the Dream Act later, the struggle for a comprehensive immigration reform package that would brilliantly renovate our currently dysfunctional, unwieldy system is still ongoing.  On June 26, 2013, the United States Senate passed the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013” (S.744).  Like any legislative effort mounted at bringing about comprehensive immigration reform might be, it is a monstrosity of a bill.  As it’s a long-awaited monstrosity, it’s thus deserving of our encouraged, detailed attention.  In its “Summary and Analysis” of the BSEIMA / S.744, produced last April, the National Immigration Law Center states that, “[T]he bill would provide a road to citizenship for approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants and overhaul the family immigration system.  The bill also would create stringent border enforcement and deportation measures, and ramp up workplace enforcement by mandating that employers use an electronic employment verification system (E-verify).”

The most important, or at least the most collectively gratifying, aspect of the Senate’s BSEOIMA / S.744 bill is the provision putting forth a potential pathway to United States citizenship for the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living here.  To this end, the bill creates “Registered Provisional Immigrant” status (RPI). RPI status is not tantamount to that of a “legal immigrant”.  RPI is a gray category in between being undocumented and being an immigrant lawfully allowed to reside in the U.S.  However, the greatest benefit received by immigrants by coming out of the shadows and accepting RPI status is that the status comes with the ability to legally work here in the U.S.  In essence, if not in name, an individual granted RPI is allowed to be here under the law, to work and thus reside, even if individuals with RPIs are not lawful permanent residents.

To qualify for RPI status, an individual has to be able to prove he/she meets certain criteria, as follows:  He/she arrived to the United States on or before December 31, 2011, he/she has maintained continuous presence up until the date of application for RPI status, he/she must have settled any all federal tax liability, he/she must not have been convicted of a felony or three or more misdemeanors, and he/she cannot have previously been on any lawful status.  The grant of RPI status to any qualifying individual is dependent upon the implementation of particular border security measures.  Before any individual can be granted RPI status, the Department of Homeland Security has to certify that the border security strategy encapsulated in the bill has begun.  Further, after the border security strategy begins and RPI status is allowable, the Department of Homeland Security has to announce whether and when border security measures are substantially put into place in accordance with the bill.  Only after the Department of Homeland Security confirms that certain border security measures have been put into place, and after and individual has held RPI status for ten years, can individuals with RPI status go forward and apply for their lawful permanent residence (LPR) or “greencard” status.  After three years of holding LPR or “greencard” status, an individual can apply for U.S. citizenship.  The path is a thirteen year stretch from RPI status to U.S. citizenship.  

Essentially, the matter of legalizing the 11 million undocumented people has to happen as steps subsequent, and then concurrent, to the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to beef up border security.  If the threshold border security measures are not reached, say for instance because there is not enough funding, ostensibly the 11 million individuals striving to sort out their undocumented status cannot get very far, procedurally, in their aim to legalize and ultimately gain U.S. citizenship.

The substantively robust Senate’s BSEOIMA / S.744 bill includes various other notable provisions that:

• Expedite the process towards U.S. citizenship for so-called Dreamers,

• Eliminate certain family visa categories such as the category that allows U.S. citizens to sponsor their foreign national siblings for a greencard,

• Eliminate the Diversity Visa Program,

• Create the V and W visas that allow family members to enter the U.S. to reside here while awaiting his or her greencard and creates a new worker program for low-skilled workers respectively,

• Require all employers to utilize the federal government’s employment eligibility verification system, i.e. E-Verify

• Give more protection to immigrant workers who may suffer workplace abuse, and provisions that expand grounds of inadmissibility and removability,

• Eliminate country-specific limits on employment-based immigrant visas, which have caused enormous backlogs for applicants from large countries like China and India, and

• Raises the annual H-1B non-immigrant specialty employment visa cap, raises H-1B wage requirements, and requires employers to make significant efforts to recruit U.S. workers in order to submit an H-1B petition.  The current H-1B visa cap of 65,000 (the number of H-1B visas available annually) is replaced with a cap that fluctuates between 115,000 and 180,000 based on a market escalator formula that considers employer demand and unemployment data.

Summer felt like a promising time for the possibility of immigration reform legislation to finally make it to the President’s desk.  Sadly, momentum seemed to wane dramatically with the heightened violence in Syria and our government’s deliberations over whether to intervene.  And we all know what happened after that, the government shut down owed to the fiscal snafu.  Even in this atmosphere of debt ceiling uncertainty and stock market drops, however, a few of our leaders on Capitol Hill are responding obdurately to the trend of letting immigration reform fall away from grasp yet again.

On October 2, 2013, in the midst of Democratic and Republican fisticuffs over how to reopen the government, Democratic leaders within the U.S. House of Representatives released their proposed legislative treatment of immigration reform.  According to Mike Lillis, writing for TheHill.com on October 2, 2013, “The sweeping proposal, which largely mirrors the bipartisan package approved by the Senate in June, is designed to keep the immigration issue in the headlines and intensify the pressure on GOP leaders to bring a reform bill to the floor.”  Lillis further notes, however, that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R – Ohio) “has already rejected the Senate’s approach to immigration reform and is not expected to act on the similar plan from House Democrats.”  Earlier this year when immigration reform appeared to be a more popular subject, the Republicans in the House issued grumblings and complaints about the Senate’s BSEOIMA / S.744 bill, citing that the border security measures included were not strict enough.  There were also rumors, or at least predictions, that any reform effort ultimately produced by the U.S. House of Representatives would exclude U.S. citizenship and perhaps only provide a path to legal permanent residency (LPR status) at best.

The tragedy of not addressing the dire need for immigration reform is multi-fold.  Not only is allowing the 11 million undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and procure work lawfully a humanitarian imperative, but doing so would boost our economy according to many credible studies.  Therefore, by not successfully tackling immigration reform now, we stand to serve the enormous immigrant community an injustice while simultaneously sabotaging our nation’s chance to take advantage of a movement that would substantially advance its economic recovery.  This was going to be our year for reform.  Finally.  But with each passing day that we inch towards 2014 the likelihood shrinks and takes our hopes with it.  To answer the question of where is immigration reform?:   Much like a longsuffering, frustrated driver in the District of Columbia whose car sits idle behind a long line of cars, many traffic calamities, and a juggernaut of pedestrians and cyclists, immigration reform sits idle, trapped behind a long line of issues, many political debacles and a clash of ideologies and political pandering.

"People were dying every day from apartheid itself." - Denis Goldberg

Long Walk to Freedom is extraordinary.  I just can't stop saying that.  Nelson Mandela is 95 years old.  He lives in Johannesburg, the primary city from which he fought for freedom for decades in South Africa.  When he inevitably passes on to another life, this world loses a man within which lies an enormously bright spirit - the likes of which the world is rarely a witness to.  Where do these caliber of so very few people come from?  Willing to stand up and keep standing up in the face of unrelenting abuse and horrid oppression.

Like the Germans who opposed the Nazis, willing to pay the ultimate price for taking action en contra what they knew was just wrong wrong wrong wrong.

This is a very recent interview with Denis Goldberg, the White freedom fighter, 15 years younger than Madiba, who stood next to his Black colleagues at the Rivonia trial and faced death for opposing apartheid.

And now I'm late for work because I don't want to stop reading all about everything that happened in South Africa.

"Second Wind" by Kimberly "Redefining Freedom" McCrae.

I didn't just read the following poem, I savored it.

The moon reminded me that I was once a dreamer

Was once all

“Once upon a time…”

and

“Happily ever after…”

was long walks on spring mornings

and soulful duets with the water

I was an ounce of southern comfort

With a dash of Brooklyn flair

And every gospel anthem in between

Was never skinny jeans

But was bell bottoms

And a high wedge sandal

With painted toes

On bridges built into the sculpted arch of a foot

From tank tops

To turtle necks

I was someone’s wish upon a star

And I knew that home

Was where the heart was

So I had oft found a temporary dwelling place

But never yet found a permanent home

I was sexy

That’s what the moon said

As the clouds laughed until they cried

Remembering my 5 inch heel sashay

Coaxing cobblestone into catwalk

I was hips

And lips

And fingertips

With brains

And fame

And his last name

I was Ms.

Just in case he was not Mr.

And he

Was only he

When I let him

I was fine

Not like wine

But like a vintage car made new

Was hair

Lots of hair

That waved and kinked and curled

And never asked permission

to dance in the breeze

I was mambo

And samba

A ballroom dance in an embroidered gown

I was sipping wine on a fire escape

Counting playful stars

flirtatiously winking at me

I was city streetlights

With subway rumble

And tokens to take you

On a ride to eternity

I was beef patty and coco bread

With peach cobbler

and pink lemonade

I was eclectic

I was forever

Was forever and a day

Was no apologies

And no strings attached

A ferry ride

leaving here

Going there

A romantic moment

Hiding in the charm of a smile

I was it

When it was my turn

I crossed my legs

Sipping on starlight

And the moon agreed

It will soon be my turn again

Copyrighted 2013, Kimberly "Redefining Freedom" McCrae

Period.

I got my period today.  Isn't that a stupid way to say I'm menstruating?

It isn't gross.  It's not too much information.  It's a fact of life for half or more of the global population.

Spoiler Warning:  The rest of this blog post will contain more bletherings about me being on my period.   If you are a prude, make like a baby and head out of here.

Now then.  For whoever is left (echo chamber) I will proceed with wild abandon.

Womanhood is an interesting experience.

As one might await the fall of mankind, I'd been waiting on my period for several days.  Like I do every month.  Just today it came.  My period punctuates its dawning day with fatigue, listlessness and an abject lack of desire to work.

Here I sit at my desk.  Making a pathetic attempt to pretend to be productive.  Sometimes I do what I call my Swan Flamenco Chair Yoga.  Visualize it:  I'm sitting at my desk, which is a triangular cubicle thing.  Staring at a giant iMac screen.  Sitting in a none-too-thrilling roller desk chair; Staples-issue black with little wheels.  My arms rise in tandem up above my head, then sway from side to side in perfectly-timed simultaneous movement.  I curl my hands ever so slightly to mimic the delicate gestures of a flamenco dancer, ignoring what is the confused look of the male coworker seated next to me.  This pain, he does not know.  He does not get a period.  So he condescends to give a question mark.  Dick.

Unfazed, I continue with what can only be described as an Olympic performance of the Swan Flamenco Chair Yoga.

This is not waste, this is grace.

My arms stretched to near perfection, I go back to surreptitiously typing this post.  As I type it, I am hoping no one walks by during the crucial moments it takes me to churn it out.  Intermittently, I will answer a text message from my guy friend in Pennsylvania whose wife walked out on him last spring.  He is a big, ole hot mess right now.  I truly feel bad for him.  Convincing him to make some changes to his own self and surrounds in order to bring a patina of optimism to his life has been an uphill.  I said, Revamp your house.  He said I'm a guy, I hate decorating.  I said, Well reinvent yourself, go to Barnes & Noble, buy a home decor magazine, see what moves you, don't get overwhelmed, pick one wall in your house and paint it.

Damn, I should be a professional counselor.

Oh god the Russian guy I work with just walked by.  I swear he is a spy.

This is life and death, folks.

The death of my uterus lining for the month anyway.  It makes my back hurt.  Blood feels like it is draining from, not my nether region, but my brain.  I become ghostly pale, my skin can get blotchy.  I get completely super anemic.  I desperately crave gored gored and am ready to procure it at the cost of anything.  My hormones experience a seismic shift.  Vice grips are painfully crushing what's above my cervix.  The urge to claw out the eyeballs of any man who dares cross my path ebbs and flows.  For days, it's all Lord of the Flies up in here.  In a word:  Danger.

People don't think much of a menstruating woman.  They think this stuff is beyond ordinary just cause it happens every month to virtually all females who are not in menopause.  As if the world weren't misogynistic enough, we have to go from period to less pause, the latter which is followed by pause or, you know, death.

Look, all I'm trying to say is that society takes the matter of the menstrual cycle lightly at its own peril.  Next time you are merrily farting down the road in your car and you see what you might at first believe is an irrational motorist cut you off or put the pedal to the metal a little bit too fast think hard about what is really going on.

Women need three days off from work every month.  Three days that correspond with the first three days of every woman's period.  This is not weakling excuses.  This is reality.  Women should not have to prostrate themselves to the stupid traditional work schedule dominated by men.  For three whole days out of every month women should be able to just not go to work while they are menstruating.  That gives them three whole days to lay in a fetal position, drink wine, blog, work on their book, watch soaps, eat bon bons, pick at their toe lint, navel gaze or just do whatever the fuck they want in between changing tampons and liners for three days.  Three whole days that do not also involve being forced to look at the face of any adversarial, question-mark giving, member of the opposite sex during work hours.

I know, I know.  You are thinking that during those three days men will get a competitive advantage in the work place.  Well, the period of women's periods will be interspersed throughout the month, for one, so not all women will be off for three days at once.  Also, men are nothing without women.  So pathetic is their collective sensibility and sensitivity, that they would just devour themselves up in a big cutthroat testosterone-overkill messy environment.  One need not worry.

Now if you will excuse me while I go back to pretending I am writing a letter for a client for 2 more hours.  After which nobody better stand between me and my bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Monstrous Enmity.

Nelson Mandela, a scholar, a successful attorney, a law firm owner, a husband, a father, an indefatigable freedom-fighter, sews clothes in prison in Pretoria, South Africa.

"At six o'clock we received sleeping mats and blankets.  I do not think words can do justice to a description of the foulness and filthiness of this bedding.  The blankets were encrusted with dried blood and vomit, ridden with lice, vermin, and cockroaches, and reeked with a stench that actually competed with the odiousness of the drain...

The prison, according to apartheid dictates, separated detainees by color...  Our diet was fixed according to race.  For breakfast, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds received the same quantities, except that Indians and Coloureds received a half-teaspoonful of sugar, which we did not...The diet for white detainees was far superior to that for Africans.  So color-conscious were the authorities that even the type of sugar and bread supplied to whites and nonwhites differed:  white prisoners received white sugar and white bread, while Coloured and Indian prisoners were given brown sugar and brown bread..."

This is a small excerpt from Nelson's Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.  It supplies the smallest example of what is enormously replete throughout, at least, the first half of the book, that which is the incredible, baffling, immoral denigration, maltreatment, discrimination, disenfranchisement, segregation, ridicule and humiliation meted out to Black Africans by White colonial-European-descended Afrikaaners.  Simply, Africans were treated like animals.

From my perspective as a mixed-race-heritage 36 year old woman living in the United States in 2013, it is absolutely astonishing.

The passage excerpted speaks of the time before Nelson Mandela went to prison for over 20 years.  Before the 1993 de Klerk / Mandela Nobel Peace prize.  And yet well within the past 50 years, squarely within the lifetime of my father and myself.

The profound indignities so recently suffered by Black Africans in South Africa at the hands of Whites are incomprehensible.

Into the Fire, Mom and Dad.

I ran this morning, in the dark, as the cool early fall air caressed me.

I ran to this song.

I ran away from every petty or malicious demon chasing me.

I ran away from the three consecutive nightmares I have had about my Ex for three nights in a row.

Then I alternately cried, deep sobs difficult-to-breathe, and ran.  It came upon me an incisive understanding of what my parents went through 32 years ago.

Divorce is devastating, Mom and Dad.  I am sorry you had to go through that.  I am so sorry you had to make excruciatingly difficult choices under extreme emotional duress.  I was 4 years old, my brother was 6 and my sister was 10.  You sleeplessly worried about us.  You cried and cried and cried.  You started life over, and it was an epic challenge for both of you.  

You were devastated.  You were guilt-ridden.  You would spend the rest of your lives wondering if you could have done things differently or better.  I know you did that especially, Dad.  I know you blame yourself for every insane thing that happened to my brother.

Mom, Dad, it's not your fault.  You are human.  You really did the best you could.  

It is impossible to walk away from a family life and a marriage, even when it is absolutely impossible to stay.  Devastating.

I am so sorry for your incredible despair and your profound suffering.  I know it took years for both of you to heal.  Mom, you never really healed.  I'm so sorry.

I ran and as I ran I saw the wreckage of the emotional cataclysm around me.  I tended to every one of the wounded.  

I ran over to Hurt, laying there in a puddle of blood.  I patched up Hurt's wounds and I kissed her on the forehead and told her she would heal.

I climbed over dead bodies to reach Resentment, legless, screaming in rage.  I applied a tourniquet, injected morphine, and told Resentment its time had come, despite my best efforts.

Guilt was face down in the mud.  Only upon reaching her did I see she had extensive open wounds.  I had to stop the perilous amount of bleeding.  I sutured, then bandaged every rupture.  I told her I loved her and that it was okay.  That she conducted her service with valor, but that she would be released and never called upon again.

I reached Anger just in time.  Except, no, I was too late.  Anger was dying.  I said a prayer.

Finally, I reached Sadness.  Sadness, in a fetal position.  I enveloped Sadness in my arms and we cried together.  With kind words, I assured Sadness she would beat the odds and be reborn.