Phone Call with the Now Former Beloved, November 2016

: I’m reading a Martha Nussbaum essay right now called Love and the Individual. I’m halfway through but I think you’d like it. She talks a lot about Greek Philosophy. She like, writes about it, and she’s talking about this woman who wrote a story about a woman who had an experience with love, trying to figure it out. I’m pretty sure she’s all three women. But she makes a point of saying, I found an essay on the floor of an office I just rented, and I don’t know who wrote it, but it has the same title as the one I was going to write… It’s comparison and contrast between different views of love… One is like, Everything is general, and every loving person is an extension of a universal value, so it’s all replaceable, and another says, It’s entirely personal, and virtues of another person are built upon a history.

: Did you ever get the book I sent you?

: No, there was no mail on Election Day or yesterday, Veteran’s Day.

: What’s the climate there?

: Pretty cold, I woke up and it’s frosty -

: I don’t mean... I mean the attitude, the feeling.

: Oh! Everything’s – you mean – ? There’s a lot of talk, I guess, myself, I’m past the initial shock. Everybody was talking about it for a while and then it was like, whatever. One joke that keeps coming up is that everybody keeps telling my bunkie, you’re going back to Mexico!

: No what I was saying though is like, ‘cuz there’s been sort of like a um, a split between people who are like, If you supported [              ] then don’t talk to me, I don’t want to interact with you, versus like, Well, the reason this happened is because we’re not talking to each other, and … I don’t know, I mean, there’s some pretty, I think that like, the news outlets that you are seeing, or you have access to right now, like, I think, I’m probably seeing different, or more, like on-the-ground-stuff, and one thing is like what this government can actually do, and the other is like, a certain type of [         ] supporter is now emboldened to think a certain kind of language is acceptable, so I have connections, friends on social media, people talking about very, incidents that have happened to them in the past 3 days that are directly the result of… like, people thinking it’s ok to follow an East-Asian presenting girl on the street saying Do you speak English do you speak English go back to your country, I mean, these are people I know, these are people I went to high school with, so, it’s kind of, yeah. like -

: I think there’s going to be some government, emotional fallout from this, I mean, it’ll be interesting. I mean, in terms of practicality, I think the only thing moving forward is… Ok, so if people in general really need to be able to decide for themselves, to say, we need to find our own way to make things happen. [pause] You ok?

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: Call me back.

 

 

 

 

 

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: Ok so I probably sense a certain feeling of responsibility that you don’t feel because your outlets are very limited, in terms of what you could do in this situation, I mean, I don’t want to make assumptions, but I mean, you couldn’t even vote, so when I hear you talk about it, nothing you’re saying is incorrect, but it’s not the tone of how I’m thinking, because for me, it’s not like, “people need to do x,” it’s like, what do I need to do?

: What are you doing today?

: I don’t know, schoolwork.

: How’s that going?

: I mean, it’s hard to focus, but I think it’s gonna be fine, but, uh, what was I gonna say, oh, uh, I was walking yesterday… I wrote it in part of my essay, so I was walking out class, and there was a big rally coming through, and I was crossing 6^th Ave., which is a really big street, and I was crossing and I had a walk signal and I was looking in the direction of where the rally was going, and a biker ran into me, like, a biker hit me –

: Are you ok?!

: Yeah I’m fine, I mean, it coulda been really bad actually! And he didn’t… I mean, he didn’t hit the middle of me, he like hit, I don’t even know how it happened… it was either right in front of me or beside me… brushed my side... but it wasn’t like, I felt the wind in my hair, he like, ran into me, and it was like, really bizarre, and he just kept going, and then he looked back, and yelled “sorry!” and then I said sorry!

: I do the same thing, I mean, my Bunkie will run into me and then I’ll say –

: No but he ran into me on a bike! In the middle of a street!

: You wrote about it in your paper?

: Yeah, kind of, it just seemed like another thing to throw into the mix of the week.

: Are you getting a cold?

: No. Are you?

: Yeah.

[[car horns]]

: Do I sound like I am?

: A bit.

: Maybe you were projecting.

 

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