[He’s a security guard,” “He saved us!”. I only took one screenshot of it but the post is very powerful if you’re in the mood to go look it up].

[Yin]: The synchronicities are piling up. A couple experiences yesterday sought to confirm certain things for me and I came to post about it then saw this at the top of my FB feed. I mean, what can even be said?

Yesterday, I blocked someone who after a philosophical text exchange managed to be disrespectful to me for no reason except their own inattentiveness; I’ve also unfriended/blocked/extricated others for similar reasons about which I am always questioning the validity of. Because I legit have no time for a daily come to Jesus with folks but of course I still doubt myself; of course I question what I could have done to have met with a different result; of course I wonder if somehow my actions are making the world a less loving place. Then I see a story like this.

For the big truth is: you can do everything right, bend over backwards to honor someone else’s experience and do the right thing—you can try hard to explain, sacrifice self, lay your heart out and put it all on the line to nobly show up for your world—and someone can still kill you.

And it’s awful, and heartbreaking, and obviously my experiences are nothing compared to Jemels but his story resonated not just because of the filthy injustice of it but also because it helped me see that it’s the non-Jemels of the world that often make so much fucking noise that sometimes they need to be blocked so that they’re forced to listen to their own shit for a while.

Rest in the peace of the powerful, Jemel. May we all live by your example. [Yang: In some sort of wonderful balance, a lady I sit for left for London yesterday and its funny because she’s young, well-coiffed—blonde, gorgeously put together—and just everything I’m not [though I honestly don’t try; I resist “performing” for society; I’ll only be bowing to my own dysfunctional bullshit, thanks], and sometimes I wonder why she likes me so much. Since we don’t know one another in our outside life, on the surface I’m nothing like her and often that’s as far as people go to know someone—the surface. But she always speaks with respect, goes the extra mile to communicate in deferential ways, is a tipper, and in group texts with her friends who also come over to see her kitty while she is gone, specifically says to make sure they let me know when they’re coming over so as not to waste my time because “her time is valuable.” And it’s actually kind of shocking to have someone make space in this regard; because left and right, I block and don’t communicate when people let me know in one way or another that it’s an exercise in futility to keep attempting. Because if it’s obvious you don’t value my precious time, the only place we can go is “angst.”

So last night, I was playing with her kitty next to the pole she’d recently installed in her living room, listening to the very meditative instrumental music channel she had on, and made to say goodbye to Mina, and there, right in her hallway were several big Cat Palmer prints—a large Last Supper and a smaller print of a masked nude, tummy markered in Spanish—that I recognized from Cat’s FB. And even though I’m sorry to say that not all feminists show up in their world as what they preach they are, seeing those prints after the day I’d had, realizing in an “aha!” that this lady was a feminist then backtracking to how she’s always treated me was such a revelatory moment that it confirmed the legitimacy of quelling my doubts. I’m no Jemel but I give much, show up for my world in whatever way it feels possible to do so and my time IS valuable, so thank you Mina’s mom for dimming the noise of a world so that I could better hear myself]