Meandering

How much can a girl sleep? Well, quite a bit it seems. After this morning’s entry I went back to sleep. I have cut back on coffee. Not because I want it out of my life, just because. I love coffee but I don’t want to need it. Anyhow, that means that I have a more natural sense of tiredness. On this day, my only off day of the week, I told myself that if the urge came upon me to sleep, I would sleep.

At noon I woke up, cooked a delicious brunch of apple pancakes (made with Honeycrisp Apples of course) and scrambled eggs. Then I pulled out the computer. It is nice to have an entire day with nothing planned. That means that I don’t have to restrict my wandering mind to a schedule. I write in-between Facebook posts, hockey periods and information searches. Occasionally I just sit here and stare out into space, letting whatever may come fall into step without any urgency. It is not so much that I am easily distracted. Distraction is the way that I work.

So far today has been one full of connections that I needed to make in my head but not so much on paper. If you are going to tell a story you have to do some research. Years ago I did some research on northern Quebec and the Cree Nation but I needed to refresh my memory a bit. I dug some of the old documents out and tracked down some new ones. While that stuff may not sound like writing at all, it really is a big part of the process. I don’t have to necessarily use the information in the actual story but I have to know it. I have to be careful to not over or under represent the different cultures that I am writing about. Of course, part of the meaning behind Lives Lived is that culture is a construction that can be torn down and built in any manner one pleases. With that said, there is a base that we can jump off of if we choose. Our parents and forefathers lay the foundation but we have the choice to follow their lead or not.

I love being at home, especially on Saturdays. Saturdays have long been my day to study, write, cook and watch hockey. My manager, a dear friend for years now must remember my love of hockey and Saturdays off because she obliged me this week without my asking. Anyhow, before I get too far off track, I saw something at the market today that got me thinking.

So, I am making chili. Here in Michigan it is the perfect chili day. Low to mid 50’s and partly sunny and I have time to make a healthy slow cooker chili filled with veggie and the best beef around. So I went shopping for the ingredients. I was looking for diced tomatoes, kidney beans and tomato sauce. Where did I find these items?? In the “Hispanic Foods” section of the market. So….what exactly are Hispanic Foods and why are there diced tomatoes and tomatoes sauce in another section of the market for lower prices? I’m sure there are reasons but come on. Hispanic Foods??? What the heck does that mean?

This is how we go wrong. First we have Hispanic Foods and then we have Hispanic music and Hispanic Movies and Hispanic everything. This automatically causes a distinction between Hispanics and other cultures. Why would we do that? I am pretty sure that I can consume diced tomatoes and I am in fact not Hispanic. So why are we labeling foods like that?

This may seem like a small quirk that I have but this is how things go wrong folks. Anyone can eat tomatoes and kidney beans. They don’t have a darn nationality or race or whatever. They are just food items. They may hail from some part of the world but they don’t belong to any race or group of people.

As I was saying before, everything has to do with the book. As I stood there holding my “Hispanic Foods” I thought of Gabrielle, the protagonist of Lives Lived. She travels throughout the country looking for a place to belong. She leaves Detroit because she can’t find a place she feels comfortable because she is hard to label. She moves south because she figures that the labels will be clearer to her and maybe she will fall into the right one. She moves to Boston so she can live in a place that has labels but is, in her opinion, too clinical to focus on them. Eventually she flees the United States for Canada where she finds a different brand of labeling.

Gabrielle does not start to get better until she realizes that she does not fit in and that is okay. She doesn’t have to try to be “normal” she just has to try to live. The people in Lives Lived that figure that out are the ones that grow. The ones that are caught up in being the people that they are “supposed” to be have trouble.

This is the message. At the end of the day it does not matter if you are Cree, black, white, Muslim, Catholic, etc. All that really matters is that you are you, whoever that may be. Have I done the best job possible in conveying this message? There is the constant back and forth mood battle that Gabrielle faces but does she embrace her state of being enough? This is where the writing begins…after I start the chili of course.