So I been reading this Frank Chin novel Gunga Din Highway, a 50s American of Chinese descent novel (well, a contemporary novel with that setting), and it is nice to see the multiplicities of experience, but it seems much more difficult to write in view of that: it all feels somehow very different from my own limited experience, and again it's not clear why I am so compelled, other than this uneasy sort of hatred and disgust. I guess I will just need to own up to my own shameful class background, and how that has skewed my experience. And I need to make more progress--I have gotten lazy in this latter phase of classes, and have been thoroughly unproductive prosewise, with very little poetry to boot, either. In many ways, as I don't intend this blog to be fully narrative, I feel as if the death of the old logging activities has made me lackadaisical, fallen off from my old routines of working out and such: much less reflective in the longer term, much less self-textual, much more episodic. It's just a different mode.

I was thinking meanwhile in terms of politics, and realistically how far I can actually get. I am thinking of doing a massive Manhattan schlep on Wednesday, emboldened by my freedom and my subway-less wanderings from before, but the point of that is that I can save on MetroFare and still get this manga Eagle, the first Asian-American president. But realistically, what with the war coming and all, there is little chance I'd ever rise that high. For I guess I still have some leftover ambition--in the first grade, I memorized, like a good little chinaboi, all the presidents, and could still recite them now, though with perhaps more of a pause--but when it was mentioned that a previous student in that little red schoolhouse had stated the ambition to be president, and had his wish fulfilled (he was two years ahead, and I guess now we are the same class), I, in my meekness which I bear with me to this day, never mentioned it again, not wanting to be a copycat. Of course, then it was more 6-year-old ambition, rather than the anger and impotence I feel now. Well, that an arrogance. So maybe I've not made that much progress after all. The point, though, is that there are other levels, but there is only so far that a gaysian leftist (and a short one, at that) can go within the system. I might just hafta grit my teeth and be a principal, or just a teacher, or something more modest externally--past the adolescent desire to cure AIDS (which would only cure the rich first, of course), and focusing not on helping strangers to win their praise, but helping those you know, or get to.

So I should clean, and I should write. And I should come up with a template for lesson plans. Now or later which is never.