Lying on the cold ground outside of Penn Station on Thursday night, surrounded by activists chanting “We Can’t Breathe” as I chanted those very same words myself, I felt my body. I couldn’t say how many times it has happened other than to say that it rarely does, and if you asked me to describe the feeling now, I couldn’t for the life of me. I call it a feeling and not an experience because that’s what it is: a feeling. Everything else seems like an experience in comparison. The magic in feeling my body is that I am not in control of it. It just happens to me. It feels as though there’s a shift in my being in which I go from experiencing my body through my consciousness to actually feeling my body, being my body. Continue reading
Author: typhilip1
How?
I’m not surprised in the slightest by the failure of the justice system to indict Darren Wilson. In the eyes of our society, black bodies and lives do not matter, and it’s no shock to anyone who knows any statistics on black male imprisonment that the law would side with an armed police officer’s right to self-defense before coming to the defense of an unarmed black man. The correlation is direct, it is salient, and it is hiding in plain sight behind the bars of our prisons. The justice system in no way favors black men, and so even one who was killed by said justice system is at the mercy of the same racism as those being charged with crime. Were Mike Brown still alive, it’s possible that he could be the one facing time for aggravated assault of a police officer and attempted robbery of the convenience store which he allegedly stole cigars from.
Not Feelin’ too Gouda
Cheese is definitely my favorite food. I am a strong advocate of cheese, have eaten it daily almost religiously, and believe that it can be incorporated into every meal of the day. Breakfast? Cheesy eggs. Lunch? Grilled cheese. Dinner? Fettuccine Alfredo. Dessert? Cheesecake. You name it, I will find a way to put cheese on it. Except not anymore, because I’m finding that cheese and my body no longer agree, and the way that I think about food and my body has been completely shifted.
Fictional Reality: the Danger of Matter over Mind
I think at this point in my life, I can safely say that I owe most of my coping mechanisms to the vast amounts of fantasy fiction that I’ve read. Cartesian dualism has been an integral part of the way in which I built my world, and up until this point has been the only way in which I know how to reconcile what happens inside of my head and what happens in the outside world.
Unruly Bodies 