Sleepless Nights, Wokeness and Brain Farts

I woke up at four-thirty to pee and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Don’t you hate when that happens! Everything that I had heard or saw the day before waltzed through my head like it had all the time in the world to linger in the silence. One particular topic was growing like mushrooms in the dark and what was keeping me awake in the wee hours of the morning was spelling and punctuation, of all things. Finally I got up, made myself a cup of Land O Lake French vanilla cocoa and sat down at my computer. Coming up that afternoon was our monthly creative writing group and I had a confrontation to face. Confrontation is not quite the right word, maybe perplexing mystery would better describe the editing one of the guys in group made on the round-robin story we’ve been working on and I had typed up. Situations like that---when writing is involved---make me nervous because I never know when my dyslexia, unbeknownst to me, will or did show up.

I’ll give you an example. The text in one of the segments I wrote for our round-robin read: “All families have their secrets but B.J.’s is safe with me.” He highlighted ‘families’ and he tagged the ‘alright’ in my dialogue, “B.J.? Are you alright?” With all the problems in the world why would something so silly be the thing that drove me out of bed? After a google search I decided, yes, the ‘families’ (vs ‘familys’) was right but a case could be for using either ‘alright’ or ‘all right.' Even after checking and rechecked each highlight on the document I dreaded going to group that afternoon to debate things that trivial. We are setting world records for weather events and mass shootings, we have an x-president under indictment as the front runner going into the primaries and a proxy war between the USA and Russia still rages on in Europe rages. But my subconscious mind apparently can file those things deep enough that they don’t deprive me of sleep. Maybe that’s because no one on campus is talking about that stuff. It’s like it only exists on our television sets. At lunch lately the main topic of conversation has been the high cost of strawberries this season and why did management take the later risers breakfast off the menu. Maybe it’s because talking and worrying about the big things that we can’t resolve on our own makes us all feel hopeless so we focus on the trivial stuff? Or maybe we’re just a group of boring, self-centered old people?

I’m tired of people being confrontational over nothing, though. In book club this week we were discussing Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Everyone with a brain can see how this book could cause some tension in a book club but I didn’t expect to get jumped on for what I thought was a neutral statement of fact. I was one of the first people to speak up and all I said was, “I read a lot of the negative reviews on Amazon. Out of 4,688 reviews 76% gave the book 5 stars and 3% gave it one and two stars.” At that point our resident racist, Trump supporter and devout Catholic jumped in with, “It’s called free speech!” You could have cut her hostility with a knife. She was obviously gunning for us liberals and for the entire hour her only contribution to the the discussion was her chiming in with: “In your opinion” or “in the author’s opinion” with a hostile accent on 'opinion.' At least she showed up. I overheard another Trumpests say she wasn’t going to go to book club anymore because “Some of those people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.” We are a pretty ‘woke’ group and we don’t usually read fluff which makes for some interesting discussions. It’s one of the highlights of my month when the twelve us meet.

 

Can you believe how quickly one person---namely a certain governor from Florida---can popularize a word like ‘woke’ in such a short time? I guess it’s been around since the mid-1900s and was coined by progressive Black Americans. Trump throws the word around a little as well, but DeSantis is the king of trying to turn it into a dirty word only to be spoken in disgust and something to fight against if you’re an ultra-conservative. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to be woke means you are “informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality.” But governor DeSantis’ website defines woke as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." His website also says, "We reject woke ideology.” I’m pretty sure most woke people reject him as well.

 

I started writing this post the morning the edited round-robin document kept me from falling back to sleep. That afternoon our creating writing group was meeting and I wasn’t looking forward to going this time. But as it turned out the document I typed up and the guy in group edited---the document that drove me out of bed----not only was it highlighted it had also been corrected under the yellow highlights. So when I looked at the document and saw ‘families’ and ‘alright’ highlighted and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them it was because there wasn’t anything wrong. It was my dyslexia driven insecurities causing me to freak out. I’ve been used to my husband’s style of editing where he just highlighted mistakes for ME to go back and fix. It took awhile in group for me to finally understand where I was leaking IQ points but I was deeply relieved when I finally did understand the source of my brain farts. 

By the way, our round-robin story is a fun read. We each write in the voice of one of the characters and I'm the oldest sibling in a dysfunctional family. I wish I could share it here but I'd have to ask permission from the other writers and so far no one on this campus knows I blog. We're talking about doing a reading of it in our fireside lobby later this year, though, as a way to get more people involved in our writing group.

 

Until next Wednesday…©