03/26/18

This weekend was definitely not one of my greats

Friday night started out with Tem landing from a business trip so I left from catching up with Vanessa and Mike to see her. I got to her place she was already in bed I felt pretty rejected and on top of that she informed me that if I couldn't fulfill her needs while she was away that she would find another guy who could. Who knows how much she talks to her ex-husband while shes on these trips. Saturday I visited my parents as if the night before wasn't enough of an example of relationship fears spending time with my parents alone in sparsely populated Fulton County didn't do me any favors.

I was hurt by what Tem said and her actions the night before but I missed her so I came back to Columbus that same day. I texted her asking if I could see her (earlier in the day I told her I think I should take some space for the weekend) She texted back and told me I should take my space, that it would suck because she would be gone most of Sunday but that it was what I asked for. I didn't want to fight her on the issue so I sat in my home getting some things done and relaxing to spend the night in alone. A few hours went by and she messaged me again asking when I would be over...I misunderstood her text earlier she had been waiting for me to go over to her place. I arrived at the end of this emotional 24 hours and we sat on her couch talking.

Sunday morning she left to visit her parents and I went back to my place to lesson plan. I spent the day putting in 3rd quarter grades and preparing for the short week before spring break. Got groceries, showered, and was ready for the work week. Tem and I got chipotle for dinner and went to her place. Alicia had texted me asking if I would reply to living with her this August. She asked 3 weeks ago March 4th I held off because Tem and I have basically been living together for the past 4 and a half months. I asked Tem what I should tell Alicia Tem said we needed to discuss some things first. We looked for a new apartment together for an hour or more after the search Tem informed me that it wasn't exactly a discussion and that she did not want to live with me. I felt hurt and very confused.

For probably the past 176 days or so we have spent every night we could together. Our apartments are roughly 2,112 feet apart. I've probably made that trip 5 times a week for the past 25 weeks both ways. That's 528,000 feet which equals out to exactly 100 miles of walking back and forth between our apartments. I wake up next to this woman I walk that 2,112 feet back to my house put on work clothes, make coffee and head to work. When I leave work I drive to my house eat, shower, and change then walk back to her apartment to stay the night and repeat the routine. Unless I have to get up early to go to the gym. Then she comes to my apartment and is forced out of bed at 6:30 where she drives back to her bed to continue to sleep for another hour or more. That 2,112 feet is basically an outdoor hallway to my closet and pantry. Tem pays $1,375.00 a month for her apartment entirely on her own. I couldn't understand why she'd prefer to pay $687.50 a month or $8,250.00 for a year to continue to travel those 2,112 feet back and forth back and forth. There are 493 days until August 1st 2019 which is now the soonest date we could move in together. That's 1,478,400 feet of travel between my apartment and hers I will make in that time if I continue to visit her at the rate I have been for the past five months. 280 miles. 280 miles for me to walk and $8,250.00 dollars for her to spend.

She told me her friends when they were younger had bad experiences moving in too early with boyfriends. She also said I've never lived with a girlfriend before so I have no idea what to expect.
She told me because I used the term 'roommate' that I wasn't ready.
She said because I haven't used the word 'love' yet that I wasn't ready.

No discussion.
Rejected.

It's frustrating to me and I've been struggling to move past this choice. I guess she never thought that maybe there's a reason I never moved in with a girlfriend...maybe I understand exactly what to expect and that is EXACTLY why I wasn't dumb enough to rush into moving in with someone like her friends seemed to have. Maybe I understand exactly what the word love means. Maybe a one year lease with someone is easier to get out of than those words. Maybe I know EXACTLY what that word means to me and what it means to be given to someone. Maybe I want that moment to be right, not rushed, not out of routine, comfort, or because an arbitrary amount of time has passed where society has deemed it appropriate for that word to be tossed back and forth. Maybe I want to wait for a moment on a mountain during sunset, or a perfect day in Iceland. Maybe I want to wait until it's warm and the stars are out. Or maybe I want to wait until her marriage with another man she said she loved is legally dissolved. It's as if I am penalized for not senselessly living with people I'm not ready to live with when I was younger. It's as if I am penalized for not senselessly throwing a word around that means a great deal.
We've been living together for the past 176 days and there is still another 128 days before August 1st.

But it wasn't a discussion. My thoughts and my feelings were predetermined for me by a group of women in a group chat. Even to think the sole purpose of me moving in was financial which not only makes me feel ridiculously sleazy, shallow, and insulted but doesn't even make logical sense. If I live with Alicia I'll pay $550 in rent. If I moved in with Tem I'd pay $687.50 a month. I'd be spending $1,650 more that year. It makes me feel like Tem has no idea the kind of man I am...she has no idea about my character.

The more and more I think about this situation the more frustrated and insulted I feel. I'm trying, I'm really trying to move past this but it's something my brain can't seem to comprehend. I wish she would have said she wanted to spend more time living a lone after her previous relationship ended but even that doesn't make logical sense since we spend 7 nights a week sleeping together. Even on the nights I hang out with my friends, or she hangs out with hers she or I will literally just come over to sleep next to one another...

ugh I need to stop thinking about this. This weekend was a shit show to say the least. I'm looking forward to spending some time away in Seattle this weekend with my friends.

03/18/18

The Utes Must Go!

The beginning of the end of freedom upon their own reservation came in the spring of 1878, when a new agent reported for duty at White River. The agent’s name was Nathan C. Meeker, former poet, novelist, newspaper correspondent, and organizer of cooperative agrarian colonies. Most of Meeker’s ventures failed, and although he sought the agency position because he needed the money, he was possessed of a missionary fervor and sincerely believed that it was his duty as a member of a superior race to “elevate and enlighten” the Utes. As he phrased it, he was determined to bring them out of savagery through the pastoral stage to the barbaric, and finally to “the enlightened, scientific, and religious stage.” Meeker was confident he could accomplish all this in “five, ten, or twenty years.”

In his humorless and overbearing way, Meeker set out systematically to destroy everything the Utes cherished, to make them over into his own image, as he believed he had been made in God’s image. His first unpopular action was to move the agency fifteen miles down White River, where there was fine pastureland suitable for plowing. Here Meeker planned to build a cooperative agrarian colony for Ute Indians, but he overlooked the fact that the Utes had long been using the area as a hunting ground and for pasturing their horses. The site he chose to build agency buildings on was a traditional racing strip where the Utes enjoyed their favorite sport of betting on pony races.

...Also to assist him in his great crusade, Meeker brought his wife, Arvilla, and his daughter, Josie, to the agency. He employed seven white workmen, including a surveyor, to lay out an irrigation canal, a lumberman, a bridge builder, a carpenter, and a mason. These men were expected to teach the Utes their trades while they were building the new agrarian paradise.

It was Meeker’s fancy to have the Utes address him as Father Meeker (in their savage state he looked upon them as children), but most of them called him “Nick,” much to his displeasure.

By the spring of 1879 Meeker had a few agency buildings under construction and forty acres of land plowed. Most of the work was done by his white employees, who were paid money for their efforts. Meeker could not understand why the Utes also expected money for building their very own cooperative agrarian community, but in order to get his irrigation ditches dug, he agreed to pay money to thirty Utes. They were willing workers until Meeker’s funds were exhausted; then they went away to hunt or attend pony races. “Their needs are so few that they do not wish to adopt civilized habits,” Meeker complained to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. “What we call conveniences and comforts are not sufficiently valued by them to cause them to undertake to obtain them by their own efforts … the great majority look upon the white man’s ways with indifference and contempt.” He proposed a course of action to correct this barbaric condition: first, take away the Utes’ hundreds of ponies so that they could not roam and hunt, replace the ponies with a few draft horses for plowing and hauling, and then as soon as the Utes were thus forced to abandon the hunt and remain near the agency, he would issue no more rations to those who would not work. “I shall cut every Indian down to the bare starvation point,” he wrote Colorado’s Senator Henry M. Teller, “if he will not work.”

The Utes are actual, practical Communists and the government should be ashamed to foster and encourage them in their idleness and wanton waste of property. Living off the bounty of a paternal but idiotic Indian Bureau, they actually become too lazy to draw their rations in the regular way but insist on taking what they want wherever they find it. Removed to Indian Territory, the Utes could be fed and clothed for about one half what it now costs the government.
-William B. Vickers, Denver Tribune

Honorable N. C. Meeker, the well-known Superintendent of the White River agency, was formerly a fast friend and ardent admirer of the Indians. He went to the agency in the firm belief that he could manage the Indians successfully by kind treatment, patient precept and good example. But utter failure marked his efforts and at last he reluctantly accepted the truth of the border truism that the only truly good Indians are dead ones.

Vickers wrote considerably more, and his article was reprinted across Colorado under the title “The Utes Must Go!” By late summer of 1879, most of the white orators who abounded in frontier Colorado were uttering the applause-producing cry The Utes Must Go! whenever they were called upon to speak in public places.

...Ouray was a dying man in 1880 when the Indian Bureau brought him to Washington to defend the future of his people. Ill with nephritis, he bowed to the wishes of Big Eyes Schurz and other officials who decided “the Utes must go” to a new reservation in Utah—on land the Mormons did not want. Ouray died before the Army herded his people together in August, 1881, for the 350-mile march out of Colorado into Utah. Except for a small strip of territory along the southwest corner—where a small band of Southern Utes was allowed to live—Colorado was swept clean of Indians. Cheyenne and Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche, Jicarilla and Ute—they had all known its mountains and plains, but now no trace of them remained but their names on the white man’s land.
-Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

03/11/18

 

Standing Bear Becomes a Person 1879

Judge Dundy issued a writ of habeas corpus upon the general, requiring him to bring the Ponca prisoners into court and show by what authority he held them. Crook obeyed the writ by presenting his military orders from Washington, and the district attorney for the United States appeared before the judge to deny the Poncas’ right to the writ on the ground that Indians were “not persons within the meaning of the law.”

Thus began on April 18, 1879, the now almost forgotten civil-rights case of Standing Bear v. Crook. The Poncas’ lawyers, Webster and Poppleton, argued that an Indian was as much a “person” as any white man and could avail himself of the rights of freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. When the United States attorney stated that Standing Bear and his people were subject to the rules and regulations which the government had made for tribal Indians, Webster and Poppleton replied that Standing Bear and any other Indian had the right to separate themselves from their tribes and live under protection of United States laws like any other citizens.

The climax of the case came when Standing Bear was given permission to speak for his people: “I am now with the soldiers and officers. I want to go back to my old place north. I want to save myself and my tribe. My brothers, it seems to me as if I stood in front of a great prairie fire. I would take up my children and run to save their lives; or if I stood on the bank of an overflowing river, I would take my people and fly to higher ground. Oh, my brothers, the Almighty looks down on me, and knows what I am, and hears my words. May the Almighty send a good spirit to brood over you, my brothers, to move you to help me. If a white man had land, and someone should swindle him, that man would try to get it back, and you would not blame him. Look on me. Take pity on me, and help me to save the lives of the women and children. My brothers, a power, which I cannot resist, crowds me down to the ground. I need help. I have done.”

Judge Dundy ruled that an Indian was a “person” within the meaning of the habeas corpus act, that the right of expatriation was a natural, inherent, and inalienable right of the Indian as well as the white race, and that in time of peace no authority, civil or military, existed for transporting Indians from one section of the country to another without the consent of the Indians or to confine them to any particular reservation against their will.

“I have never been called upon to hear or decide a case that appealed so strongly to my sympathy,” he said. “The Poncas are amongst the most peaceable and friendly of all the Indian tribes. … If they could be removed to the Indian Territory by force, and kept there in the same way, I can see no good reason why they might not be taken and kept by force in the penitentiary at Lincoln, or Leavenworth, or Jefferson City, or any other place which the commander of the forces might, in his judgment, see proper to designate. I cannot think that any such arbitrary authority exists in this country.”

When Judge Dundy concluded the proceedings by ordering Standing Bear and his Ponca band released from custody, the audience in the courtroom rose to its feet and, according to a newspaper reporter, “such a shout went up as was never heard in a courtroom.” General Crook was the first to reach Standing Bear to congratulate him.

At first the United States district attorney considered appealing the decision, but after studying Judge Dundy’s written opinion (a brilliant essay on human rights), he made no appeal to the Supreme Court. The United States government assigned Standing Bear and his band a few hundred acres of unclaimed land near the mouth of the Niobrara, and they were back home again.

As soon as the surviving 530 Poncas in Indian Territory learned of this astonishing turn of events, most of them began preparations to join their relatives in Nebraska. The Indian Bureau, however, was not sympathetic. Through its agents the bureau informed the Ponca chiefs that only the Great Council in Washington could decide if and when the tribe might return. The bureaucrats and politicians (the Indian Ring) recognized Judge Dundy’s decision as a strong threat to the reservation system; it would endanger the small army of entrepreneurs who were making fortunes funneling bad food, shoddy blankets, and poisonous whiskey to the thousands of Indians trapped on reservations. If the Poncas were permitted to leave their new reservation in Indian Territory and walk away as free American citizens, this would set a precedent which might well destroy the entire military-political-reservation complex.

In his annual report, Big Eyes Schurz admitted that the Poncas in Indian Territory “had a serious grievance,” but he strongly opposed permitting them to return to their homeland because it would make other Indians “restless with a desire to follow their example” and thereby cause a breakup of the territorial reservation system.

...The Interior Department first issued a statement that Standing Bear’s brother “Big Snake, a bad man” had been “shot accidentally.” The American press, however, growing more sensitive to treatment of Indians since the Standing Bear case, demanded an investigation in Congress. This time the military-political-reservation complex was operating in the familiar climate of Washington, and nothing came of the investigation.

The Poncas of Indian Territory had learned a bitter lesson. The white man’s law was an illusion; it did not apply to them. And so, like the Cheyennes, the diminishing Ponca tribe was split in two—Standing Bear’s band free in the north, the others prisoners in the Indian Territory.

-Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

03/04/18

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.
― Norman Maclean,

This weekend she got the papers signed
This week Alicia asked if she could move in when Travis moved out
Thursday Tem and I went to an escape room for date night
The Arnold Expo is here this weekend
3 months left of my first year teaching

My life right now is near perfect. I live on a balancing beam over a canyon, at least that is how it is perceived at times. Sitting calmly, a boat in the storm, careful not to rock the boat for fear it will tip and the single thread could unravel everything...

and toward the canyon I fall.

Near perfect isn't perfect nor is it complete disarray.
Do I stretch out towards something more risking the equilibrium
Or remain in silent contentment?
It is hard to know which path to walk and we can only ever walk one
If only we could somehow preview the paths, if only I could merely tip the lid slightly to peer in and carefully close the corner.
Or in delight rip the lid entirely off

power struggles and cold wars

Why should I ask for more? Is not my life as it currently exists more than it has ever been before?
2017 the best year of my life 2018 looking to top it
Why rock? Why stretch?
It was the only option I voiced...
It was the only option, I voiced
Because you can't unspeak something
Because we can't crack open corners and peek down pathways
We either walk through the doorway or we close it

It's so simple for my thirty year old self to look back at the previous versions of me and critic choices, everything is so clear up here on the ladder of life.

If only I could grasp at the forty year old Adam
Which path would he like?
Do I reach out?
Do I say those unretractable words?
Do I voice the unvoiced option?
We live, and we learn.
If only we could learn and then live.

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.
― Norman Maclean

Khalid & Normani - Love Lies