I am spending the long weekend moving out of the apartment that I have lived in for the past two and a half years on the border of Central Park.
So far, since I detest and delay packing, most of my moving has been in shedding, giving away inessential objects. Clearing out space has been a life-giving task in surprising ways.
I recently removed my no-longer needed dresser and moved my desk into its place by my bed. Discovering, in that process, I have very late in my sojourn in this room made it more beautiful and functional than it was before. I’m having a bit of an Everything Everywhere All at Once moment imagining the person I might have been if I had spent the entire pandemic at this desk, curled up on the perfectly-heighted ottoman rather than my faux-standing desk arrangement on standing on a yoga mat in front of my dresser, laptop perched precariously on a pile of books.
Getting rid of the inessential can be freeing. Perhaps if I had gotten rid of the clothes I never wear a year ago, I would have spent the past year with this beautiful working space that I have enjoyed the past week.
Food for thought.
I’m not a keen practitioner of letting go of things. I hold onto both grudges and memorabilia from college with a vise-like grip. This trait (for good and ill) stems from the desire to remember well—to recall history correctly, to hold onto the facts sacramentalized in things, to remember who I am from chapters long since closed.
And so moving has always seemed to me a kind of death. Because you do have to leave things behind and let things go. Its costly to bring something with you, so you try to prioritize only moving what is most prized or necessary. When you move forward, you take what is essential, the things of the deepest meaning that hold the most weight. You have to decide: what weight will I carry with me, and what will only weigh me down?
And so, as I clear out clothes I’ve long ceased wearing and books I’ve only half-read, I have been thinking about what we ground our identity upon and how we know what we are without measuring our self by what we cling to.
Perhaps remembering is not solely one individual’s task, perhaps the remembering of my life is not even primarily mine to do. Perhaps, as my friend is fond of repeating over and over: “whatever partakes in God is safe in God.” And the rest you can’t take with you anyway. So might as well let it go.
Affectionately yours,
Keats in the Sheets
“There is no greater Sin after the 7 deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet”— to Benjamin Robert Haydon, May 1817
— From the Blog—
Why Christians Shouldn’t Stay in Hotels
“In the Middle Ages, it was an obligation of the bishops to provide houses of hospitality or hospices for the wayfarer,” quoth Peter Maurin.
Two weekends ago, we stayed in a hotel, which, I have come to believe is a scandal to the Catholic Church.
Getting rid of hotels is the third stage on the journey of the heart to peace. This follows the second stage, which is divesting from diamonds, and the first stage, which is canceling Amazon Prime. Diamonds really aren’t that impressive or magnificent unless they’re Elizabeth Taylor-sized, and Amazon is actually a pretty bad website, which becomes more clear the less time you spend on it. There’s a connection to be made here about exploitative labor practices showing their fruits as shiny and vapid products that aren’t as great as their prevalence in and broad acceptance by mainstream culture suggest they ought to be.
Read the full post here.
Keats in the Streets
“I am however young, writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness” to George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819
—Sweet Unrest writing out in the world—
Why Regis Students Debated Rikers Alumni for Cash Bail, Sojourners
I was delighted to be allowed to write about this project of Rikers Debate Project and Regis High School. Although it was a bit of a challenge to write about an event whose contents were off the record, I found the story of why we were there and how it impacted the participants was an enough of a story to tell.
Please read here.
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Two Catholic Dioceses Announce Paid Parental Leave Plans in April, FemCatholic
With their new policy, which retroactively went into effect August 21, 2021, the Archdiocese of Denver has become the fifth dioceses in the United States to offer twelve weeks of fully paid leave to employees, joining the Archdioceses of Chicago, New York, Raleigh, and the Diocese of Omaha.
The Archdiocese of Denver cited the decision to offer this leave as a specifically pro-life action. Their leadership expressed hope that other dioceses would trust in God to provide for an action that would create a culture more in line with the teachings of the Church.
You can read the full piece here.
Keats Reads
“The Literary world I know nothing about” to George & Georgiana Keats, Feb 1819
—Highlights from the Good Reads shelf—
Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado-Perez
For the reader who loved Ladyparts and wants more of the same: Carolina Criado-Perez, British journalist, offers a stunning data investigation into the fundamentally anti-woman bent of our “gender netural” data. My friend Monica recommended it, and I tore through it in two days.
We live in a world that tries to be gender neutral, but in fact fails. The default gender without specifying “female” is generally, statistically speaking, male. Gender neutral words—like doctor or author—are often interpreted as male. And so are is the word person. The “drawing test” asked children to draw a “scientist” —out of several thousands, only 28 drew a woman. Similar results resulted when asked to draw a “person.” And perhaps that’s reflecting what they see. In a study of film scenes from 1990 to 2005, only 17% of actors in crowd scenes were women.
Marginalization of non-motorized travel is a marginalization of women. Women are more affected by inadequate walkways, since they are often walking children to daycare or school, quite often with prams, wagons, or strollers. Traveling around the city with a stroller or buggy can take four times as long. 64% of public transit riders are female and women are 2/3 more likely than men to take public transit as part of their commute.
Vienna—a city that Criado-Perez exemplifies as taking gender into account as a factor in its city planning—improved crossing locations, ramps, increased pedestrian street-lining. They discovered that it lead to a greater increase of GDP — women were able to do the unpaid work caretaking and home-managing work (shuttling children, grocery shopping, running errands) and still get to the office on time.
Women do 61 % of the household labor in households around the world, and 75% of the unpaid labor (usually domestic labor, childcare, or eldercare). On average, men spend 30 mintes to two hours a day doing unpaid labor, where women spend three hours to six hours. Single women may find that some things are easier with husbands, but housework isn’t one of them. Husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women. This unpaid labor puts a strain on women. Women under 55 have worse outcomes than men or elderly women after coming out of heart surgery. Often because they instantly go back into caregiving roles after an intense heart surgery.
In a world that crunches data to justify doing things “efficiently” and “equitably,” Criado-Perez points out that the data sets collected are often solely on the male experience and male body without accounting at all for the female body and its subsequent experiences. Female bodies are not complex mysteries so much as they remain unprioritized subjects for study. And so we misundertand the female experience because the lens through which we understand our world—data—has an empty space where a woman ought to be.
Mr. Brown’s Bylines
“Brown, who is always one’s friend in a disaster, applied a leech to the eyelid, and there is no inflammation this morning though the ball hit me on the sight.” to George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819
—Pieces from good friends, and from writers whose words have been a friend to me—
Denise Gococo-Benore, “‘Turning Red’ Shines Light on Women’s Intergenerational Struggle for Self-Acceptance,” FemCatholic
Denise bring profundity to all her endeavors, even a children’s film review.
There was no way I wasn't going to like Disney Pixar's Turning Red. I’m an Asian American whose pre-teen years fell in the early 2000s. I made straight As and landed the career my parents wanted for me. And, for a brief period in college, I was known to my friends as a red panda (I’m still unsure as to the exact reason, but was never upset because red pandas are pretty cute). I went into watching this movie with a positive bias, already impressed with the writers for capturing some of the cultural mainstays of my childhood: boy bands, virtual pets, strict parents, dim sum, and loud aunties. But what I didn’t expect was Turning Red’s powerful message about accepting the different parts of ourselves.
Read the full essay here.
Bo Bonner, “Considerations on the Sacrament of Matrimony” DesMoines Diocese
Bo is a fellow Notre Dame CCEP cohort member who spoke on matrimony for the catechetical institute at the Diocese of Des Moines.
But what I mean by this is by the time the late 1800s to 1900s roll around, it is basically impossible to imagine life not dominated by the middle-class. The proof of this is everyone working class is aspirationally middle-class, and even the ruling oligarchs show up in jeans, because they want to remind you that they are middle-class too. Even if they have a billion dollars.
The middle-class reign supreme. And the ideas that the middle-class have, even when they don't think they have access to it, are seen as an ideal life.
Listen to Bo’s talk on matrimony here.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever
— John Keats, from Endymion