Connective Cube

I once wrote a long paper for graduate school about community garden movements in post-9/11 New York City. Brooklyn, specifically, where I lived at the time. The writing process made me fall out of love with living in New York City. I wanted to live somewhere cheap where I could organize my wobbly executive functioning and attempt to piece together 100 pages of coherent writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djr7fp_JxgA

I left my home of nine years to complete this really long paper that required reading material that I can scarcely recall in detail right now. The book titles, and the general themes, sure. But could I quote a passage? Only if I practiced in my own head in front of a mirror for multiple hours. Staring at myself pretending to be someone else gets boring after awhile, especially when I already have an inborn proclivity to stare at my own image above anything else.

I wish I could quote Lacan right now. In order to do so, I pull up Lacan quotes on a search engine.

“What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one’s cards face up on the table?”

The alternate is face down, my default setting. No one besides me, my thesis advisor who I don’t speak with, and a department administrator who didn’t like my lack of formalism in writing, have read this paper. Most people have no idea I labored for a year of my life reading a stack of 100 books to write this paper. I refer to it often in my own head.

I didn’t write it with an audience in mind. It was a distillation in my own shift of political and personal consciousness, and it weaved through Jack Halberstam and belle hooks as much as highly designed books about the promise of community garden movements.

Is our new form of developing green space in urban environments a new form of colonization? I didn’t ask the question so neatly five years ago.

One of my extreme weaknesses about writing is my intense fear of reading my own writing. I glaze over it, treating revision as fixing items that a more detail oriented person would catch. I am also terrified that someone will secretly think I am a moron and tell other people how stupid I am because I make mistakes. It scares me that what I am writing is by no means original.

My feelings aren’t that extreme anymore. They persist. And everytime I take the Myers-Briggs, I land squarely as an INFP, even when major life shifts occur. This is natural, apparently, for my typology.

It still makes me cringe when people say that mostly abandoned blocks should be razed for greenspace. I think people don’t think too deeply about the history of marriage, a major organizational tool for social relations.

Is Manifest Destiny attempting to inward? In what name?