December 2015 – Elizabeth DeOrnellas

What Fight the Power Means When You’re the Adult in the Room

Have you ever wanted to break something?

I have a recurring fantasy about smashing wine glasses. It doesn’t have anything to do with potential metaphorical implications – they’re just small, and thin, and, if you’re going to do it, the point is shattering.

Not sure why that particular vision has stuck around my head so long, I just know that if I was to ever direct a scene in which metaphorical catharsis turned literal, that’s what the heroine would be doing.

Of course, here’s the problem with that – in said scene, you eventually end up with a crunchy carpet of broken glass, and, if the theoretical heroine is anything like me, she’d then feel obligated to sweep up.

That’s my main issue with rebellion. I’m all in favor of window smashing and flamethrowing – except I know how much work it takes to get to the point where you own a window, and I’ve seen how long it takes the scars to heal when someone gets burned.

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10 Things About the Bay

Is it too early in December for year-end Top 10 lists? I think not. My “I’ve been in California a year” moment passed in November; so, in honor of said milestone, here are 10 Things I’ve Learned About the Bay:

There are bins of skateboards in the thrift stores.
Some time in November the temperature hits the 60s, and people start to talk incessantly of “winter.”
Tree trimming three palm trees takes a week, and the resulting trees look like chewed-on toothpicks.
Water sports with a following include synchronized swimming.
Hoodies really have become acceptable corporate attire.
Yoga is the only religion no one questions.
Tech companies not only fill the roads with charter buses; they fill landlord’s rooms with people who need a weekday work apartment, while their family lives in the mountains or by the beach.
Carpool lanes are sometimes on the right, and apparently every traffic lane doesn’t need its own light.
California schools have a thing for bears – also banana slugs and trees.
Micro-climates are real. Be prepared.

The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time, from the inimitable James Baldwin, is a book in two parts:

-My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation

-Down At the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind

The first letter is only seven pages, and it is what (in format and content) most directly influences Ta-nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. It’s the kind of communication that seems too well put together to be worth picking apart. Go read it.

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Holiday Reading List 2015

“Just because it’s Christmas – And at Christmas you tell the truth” –Love Actually

It’s that time of year. The time of year in which Thanksgiving has actually passed and this thing called December has started and I allow myself to use the word “Christmas.”

Sometimes I like to celebrate Christmas by listening to the latest “War on Christmas” diatribe and shaking my head at how strange it is to live in a deeply religious country that occasionally pretends to be secular.

Sometimes I like to celebrate Christmas by carefully employing the phrase “Happy Holidays” to emphasize that all that D.C. area political correctness sunk in, which is why I used to know at least two elementary school choir songs about Hanukkah (and still can’t ever decide how to spell it) and one about Kwanzaa (although my main memory of that holiday is that there was one black student in my high school journalism class, and he hated the end-of-year issue because someone would inevitably ask him if people for real celebrated that holiday – a question which was justifiably met with the same eye roll a Japanese friend gave to our freshman history teacher when she was asked if she wanted to explain to the class what Buddhism meant).

Mostly I don’t play that game.

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