I woke up this morning and checked the news; I saw all the shit we're all seeing. I spent most of last week off of Twitter but it's Monday and like any addict I missed it so I'm back on. And of course it did the thing that it does sometimes, which was to provide me the thing I actually did need to see: the halls of Yale Law School impassable with students dressed in black, certain and somber. 

It is a very small slice of the whole thing, the news and the world, but this one is mine: I went to Yale as an undergraduate and I worked for the University after graduation. I spent years & years & years there. It is the only place other than Los Angeles that I would call home.

Like Los Angeles, people who've never been have a lot of opinions about Yale. Say you went there and some near-stranger will joke knowingly about your parents' expectations and their bank accounts; I've had people clean stop speaking to me, mid-conversation, when the fact comes up. "You wouldn't be interested in what I have to say anyway." It's not a serious problem to have, but it is persistent and frustrating.

It is especially frustrating because, honestly, dweebily, I loved Yale. Forget the proper noun of it for a second, I loved college: Yale doesn't mean anything abstract to me, it means pitchers of beer and Belgian frites at Rudy's and writing essays in the greenhouse-glass of Booktrader and the night B and I lay in the grass of Trumbull and he said "some things it's easier to say when you don't have to look at a person," looking up at the stars. It's M & J & N & E & C & L & B&S our weird dumb adventures, the years we spent shaking out of old skins and growing into new ones together. It's where I learned how to drink; it's where I re-learned how to eat; it's where I learned that loving someone thoughtlessly is so much worse than just leaving them alone. 

I understand that Yale means bigger things than what it meant-- means-- to me. It feels selfish, sometimes, to claim that anyone else needs to see it as nuanced, when in fact its force in the world, as an institution, is blunt and systemic-level. And when so often it and its students are doing exactly what you'd expect Yale to do.  

So it is heartening, in that I feel it in my heart, when I am reminded that Yale is an institution but it is also a mass of people who are also having their own specific experiences, who will also remember it as a series of long walks and late nights. That Yale is not just Yale: it is men and women filling a hallway with their bodies and saying this is injustice, it will not stand. That we are everywhere, people are, if you know how to look for us. I don't always recognize the Yale I know when other people talk about it, but this morning I saw those familiar hallways filled with those bodies, intent on making their existence an act of defiance, and I felt such a sharp longing for my home.

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I haven't written anything this week, but speaking of solidarity, you owe it to yourself, especially if you are not fat, to read this essay on the medical establishment's horrific and systemic mistreatment of fat people.