Rhena Writes

Category: Uncategorized

  • How do you improve a community that was someone else’s dream?

    Daily writing prompt
    How would you improve your community?
    View all responses

    I live next a six lane highway.  I am deeply resentful of it. The county I live in is one of the wealthiest in the country. My neighbors are mostly working and middle class and immigrants. The highway is maintained by the state (of Maryland) but the sidewalks on either side are the responsibility of the county. Except for when it snows, when it’s the responsibility of the individual home owners. Except for the bus stops, which might fall under the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Or maybe the county. It’s unclear. 

    I’m an average homeowner and resident but I know more about those inner workings of the roads because living at the intersection of a county road and a state highway necessitates it. When we first moved in here, there was no sidewalk in front of our house in spite of the fact that it’s right next to a bus stop. I spend a lot of time emailing and on the phone with various people trying to get a sidewalk installed. Representatives of the county tried very hard to dissuade me. I kept sending pictures of elderly people walking in the road to get to the bus stop. One of my neighbors was a wheelchair user at the time and I told anyone who would listen about the time that he called for a ride share because the medical building he needed to go to was inaccessible to him in spite of the fact that he can see said facility from his front porch. 

    A man was killed when he was struck by a driver crossing the highway (at a crosswalk) about a mile up the road. The audit of the intersection resulted in removing a small section of fence that stood between the sidewalk and the crosswalk button. 

    A driver ran her car off the road and hit the fence around my property. My children were playing on the other side at the time. Needless to say, a sidewalk with an appropriate curb would have stopped her. 

    Eventually they installed the sidewalk. It was one of my greatest victories. A few more crosswalks were put in where neighbors and I had requested them, mostly near the parks and schools. But not much was done to actually slow drivers on the highway on our surrounding residential streets. 

    But I was still emailing and calling and tweeting (this was back in the days when I was still using that site), trying to get the speed limit lowered on the highway or at least some speed cameras and enforcement. On many nights, I could lie in my bed and all I would hear was cars (many with modified mufflers) drag racing up and down the highway outside my house. I’d call the non emergency police number many nights. Little changed. 

    The highway we live on connects outer ring suburbs to downtown Washington, DC where the streets are largely laid out on a grid, except for these wider roads, which shoot out from the center of the city likes spokes on a wheel. The highway I live next to is one of these spokes. The next spoke over would potentially be just as inviting to drag racers, but the residents along that spoke are wealthy enough that they have their own private security force replete with speed cameras. So the drag racers converge on spokes like ours where the residents rely on the county and state for safety and security. 

    A little girl died two blocks from my house in a car crash that was a result of this drag racing. 

    Some time after that, the speed limit was lowered. Some time after that, speed cameras were installed. 

    Too late. 

    Once upon a time, this place might have been the American dream of the suburbs. Single family homes, green lawns all the way from the front door to the street. No need for sidewalks when Dad can just hop into the car and drive into the city for work! Hey! The developers even left out the curbs so that homeowners can decide where exactly to place the driveway! No need to think about the messiness of women and children or oh, I don’t know, poor people? (You know the people who build and care and clean to maintain these beautiful homes and offices and the roads that connect them?)

    My six year old loves nothing more than to punt a ball as hard and as high as he can. (Ok, maybe he loves lego slightly more.) The problem is that the ball often ends up over the fence and in the street. We take him to the park a few blocks away from time to time. It’s just a big open field and a large parking lot. There’s no playground (in spite of promises made by the county that one would be coming). Sometimes there are a few neighborhood kids there  but mostly it seems that people use it as a spot to pull off from the highway. I see people eating or sleeping in there cars there. Sometimes people are working on their cars. Once after a recent snow, three pick up truck drivers used the parking lot to film themselves spinning doughnuts. That was nice (/s). 

    I’m always tense walking there. In spite of the crosswalk, I still worry about drivers coming off the highway too fast. We have strict rules about where the kids can and cannot bounce the ball to minimize them ending up in the middle of one of the more dangerous streets. 

    The other evening, as we approached, we could hear music. Soon, a man sitting at one of the benches playing a saxophone came into view. 

    My son turned to me. “How does he play so good?” he asked. I didn’t know. 

    The sky was moody above us. We could see dark clouds gathering next to the field. And the man kept playing. The wind was picking up a bit. And the kept playing. And my son booted the ball to himself and kept chasing after it. And I tried to pause to listen to the music but also my son kept asking me to play with him, to kick the ball or throw it to him. And so sometimes I did. And the man kept playing his saxophone. And the clouds kept clustering. And the wind kept doing its thing. And it was a maybe a jazzy tune but maybe all saxophone sounds like jazz to me. And my son kept playing. And the wind blew the man’s sheet music about and he got up to collect it and we started to leave. And he shouted something at us. And I couldn’t hear him and maybe he said “Rhena!” But he smiled. So I did too. And the traffic didn’t slow. No one came back to life. The drivers didn’t stop and exit their cars and pick up litter or even stop to listen. And he kept playing even as we walked away and even through the first drops of rain. 

  • Has anything changed?

    Daily writing prompt
    How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
    View all responses

    A few weeks ago, I had the bizarre experience of being in a very, very bougie place in DC. I’ve mentioned before here that I grew up in DC and many of my life experiences have been shaped by having observed power; by having spent a lot of time in close proximity to the very center of empire but not being a part of it. Being, rather, apart from it. In any case, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had fewer and fewer occasions to experience that world again. Which is all to say that it had been a while (and definitely since before the pandemic) that I had been in one of these “finer” corners of the DMV. It was very surreal. It was as if the pandemic never happened in that world. At least, it had that veneer. No one was in masks. There were no written signs about safety protocols. No containers of hand sanitizer out. Of course, if I had poked the surface, I’m sure I would have found changes and adaptations. Probably many of the staff lost loved ones or livelihoods or ways of life but they are probably also trained how to maintain appearances as if nothing changed. 

    I remember in the thick of the pandemic and lock-downs, watching movies or TV shows from before the pandemic and having to take a moment to remember, “Oh, yeah, we didn’t always wear masks everywhere, we didn’t always not shake hands.” I remember just watching old footage of crowded places made me feel a little uneasy. I read recently that even today, studios follow strict protocols to keep the actors from getting sick. So while they are presenting worlds and stories where the characters show no signs of there ever having been a pandemic, the key grips and food services and hair and makeup are still masked up. 

    Being in high-end DC had that feeling. I was being presented a world in which everything was care-free and easy. But behind the scenes, the people creating this world were not enjoying its ease. 

    It was head spinning when the next day, I went to take my girls to get their hair cut. I cut their hair (and my son’s and my husband’s and my parent’s) for the first year or so of the pandemic. It’s not easy work. So I was grateful when I was able to bring them back to the woman who’d been cutting their hair before the pandemic. She has her own salon attached to her house just outside the beltway in a largely immigrant community. It’s very small and worn down a bit, but we like it. During their haircuts, she was masked the whole time and when I checked in with her at the beginning, she mentioned how business hasn’t been good. It seemed to never have picked up to what it was like before the pandemic. 

    This is why I say that it feels like nothing has changed and everything has changed. Many have had no choice but to adapt in order to maintain an illusion so that others don’t have to adapt at all. 

  • The first hour of my day.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
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    My alarm goes off at 6 am. I should probably move that back to 5:55 to give myself five minutes of lazing and stretching. The soles of my feet and heels always ache and burn when I place them on the floor and take my first few steps. I’m trying to figure out what stretches or movements I can do before getting out of bed so that there’s less pain. Or else maybe just to give myself a few more moments of being awake and not suffering. I know. I know. All life is suffering. I cannot delay these moments.

    I change from my shorts into pants and then use the bathroom, clean my night guard, scrape my tongue, and brush my teeth. I check my phone to see how many hours I slept the night before. I realize now, typing this that this is a silly habit, born of a distrust of myself and my own body. I know, for example, that I did not sleep well for one long stretch last night. Yes, my watch confirmed it, but so did my body and my memory. Does the idea of my watch monitoring me in my sleep in fact disrupt my sleep? Would my sleeplessness bother me less if my phone hadn’t confirmed it? Is the technology helping or hindering me in my quest for rest? Do I need more data to answer these questions? Or do I need to trust myself more?

    I retrieve my glass of water from my nightstand and my yoga mat from the closet. I roll out the mat on whichever floor space near windows is available and set the timer for ten minutes for some meditation, light stretching, and sun salutations. I am unnecessarily attached to the idea of doing this part of my routine near the windows where I can peer out at the trees and, on some mornings, see the moon. It seems so picturesque, like something from IG accounts that I have scrolled. But the truth is that all of that is a distraction from my attempts to use this time to listen to my body and to give it what it needs. As for the moon? I do not think she cares one way or the other whether I am near a window to greet her, to admire her beauty. She is there, somewhere. And that is enough.

    I roll up my mat and set my tea to steep before I: take my medicine (trying to remember to be grateful that my morning dose is one tiny pill these days), let the dog out (and check to make sure the older children are awake and getting reading for school at the same time), and return my mat to its place in the closet. I finish making the tea (you can see my more in-depth take on this central morning ritual at this blog post: The Doctrine of Chai) and settle into my morning spot on the couch. I’ll alternate between writing and chatting with the kids and my husband and seeing them all off for the day. I’ll feed the dog at some point in there, but otherwise I’ll use that time to sip my tea and water and, most importantly, to write.

  • The aspects that make me unique is the specific combinations of what I have considered googling*.

    Daily writing prompt
    Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
    View all responses

    Sun salutation variations.

    Who’s the one actor? on that one show?

    Are the seeds in my smoothie the same ones as chia pets?

    Where are my keys?

    How many daily sun salutations for maximum health benefits?

    New Yorker article Bangkok flooding

    How to draw a monkey

    under desk foot massager

    Where are my glasses?

    How many sun salutations is too many?

    What does arthritis feel like?

    How old kids start baseball?

    optimal number of hours of sleep

    Phife Dawg how old passed away

    National pencil day?

    Are chia pets still a thing?

    Can sun salutations cause injury?

    Octavia Butler journals

    beginner collage

    “oh oh oh oh oh” song lyrics

    What’s the name of that one small yellow flower, the one that seemed to pop up overnight in the stand of trees near my house to that it looks like there’s a bright carpet laid out to greet me on my walk?

    Where is my phone?

    Smithsonian timed entry tickets

    synthetic marijuana side effect constipation?

    How to celebrate Cheng Meng?

    unproblematic young adult authors

    how to do more sun salutations?

    Dave Coulier and Alannis Morisette: what was the deal there?

    Oatmeal raisin cookie recipe

    facial sunscreen for women of color

    Did Donald Glover’s Atlanta get canceled?

    Benefits of daily sun salutations and chia seeds

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    * But did not.

  • All the things that cannot be named.

    Daily writing prompt
    If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
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    If I could have something named after me, it would be all the things that we do not have names for, the things we cannot name.

    When your friend asks, “How are you?” and you feel a mixture of contentment lined with a soupçon of ennui and something else which you eludes you, you will say, “Rhena” and your friend will know.

    And when your friend is at a loss for how to console you, comfort you, and give you space, she will say, “Rhena” and you will know.

    When put your earbuds in, you will say, “Hey Siri, play Rhena,” she will play the music you need to hear and it will always be Nina Simone or Lauryn Hill or Salt-n-Pepa or Tracy Chapman or Aretha Franklin or or or or…

    When you see a man pushing his baby in a stroller at a great distance and want to shout “Thank you for bringing your baby out on this beautiful day. I was feeling a little down and then I saw her beautiful black hair, like ravens feathers on that sweet head bobbling on top of her neck while she peered around, trying to take in all the world with her new eyes and isn’t God good?” but he is too far and there isn’t enough time you will whisper “Rhena” and he will know. And he will whisper “Rhena” and you will know that yes, God is good.

    And when you cannot choose what to eat for dinner, you will say, “Rhena” and the server will nod, knowingly.

    And when you want someone to see you but you are so, so tired of speaking and explaining and justifying, you will say, “Rhena” and they will know.

    Until all the people say,

    Rhena!

    Rhena?

    Rhena. Rhena. Rhena.

    rhenarhenarhenarhenarhena.

    Until there comes a day when there is no longer need

    to speak my name.

  • I do. I make myself laugh.

    Daily writing prompt
    What makes you laugh?
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    It’s not so much because I am particularly funny myself (although I am that too). It’s not so much that I am the butt of my own jokes (although I can laugh at myself too). What I do is keep bits and bobs tucked away. I have trained myself to call them forth at will when they are most needed.

    In recent rotation:

    “This is a tortilla.”

    “Short arms.”

    “Croissant pamplemousse je m’appelle bonjour!”

    I do not think these alone will make anyone else laugh. And to explain the joke would be to ruin it, as these things go.

    But trust. If I have laughed once (which I have), I will laugh again.

  • Damn, WordPress, you really got me deep into self reflection today, don’t you?

    Daily writing prompt
    When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
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    When I was five, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.

    My parents owned a restaurant in those days and I didn’t go to preschool. I spent a lot of time in the offices on the second floor of their business where my mom would be handling paperwork as the manager. Even once I was in Kindergarten, I usually spent parts of my summer days there.

    There wasn’t much for a kid to do at the restaurant but there was a stack of thick beige paper that my parents used to print menus and flyers on. And somehow, there usually were markers or crayons around. I went through an abstract phase: drawing long looping lines and then coloring in the shapes that emerged as the lines crossed each other. This phase could have been an entire summer or it might have lasted a few hours. Time and memory. You know how these things mix up, and especially in the mind of an abstract artist five year old.

    I do remember announcing that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. In spite of the fact that I spent so much time in my family’s place of business, I still had a five year old’s understanding of things like jobs and careers. What did I know of galleries and studios and monetization and starving? All of that was even more abstract than my looping lines.

    At times, I told my dad that I wanted to be a doctor. I planned on attending Harvard Medical School. Or so I said. I was mostly saying this type of thing to please the adults. And while “doctor” might have been closer to making grown-ups happy, “artist” was closer to making me happy. This is why what I really think I was getting at when I claimed that I wanted to be an artist is that I wanted to spend my life expressing myself and perhaps that I hoped that as an adult, there would always be space for that.

    Well, I’m not a doctor, so the need to please adults didn’t win out. But has my life otherwise turned out the way that five year old Rhena hoped? Although there have been long stretches where I haven’t, I now paint and draw semi-regularly. And as a five year old, I couldn’t write well enough to picture it as part of my future. But I’m writing now. And while it’s taken me a long time, I’m creating ever more space for self expression.

    In the meantime, my six year old son regularly announces that he IS an artist. There is no future dreaming about it. He is what he is in this moment. And I think I created space in his life for him to express himself now. So, yeah, five year old Rhena is very proud.

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    If you’d like to support this artist in living out her five-year-old dreams for herself, please visit my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! (Also, shares, likes, and poking around the other posts helps too!)

  • You lack discipline!

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s something most people don’t understand?
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    Discipline is something that most people don’t understand. And when I write “most people”, I mean me.

    The word discipline recalls a punishing authoritarianism, an asceticism that leaves little no room for joy. When I got the phrase Kung Fu Life in archaic Chinese tattooed on my arm, I wasn’t really thinking about the discipline aspect of Kung Fu. You see, discipline isn’t the most romantic of notions. At least to my mind. And then there’s the movie/ TV show trope of the Asian elder with a lot of thoughts about discipline (or lack thereof) and who is sometimes the butt of the joke, is always flat and one-dimensional, and who never gets to be heroic.

    But here I am, with this phrase that alludes to discipline in pretty permanent ink in my skin.

    Aside from the Asian elders tropes, my (mis)understanding of discipline where most of my understanding of life was first established: in the halls of elite (and elitist) institutions of higher learning very close to the very center of empire. In other words, I grew up in DC and went to mostly private schools including one Ivy League for graduate school.

    Let me tell you: power does not like discipline. It’s a paradox. You’d think that at the schools where the powerful sent their children, they’d want discipline to be taught. But it isn’t. This is because, in part, much of the power that the elites enjoy was bestowed upon them. It was inherited by their station in life. I know that this is an unpopular idea to have in the United States where a belief in meritocracy runs deep. But you’ll just have to take my word as someone who spent many formative years observing how some of institutions at the center of empire work.

    The paradox continues. Creativity, success, and genius are considered innate in these circles. They are gifts bestowed upon a chosen few. But what discipline does is create a way in which this so-called gifts can actually be cultivated. This is an offense to power. And self discipline also requires saying “no” to certain things (we saw this in the other question of the day about setting goals). Elitism hates being told no. The closer to power one gets, the more one has to say “no” if one wants to maintain a sense of self, a sense of integrity, which is discipline’s bedfellow. Discipline is also self-control. And if it is the self that is in control, then elitism, power, empire has no chance at controlling the individual.

    Every day for the past month, before I go to bed, I’ve been writing three moments of joy or gratitude. I learned of this practice from Alex Elle. This is a discipline. I know because even in this, I sometimes phase internal resistance. It feels like one more task. But I’ve been disciplined. I’ve practiced every day and now it’s becoming automatic. It’s not just becoming automatic at the end of the day when I sit down to do the task, but during the day, I’m becoming more alert to moments of joy and gratitude so that I am starting to be able to find both in smaller and smaller things, in darker and darker times. I don’t require winning the lottery (although that would be nice) to feel joy. I can appreciate the buds emerging on the maple outside or someone’s smile or the way the sunlight hits the side of my house (that I have a house for the sunlight to hit!) or the way that Aretha Franklin sings “freeeeedom!” on “Think”.

    And so joy is the reward for that discipline.

    I’ve also been trying to be disciplined in making space and time for creativity. I paint or draw everyday — even if it’s just a little pen sketch on the side of a piece of writing. Lately, it’s been painting in drawings of insects in water color. I used to be very “precious” about this type of thing. I’d pull out all my materials and set it up just so and mix colors and all the rest. And this is also a certain type of discipline. But this production meant I wasn’t doing it as often, so I got some discipline. I promised myself I’d do it every day, even if it was just a single brush stroke. The painting I’ve done has been messy and loose. And it’s beautiful. It’s perfect in its imperfection: I’m painting outside the lines. I’m just letting the colors do their thing and the water too. And what has emerged looks so free and open and natural. It was discipline, a commitment to returning to this practice to painting that allowed me to learn and see the beauty there.

    I’ve also brought discipline to learning guitar. I do it every day for thirty minutes. It’s a struggle at times. I pretty sure that at some point in my childhood, I learned how to read music. But somehow I had to start that process all over again learning guitar. (I suspect that perhaps it has something to do with how things are taught in those institutions of higher learning that I mentioned earlier, but I digress.) But slowly, my brain is making these connections. This morning, I sent a few texts to my daughter asking her about notes and half steps and full steps. We exchanged a few texts back and forth. She knows a lot more about music than I do. And it occurred to me how music is like a whole other language and she told me how not every system of music uses the same twelve notes. This might seem pretty basic to a lot of people, but, to me, this was mind-blowing. And it changed the way I think about playing guitar. In a good way. And I was also struck by how the discipline that I bring to playing and practicing guitar, which I’ve largely experienced as fairly solitary, opened up this whole other aspect to my relationship to my daughter.

    And, of course, I try to bring discipline to my writing and, yes, even blogging. I had a doctor’s appointment today and usually that kind of wears me out for the day. And I extend myself a little grace at these times and don’t always force the writing. But I think because I’ve been disciplined about it on other days, I was actually excited to write a blog post in spite of my fatigue.

    Still, I’ll end this in order to practice discipline in one other area of my life that I’ve committed to: rest.

  • Pen, paper, and the word of Doechii

    Daily writing prompt
    How has technology changed your job?
    View all responses

    I admit that one of my current struggles is taking my writing from pen and paper to the keyboard and screen. The problem is that I love my handwriting. And I love the physical sensation of putting ink on to the page of a notebook and watching the words unfurl. So much of writing is living inside my head with my own thoughts that the physical aspects of the process (the job) become magnified. As does my enjoyment of them. And my discomfort.

    When I do sit at the computer (as I am now) to write, it feels decidedly unnatural. I’m sitting upright in a chair (rather than curled up in a chair when I’m writing by hand). I never really know what to do with my wrists. And do I leave my bracelets and watch on or just kind of tuck them out of the way? Excuse me. I’m going to pause a moment here to change my pants to ones with an elastic waistband as I have suddenly become intensely aware of the stiffness of my jeans.

    Ok. Much better. But see what I mean?

    I have loads of handwritten poems and stories and essays and errant thoughts and musings, but until I can transfer them into my computer and send them out in the world, do they have meaning? I’d argue that, yes, they do have meaning. Very deep meanings. All that work, using seemingly outdated technology of pen and paper, has meant a great deal to me. And I’ve come to the recent realization that my job as a writer being meaningful to me and me alone is enough.

    I’m going to stop writing for a moment and think about that (in my awkward upright chair that I don’t really know how to sit in). All of those notebooks and scratchings? They reveal something. And it think it’s a life lived. Thoughts. Dare I say: a soul? It’s the cumulation of thoughts and moments and lessons and exchanges and interactions of a life and mind. But I could burn them all tomorrow, or today, and all of that would still exist. In fact, I’ve thrown out a good deal of my writing. Sometimes I’ve even burnt my writing ritualistically in moments of attempting to let go of something and perhaps to have a better understanding of the transient nature of life. Other times, I’ve just tossed out entire journals in a move or housecleaning. We can’t take it all with us.

    And servers can also go up in flames. Computers crash all the time. Even our technology cannot save us from impermanence.

    So the obvious question is why am I even writing on this computer, posting to this blog? Why use this technology that makes me physically uncomfortable when pen and paper bring me so much joy? And it’s an excellent question, one that I ask myself pretty much every day.

    The other day, I mentioned to someone that I’m a writer and she said offhandedly something along the lines of, “I guess with AI, there’s not really a need for writers anymore.” I wasn’t offended. This is the reality that writers, everybody with jobs that involve creating are up against right now. If we choose to be. The woman who was speaking is herself a visual artist and we all know that one of the first things that people did with AI when it became commonly available was to use it to render visual art and images.

    The easy answer would be that this blog, me posting to the internet regularly is a last stand against AI. But I’m not really a last-stand kind of person aside from the fact that I don’t think this is really a last-stand narrative that we’re in the middle of here. AI is just the most recent of many tools that have, in the wrong hands, been wielded against the better angels of humanity.

    When I write by hand, I am very much aware of what my body is doing and what my body is capable of. In other words, I feel very human in those moments. And when I say human, I mean all of it, the messy and the creative. I feel as though I am wading into the rivers of my source. Listen to Doechii’s track, “God”, on her album Oh The Places You’ll Go if you want more insight into what that’s like. She talks about her realization that her source is infinite and then the complementary thought that that means everyone’s source is infinite. Each person’s creativity is already limitless. Including mine. Including yours.

    And that is what pulls me out of the just “enough for me” existence. My job as a writer is to, yes, tend to my own humanity first and foremost but it’s also to tell the stories, to share the thoughts and connections, to announce, “I’m still alive and I’m a human” to whoever needs to hear it, and also and maybe even primarily to spread the word of Doechii.

  • Question of the day: goals

    Daily writing prompt
    How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
    View all responses

    Every day. Every hour. Every minute. Every second. Every moment. Never. Not at all. Not ever.

    I’m going to have to say “no” to answering this question; it doesn’t align with my goal of never divulging my secrets to success, of only writing what is meaningful to me, of not being goal driven, of trusting that the words will come and being at peace when they don’t, of allowing myself only what feels right and good for me, of a little self indulgence now and again, and using my time wisely.

    I’m going to have to say “yes” to answering this question; it aligns with my goal of posting to this blog today, of self reflection, of taking advantage of opportunities and moments presented to me, of living in each moment, of self reflection, of not judging myself, of trusting that the words will come when they need to come, of sitting with the aches and pains and noticing that even the my annoyance at that roaring dumptruck that just rattled my house means that I’m alive, of strengthening that muscle that shoves aside the fears, of being able to complete ten burpees without taking a break, of trusting myself.