This might be the lamest thing I've ever seen. Not the text, by the brilliant Binyavanga Wainaina, but rather the video.

Is it that they stuck Djimon Hounsou, a two-time Oscar-nominated actor, in a 10x12 bedroom with a little girl surrounded by photographs and taxidermied animals...or the cliche music...or the montage of starving children at the end that only reinforces stereotypes of Africa, turning the entire piece on its head...or the tagline/plug, "Great Music Saves Lives"? Maybe a combination of all of them.

This is exactly my problem with Bono's whole RED campaign. If making change really were as easy as buying a T-shirt, then we wouldn't need more activists, we'd need more hawkers. And I really don't think rock stars should liken themselves to politicians, but I guess I'm no expert.

Just some thoughts on the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy. I don't know him that well personally or professionally, except through the footage from the documentary on immigration policy I'm working on right now. He seemed like a decent, upstanding, determined guy with a really big heart. Cut to my surprise this morning in doing a little reading about Mary Jo Kopechne.

I think maybe Kennedy spent his life trying to make up for that, and no amount of good work -- and, believe me, he did a lot -- could ever soothe his soul and conscience. I think it is unfortunate that she died. I think it is unfortunate that, at that time, his political will was more important than her life. I think it is a tragedy that so often women's voices are silenced by more willful and powerful men.

I was even more horrified in reading about Rosemary Kennedy, and how the truth of her life was silenced and covered up by the whole family, most of all Joe Kennedy. I put her picture on the blog because it's likely we will spend the next weeks and months and years eulogizing Ted, and indeed have spent the last forty years grieving his brothers, and will not have spent even a moment remembering Rosemary's promising life, snuffed out at 23, lived in mental infancy into her eighties.

I suppose all families have their secrets.

I believe in redemption, and I do applaud Ted Kennedy's strength of will, character, and political capital to become a champion for civil rights, immigration and healthcare reform. But I must lament the suppression of an equitable, just, and egalitarian family unit in order to produce a Ted or John or Robert. And the suppression of the many stories that get lost in the shadow of great men.

(I'm not cut out for politics. Not for lack of will, but rather for lack of ego. I am unable to submit the wills and dreams and voices of others to my own peculiar interpretation of the world. I notice this is a major criterion for all great men -- and women, who must marshal ego skillfully. I am lucky to have only sisters.)

I am a mover -- dancer, runner, cardio kickboxer, anything to keep from sitting still. But I haven't been able to move in awhile since I tore the meniscus in my right knee. I have been holding it together for several months, have taken well to pilates class and long walks in the park, but yesterday I found myself losing it.

I watched Quentin Tarantino on Charlie Rose and Lorena Bobbitt on Oprah, wrote a little, and then decided I should go to the first dance class I've attended in weeks. I don't know what I was thinking, perhaps I had just overcome the fear of re-injuring myself that kept me at home the entire week of Ronald Brown's intensive in Brooklyn. Well, dancing yesterday confirmed that my right leg has in fact been rendered lame by my torn meniscus.

I tend to move quickly without thinking much, in life and in dance, and it's largely why I hurt my knee to begin with. I threw my leg up too fast, I think, and it certainly could have been prevented if I had ever learned to move properly. There have been bits of myself falling apart for years, I suppose, but this seems so dramatic. To see my right leg shake just to support my body is like watching a new baby wobble. And I do not take well to infirmity.

Instead of crying, yesterday, I bought vegan chocolate chip cookies at Whole Foods. I find that comfort food, too, is not working anymore. Damn raw foods turned my system against all that is well and good in junk food. My stomach is okay, but my intestines cramp up and I end up doubled over.

At home at night, I lay in bed watching Star Trek on my laptop and icing my knee. The pain feels like a deep sting radiating out in concentric circles. I wanted to scream, to ask God why it is that my knee does not work any more. Why it is that the thing which brings me the greatest joy has been taken from me. I cannot express how stunning the physical and mental pain.

I read somewhere that, when life spins out of balance, one should seek the center of the wheel -- the self (I think). But I don't know what to do when the self is also spinning, exploding outward, collapsing.

I think perhaps the holding on to the wheel at all, to what is being lost, to what is not working, hurts far more than the letting go. Perhaps if I lost it, I might find some measure of relief.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be paper thin and pretty and foolish. It seemed to me like the world just laid down flat and let pretty folk walk all over it, while the rest of us had to pick our way around them. I learned, early on, that my body took up too much space than was desireable; that my nose and forehead were unnaturally big; and my overdeveloped brain made me "too smart" for my age.

When I read Pecola in The Bluest Eye, I read myself. I didn't want blonde hair or blue eyes, but I wanted to be pretty -- desperately. Even now as an adult, minus the thick glasses and secondhand clothing, I'm conscious of an unquenchable need for physical validation.

Seeing Toni Morrison tonight, I envisioned all my childhood yearnings embodied in the person of one woman. When she opened her mouth, I half expected to hear a boom like God from the sky and not her gentle voice, somewhat self-conscious and prone to girlish laughter.

Writing, I always thought, was heavy stuff. But I'm beginning to think that most of the heaviness is likely what the reader brings to the page. I've been learning lately that a writer writes best with love and generosity and laughter. I suppose that is true for Morrison.

What I've also learned from her -- and myself, in my old age -- is that beauty is only important where useful. The kind that sits and is admired is useless; the kind that loves and nurtures and protects and perseveres is useful.

So perhaps it is okay that I am an awkward little girl who has grown into a creative, thinking woman. Perhaps that itself is beauty and I had been thinking of it all wrong. If what we call beauty is in fact artifice, I should rather be useful than beautiful.

finally saw the yinka shonibare exhibit at the bklyn museum (the man is a genius) and hung out afterwards wit my (new) homies from Fela!; met Aklass and the dry eye crew; saw lemon andersen's show, county of kings, at the public theater, met sarah jones and spike lee, caught jesse l. martin checking me out. life's cup has been overflowing lately.

i am going into the woods with a handful of women artists for a month without tv or internet or my cellphone. i was excited to get in to hedgebrook, but am a little petrified of leaving behind my creature comforts.

when i was a kid i felt like a tiny ant on the anthill of God. thought if i disappeared nobody would notice. i still feel mostly the same way. hence the apprehension over leaving. hanging around has been a primary means of staving off irrelevance, though in the past year of leaving film school, moving to the Bronx, and injuring my knee i have largely disappeared from the film crowd, the african dance crowd, the underground BK dance crowd, and the arts crowd in general. so perhaps i am already irrelevant and haven't realized yet.

so i wonder what in fact i am doing leaving. the audacity to call myself a "novelist" or "artist" or "woman" or "revolutionary" (hedgebrook, as they say, is for women authoring change). i suppose i now have to be the person i've been aspiring to be my whole life -- myself, only wiser and bolder. i actually (yes, true story) visit my older self while meditating (only once or twice a year) and ask her questions. she would say now, i think, that she has been waiting for me a long time.

i've considered, rather frantically, deferring the residency and going back to school. yes. esp since it means i have to take another year of leave. i wonder what the hell hell i'm doing trading a year of film school for a month in the woods, like some dreadlocked, hemp-wearing purist. i suppose if i did try to go back to school, having hustled this entire year, i would likely burn out around january.

after all (i tell myself), i have no husband, no children, no mortgage, no apartment, no car payments, no cellphone contract...nothing but a few emotional ties to this place. maybe i should have spent the past year traveling like a bedouin. or maybe i should spend this coming year that way. all i know is that; on the anniversary of my mom's death, her birthday, and mine; i will be sitting in a rocking chair by a wood-burning stove writing or maybe reading from old journals.

i came across this entry once, written when i was fifteen, about how i acted differently around different people. i wondered who my "true self" was and why i wasn't more authentic. i suppose that i don't care that much now who i am to other people as long as i know who i am to myself. and maybe this retreat is all about that.

i'll be turning 28. (wow, i'm getting old.) i think i was supposed to be a doctor by now, with kids and a dog and a pool in the backyard. i'm not sure where this blog or my life is going. but i guess that's alright for now...