150. The 150th Episode(!): I Have a Hard Time Trusting Anybody to Do Anything Good Enough for a Long Time

Explicit content warning

06/23/23 • 45 min

In this episode Deondre and I (Isabel) talk about this book that Isabel has been reading with her book group called My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem, which talks about how trauma physically manifests itself in the body, and how human beings can try to deal with that trauma using somatic methods like humming together, dancing, and physically settling the body by focusing on breathing.

In this book, there is a section that talks about how racism was actually conceived of fairly recently in human history, when white landowners in Virginia were trying to come up with a solution to the class-based unrest amongst the workers. At the time these "bondsmen" were of both white and black skin colors, and had deals with the landowners that said if they worked long enough they could buy their freedom from servitude and be given a parcel of land that they could work themselves. However, the white landowners decided that the best way to appease the masses, who were getting more and more agitated about their economic situation, was to allow the white bondmen to receive land and to deny land to the black ones. This strategy became law in 1619.

This makes race one of the craziest acts of evil genius that humans seem to have come up with: those white landowners probably had no idea that their Hunger Games-esque scheme would be a major force throughout all of subsequent American history, they were likely only out to save their own asses. So we talk about whether there are other similar social constructs that have been a force for good in human history, and why it is so difficult to see and appreciate those things as well, when there are so many dastardly human ideas that seem like they are shaping our modernity.

Link to My Grandmother's Hands: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34146782

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Link to My Grandmother's Hands: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34146782

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Previous Episode

149. The Experience Camps Episode: Talking to the Sumo Wrestler on Your Hip to Take Away the Pain

Jesse Moss is the Senior Marketing Manager at Experience Camps, a free grief camp for kids. Before she worked at Experience Camps, she was talking to her friend having one of those classic conversations about how to find a job that you find meaningful, and her friend told her about the nonprofit for the first time. She knew she wanted to work there but they didn't have any job openings at the time, so she signed up to volunteer at the camp. And serendipitously, a job opened up a few days before she went to camp so she tried it out and loved it. It was especially meaningful because her brother Jordan who died by suicide who was 3 years younger than Jesse had also gone to camp with her, and so it was a special experience they got to share when they were kids.

In this episode, we talk about how much of grief can be psychosomatic - she describes doing a grief retreat with a death doula and therapist and about 60% of the retreat was spent in silence, just focusing on the body. She discovered an amazing leg swinging machine that really helped her to process the grief that was in her body. She also started running marathons after her mother died a few years ago, and last year a week before Jesse ran the New York City marathon, she got this horrible pain in her hip, and her grief therapist told her to name the hip and talk to it and miraculously...it worked. The pain went away.

Lastly, we get to hear some incredible stories of grief camp: there's a bonfire on the last night where the kids can say the name of the person they lost and say whatever they want about them, and there was one kid whose dad died who said he had not been able to get a full night's sleep ever since his dad had died. He had told the other kids in his cabin about this and they all decided to push their beds around his bed, and that was the first night he had slept through the night since his dad had died.

Links:

Experience Camps Website: https://experiencecamps.org/

Experience Camps Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/experiencecamps/?hl=en

Link to leg swinging device mentioned in the episode

Next Episode

151: The New York City Episode: What Would Isabella Chiu Do?

What factors do you think about when you are deciding where you want to live? This is another one of those life design episodes where we discuss the factors we think about when trying to design how we want to live.
When I was at South by Southwest in March, I ran into my friend Eric from high school, who I haven't talked to in like a decade, and his partner Isabella Chiu. She came on the show to talk about how they recently moved to New York after being nomadic for most of the pandemic and living in San Francisco prior to that.
They chose New York because they have family on the East Coast they wanted to be closer to, and they also love the bigness of everything. Isabella was also pleasantly surprised by how convenient it was to have everything she could possibly need within a 15 minute walk from their house. We also talk about some of the cons, like the smells and the pressure to be doing everything all of the time. Generally speaking, we talk about which factors are most important to us when deciding on a place to live, ranging from things like crime, proximity to friends, ability to drive around easily, and even just being able to smell fresh air. And at the end you'll also get a bonus little story about Isabella almost missing a flight, Deondre' accidentally going into the women's restroom, and Isabel being hit by a car.
Links:
Isabella's Blog, "What Would a White Man Do?": https://www.whatwouldawhitemando.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.