The World As I Want It To Be, The World As It Is
Parking
Happy Emotional Labor Day!
Sometimes, in August, I think about driving somewhere in the City, just so I can park when I get back. Neighborhoods occupied by people with disposable income thin out, and the empty parking spots announce themselves on what are usually the most densely parked blocks. I think, “If this were the everyday density of this zip code, it would be perfect.”
Sometimes I want to raise the topic of the parking situation with the politicians and the powers that be, but nobody wants to make life easier for car owners, even if the reality of car-owning life means thousands of hours of lost productivity and idling engines every day, due to alternate side parking rules.
But then I think: We’re here, though. We know you don’t want us, but we’re here.
Still, fewer parking spots each year, as they give way to private companies offering shared cars or shared bikes or bike lanes or…well, good things, mostly. Except they tend not to discourage people from owning cars, and increase the average time of searching for parking. That’s the reality, like it or not.
Last night, upon arrival home after two weeks in various urban planning utopias (my original obsession, pre-gender, was the architecture of community), I found so much sloppy, lazy parking, people taking up multiple spots, cars yawning their way over the line. Infringing. Only in the Friday spots, though. The Tuesday side of the street had plenty of parking, but nobody wanted to move the car again Tuesday. It was 1AM, we’d been driving for hours, and I was pissed about the selfishness, the smugness of these poorly-parked cars. Resources are limited. We must be sensitive to others. We live in a community, dammit.
As I walked home from parking half a mile away, I pulled my parking thoughts back to gender. This is my community. I must share it with people who have very different beliefs than I do, who avow that children have a sparkly soul called “gender identity,” and that it must be affirmed. I believe that gender identity is a cognitive phase for preschoolers, their conception of boys and girls based on stereotypes. That’s a phase on the way to gender constancy, which they achieve sometime between six and eight years old: the understanding that the categories are based on bodies.
The newfangled, institutionalized gender identity beliefs—and the insistence that I follow them—are the equivalent of taking up two parking spots on the better side of the street. They affect me, but I can’t do anything about them. I can’t transform my old, long station wagon into a Smart Car that can tuck neatly into the half-space they’ve left, and I can’t make them shift their cars forward or back. I’m not going to leave the neighborhood, and neither are they.
All I can do is park farther away, and walk longer, and use the time to think about utopias and beliefs and navigating shared spaces, and how hard it is, and how sad when we hate each other for the way things are, rather than how we wish they would be.
This is where I live. The sloppy, lazy car-parkers are my friends. I still love them. I can disagree with them. I can figure out how to be curious, concerned, confounded, weirded out—angry, even—and still accept the reality that I have to look harder and longer for a spot, and figure out how to make it work.
The question is: Will they accept this compromise, or will they disavow me because I will work around their infringing behaviors, but I won’t cave to them?
You need a stack of flyers with "LEARN TO PARK" on one side, "STOP TRANSING KIDS" on the other. Tuck them under windshields.
I am reminded by this lovely, meditative post of my own constant sense of dislocation, as if I live in two different worlds at once, when those with whom I am coming in contact live in only one. Those all too few moments when the worlds are bridged feel like a miracle, and perhaps they are.
Not long ago, I had lunch with two friends from university. I like them both a lot, value their friendship, and wanted us all to have a carefree time. I didn’t want to disturb this by bringing in information from the other universe in which I live, so I promised myself I would not discuss “troublesome” topics.
And then, as I sometimes do, I found a small way in, despite it all. I told my friends a story of talking with a candidate for office. The candidate and I were discussing the issue of allowing trans-identified males (my language, decidedly not his), into women’s prisons, the problems that creates, and how those problems might best be resolved. As I recounted this story to my to friends, they were astounded, first, that anyone should think it was OK for men, no matter how they identified, to be placed in women’s prisons, and then they quickly set to work on thinking about the issue of men who, because of their status (trans-identified, gay, etc.), might be in danger when mixed in the general male population and how best to resolve that in another way. We had a good discussion about that, once the parameters were defined.
It was such a relief, and at the same time, I wondered all over again, given how easy this was, why it is that, most of the time, it is impossible to have conversations like this.