kjmason's blog

So I started thinking about life. About jobs and respect. About responsibility to self and to society. About the student who goes to class everyday getting good grades because she has been told that is right and good of children to do that. About her little brother who goes to school and gets into fights and gets detention because that’s what his best bud does. How much of our actions, habitual and unrevised, are even our own?

Let me try to make this point slightly more clear. I won’t do William James’s squirrel is to metaphysical disputes analogy justice but I will try to be as creative as possible…

Call me Isabel (Archer). I’ve been that girl looking on the picnic on a sunny green, the ferocious, “ridiculously overactive imagination”, the woman who mistook a man for who she wanted him to be, the painter of blank canvases, and the hostage of a kiss. Call me Isabel.

I walk into the theatre, all her family, friends and those who call themselves her friends, sitting in the burgundy velveteen rows of seats that ripple out from the stage. In the centre of the stage, one light shines down, dim and yellow with age, on a chez lounge.

 Note to Anne and Kristin:

 Day 15 “On Seeing (and not seeing) Disability." I was so excited to be given the opportunity look fully at disability, to stare. Not in a degrading way, but almost in wonder. Crip Art can possess a certain raw and vulnerable beauty that I haven’t been effected by as fully in other forms. As nice and politically correct as it would be to say Crip Art is just like other forms of art with “just people” as the subjects, it would be false. The disability adds to the art for me. I get a sense of strength, defiance and agency that is really striking to me.