I miss being really stoned. I hate my dreams. I’m edgy and tense and on the verge of being really snotty.

So recently a friend was talking about food stuff. When he was a kid he was forced to sit at the table until his food was all consumed. He could sit there for hours. Sometimes, if his mom was feeling really nice, she would rewarm things. If after multiple hours of sitting there while getting yelled at didn’t get him to eat his food she would wrap it up, put it in the fridge, then serve it for breakfast.

He describes his early life of being a time when the fear of hunger haunted everyone. Sometimes grocery stores did not have enough of what you wanted so you had to eat the gross stuff.

I contrast this with my own childhood. I wasn’t told to clean my plate. Well, that’s not true. I would occasionally bop through a house that had that rule but I was never there for more than a few weeks. I don’t feel like I have lived with a “clean your plate” rule.

Instead I made my own ramen every meal. I started when I was too young to even use measuring cups. I had a particular pan and I knew the water level was supposed to get close to the screws for the handle. I usually ate out of the pan so that I didn’t have to wash two dishes.

Then I sit down to breakfast with my kids. A breakfast *I* requested because I didn’t yell at all yesterday. I wanted Brussels sprouts because I haven’t been eating enough vegetables in the past few days and I feel kind of off. The meal was rounded out with mozzarella, prosciutto, and scones. Cause I’m nice about the scone bit. Mostly, I ate the Brussels sprouts. (I wonder if I ever would have grown to like them if I hadn’t first eaten them at blacksheeps.)

When I say I “made my own ramen every meal” that is kind of misleading. I made it when we had it. Sometimes I had to walk to the store alone and steal some if I wanted to eat. We rarely lived within a mile of a store so I was walking alone when I was 5, 6, 7.

I look at my daughter and I think, “There is no fucking way in hell I would allow you to walk the 1.4 miles to Safeway alone to steal your own food.”

But my friend doesn’t believe in privilege and I beat my head against a wall trying to find a way to explain to him that I don’t care if he “gets it” I need my daughters to get it. I need for my kids to understand that not everyone has someone to take care of them. I won’t always be here to take care of you.

You have to be prepared for life. It is a privilege to have someone around who teaches you what you need to know.

My friend can cook and prepare a wide variety of vegetables even though he usually won’t eat them on principle because now he is an “adult” and he “doesn’t have to”.

But his lifestyle choices have resulted in diabetes and he isn’t treating it very well. And he refuses to change how he eats. So I’m sad but I don’t expect him to be in my life for that many more years. I’m not going to bother arguing with him about privilege. I’m going to lose that battle and turn my sights on younger people. The people who have a chance of making things substantially different.

I talk to my kids about privilege. I’m very aware of it because I’m handing them a whole train load of privilege I never had and I notice all the time.

My kids expect to be fed good, nutritious, healthy food 3-5 times a day. If you don’t present such food on demand they are incredulous. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T HAVE A SNACK AND I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL LUNCH?! I think my kids have more indignation over being denied a snack than I have over large scale social problems. They have a lot of indignation left to spread around.

Food security is a huge privilege. When someone grows up with always having a sufficient quantity of food but it isn’t always of high quality or good tasting it is a very specific kind of privilege.

I’m aware that I ate a lot more consistently than many children in third world countries. That is terrifying to me. Between the ages of 3 and 12 I probably only missed 3-5 meals a week. That’s not starvation hunger. Sure, I also had a lot of malnutrition because I ate *no* vegetables and very little meat, but I ate.

Privilege is not a binary scale where you have it or you don’t. Privilege is about understanding the good you have gotten from your unique set of life circumstances and knowing that other people may not have that advantage.

I ate enough that I was still able to learn. I was still able to go to stupid schools where they taught me very little and get straight A’s. That’s not true. I never had straight A’s. I always had a D in homework because I refused to do extra work at home. If I can pass your fucking tests leave me alone. Err, and I usually had a bad grade in PE. My body has hurt all the time throughout my life. I was an incredibly unfit child. Now I understand what that means.

I don’t have to care if some of my rich white male friends “believe” in privilege. Their “belief” or not is going to have no impact on my behavior or my beliefs.

It is really easy to deny the existence of privilege when you’ve had so much of it. I’ve been up and down the ladder so many times that I can’t unsee what I have seen. It stays with me.

I grew up with people for whom it was a major life goal to be able to eat out every meal because “cooking is lame”. So they eat at McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and 7-11 because that is what they can afford. They then have severe health problems (it doesn’t help that they are completely sedentary) and can’t figure out why.

At this stage of my life I believe that understanding nutrition is a privilege. It’s about education and not everyone has access to early enough education that can shape their lives. It is not *necessarily* tied to wealth because a great many poor people can tell you to eat your greens. Privilege is not *only* about wealth. Privilege is about access to education and teachers and I don’t just mean Teachers Who Are Paid.

If you had a grandmother who taught you how to cook your collard greens you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had a grandfather who yelled at you to get off your ass and move your body around so you can be healthy you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had an aunt who would whisper to you about sex and how to keep yourself safe then you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had an uncle who would teach you sports then you have access to one kind of privilege.

Community, family, education all of these things are tied up together to make privilege. Have you ever noticed how of the top Ivy League schools in the country (which have the potential to be pretty homogenous) instead have extremely different sets of skills they turn out? Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT don’t turn out identical programmers. They each have different styles and flavors. Because people are shaped by their environment and in turn they shape the environment around them.

My old technical director told me that my college had a “golden period” of about six years where there were an unusual number of students who were all passionately involved in the theatre department. We did bigger shows than usual. We had more community than usual. We had a lot of outside adventures together. We grew up together.

Where you are in the country decides a lot about what kinds of bdsm you can learn to do. You learn from the teachers who are near you. Sure, if you have boatloads of money you can travel and learn from all the big names all over the country, but most people have to just learn within their local communities. Which means that some jackasses who have no business teaching become teachers anyway. To fill the void.

Right now West Virginia is having to deal with some crazy pollution in their water. It means that some people in the United States are finally dealing with some of the insanity our country usually pushes over seas. Go do some research on what Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola do to local watersheds in their overseas plants. It’s horrifying.

Access to clean water shouldn’t be a privilege. But it is if you don’t have enough money to keep the polluters the hell out of your water.

California’s governor has declared us officially in a state of drought and he asks everyone to cut water usage by 20%. So–am I still “gross” for not flushing the toilet every single time I pee? Give me a break.

I have these conversations in my head even while I’m asleep.

What is privilege. How do you talk about it. I get that a great many people use “check your privilege” as a short hand for “shut up white man” but just because people use a worthy phrase in ways I don’t like that doesn’t mean I’m going to get rid of it. I’m not giving up feminism for the same reason. Just because some people who share my label are icki that doesn’t mean I will let them have it.

How do I teach my children to be aware of the fact that their life experiences are unusual and exceptional and they need to think hard about leveling the playing field.

Just because you are a special fucking snow flake getting lots of privilege that does not make you better than anyone else. It’s an accident. You got lucky. What can you do to make your “luck” more of a right for other people? Every child should get to be educated and safe. That isn’t happening right now.

Being able to go through your childhood without being sexually assaulted is a privilege denied to a great many children, regardless of gender.

Being able to go through your life without being the victim of violent crime is another. It’s a privilege and it god damn shouldn’t be. Transsexual women of color are the single most targeted population for violent crime. That makes me cry.

I don’t want to just move the target. I don’t want to say, “Ok, how about if we just talk people into hating the white men instead. Or the brown men. Or the white women. Or the red women or the…”

No. The violence needs to stop. How do we do that?

How do we teach people that violence isn’t the answer? How do we teach awareness of privilege without playing the Oppression Olympics?

Yes, into every life a bit of hardship has to come. If your hardship was getting beaten up in grade school maybe it’s time to stop hating everyone in the world because your life was sooooooooo hard. Yes. It was hard. I don’t deny that. Have you been beaten up in the last twenty years? No? Then can we maybe focus on getting the people out of danger who were beaten up yesterday and who are probably going to be beaten up tomorrow instead of sitting around talking about poor you?

I am not the center of every conversation I have. Sure I’m the center of most of my blog posts (that is the nature of writing and all) but I am not the most important person in almost any conversation. I understand that my life was weird and on the fringe and in many ways privileged beyond my comprehension regardless of the ways I was not privileged.

Now that they hate me I can be more frank about the fact that I probably wouldn’t have gotten my dog bite settlement if I hadn’t been white. The neighbor who defended me didn’t let his pwecious widdle baby girl hang out with the brown kids in the neighborhood.

I am more in favor of a guaranteed income as I get older. I had one. I had $14,400 to live on for the first twelve years of my adult life. It changed everything for me. It’s not a lot of money but it was enough for me to squeak by and more importantly it was GUARANTEED. I didn’t have to feel fear every month about how I would get things paid for. I didn’t have to try to work extra shifts or cry when my shifts were cut. I had my money.

I feel like that was one of the most important things that has happened to me in the whole story of my life. I’m so glad that pit bull attacked me. (I swear I didn’t antagonize the dog so I could get a settlement. It wouldn’t have entered into my mind.)

Having two parents in your home who love you and are kind to you every day is a privilege. It gives the gift of a settled nervous system. It gives you the ability to be calm. It gives you the ability to work out problems without being hurt unduly by mistakes.

Having parents who “force” you to learn to clean up after yourself is a privilege. It allows you to be more able to care for yourself as you become an adult. You won’t thrash and fail because you are unprepared. Having parents who educate you about how food works and how your body works is a privilege. Having parents who insist on you being physically strong is a privilege.

Having people look at you and say, “You are incredible. You could do just about anything you want to do. You are going to have to have to work really hard for all of it because all the worthy things are hard work” is a privilege.

Having access to toys that shape your learning is a privilege.

Having….

No, these aren’t just “differences”. These are about advantages. These are about the fact that humans don’t learn in a vacuum. Humans can learn as much and as fast as we can because we aren’t all starting from scratch with a bunch of sticks. We build on the collective knowledge of those who are around us and those who have come before us. The more access to that collective bunch of knowledge a person has the more they can do. Period. Yes, it’s a privilege.

Today should be quiet. Good. I want away from my dreams for a bit. I hate sleeping.