Category Archives: activism

I think talking about money is important.

1 Reply

So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account.  Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses?  I owe $17,000 on credit cards.  That will be paid off this month.  I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy.  That’s another $9,000.  This is an unusually expensive month.  Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month.  I am waiting to write checks for $17,650.  That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash.  We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis.  We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me.  It’s unhealthy.  I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about.  But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare.  I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year…  I bought it for Sarah and me.  Noah wasn’t thrilled.  Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch.  He’ll go.  But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share.  Do you know why?  Mostly because she is disabled.  It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices.  If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff.  It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah.  She appreciates it the same way my mom does.  Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy.  Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole.  I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing.  What a dumb fuck am I, right?  Only dumb fucks buy time shares.  It’s a racket.  Geez.  What a fucking waste of money.  A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me?  Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations.  They are paid for.  I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there.  Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home.  Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt.  I wanted it paid off in a year.  Err, that hasn’t happened.  Other things keep coming up.  Like getting my heart Occupied.  Why is this so fucking important?  Because people matter.  We need a William Wallace.  We need someone to step up.  This is a Revolution.  Hell, we need everyone to step up.  What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place?  Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months.  Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me.  My life is the fantasy.  My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars.  Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit.  How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing.  I think good will come from it.  I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime.  I can give people things to think about.  They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely.  But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.”  That’s what I fucking want.  I don’t need to have other people agree with me.  I need them to understand WHY I am different.  Why my opinion is different.  Because maybe that will ripple.  Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too.  Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties?  What is the fucking point?  Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people.  I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican.  I kind of hate you all equally.  And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists.  Or the members of my own, Libertarian party.  I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them.  Good grief.  But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point.  When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted.  Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job.  He doesn’t want to.  Ok.  The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen.  If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok.  Really.  I can deal having to “tighten my belt”.  We are part of the 99%.  In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives.  It’s $8,000.  We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card.  You do the math.  No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening.  But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend.  Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.  The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope.  They need to see things being done.  I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement.  I really kind of wish I could.  But that’s not my story.  I’m trying to bait other people.  I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams.  Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with.  But there will be so much hunger.  So many dreams.  That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.”  I hope.  I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized.  I have marched.  I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally.  I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont.  I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it.  I think I should Occupy the space I am in.  Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland?  Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money?  Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation.  Hm.  It’s an idea.  What would I do if I occupied Fremont?  Hmm.  I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days.  I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there.  This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors.  There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here.  Why?  I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers.  Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them.  Pretty much ever.  If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude.  Fremont is beneath people.  I’ve done it too.  I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont.  This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas.  Not the lowest, by any stretch.  This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda.  I really don’t want to.  I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity.  I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white.  But I’m scared here.  This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet.  I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever.  People here just see me as that nice weird lady.  I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story).  I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly.  Very distantly.  I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings.  I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors.  Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood?  I’m out with the kids all the time.  Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out?  Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money.  I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life.  Whatever the fuck that means.  Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar.  I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you).  And that’s more than ok.  It’s awesome.  I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person.  I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either.  Or London near as I can tell.  I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people.  I never fit.  Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right.  I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it.  That will be financial for a lot of people.  But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system.  Any system.  How’s that going for folks?  Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town.  I have to live here.  But I can’t stay in the closet.  This is horrible.  I’m not much like most of the folks around me.  But I’m not like folks anywhere.  That’s ok.  I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me.  Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say.  I say it because I hope it’s true.  I’m trying to convince myself it is.  It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok.  That feels like a lie.  So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok.  Not directly.  Not to my face.  But in the very air I breathe in this culture.  I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest.  I feel that way because I am an American.  In fact, that seems to be our national culture.  Anything different is wrong and bad.  People, you need to lighten the fuck up.  Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me.  That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.


But I will have to do that alone.  I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away.  I will have to find the drive and determination to do that.  I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen.  It makes me tired.  I can’t do that yet.  I feel like I am failing my human beings.  I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me.  I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.


Who the fuck am I helping?  I don’t know.  I hope that the RV comes through.  That would be something.  I wish I knew where my life was going.  I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions.  Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively.  You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively.  There isn’t enough me for that.


I really hope this movement spreads.  Please people, you can change the world too.  It doesn’t actually take money.  It takes the desire to do good.  You’ll find a way.  Please? 

Cheese factor.

4 Replies

Laugh at me if you will, but after having my religious conversion at the General Strike I’ve been having daily bible verses sent to my phone.  I’m altering them slightly as I think about them through the day.  I like my version a lot.

Psalm 5:11-12 (almost): But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you, Occupy. 12. For you bless the righteous; you cover him with favor as with a shield.

I’m so glad my heart was Occupied.

Open letter

2 Replies

Hello.  My name is Krissy Gibbs.  I was at the General Strike.  I was among the first two hundred people to arrive at the port.  What I saw there changed my life.  I am part of the 99%.  But I am also part of the 5%.  I believe in the Occupy movement.  I think that it needs to continue and grow.  I think it needs to be done through peaceful means only.  I grew up in extreme poverty.  I was homeless.  I stole food to eat.  I am a survivor of incest and rape.  I had a very hard life.  I moved more than 50 times before I was 18.  I went to 25 schools before dropping out of high school at 16.  I went to graduate school and I taught high school for three years before having children.  Now I’m upper class because I married someone who is the son of the 1%.  My life was changed because of an accident.  When I was five years old I was attacked by a pit bull.  The money was wisely invested because my lawyer was the father of my life long best friend.  He knew my mother would have wasted the money.  He put it in trust for me until I was 18.  Then he gave me $1200 every month between the ages of 18 and 30.  I turned 30 this year.  On my 30th birthday I fretted and fretted about what to do with the money.  You see, I got the last check.  $35,000  It’s a lot of money for someone with my childhood.  An insane amount of money.  An amount of money that could have made every dream I had then possible.  Because I was that poor.  My needs were that simple.  Now, I had to try to come up with some ridiculous over the top wasteful way to spend it.  Because all of my needs are met.  I have extra.  I don’t know what to do with it.  I want to spend this money on something that is just for me.  I’ll tell the truth and say that some of it is gone.  My best friend got married in Scotland and that was not an opportunity I could ignore.  I have $20,000 left.  I want to use that money to repair some of the damage done by vandals in my name.  I am Occupy Oakland.  I am the General Strike.  I apparently fucked up and broke something.  I’m really sorry.  I didn’t mean to.  I hope this is enough to cover the damages, and if it isn’t, I’ll ask some of my friends if they have any I can borrow.  I think they can.  They all have enough too.
Krissy Gibbs
PS: I will be emailing this to the Oakland Mayor, Oakland PD, Well’s Fargo, and Chase.  I am not sure to whom I should address the check.

Some notes on the General Strike

9 Replies
I spent yesterday at Occupy Oakland participating in the General Strike.  I know a lot of people who are dismissive of this protest and I want to write about why I went and what I got out of this experience. 
I spend most of my life feeling like a dirty little street kid who should shut up and disappear.  I feel invalidated and disenfranchised and invisible.  I feel like I am nothing in the grand scheme of things.  I’m not alone.  I have much more concrete reasons for feeling this way than most people.  I can point to a long history of inconsistent housing, poverty, hunger, sexual assault, bullying, etc.  I can say, “See!  I feel this way because of all of these real things.  Most of the people who were at the protest with me felt the same way.  They don’t have the same history though.  I find that curious.
How has our society morphed into this bizarre consortium of unrelated people brushing past one another without dependence? How did we come to a place where people feel like they don’t matter?  People matter. 
I arrived in Oakland around 12:30 and got off at the Lake Merritt Bart station.  I wanted to walk in and see how much of the city was taken over.  It wasn’t much.  Mostly there were people leaving because the first march was ending and people had other things they had to do.  The first thing I was struck by was the fact that everyone looked elated.  Everyone looked like they felt good about themselves and what they were doing.  I don’t see large crowds of people who look happy to be alive very often.  As I approached the main camp area I felt nervous.  I felt like I am such a small person, what do I have to give?
I arrived with a grocery bag full of supplies to help deal with police brutality because I live with a Greenpeace person.  I was elated to discover I only saw a handful of cops in the first several hours.  Most of them looked pensive or they were smiling.  They didn’t look like the enemy.
I wandered around the plaza by myself for about an hour and a half.  I sat down and talked to this really wonderful man.  He is out here from Atlanta because he works with an organization that is promoting alternative discipline models in schools.  They want to work towards restorative justice.  The conversation with him was inspiring.  He has done so much to help so many people.  He is truly an activist.  He is compelling and charming and very well educated.  I felt ashamed to tell him that I stopped teaching because I couldn’t handle being a parent and teaching.  Both jobs take too much of me.  There isn’t enough of me to go around.  He smiled and told me, “You are just working on a different part of education now.  You’ll figure out later what you’re supposed to do next.”  I felt seen.  And valuable.  This person I will never see again told me that if I feel strongly about helping children I am valuable and I should not give up on myself.
I went to the protest at least in part because I object to the police trying to evict the Occupy movement.  As a taxpayer I think that I have some say in how public lands are used.  If people who are very upset want to camp in fairly miserable conditions in order to raise public awareness of serious issues I think they should be allowed to.
I posted continually yesterday about what I was seeing.  One friend was dismissive and catty about how there wasn’t a unified message so he wouldn’t take it seriously.  I feel like that summarizes the problems in our country perfectly.  If you can’t summarize your discontent in a thirty second sound bite it isn’t really important.  Really?  Since when?  This is a complicated issue because there are a lot of people involved and influenced. 
If you go back and read Revolutionary War era public discourse there wasn’t much of a unified message then either.  But we still fought the British off and declared ourselves a separate country.  Even though we didn’t know how that should look.  Even though we didn’t know at the beginning what the unintended consequences were.  I think as a country we made the right choice.
The Occupy movement is fractured because right now there aren’t enough people upset.  In my opinion.  As long as the Occupy movement can be dismissed and ignored then it will be.  I think that the Occupy movement needs to grow until so many people are inconvenienced that even Joe Schmo who “doesn’t understand the movement” wants to give them their reasonable concessions already so we can all move on.  I think this needs to grow. 
Yesterday I was in the first 200 people to arrive at the port.  I wanted to be there.  I stayed at the first gate and held hands with my muse.  We watched the crowds pour in.  We listened to the music.  We watched people be excited about the fact that they were courageous enough to say, “I am allowed to express my anger”.  Because that is what I saw most.  People were angry and upset.  They had a lot of anxiety about being there.  They didn’t know what to expect.  Everyone seemed to be delighted to find that being angry and upset just means you are like all these other thousands of people.  None of us are alone.
I climbed up on a scaffolding and watched thousands of people pour into the Port of Oakland.  I cried.  I was overwhelmed by the strength of my fellow humans.  I was simultaneously part of this movement and separate from it.  I am still the dirty street kid in my heart.  I watched all these people and I gloried in their beauty and I felt like I sullied them because so many of them have strong beliefs that I completely oppose.  And yet, I want them to be allowed to have those opinions.  Whatever they are.  No one has to agree with me.

My opinions are the result of the unique set of circumstances involved in my life.  That is true of every one.  In this way it is nearly impossible to ever understand someone else’s perspective.  But as I watched all of those people I was so glad that they had the courage of their convictions to march to the port and shut it down.  I was so proud of my fellow humans.  We are here.  You cannot ignore us.  Whose streets are these?  Our streets?  Whose port is this?  Our port.  If we want to shut it down to prevent those rich people from processing more commerce, we can.  We can make it so fucking uncomfortable that you can no longer pretend we don’t exist.  None of us are invisible any more.
When I left I was exhausted and drained.  I was emotionally spent.  My body ached.  I felt this simultaneous let down and building up.  I’m not sure where to go from here.  My first step is that when I finish this essay I am going to go work on NaNoWriMo more.  Telling my story is part of my life work.  That is the work I am doing right now in this stage.  I think I am going to be going back to the encampment.  I will be bringing my children over the protests of my co-parents.  I believe it is safe enough. 
I was standing there watching when the anarchist group attacked banks.  There were a few people who had their own agenda.  I do not identify with them or their methods, even though I understand them.  I’m not even angry with them.  I think they are misguided, but not evil.  Not bad.  They are willing to be the far end of the bell curve giving me the illusion of being moderate.  I’m kind of thrilled by that, actually.  That doesn’t happen much in my life.  They were arrested last night after scaring people and giving the news a reason to rant about how of course the protests ended badly because activists are bad people.
100 something people.  Out of at least 7,000 but probably more people.  Really?  That is what people are going to remember?  That says a lot more about the people remembering than the protest.  This was a beautiful peaceful protest.  There were fringe assholes acting on their own agenda at a similar time.  Please do not confuse the two.  And yet, it’s the same thing.  Those anarchists are so fucking angry that they are willing to take the courage of their conviction and say, “You are bad and you should go away.”  I can’t disagree with that sentiment.  I think the huge banks are pretty evil as well.
In my opinion one of the rallying cries of the Occupy movement should be to remove person-status from corporations.  Corporations should become third class citizens.  I’m sure people will say that will drive business away from our country.  To that I laugh.  Have you seen our country?  We are beautiful and wonderful and strong.  Even if our corporations made far less money, we’d be fine.  We have all these wonderful people.  We can do anything.

For the record, I release this into the creative commons.  Please give me attribution: Krissy Gibbs

Rape Culture

7 Replies

Often I do not get along with rabid feminists on the topic of rape culture.  The reasons for that are myriad, but mostly revolve around the fact that I think most feminists are too sensitive.  I think a lot of women cry rape when they are stretching.  I think we need another word.  I think that there should be some commonly understood word for coerced or unwanted sex that the woman never actually refuses.  I think there should just be a way for women to talk about it.

“Yeah, last night he totally ______ me.  It was ok.”  I don’t know what this word should be.  There is something missing in our language.

I have a hard time asking my casual sex partners to not choke me.  Do you know why I have a hard time with this?  Because I was brought up in a family where sexual assault was as common as dirt.  Anything short of penis in vagina rape isn’t even worth talking about.  I have had members of my biological family tell me that because my father and brother never had their penis in my vagina that I shouldn’t complain.  Orally raping me with a gun to my head doesn’t count.  The fact that I had to physically fight my brother off of me over and over and over… doesn’t count.

I have a hard time believing that I am allowed to feel good during sex.  I’m going to tell you a secret, oh open internet.  That whole “being trained to orgasm on command” thing?  I actually don’t like that about myself.  I feel pretty disgusting.  But it’s a really good trick for when I am in a lot of pain and I’m not enjoying the sex much.  I can whisper in someones ear that this works.  And it does.  Hypnotic suggestion is awesome.  An orgasm involves vaginal muscle spasms.  It’s more complicated than that.  But the vaginal muscle spasm part can be triggered.  It’s enough to keep the endorphins up in my brain to numb the pain so I can get through the experience.

I’m also going to tell a secret, I mostly only do this with men who are physically too large for me.  I don’t need to resort to this “trick” when I am sleeping with someone who has a smaller dick.  Which is why I prefer sleeping with men who are not that big.  I don’t like having to use over ride tricks to talk my body out of throbbing pain.  It’s not very fun.  It feels like cheating.

It feels like cheating that I can’t depend on my partners to only do nice things to my body.  It is a rape culture adaptation.  I know that men are going to be doing things to me that hurt.  When I was younger I was smart enough to have an overly endowed partner figure out how to make sex with him bearable.  It’s a good trick.  But it’s a trick.  I always know later that my body didn’t want to be there.  My body didn’t want that experience.  It hurt.

I lost my ‘virginity’ when I was 12 and I asked a 25 year old to fuck me.  He did absolutely no foreplay.  He spit on his hand, wiped it on my cunt, and started fucking me.  That is still how I have sex.  These days it is better if he grabs me by the head and has me suck him hard first.  A lot more saliva is deposited that way.

No, sex isn’t about orgasms.  I have learned how to have sex with my husband that feels nice and makes me feel like a whole person instead of a hole.  I rarely orgasm.  If I need to get off, if I physically feel that ache… I need to feel like a hole.

I don’t like that I have become so thoroughly part of rape culture.  I am the byproduct.  If it doesn’t feel kind of like rape it probably isn’t going to get me off.  But I’m honestly only kind of willing.  It hurts.  It makes me feel bad about myself.  That I need to be treated like that.  That I’m not very interested in sex with people unless they hurt me.

If I swear of masochism I swear off orgasms.  I don’t want to say that out loud.  It’s not completely true.  But my days of numbering my orgasms in the hundreds are over.  I can’t do that without someone hurting me.

I get off because someone else is using me to pleasure themselves.  Because they want me that much.  I don’t orgasm because things feel good.  There should be a word for that.  There should be a word for this feeling of needing violent sex but not enjoying, kind of.  Yeah, we mutually got each other off.  It was kind of emotionally uncomfortable.  Yeah, we exchanged a little light-hearted sexual assault.  Yes we totally _____________.

I need a word.

Kneejerk statement

2 Replies

I had a brief panic attack as I looked through the referring URLs for my blog.  Lots of looking for porn searches.  I thought that was kind of amazing.  I really felt invaded and horrified by that.  That was hard to feel for a few minutes.  You see, there is this nice blogger who happens to be a chick.  And I don’t know about you but I find that people are way less heated about business building than sex.  This woman hasn’t done anything sexual in a public way, but she is denigrated sexually quite viciously.  I’ll tell you flat out, universe, that makes me feel like I should probably figure what I am: a sex blogger or a mommy blogger and never the twain shall meet.  Because if Naomi Dunford is getting death threats I need to prepare myself for the possibility that some day I might too.  I don’t think I can stop myself from posting on the internet.  It’s pretty compulsive.