How MENSA Improved my Mental Health

Last year, I joined MENSA.

As a joke, mostly.

But also because it was a childhood dream of the Maya who picked up that those in my intersecting social categories were often dehumanized, who realized that she was good at school, who yearned for meritocracy to be a real deciding factor in the world, and who believed that education was the path to a successful and prosperous future.

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dreams of a gay myspace killer

I spend a lot of time wondering what it would look like if Facebook were rooted in the science of relationships and positive psychology instead of capitalism and the science of addiction.

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Rather than the whiplash of seeing newborn announcements, police assault videos, global crises in headline, and metaironic memes with a mayfly lifespan all colliding into each other; maybe Grammarly-style tone detectors could suggest post categorizations that people could either accept or insert their own. Those categories could be used to filter the timeline: I may want only to see pet photos today, but tomorrow I may review which of my queer friends in crisis are holding GoFundMes. If I’m well enough the day after, I will review everyone’s achievements and life updates with only compersion without envy.

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[late] National Poetry Month poem #3: a golden state

named for queen Calafia

from khalifa from caliph,

my love is muslim at her core

carrying jasmin & date palm with her

i was born hers, in a stolen land

of milk and honey. jannahic

are her oases, meccan her temper

her sands crossed by parents

caravan of vagrants transients homeless

exiles awelcome. what else is Blackness

beyond a pilgrimage from ash?

our bottleblonde hollywood mother

(permissive, permissible, halal)

lets yajuj & majuj pigs & dogs

run feral through Hidden Hills

lets the quakes rockabye us all

bathes in brimstone & smokescent

& we no longer know who to follow

let each tsunami wash as wudu

let a new variant of faith blaze & bloom

let the mahdi be born tan, soon

here in the home of all sunsets. here

we stand at the end of the earth,

all eyes on us. here is where i shall die