“My process of selection is driven both by my personal friendship and political networks, as well as by happenstance…” 
                -Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

                I’ve been sitting with how the shape of what I think (and how I think) is also a map of who I know, of what groups have made me feel at home, what friendships I’ve worked to build, what causes I’ve taken up and where I’ve managed to listen.
                There are so many examples. On Friday night my brother and I took his two kids camping, thunder echoing above our heads, and I remembered an early camping trip when I helped carry my little brother (a year old, then, or thereabouts). On that trip years ago we walked in close to sunset, and when my little brother woke up in someone’s arms in the middle of the woods while we set up a tent, I could hear in their child’s voice that all of this felt normal. How could it not be, raised in the family we were raised in? Sometimes you woke up in the woods.
                And of course, since then, my little brother (like my older brother, like just about everyone I know) had challenged the way I think about things. They’ve directed my attention toward different viewpoints, different works of art. Day by day, quietly, they pull my selection of what I believe and what I look at towards what they believe, what they look at. This summer they played me a song I hated. They sang phrases from it. And now, weeks later, that song’s running through my head. It’s more interesting than I noticed at first. I find myself wanting to sing it. And wondering about the viewpoint this song takes up, the implications, for relationships and politics, of what it says.