Wanderlust.

I have persistent, pernicious, well-documented and terribly inconvenient wanderlust. It started when I was 12. I begged and begged my parents to take me somewhere, or (better yet) send me somewhere.

My mother understood. I get this from her, after all. We think it's genetic.

They sent me to Australia and New Zealand. Since that trip in the summer of 2008, I have proceeded to visit Spain, Morocco, the Bahamas, Paris, Germany, Luxembourg, London, Mexico and Colombia.

In the last 9 months alone I've been to Mexico and Colombia, after having not left the country since my daughter's conception in the fall of 2007. I have laughingly nicknamed 2010 "The Year of the Return of the World Traveller."

I want to run away. Right now.

I want to buy a plane ticket, any plane ticket, the cheapest plane ticket I can find, and hop aboard and not look back. At least not for awhile. At least not until the wandering beast inside that seems to be insatiable is temporarily tamed.

I want to climb Kilimanjaroo and see Baku. I want to wander Copenhagen and Amsterdam, learn to dance cumbia on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, visit the jungles of Ecuador. I want to see Johannesburg and return to Tangiers. I want to sit on the sea steps of Barcelona and go dancing in Munich. I want to ride a scooter through the streets of Taipei and walk along the Great Wall.

And I want to do it all right now. The effort involved in keeping myself seated in this desk chair is superhuman. I squirm, I dance, I do anything and everything that makes me look ridiculous because if I don't, I will get up and run away. RUN. AWAY.

I want to see the world. I want to drink it in and love every dirty, shining, beautiful piece of it.

And right now, I want to do it right now. Who's in?

Food IS Art.

I think I just have read the only letter-to-the-editor in the history of my reading letters-to-the-editor that has honestly and truly offended me. Two weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published an entire issue dedicated to food and the ways in which food can build community. This letter was written in response to that issue, and published this week (about halfway down the page):

In dissecting the nation's eating habits, the Food Issue presents a smorgasbord of obsessions that are inevitably linked to the astounding fact that from the early 1960s to the present, obesity in the United States has risen to well over 30 percent, from 13 percent. Worse yet, abdominal obesity has risen in both women and men. These unsightly trends suggest that America's obsessive interest in eating is dangerously abnormal. Typically the plight of our nation's waistline is blamed on low-cost fast food and ever-present junk food. But clearly the malfeasance is broader and extends to more sophisticated, high-priced epicurean foods.

This end of the food spectrum needs to take more responsibility for the weight problem and start warning consumers that the tiramisu and T-bones are injurious to their health. Better still would be recognizing that food is not an art, that eating is not a sport, and that conquering obsession is good food for the soul. [Emphasis mine.]

Well, thanks for that lovely expose on what's really wrong with our eating culture. It's not the abundance of junk food or the high-calorie, high-sugar fast-food that's constantly being shoved at us in advertisements. It's not the fact that most of our meat and dairy comes from factory farms where conditions are deplorable, animals are genetically modified to produce more, fattier, and faster, and antibiotics are as necessary to life as water. It's not the culture of eating without thinking that's to blame for the myriad nutritionally-based problems that people suffer.

No, none of that.

It's those darn foodies and their epicurean ideals. It's those darn people that want to bake their cake and eat it, too. Preferably after having consumed a dinner that they prepared from scratch using fresh & locally sourced comestibles.

What we all really need to do is realize that food is not art, and that we would all be much better off eating nothing but bran flakes, sprouts, and water. Then, we could all be perfectly healthy and painfully skinny models of productivity that have conquered our need for comfort in life. Oh, and we'll be aesthetically pleasing to the fat-phobic.

"Food is not an art." I don't think I've ever been quite this offended. Food IS, in fact, a beautiful, primal, fascinating art form. To cook is play with color like a painter, with texture like a sculptor, with sound like a musician, with mathematics, with flavor. Cooking is the ultimate art form, creating pieces that indulge every single sense we have, not merely one or two of them.

In my kitchen, I am an artist. Forgive me, sir, that my obsession with the creative and curative power of food so offends you, but don't you dare detract from what I do with my hands and my time and my energy and my brain. How dare you denigrate my art form to such a degree. How dare you tell me that my life is unhealthy because I put care and thought into the morsels I put in my mouth, those bites that sustain me not just physically but also emotionally and spiritually? Yes, it's my thought that is the culprit, the root of all evil in the culinary and gastronomic worlds. Thinking is always, always the enemy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make a pie crust. And start cleaning beans and potatoes. Food brings the family together, after all, and I've got 10 to feed for dinner this evening. Ten happy people with a little belly fat between them that enjoy a good meal and appreciate the art that is good food.

Slut.

I was eleven the first time I was called a slut. Sixth grade. I rode a big yellow school bus to school, and it was a long ride, sometimes 45 minutes. There were a group of us that were attending this school that was on the other side of the city, and we were the first ones picked up and the last ones dropped off.

There was a boy on the bus, an eighth grader. Jesse. He was beautiful, and counter-culture, and really, really smart. I was pretty much in love with him from day one. Sometime during that year, he noticed me. And we started to sit together on the bus, bumping legs while we lurched over streets riddled with potholes and talking about everything that an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old can possibly think of to talk about.

One afternoon, we were sitting a bit farther back in the bus than usual; it must have been the first available open seat. About halfway through the ride, everyone left on the bus was sitting in front of us. This girl, I don't even remember her name, came and planted herself in the seat in front of us and started asking questions about our relationship. Were we going steady? Was he my boyfriend?

I had no idea what to say. I had barely even thought about kissing this boy. I just really liked the way he looked, and the way he smelled, and the things we talked about and the confidence with which he made his pronouncements. It was a very quiet confidence. I think he was taken aback, as well, because he also didn't know what to say. He deflected. She would not be deterred.

After five minutes of badgering or so, she reached into our seat, picked up his hand, and put it on my breast.

No, really. We both kind of looked at it there. Neither one of us felt much about it, so after a few seconds, he moved it away, back to his lap.

But this girl whose name I can't remember started screaming and hollering about how I'd let Jesse feel me up in the back of the bus.

By the time I got to school the next day, I was that girl. That girl that let boys feel her up in the back of the bus. I got called a slut a lot that year, and the next.

When I was fourteen, I went on a chaperoned trip to Australia and New Zealand with 40 other kids. The chaperones were four schoolteachers. The senior chaperone was a woman named Mrs. Sphar, and Mrs. Sphar had very definite ideas about how children should behave. I did not conform to her ideas, although by most any objective measure, I was a good kid. I got good grades, I hadn't yet tried any drugs nor had I even gotten drunk. I was a free-spirited little thing, and I had a sharp tongue and a distaste for authority, but I was a good kid.

I dyed my hair on that trip, something I'd done for the first time a year earlier with the blessing and help of my mother. (I have always felt it a travesty of genetics that my hair does not naturally have much red tint.)

Mrs. Sphar did not like the new hair color.

She told me I looked like a street walker, and demanded that I remain in my hotel room, washing my hair, until the dye washed out.

When I was eighteen, I met a man that I married less than a year later who liked to call me a whore when I smiled at grocery clerks and gas stations attendants. He never did forgive me for not being a virgin when we met, and was convinced that I was going to sleep with anything that moved because I was already spoiled, anyway.

Those are just the highlights.

I have difficult time, still, with having my sexual appetites and choices derided. "Whore" will as often as not reduce me to tears; "slut" makes me turn red and shaky with shame and rage.

I know that it's all the rage these days to reclaim these labels that have been placed on women that have taken their sexual lives into their own hands and make them positives. Women are supposed to wear these insults with pride, like precious pearl necklaces bedecking their throats, like pins of platinum pinioned on lapels.

I call bullshit.

The words are meant to be insults. You can tell me not to internalize them as often as you like, and maybe I should hear it, but don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being called a slut. It's meant to cut. It's meant to demean. It's meant to tell me that my worth lies between my legs and every time I let someone in there, I'm demeaning myself and lowering my worth.

So don't use those words. Don't play with them. They are not playful words; they are weapons. And most certainly, don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being bludgeoned with them.

Tingles.

It's the tingles that get me, everytime.

Little electric sparks run up and down my spine every time my phone buzzes after 9 pm.
It's those tingles. A live wire runs down the middle of every vein, making the very cells in my blood pulse a rhythm counterpoint to the bass of the heart. Yes, those tingles. I adore those tingles.

That there is no shock when my fingers graze your skin is a source of wonder. Perhaps it merely means I spend too much time letting fingertips wander over the contours of your bones, those solid pieces of calcified tissue lying under the surface, stretching skin into shapes that can only be learned by touch.

I want to learn.

I think I've learned your jaw. I think I realized last night that my fingertips anticipate the curves and muscles, the stretches and the flexes. I think I could trace your jaw in the air even if you weren't in front of me.

Time to move on, lower. Collarbones and shoulders, and then biceps, elbows, forearms. After that, the chest, with its pectoral plates. And on and on, memorizing each bit with tingling fingertips.

Dumb Girl

I'm all up in my head, rethinking your feminism.

Everyone knows girls play dumb. It's a pretty fool-proof manipulation tactic: the hapless damsel requires assistance. I play dumb fairly frequently, or at least I take on a position of weakness in relation to whoever I'm interacting with.

But do I really do this because I'm female? I'm not so sure.

Certainly, it would be an easy out to point to pressure that girls come under to conform to standards of femininity that have been seriously influenced by Victorian mores of silent, subservient women. It would be easy to cop out with some pithy denunciation of society at large that told me for most of my childhood to sit down and shut up.

But it would be false.

Don't get me wrong: I was certainly told to sit down and shut up during my childhood. Repeatedly, in point of fact. In my very early youth, I was a talker, a mover, a smiler. I was a charming toddler, always asking ever-so-slightly intrusive questions of total strangers and winning them over with toothy grins and slightly-above average verbal skills. Not everyone was charmed, as you might imagine, particularly not in institutional settings. Daycare workers both loved and hated me; so did teachers.

So I was told to sit down and shut up. Repeatedly.

But I was also encouraged, with gentle prods. Every time someone answered a question of mine I was emboldened to ask another one. Every time I smiled at a stranger on the street and they smiled back, I was fortified to do it again.

Further, I doubt that the impatience I was up against had as much to do with my gender as it did with a general fatigue at dealing with a willful and noisy child. I'd have faced much the same reaction (I think) if I'd been male.

But then I ponder that sentence, and I'm not so sure. How would I know what would have happened if I'd been a boy? I don't. I certainly don't recall watching boys get treated differently than I for similar behavior, but I was a narcissistic little thing. I may not have noticed anyone else, boy or otherwise. And I certainly find that as I got older, there was a unique sort of pressure I faced as a a person with tits and a snatch.

Then again, people with cocks and balls faced pressures that I didn't have to deal with.

So how do we sort through all the various layers of pressure to determine whether gender has a significant impact on anything in our lives?

I will never go so far as to deny that being female has shaped my psyche, but I have no idea how my gender has affected my perception. Further, I'm uncomfortable apportioning any particular foible to gender, because there are so very many things that go into making someone crazy that it feels like a cop out to point to something so big, obvious, and unchangeable as the naughty bits one was born with.

I do play dumb. I do play weak. But I'm hesitant to say I do it because I'm female. It's effective because I'm female, and if it weren't effective, I would probably stop doing it, but I don't think my gender was the original impetus for trying weakness as a manipulation tactic. I think there are probably other, much more complicated and personal reasons for that particular development.

And, in all seriousness, what does a little weakness hurt? Who is hurt if I let the guy at the pizza place hold the door open for me? Who does it hurt if I let the guy walk me to my car because it's dark and I'm alone? No one. Everyone likes to feel useful, myself included. On an evolutionary level, we've segregated this usefulness in many ways, one of which is by gender: men are providers and women are caretakers. Since my natural inclinations are toward caretaking anyway, why shouldn't I play along with the role social pressure pushes me into?

And then, of course, I wonder if caretaking isn't my natural inclination at all, merely what I've taken on myself because of those pressures. Are the messages I receive really so insidious that they've steeped through my subconscious to my core without my even noticing?

I have no idea. I'd like to think not, and so I will operate as if such a thing has not occured.

But there is always a nagging feeling of doubt, a whisper I can't quite get rid of.

If I lived in a gender-neutral world, would I be the same person? I'm uncomfortable with the question because on the whole I like myself. I like who I am. But to ask this question posits that there may possibly be a better version of myelf out there, one I can't access because of the subtle conditioning I've been subjected to.

I hate this idea, and I'll deny that it has any real validity for a variety of reasons, including my extreme distaste for anything that smacks of predestination or fate.

But I'm intellectually honest enough (occasionally) to wonder in my heart of hearts: What if?

What if, indeed.