Moments, Liminal

I don't often read advice columns. I am fascinated by people, and their problems, and their neuroses, and so reading advice columns seems like a natural thing for me to do, but I don't often do it. I find them inherently condescending, primarily, and that makes them difficult for me to read.

It's probably a good thing that I don't read them often; as was pointed out to me recently in disparaging tones, the last thing I need is to become further steeped in pop psychology and dime-store theories. All the good intentions and compassion in the world will be for naught if I start to believe too strongly in my own cleverness.

But sometimes, the tag line is too good, too close to home, too grabbing for me to ignore. Tag lines like "Must I Choose: My Muse or My Wife?" are more or less guaranteed to get me reading.

I'm not male, and my personality is not really set up for clear-cut dichotomies, but this is a thing that I have often struggled with. I require, for better or worse, a great deal of stimulation. I need people, different people, different perspectives, new ideas. I crave them. I crave the interaction that is exchanging thoughts with someone, and I crave variety in that enterprise.

My ex-husband had a less charitable view of this desire of mine; he told me that I required a lot of attention. That is probably true, although not, I think, entirely in the way he meant it. I am not someone that requires the full attention of another person at all times. I crave copious quantities of solitude as desperately as I crave new ideas and interactions. I need time to recharge and regroup, to integrate the sum total of those new ideas gleaned from new interactions into my cosmology and adjust as necessary. But I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy the attention of the people that I love, or admire, or respect. Who doesn't enjoy attention, honestly?

But the thrust of this man's problem is that while he very much wants to be a good husband to his wife, he finds he is consistently projecting desire onto other women and using the resultant emotional reactions as inspiration. He is creating muses for himself. And he is afraid he is hurting his wife in this process.

I very much want to be a good partner, but I require a lot of stimulation. No one person is ever going to be enough for me. And that can be hurtful. Jealousy is an ugly, wily, slippery thing, and it can rear its poisonous head and kill even the heartiest love dead.

Most of the columnist's advice I found unhelpful and unnessecarily downing. But there was one line, one line in the whole response, that sent the hamsters in my brain madly turning their wheels: "I also think it might be useful for you to read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Why do I think that? Not sure."

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Don't know why, just do it. Perhaps the columnist knows more than he is telling, or perhaps he intuitively knows something he can't verbalize, or perhaps it was just a random stab in the dark because this guy really likes the concept of liminality. I don't know. But that was the best bit of advice I have ever seen in an advice column in my life.

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Just do it.

A liminal moment is a threshhold, it is the state of being betwixt and between two concretely defined states. Liminal moments occur in all strata of human organization, from individuals to the world at large. The term was originally coined in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in the classic anthropological tome Rites of Passage. I studied van Gennep; I remember being fascinated by the concept seven years ago.

Because the columnist did not see fit to elucidate his reasons for recommending reading about liminality, I can only guess what he was trying to impart. But I know, very clearly, what I got out of reminding myself about the concept of liminality.

I am spending my life searching out liminal moments. If I could, I would live entirely in the threshhold, in the state betwixt and between all definite things. It is in those moments, and that state, that creativity is most abundant. It is in those spaces where all stability and order have passed away and new orders and structures have not yet been erected that inspiration is clearest. I have spent my life, and I will continue to spend my life, seeking permanent liminality.

New people and new interactions and new ideas are merely vehicles for finding those things that force me into liminality, so that I do reorder my cosmology. All that attention is fodder for the productive use of my solitude.

Some part of me, the heedless, reckless, wild part wants to say that art is that which is a catalyst for liminal moments. Art is that which sends you careening into the space betwixt and between the ordinary structures of the world. Anything else is mere craft, no matter how well constructed.

And I want to create art. I want to live in the empty space between letters, in the pause of the comma and not in the words surrounding it.

Living With Art

Last night, I stood in the presence of art. Art. Capitol A Art. My nose was inches from a Picasso ceramic. I put my hand on the frame of a Matisse. The room hummed and thrummed with energy, with life, with beauty and statement and meaning and history and emotion. This is why people create, isn't it? So that all that life inside them gets transferred to some other vessel, and when they die, some part of them is left behind. And when a group of art is gathered in a room, the room sings as if the artists were there, having a party.

Madame Pampadour, Henri Matisse.



We were just a group of people at a holiday party. There was wine and beer and food and laughter. But the party was in the former gentleman's homestead of Mr. And Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, and still houses the collection of work Mrs. Lynde Bradley amassed that has not been donated or loaned to museums.

Vase, Pablo Picasso



It is an amazing, incredible, uplifting, giddy feeling: to be in the presence of art, of Art, without glass or sensors or security personnel watching silently and with hawks' eyes. It is a rare thing, to be able to reach out and touch and feel the buzzing from the canvas, the cool porcelain regal and domineering and utterly self-contained. I could have spent hours, days, months in that room. I could have gently placed my fingers on each and every piece and slid it carefully from its place in the rack made of two-by-fours. I could look at each of those paintings, each of the Toulouse-Latrec lithographs, forever.

Every moment is eternity in the presence of art. In the presence of Art.

But, as I was discussing with a fellow adventurer prior to being overawed by Mrs. Bradley's collection, living with art is a very different experience than visiting it in a museum or a gallery. There is a subtle pressure, when you go out of your way for something, to experience it fully or to appreciate it all, and immediately. It's the Mona Lisa syndrome: visiting the Louvre inevitably means a trip to see the Mona Lisa, even though the painting is small, and the crush of people around it so thick and intense that you don't get to look at it for more than a moment before the tide of humanity carries you away. And this generally leaves one with a sense of ennui about the whole experience: "All this, and just for that? Sigh."



Treasures at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.



But living with art is different. Matisse in your living room can be sat and stared at for hours, just you and it and the quiet of your home. It can be absorbed, in slow sips rather than great gulps. It can be taken in fully.

And, Matisse in your living room can be ignored. It can be pushed to the back of consciousness while you read, or entertain, or play the piano, or eat a midnight snack, or chat, or write, or whatever it is you like to do in your living room. And then, at some point, you look up from what you were doing, and Matisse is still there, and you are struck anew, and you want to devour all that beauty again.

I want to live with art.

The Dinner Date: A Story in Pictures

There are few things that are more enjoyable than a dinner date with my best girl.

She played coy, but I know how she really feels, and soon she provided proof of her affection.



This moment might be the highlight of my life.




But when dinner arrived, she saw seared scallops placed in front of me with a glass of malbec.

 

She transferred her affections to someone with more sense of propriety.



On Generosity

There was an interesting, albeit tantalizing short, column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled The Generous Marriage. The social value of generosity is well known and well-documented, but a new study about the value of generosity in intimate relationships was just released, and the column touches briefly on most of the conclusions therein.

Those conclusions are exactly what you'd expect. There are no surprises here: couples that both rank highly on the generosity scale are far, far more likely to both report being very happy in their relationship.

Duh, right?

But as the researchers point out, it's hard to be generous with a romantic partner. The lead researcher for the study had this to say about the difficulty of generous romanticism:

"In marriage we are expected to do our fair share when it comes to housework, child care and being faithful, but generosity is going above and beyond the ordinary expectations with small acts of service and making an extra effort to be affectionate."

And he's right: that's hard. There is so much expectation about what a partnership between two people is that you can get lost in all of that and never ever go above and beyond. And that would certainly make me feel unloved. But I would submit that generosity, true generosity, is making those extra efforts without expectation of return. Much like altruism, generosity requires a negating of the self to be genuine, real, and have the intended effect.

And I realized: my generosity is not genuine. When I do nice things for people, I want them to do nice things for me in return. Perhaps that's fair, but generosity is not about fairness. It's about the above and beyond.

I've been being a bad Buddhist. I have not been being truly generous.

I think that what I need to find true generosity in my soul is first a much, much greater sense of self-sufficiency. I need to be much more self-contained. I need to be much less of a selfish mess, in other words. I've not been doing so great at my resolution not to be selfish in my messiness. I think it's not possible not to be selfish when you're a personal mess on the inside.

So, I need to clean up. I need to not be a mess. I need to be able to satisfy all my own needs. I need to identify what those are, and which of the things I'm currently classifying as needs are actually wants, and having them satisfied would fall into someone being generous with me.

But mostly, I need to be more self-contained and self-sufficient. I need to need less. I need to make do with my own internal resources. No one owes me their time or attention or energy. It is nice to get, sometimes. It's nice to be cared about, and it's nice when people are generous with me. But it's not to be expected. It's not my due.

And I think, perhaps, this is the greatest personal breakthrough I've had in years, because it rather neatly resolves the tension I've always struggled with between being open and generous and being cold and closed off. I can be open and generous, truly generous, without needing anything, or becoming needy. In fact, the only way to truly be generous is to not be needy.

New resolution: clean up my insides. Scrub my soul. Neat, tidy, self-contained. And then, truly generous with the people I meet.

HIPSTER

I got called a hipster this past weekend.

Seriously. This was a serious thing. No irony, no funny business, just straight up: "You are such a hipster."

I laughed.

The giddy little girl in me was giddy and delighted that someone actually thought I was cool enough to be a hipster. I mean, I know it's pejorative and all, but still. Hipsters are cool. The label is pejorative BECAUSE it comes with connotation of cooler-than-thou and trying-too-hard.

I'm cool enough to be cooler than thou! AWESOME.

Then I conducted a (brief, terribly unscientific) Twitter poll, and the results were dispiriting.

By a margin of one to four to one (yes-no-I couldn't determine whether that answer was a yes or a no), I am not actually a hipster.

I'm too earnest to be a hipster, is the general consensus.

I guess that's why Thought Catalog never responds to my submissions. Too much earnestness, not enough snark. Or maybe it's too much earnestness, not enough self-absorption? I dunno about that one. The fact that I even keep this blog speaks to a level of narcissism that I think most people would be supremely uncomfortable with.

Either way, I'm not cool enough for the internets. Also, not cool enough to be a hipster.

Sigh.

Back to the drawing board. New life plan coming down the pike in three, two, one...

Low Ebb

I'm at low ebb. The lowest of low tides. I have nothing, nothing going on. I've been reading a lot of blogs focused on dating and relationships and sex and the interplay of stereotypes and expectation in each and all of these things and thinking about the interplay of all those stereotypes and expectations with both sexual ideas and loving ideals and the ways we conduct relationships.

But I don't have any conclusions from any of that.

At a certain point, reading something like The A(n)nals of Online Dating crosses a line from funny to abusive, and as a friend of mine said about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "You can only watch people be assholes to each other for so long." In the end, somewhere between nine and eleven pages in, I only end up feeling sorry for these people, these people that have no idea how to get what they want. Or even, that don't know what they want. It's heartbreaking. And I want to take each of them by the shoulders and give them a gentle shake and tell them to get it together, that life is full of disappointments, and that the only real guarantor of happiness is a long perspective.

I was talking about perspective this weekend, too, trying to sort out at what point altering your perspective on an emotional reaction become rationalization instead of healthy adjustment. Or, more accurately, I was trying to make a case for pure feeling that just wasn't happening. No matter how true I feel a rush of joy or a rush of sadness, it is just a perspective, and there's nothing sacred about anything.

I'm not as smart as I think I am.

Two weeks ago, I became completely embroiled in Susannah Breslin's Letters From Johns, for surprisingly similar reasons. There is enough there to disgust me, to turn my stomach and make me doubt the goodness of men in general, but there's also enough vulnerability, thinly veiled, and enough genuine confusion to make me want to do something. There's enough yearning and searching there, among those johns, to make me think that someone ought to be taking them by the hand and putting them on a different path. Maybe that's what the working girls are doing. Maybe that's what the working girls are hindering. It's hard to say. Sex is so fraught with terror.

Isn't it sad we're all so terrified of something that ought to be simple and uncomplicated and full of love? Or at least, trust.

But there I go again, wanting that pure emotional experience. That doesn't exist. It's all a matter of perspective. I speak from my perspective, and it is distinct and defined and I can try and adjust and that may change my emotional reaction. Maybe I don't want to change my reaction. Maybe I like compassion. It's a form of power, after all. All that caring.

What I mean to say is, I'm at low ebb. I have a thousand thoughts and there's a thread somewhere but I can't grasp it and I can't pull it and I can't spotlight it and make it easy to follow. I have nothing to say because I have everything to say. I can't bring any clarity to anything.

So I try and be oblique. You should see the backlog of half-started and absolutely atrocious poetry I've got catalogued. "Weave me a crown of ruby-colored leaves, and I will keep you against the winter..."

I don't know how I'm going to get through the winter.

Identity

I think I'm having an identiy crisis.

Or, I was. Maybe I still am? It's hard to tell. I'm certainly more than usually interested in certain questions that are often thought to be beastly and/or immature to expend mental energy on.

But here's what I've learned in the last four days:

I don't have to live up to anyone's expectations or ideas of good.

I mean, that should be self-evident, right? And when I say I've learned this, I don't really mean I'm ready to implement it. I will certainly still be chasing external validation for years to come.

But... when I don't get that support, that pat on the head, that "Well done!" murmured into my hair while someone wraps arms around me and holds me close, maybe I'll remember this, right now, and remember also that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. If I'm satisfied, then it's enough. Maybe I'll remember. Probably it'll take "learning" this several more times before that happens.

Which brings me to the question that I'm now wrestling with.

Am I satisfied?

No.

Why not?

I don't know. I can't separate my dissatisfaction with the ways in which I am perceived and receieved and judged and held to account from any internal dissatisfaction that may (or may not) be festering. Part of me wants to lay whatever nagging sense of "not doing good enough" I have lurking in my breast right at the feet of other people. But, that would be too easy.

We are each of us responsible for ourselves. We're responsible, ultimately, for finding our own happiness, for living our own lives, for coming to our own fulfillment. To push that task onto someone else is the height of selfishness. So, laying any dissatisfaction with my life and the things I do on someone else's shoulders, anyone else's shoulder's, is not a thing I am comfortable doing. I don't want to be that person that is selfishly putting their burdens on another.

Some part of me feels that people who love you should willingly shoulder some of that burden for you, though. Some part of me feels that loving someone is the act of attempting to ease burdens, without being asked. Pay attention, recognize need, help. That's how love behaves. Isn't it? That's how love should behave. That's how we who love should behave. But by that measure, there are strangers out there that love me more than the people I say "I love you" too, and strangers that I love more than those, since there are strangers I am more capable (and sometimes more willing) to help than my loved ones.

Perhaps it's true that familiarity breeds contempt. We can't help but start to take for granted that which we feel entitled to by virtue of some concept of love. And once we start to take actions of love for granted, they no longer seem like acts of love; they become merely what we are due, and we demand ever-greater feats of validation, of proof, of love and sacrifice to continue believing that we are loved.

It's a neverending spiral, moving up or down as you see it, positive or negative, up to the blissful heights of heavenly perfection in which we have obliterated a self for another and they have done the same and we have essentially swapped care of ourselves, or down to the depths of hellish despair where nothing is ever good enough, where nothing we give nor nothing we ever receive manages to prove that we still love.

But if familiarity breeds contempt and there's no way around it, then there's no hope for any long-term relationship. We should all wander the earth as half-strangers, helping when we think we are needed, being helped by those that think we need it, and allowing the connection to fizzle out as soon as whatever it is has passed. We should never try to develop or deepen our relationships. We should be forever generous, loving strangers to each other.

How depressing.

I don't want to live in a world of strangers! Even generous, loving ones.

So how do we continually prove that we love, and continually accept that we are loved, without starting to trod that spiralling path that leads to utter disaffection or complete loss of self? How do we tread water and still get where we want to go?

I don't know.

I would like to know, though. I would like to know how to be happy for praise, hungry for it even, without trying to curry it. I would like to know how to not feel guilty when I can't help someone that something in me whispers I ought to know how to help. I would like to not be contemptuous of the familiar comforts that were once new and fresh and perfectly capable of lifting me up.

Perhaps I haven't resolved the identity crisis yet. Perhaps if there's a solid enough sense of self, of purpose, of skill and craft and art and love, of ideas, these aren't questions that need to be asked or pondered.

So. Am I satisfied? No. And it is my responsibility to change that. But it would be good to be loved, anyway. While I do that.

Creative Dilettante

I've been toying with  the idea of buying a camera for, oh, I don't know, something like three years now. A real camera, I mean. Not an iPhone or an adorable little point-and-shoot I find refurbished on Amazon for about a third the original price.

No, I've been toying with the idea of a camera. I like pictures, after all. I like images, I like playing with and manipulating them, making the scenes in my head appear in two dimensions. And since I am terrible with a pencil or a charcoal stick or pastels or even watercolors, my options for making those images appear are limited to words and cameras.

So, I've been playfully batting the idea of a camera around in my brain. I came pretty close last year. On Black Friday I was out at American, scoring a fantastic upright freezer for my parents, and they had some sort of super-bundle deal on a Canon T1 (or maybe it was a T2? I don't really remember) with two lenses and a memory card and a transport case and I very nearly pulled my credit card out and plunked it down. Good thing my credit limit at the time was $500.

A friend loaned me her 60D for about six months last year, and I was pretty well in love. I took that camera to every protest in Madison and Milwaukee last spring, and also to the Dominican Republic. I took the best pictures ever! (Ok, the best pictures I've ever taken, which is nothing in the grand scheme of the world. I know this.)

Here I am, again contemplating buying a camera of my very own, to have and to hold. I've been poking through the dark corners of the internet, found a few scams, solicited advice from trusted sources about what to get. And every time I think about that box with a shiny new 60D in it, I get chills up my spine. Or, that box with the T3 and a collection of lenses. That's also on offer, also percolating through my gray matter like the warm, rich scent of good coffee being brewed by 15 bars of steam pressure. I want these things. I want them like I want coffee at 6:30 in the morning. There's a line between want and need that I can't quite parse rationally when it comes to coffee at 6:30 in the morning, and I'm having similar trouble with my desire for a camera.

What am I going to do with $1300 worth of camera? Nothing great. I'm going to run around with it like a small child runs around with a cardboard box. I'm going to take pictures, and most of them will be ok and none of them will be very good, and I will put some of them on the internet and I will keep some of them on my computer for posterity and some of them I will discard entirely. None of them will ever likely be seen outside the small circle of people that like me, and will look at the things I do just because they like me personally.

I am, essentially, a dilettante in everything I do. I don't have the discipline to take anything seriously, I don't have the focus to perfect anything. I blog, but I don't write. I take pictures with an iPhone and run them through editing software to make them pleasing. I have a closet full of dresses and the shoes and hats earrings and bags to go with them, and today I sit here in ripped jeans and an oversized t-shirt. I bake good french bread, but have failed miserably at brioche more than once, and my pizza dough is still hit-and-miss. Also, I fucked up a roulade the other day like you wouldn't believe. Never has an uglier roast been served in my house. Sheesh. I was embarrassed, for real.

And I can justify being a writerly dilettante because it doesn't cost anything to put words on a blog, and I can justify being a cooking dilettante because even when I mess up, what I cook in my kitchen is healthier than what comes out of a box, and I can justify being a clothing dilettante becasuse I do wear my pretty dresses and my sky high heels, I just need a break from them now and again and that's ok. If I really was arm-candy at all times I'd probably hate myself a whole lot more.

But I'm having a hard time justfiying to myself spending an obscene amount of money on a camera just so I can be a better-equipped photographic dilettante. I'm not a photographer, and I never will be. Just like I'm not a writer or a chef or a model. And it's a lot of money.

But still, but still, but still. I want that camera, with the same sort of fuzzy-headed need that I want a cup of coffee when I wake up in the morning.

Bad Mommy

Today's inescapable and cringe-inducing conclusion:

I'm a bad parent.

No, really. If you'd seen the tantrums I've had to deal with in the last three days, you'd know. Good parents don't have to deal with those kinds of tantrums, because good parents know how to head them off at the pass, one way or another. Good parents don't end up in screaming matches with their kids because they can neither continue to speak calmly nor simply walk away.

Good parents don't have to fight to do nice things with their kids.

So there it is. The reason mommy drinks is that she has a toddler and there's really just no way to get through the day with a toddler that doesn't involve liquor. Not when you're a bad mommy, anyway.

Honestly, though: How do you deal with a kid that won't pick out bedtime stories for you to read, won't let you pick them out, and screams bloody murder when you try to sit and wait it out? Then screams louder when you leave the room, then even louder when you come back in and tell her that unless she picks out books to read, you can't read her any stories?

Every choice simply leads to more screaming.

Oo, oo! How about breakfast? Simple, right?

"Would you like Cheerios or Raisin Bran?"

"NO!"

"Ok, well, if you get hungry and want something, let me know what you want and I'll get you something then."

"I AM HUNGRY!"

Then do you want *Cheerios* or *Raisin Bran*?

"CHEERIOS. NO RAISIN BRAN."

"Which is it? You have to PICK one or I can't get it for you."

"NO! I DON'T WANT TO PICK ONE. YOU CAN'T MAKE ME."

"Should I put some of each in your bowl?"

"NO! I WANT BREAKFAST. YOU'RE NOT GIVING ME BREAKFAST."

"Well, I can't GIVE you breakfast if you don't tell me what you want, so please PICK SOMETHING so I can give it to you."

"NO! I WANT BREAKFAST NOW!"

(ad nauseum, ad infinitum)

This is my life. I can't fucking deal with it. I am going to lose my shit. Bad mommy.

Time Swings in A Wheel

Very few things stir my soul like the changing of the seasons. The first cloud-smothered autumn twilight, the first snowfall, the first May morning on which you can smell new grass warmed by the sun, that day in August when the sky is deep cerulean, cloudless, and high enough to seem like forever: all of them have their places in my heart. I am enamored of all of them, and of all of them equally.

There is nothing that so viscerally reminds me that nothing lasts forever as the changing of a season. There is nothing else in the world that so beautifully, tenderly, and forcefully reminds me that this, too, shall pass with time. The bone-cracking cold of February will pass away; so, too, will the humidity of late summer when the air is so thick you can feel it slipping over your skin like a warm silk sheet. This perfect day under the sun on the sand will end, and that perfect afternoon watching the snow fall with tea will end.

Everything changes. Everything passes away.

But time swings in a wheel, and everything returns. The cycle of the seasons reminds me of that, too. Happiness will come again. Love will grow anew. Death will occur, over and over.

Nothing lasts forever, but everything comes back again. I am reminded of this with every change of season, and I am grateful beyond words for the assurance. Every time.

The Gender Politics of Internet Trolling

I can be pretty obnoxiously political. As a general rule, I've kept most of it off this particular venue of expression of mine and focused here on my personal experiences of things, but really. I can be pretty obnoxiously bleeding-heart, far-left political.

Mostly this comes through on Twitter, where it was the protests against Governor Scott Walker and his union-busting that made me truly appreciate the medium. I was looking at a picture of the court order re-opening our state Capitol an hour and twenty minutes before it hit any local news site. (And yeah, I timed it.) I have made some really wonderful friends while tweeting about politics. And had some fascinating discussions.

So when I tell you that I've never been trolled, not seriously, you should understand that I do go through pretty long jags of political commentary. It's not that I've never been trolled because I stay away from that sort of thing. But, back in March when I starting getting the first inklings, I definitely did circle my wagons and clam up for a few days. And that's a strategy that's worked very well for me ever since. I am obnoxiously political for (at maximum) five days, and then I go back to tweeting about my love life or clothes or food or something safely domestic for a period of time that is at least three days longer than however long I spent tweeting exclusively about politics and current events.

This has had the interesting (and hilarious) effect of getting me on some really interesting public lists. Like "Almost Worth Following." I laughed pretty hard at that one. There was another one that was simply titled Liberal/Retard/Spam/Troll, which I thought was an interesting grouping of things to be. I didn't laugh so much at that as I did wince.

But my strategy of just never going for too long without backing off and becoming nonthreateningly girly again seemed to work. Aside from the most glancing, easy to identify, and non-personal trolling that exists, I've never had to deal with vitriol from strangers.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (one of those wonderful Twitter pals I met through politics and #wiunion) dropped a comment along the lines of "Remember when I didn't have my real name here and people thought I was a guy? That was fun."

And it made me think: I'm pretty obviously female, even on a gender-neutral platform like Twitter. My handle is "TheGirlOne" for crying out loud, and for a long while I had a picture of my actual face up there as an avatar, and I'm clearly female. What if the reason I never get trolled is less to do with my careful curated strategy, and more to do with my gender? A woman in politics isn't "worth" trolling?

I don't think that's seriously the case; I think it might be some combination of gender roles and my strategy, but after having read this piece, and this one, and this one, I am pretty convinced that my being a woman hasn't been the driving force in not being trolled, either on Twitter or here. Because there are, apparently, a lot of men out there, and a lot of people out there in general, that are willing to aim a lot of pent-up rage at women on the Internet.

And I think that the quote at the end of the Time article is intensely relevant to anyone that's about to tell me that it's *just* the Internet:

"This is 2011. It’s not “just” the Internet. It’s our culture. At this moment in time, you can work, socialize, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific. It’s about time we started discussing it."

The Internet is, for better or worse, a part of the way we live these days. It is our culture. It's no longer a subculture, or an underground culture, or any other negating adjective you want to throw on it. The Internet is pop culture. We inhabit these spaces as surely as we do our bedrooms, apartments, cubicles, cars. And what happens here is real.

I've been lucky. Startling, beautifully, terrifyingly lucky. I have blogged about gender relations, and gender bending, and patriarchal political pundits, and my own sexual history. I have been, at times, uncomfortably personal. I have been, always, lucky that all of you that read this or have stumbled upon it have been kind and supportive.

I worked for a political office in Milwaukee for a year when I was in college. When the then-governor of our state, Jim Doyle, vetoed concealed carry legislation, a lot of people were understandably upset. Several of them called into the Mayor's office to express their disapproval. (Don't ask me why people upset with the governor were calling the mayor of a city. I don't know. People are dumb.)

One of the interns answering phones during that period was a lovely young woman, a friend of mine, and she took a call in which the man on the other end of the phone told her, after she tried to explain to him that the Mayor had no control over what the governor did and it wasn't under our purview, that he "hoped she got raped on her way home tonight, so [she'd] understand that carrying a gun is a good thing."

I cried when it was directed at her, and I certainly looked over my shoulder the entire walk from City Hall to my busstop, the whole bus ride home, the whole walk from that busstop to my apartment.

I have been (for me, anyway) remarkably open here, and I have been lucky. And I have been consistently supported in that. I hope that never changes. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that putting this piece out there is taking slightly more courage than I probably have.

We should all be more compassionate. Telling that to a mysogynistic, scared little man in his basement spewing hate at all the women he can find on the Internet is probably a bit like spitting in the storm's eye, but I'll do it anyway. We should all be more compassionate. We should all be working to understand the ways in which we're all vulnerable and scared, and we should all be working to change those conditions. Life doesn't have to be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. We can be better than that. So, let's be better than that.

And let's start by all being as civil to everyone as you've all been to me.

Slut-Shaming

Author's note: This whole thing is probably a classic case of too much information. Because it's a classic case of blogging-as-therapy (because I'm too poor to afford an actual therapist). So, SPOILER ALERT: I'm being pretty frank about my sexual history, and if you don't want to know for whatever reason, just stop reading, ok? This really is an exercise in purging for me, but I do need to make it public in order for that purging to be complete.

I'm sure my intimacy issues have many causes, but at least one of them is the general culture of fear and shame around sex. I say this as someone that didn't grow up in one of those crazy fundamentalist, abstinence, purity-pledges to your father kind of homes, either. No, I think we were pretty average on the topic of sexuality, which is to say that we just didn't talk about it. There wasn't any active effort to shame or instill fear, but there wasn't any discouragement of that, either. The broader culture was allowed to shape my opinion on sex without interference.

Yeah, explains a lot, doesn't it?

Because the culture we live in is downright bipolar about sex.

Do it, don't do it. Do it a LOT, do it with anyone you like, only do it with people you love, don't do it all. Masturbate! Don't masturbate. Experiment! Don't get yourself in situations you'll regret. Take responsibility for your own pleasure! It's all your responsibility! Even violence is your responsibility. It's your fault if you get raped, it's a man's fault for not being controlled enough. Everything about sex and the way we deal with it is dual: for every person proclaiming something from the rooftops, there is another person standing on the rooftop across the street yelling the exact opposite thing.

Seriously, guys? INFORMATION OVERLOAD. I can't handle it. Shut UP already.

The constant that my mind and soul and heart have always siezed on is the word "slut." The battle for the meaning of the word is apparently being waged in my flesh, because I'm fed up with both sides.

I probably am a slut. But unlike all those women out there working to reclaim the label, I cringe. I know it's meant to be hurtful. I know it's meant to be a cut on my moral character, and I know it's meant to characterize me as less than worthy. There's no reclaiming that. I don't know why anyone would bother trying. One side of our culture, despite its rampant sexualization, still cleaves to narrow strictures of acceptable behavior, and a girl or even a woman that has a lot of sex with a lot of people is a slut, and that is BAD. There is no way around the fact that word is meant to shame and demean and alter behavior back towards socially acceptable norms.

So let's just lay this out. Cold hard facts, cold comfort numbers. I've had intercourse with something like 30 men in my life. No, I don't remember the exact number. No, I don't remember all their names. No, I wasn't always as careful as I should have been, although I escaped STDs, and I do know that.

I've had sexual contact short of intercourse with an additional 15 or so men.

I have had four mutually committed, serious relationships in my life. So the greatest part of my sexual experience has had happened outside the bounds of a close or loving relationship.

I have had incredibly lopsided relationships, in which one person cares far more than the other, three times. I've been on both sides of that inequality.

So the majority of my sexual experience has been outside of any sort of relationship at all.

I have been pregnant twice, and I have one child.

I'm a slut.
Honestly, my experience has taught me that sleeping around and lots of random one-night stands are not very satisfying. I don't recommend it as a course of action or a lifestyle. But I don't know if I would have ever gotten to the point I'm at right now, of not merely desiring real intimacy, but of understanding what real intimacy actually is because I've experience the contrast. Some people can't learn from the mistakes of others; they have to make the mistakes themselves. I am very much one of those people. So, despite 10+ years of heartache and yearning, I'm glad to have had the experiences I've had.

On the other hand, the sex-positive messaging can become overbearing and oppressive. The attempt to reclaim "slut" has led to a bizarro world of opposite sexual pressures: to do as much as possible, and be proud of it, to experiment and try everything, and to enjoy it all. And I haven't done that.

For example, I don't really get masturbation. My fuzzy-headed spiritualist view of the world and relationships idealizes sex as an energy exchange between people, and the fulfillment (the orgasm) comes from that exchange. This is why all those one-night stands were so bad. I can't get off without another person, and another person that's open. So I don't masturbate. But I spent a lot of time, at one point in my life, being pretty ashamed and wondering what was wrong with me because the "sex-positive" message of self-love was so relentless.

I wasn't slutty enough for that side of the culture, because I didn't have a lot of orgasms to go along with all that sex I was having. In fact, I pretty much never really enjoyed myself at all. And it was my fault, completely, that I was failing to understand the physical needs of my body so much that I couldn't or wouldn't comunicate them. Because in the sex-positive world, orgasm is a purely physical event that should be able to be brought about by purely physical means. That's why masturbation is so important, because it shows you what you respond to physically. And that message, as powerful as it may indeed be to a lot of people, was intensely damaging to my own ideas about pleasure and intimacy and what I needed. I doubted myself, terribly doubted myself, for years. And I still do.

I'm ashamed of having been a slut. I'm ashamed for having not been slutty enough to bring myself to orgasm. Right now, I'm ashamed that I've written all this and I'm going to share it with the world, because it's so confused.

But I'm going to hit that publish button anyway, because the only way to stop being ashamed is to just deal with the reality. So here we go. REALITY.

Make Love Not Porn

Maybe it's just me, but sex (and, more specifically, the intersection of love and sex) is terrifying. I mean, I know I have intimacy issues and so most things that involve other people are terrifying in one way or another, but man. Feelings and sex are the worst.

It's pretty easy to have sex when you don't care. Really. (I'm sure someone out there will mutter "Slut" under their breath. I could write you a whole different blog about slut-shaming and sex-shaming in current culture. I probably will. In the meantime, just don't say it to my face, ok? I'm likely to burst into tears and embarrass both of us.)

But the reality is that we now (for better or worse, and I happen to think it's a little bit of both) live in a culture in which sex is divorced from most of its traditional meanings. We hold onto the vestiges of those past associations, but really, everyone's out there doing what they do, and not a lot of people think that intercourse equates to commitment anymore. It's just sex. It feels good. It's a biological need like any other. Take your pick of rationalizations.

In a permissive culture, it's really easy to end up having a lot of sex. (I have.) And it's really easy for that sex to be utterly, completely, and absolutely meaningless.

And that, my darlings, is called a defense mechanism. It's really easy to just have at it when you really, truly do not give a flying fuck about the person that you're fucking. Said with less profanity, when you don't care about the person you are engaging in intimate acts with, the acts are no longer intimate. Intimacy (like arousal and attraction) are first and foremost states of mind, not states of body. The brain is the most highly developed and intensely sensitive sexual organ we possess.

But there's a lot going on in the act of sex without intimacy, and on the whole I think that it can contribute to a whole host of sexual dysfunctions that are increasingly common, or, increasingly talked about. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a rise in actual instances of a thing, or just a rise in the number of people willing to talk about a thing.

I came across an interview with a woman who's working on getting a campaign called "Make Love Not Porn" off the ground. It's not what it sounds like. There are no prescriptives about waiting for true love or marriage, there is no moralizing or shaming involved. Rather, she's concerned that because the focus of sex-education initiatives have been on these lines, young people are learning what sex is from porn. Porn has become the standard by which we fuck.

And that's awful. I think we can all agree on that.

Porn is not real life. Porn is entertainment of a specific variety, and it's direceted primarily at men. Porn is all about the money shot. Porn is about male pleasure. The focus is getting a guy off.

And that's how we're having sex these days. Like porn stars. And rather than a give and take, rather than an intimate exchange between two people that have feelings and are engaging with each other, we are all of us focused on the idea that good sex is sex in which a man has an orgasm and a woman moans a lot. I think that's supposed to mean she's having a good time, too, but it's hard to tell. I mean, the last time I (accidentally) watched some porn, I was actually sick to my stomach because the woman in the scene was so obviously drugged out of her goddamn mind that I was watching a rape, and painfully conscious of it. There is no way she could have consented, much less have been enjoying herself.

So there's some feminist undertone to this whole sex-as-porn thing; it is enormously detrimental to women, since the focus in porn is men. But I also think it's detrimental to men. There is no intimacy in the way we, as a culture, approach sex anymore. In that way, my own issues are part of a much larger malaise. We don't know how to be intimate with each other even when we want to, because porn-as-sex is so steeped into our consciousness.

And I believe (despite my intense feminist leanings and occasional rage) that we are all human beings first, and gendered human beings second, and men/masculine-leaning beings desire intimacy just as much as anyone else. And they, too, are being denied the tools to achieve it physically with their partners by this culture that replaces sexual intimacy with caricatures.

I can't put my own problems with intimacy on the porn industry. I was never much of a porn watcher. I mean, I've put in the minimum requisite hours for someone of my generation on redtube and I've read far, far more erotica than a lot of people I know, but I never really got into it. Porn consumption is essentially masturbation with some technological twists, and I've never really got the point of masturbation, either. But it certainly doesn't help. Being trapped in the idea of porn as sex means that even when I want to care, even when I find myself desperately longing to actually achieve intimacy, all I can think about is whether or not I'm any good, and good is measured by the unreality of porn.

So, Cindy Gallop: I am with you. Let's make love, not porn.

Have You Ever Been In Love

Have you ever been in love?

Have you known what it feels like to be able to follow your instincts without worry. Have you known what it's like to compare the color of your lover's eyes to the fallen leaves of autumn after a rainstorm has dulled the colors and shined the surfaces. Have you not been self-conscious about it. Lovers make ridiculous comparisons. Have you accepted "You are the air in my cerebral lungs" as a basic fact, not a flight of fancy. Have you believed that without yourself, someone else would not be able to think. It is far more powerful than believing that without one, another cannot live.

Have you known yourself a muse.

Have you known what it is to lose yourself in someone else's world, and in turn to pull them into your own. Have you known what it is to construct an entirely new reality on the basis of shared understanding, and to stand in that brave new world and laugh at everyone on the outside that can't come in and won't come in and isn't invited in and will never know what we two know or feel what we two feel or the completeness of two people so perfectly complementary.


Have you known what it is like to fit.

Have you known what it is to hear someone's terrible confessions, and to accept them. Not to argue about them, or convince him otherwise. Have you known what it is to let someone tell you their greatest failings, their greatest amoralities, their greatest secrets and simply absorb the knowledge and go on loving. Have you known what it is to love a monster.

But we're all monsters, aren't we. One way or another.

I have loved a monster, and I am become a monster. I have loved a monster and I love a monster still and that has made me the most grotesque and monstrous of things. This love for the blackness of someone else's soul that I carry around in my heart and refuse to cut away has poisoned me and I can't love anymore, not unless you are a monster, too, in which event I will love you like you have never been loved, and never will be loved, because monsters are the easiest to love. His love is a plague, and I will die without the pieces of my heart that he has claimed but I will not die if I keep on loving him in those pieces of my heart. Love cures all ills.

He is the one that taught me survival above all things. He is the reason I can survive his absence, with my wasted heart and my hardened edges.

I have loved a monster, and I am become a monster, and have you ever been in love? Because if you have then you have loved a monster, too. We are all monsters. One way or another.

It's Called "Disobedience" for a Reason

Yesterday morning, following an overnight clash between protestors in the financial district of Boston and the Boston Police Department, the mayor of Boston, one Thomas Menino, called into a morning news show and offered this little gem:

"I will not tolerate civil disobedience in the city of Boston."

For real. The man said this. On television.

I had to go find a video of the incident, because for a few minutes I just couldn't believe someone could so grossly misunderstand both the level of disenchantment festering among the populace AND the nature of civil disobedience. But apparently, Mayor Menino can.

I don't speak for anyone but myself, so I'll not pontificate on the reasons for the massive Occupy Together encampments and marches that are happening all over the country. I could tell you my own reasons for desiring to protest, but that seems silly as I'm really a very lucky ducky when you get right down to it, as evidenced by the stories told in this blog.

So let's talk about civil disobedience. First of all, it's called disobedience for a reason, and that reason is that practitioners are disobeying. They are deliberately choosing not to follow certain laws or directives from authority as a means to call attention to an injustice or an issue or to make certain that their voices are heard.

From a moral perspective, it is always any person's right to refuse to follow a law or directive that is in opposition to their conscience. And from a legal and civil perspective, it is always the state's right to enforce laws and directives by using coersion to ensure compliance. When I tweeted about this yesterday, I got a lot of responses along the lines of "How dare he! It's our right!" which is technically true, but it's also true that he, as the executive of a duly constituted governmental unit, has the right to make sure that there are consequences for disobedience.

That's how a government, and a civil society, functions. We hand over certain powers to the state and the state uses those powers with equal distribution, meaning that the laws are applied the same to everyone.

(This is the ideal definition, by the by, and I am more than aware that human practice of ideals leads to human error in the application of principles. This, in a nutshell, is why protest ever happens at all: because some people feel that the civil contract has been violated by an unequitable application of agreed-upon principles. The more people feel that way, the more likely it is that protest becomes action and a new contract is formed. Cf.: Every revolution in history.)

So the position of nontolerance for civil disobedience is the only one that the mayor can take. It is his duty to enforce the laws, and if the laws include prohibitions on the occupation of public space, well, then.

But what is so tone-deaf about the statement is that Mayor Menino SAID IT OUT LOUD. It is as if this man either doesn't think people are smart enough to realize that civil disobedience is, in fact, disobedience and therefore has consequences, or that if he just sternly tells them to stop they will meekly walk away, crushed by the specter of Authority.

It is UNBEARABLY paternalistic.

The Occupy protestors, despite what you may have heard, are not stupid. They realize that by taking over public spaces in ways that are, in fact, expressly forbidden in municipal codes they are risking arrest. They are AWARE that what they're doing is civil disobedience, and they are aware what civil disobedience means. So you telling them that it "won't be tolerated" is silly. They know that. That is, in fact, THE WHOLE POINT.

And if you're trying to frighten them into backing down by saying something like "civil disobedience won't be tolerated" I have to just laugh. Because people that are willing to risk arrest and pepper spray and bodily harm to make their point about the laughable inequity of the current system, and the egregious ways in which our social contract has been violated and the need for a new one, aren't going to back down because you wag your finger at them and tell them there will be consequences.

Because you see, Mr. Mayor, the consequences of remaining silent and allowing the continued unequal application of our governing principles to flourish unchecked are far, far worse than anything you can threaten.

Playground Revenge

A few weeks ago, I took  my daughter to the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Honestly, it was a truly gorgeous day and the Packers weren't playing until later and my mom needed some quiet house time, so I tossed her in the stroller (ok, ok, she climbed in herself) and off we went.

A few disclaimers, before I go further. I was probably dressed like a celebrity trying to hide from photographers, complete with inappropriate dress, oversized sweater, scarf and hat. G was probably also inappropriately dressed, and by that I mean barefoot and not wearing her own sweater. And I am known to be pretty sensitive to condescending and/or patronizing behavior. I have been since I was a wee bairn. And I may have been moderately hungover. Hangovers make me cranky.

But it was a beautiful day! Check it:

So there we were, happily at Lake Park playground. G is running about like a mad thing, sliding on slides and digging in sand and climbing on dangerously unstable chain ladders and I am happily parked on a bench in the sunshine, checking twitter and occcasionally snapping a picture of her and often letting my head fall back to rest oh-so-gently on the back of the bench while I try to banish the throbbing knot of having drank too much last night from my temples.

I turn my head to the right. And there I see them, a group of parents from G's school. including the principal and his wife, sitting on a picnic blanket together and talking loudly and raucously as they share organic snack cakes and keep vulture eyes on their various children.

Oh shit, I think. At least they are over by the little kids area and we're over here on the other side  of the playground.

FYI, NEVER think that. Because your toddler will immediately run over to you, dump her shoes in your lap and tear off barefoot toward the people you are happy not to be interacting with. She got to the swing set and called me over at the top of her lungs to push her. But she said "please" so I didn't really have grounds for refusal.

I get there and realize that my fear of being forced to interact with these people is completely unfounded, as they all ignore me. Completely. Even after the kids make the connection that some of them are in the same kindergarten class and some of them are in the class next door.

Whatever, I'm cool with that. All these parents are between fifteen and twenty years older than me, and I guarantee you that none of them were out drinking too much the night before. Also that none of them finished their evening at three ante-meridian with take-out nachos from the delightful Mexican-Californian biker* on their front porch. Interacting with them would probably be painfully awkward for everyone involved, so I'm quite happy to be spared the increase in my head pains.

But then things start to happen. A group of boys (dark skinned, which I must point out since I live in the whitest-white-bread neighborhood ever) with toy guns appear as if by magic and start pretending to shoot each other as they chase all over the playground area. A grizzled, old white man in a USMC baseball cap sits in a camo-print camp chair on the very far edge of the playground and doesn't really watch them.

Ok, now, yeah, a bunch of eight- to fourteen-year-olds running over the toddler play area is a recipe for disaster. Some eighteen-month-old will get run over, or some four-year-old will try to climb and jump like the big kids are and break something. I get it. So the principal of my kids' school asking the boys to go play somewhere else is not really out of line.

BUT THEN. HIS WIFE. This woman has got to be the most loud-mouthed, judgmental, politically correct, condescending thing in the ENTIRE WORLD. Before the boys leave, she starts talking (at the top of her considerable voice) about the inappropriateness of guns as toys. She bullies all the other parents in her little picnic into acquiescing to her superior viewpoint. And she openly (and still loudly) wonders at parents who "dump" their kids at a playground "with weapons."

First of all, the kids can hear you, lady, and you're not exactly showing them any kind of respect. Second, the other parents in your little clique are aware of how disrespectful you're being but you've got them cowed because you treat life like middle-school and you have to be the Queen Fucking Bee. Third, the guardian of these kids, probably a foster parent or grandparent, can hear you, and I guarantee you he doesn't need your moralizing from the high-and-mighty throne of your affluence. Being well off and liberal doesn't give you the right to passive-aggressively tell everyone else in the world how to live.

It took most of my self-control not to whirl around and tell her off. But I do try not to swear in front of my own kid, and I don't think I could have accomplished the verbal tonge-lashing this woman needed without dropping at least two f-bombs. Also, yelling at people is no way to solve anything, and berating this woman loudly for berating the state of these kids loudly would have been ineffective at best. So I held my tongue. It was hard.

But then I got my sweet revenge. You see, by this time, I had tamed the hangover (we'd been at the park for close to two hours) enough to be playing with my sweet little girl. We were sitting in the sand, raking it into a pile and smoothing the sides, digging a circular hole around it, placing rocks and sticks. The whole thing was actually quite soothing, building this mountainous castle, and the feel of the sand slipping over and through our fingers was delightful. I started making a rock garden outside the castle as she kept working on the walls, and suddenly other children were there to help us.

First, the daughter and son of Mrs. Judgmental Loudmouth. Then another boy from the playgroup.

AND THEN: the youngest three boys of the gun-toting group came to see what we were up to. Two were six-year-old twins; one was an eight year old. They came and sat down with us, wondered what we were doing. I told them. They asked if they could help. I asked them to please put the guns down somewhere else and join us.

And they did. We spent a solid forty minutes, the group of us, coming sand into a pile and then another pile and building a bridge between them. We put flags on top and dug a ditch around. We created an entire rock and stick garden around the exterior, and raked the sand in into patterns that included the first letter of each kids' name.

And Mrs. Judgmental Loudmouth sat on her fat ass on a camp chair not five feet away from me, and looked slightly aghast the entire time I played with her children and the gun boys and my kid. And she couldn't say a word. Because we were all quite happy together.

When her husband came to collect the kids into the minivan to drive home, he smiled at me and said hello and thank you and I smiled back and said hello and then I turned to her and with all the courtesy I could muster I sat up straight like a steel ramrod and looked her dead in the eye and gave her my most mega-watt smile ever and doffed my cloche to her. I totally saw her teeth clench. It was a beautiful moment.

(I'm totally a bad person and I'm going to hell but what the fuck ever.)

*I am going to get that awesome old biker hippie to teach me how to make tortillas if it's the last thing I do. Serious.

An Ode to the Apostrophe

What is an apostrophe? A punctuation mark. It is one of those marks we use to communicate, one of those mysterious and mystifying little black boxes that we use to contain language. Language is the concrete communication of abstract thought, or the abstract communication of concrete concepts. The meaning of an apostrophe, therefore, is completely abstracted from the strange symbol on the page.

What does its abstraction signify? It is a mark of elision, used to denote a missing letter, dropped into the void and replaced by this strange little hanging dangle; or it is a mark of possession, of belonging. It is a mark of absence, or a mark of ownership. This dichotomy is one of the more extreme examples of bipolarity in the English language. The apostrophe marks the nonappearance of something. It marks the deliberate decision to remove. But it also marks possession. It marks the desire to claim something, to assign it an owner and controller. The apostrophe marks titular rights.

His fingers kept finding the apostrophe. There were apostrophes everywhere during that conversation. What does that mean? Is he dropping me? Am I to be the letter dropped from the word of his life? Will the shape of me be totally cut away, replaced by naught but a generic mark, a tiny blot where once the complexity of me used to curve and bend and stick? Does he dislike my curves, or my bends, or the hard ways I project myself out into the space of the world, into his life? Would he prefer the blandness of an apostrophe? Would he opt for the inoffensiveness of a tiny misshapen dot, for the ease of not having to say so many syllables? Perhaps I am too much. It has happened before.

Or perhaps he is trying to claim ownership. Perhaps he wants to possess me, to declare to the world that I am his, that I belong to him. Apostrophes are marks of possession. They declare the subject to be subjected to control, or at the very least, belonging to someone. Part of me thrills to that notion. Part of me rebels. Let me say this: I will only wear his apostrophe if he wears mine in return. I know that one to one ratios don’t exist, but fair is fair, and he can only claim me if I get equal rights to stake my own claim.

Oh, apostrophe, you mystify me! I know how to use you, but I don’t know what you mean. I know how to form a contraction, and how to form a possessive, and how not to form a plural, and even how to form a possessive plural. I know your history. I know you came to us through French, and that your use in elision once included not just dropped letters but unpronounced letters. I miss the days of “lov’d.” I know all about the man who, in 2006, was charged with vandalism for painting missing apostrophes onto street signs in the area of Royal Tunbridge Wells. I know about the people demanding you be restored to your rightful place in Harrod’s (now Harrods) and Selfridge’s (now Selfridges).

But how do I interpret your sudden appearance at the end of a sentence? What do you mean to say by such a breach of the way its always been before? How do I know what to make of you when you appear out of nowhere in a new place, in a new light, and I am forced to re-examine everything I know? You make me uncomfortable when you do that. You make me shiver and glance around my living room nervously, wondering if anyone can see over my shoulder. You make me lie awake at night, trying to decide if I like this new incarnation you’ve taken on. I lie in my cold bed and my heart warms to the thought of belonging, and then I remember that you are also an elision, an absence, and I am tormented by your duality.

You are a mystery, apostrophe. I am fascinated by your enigmatic uses. I am endlessly occupied by thoughts of you. I don’t know what to make of you. But I know that I am enjoying the making immensely. I know that I would like to know all the things that you have replaced in his life, and all the things you have claimed for him.

Dear, darling, beloved apostrophe: teach me to understand his meaning in your use, and I, too, will paint you on missing street signs and write letters to restore you to your rightful place in usage. Show me the secrets of his mind.

Aging

I think being old has snuck up on me, and then jumped me in a dark alley and forever left its mark on my life.

I'm 27. True fact. I've traveled the world, been married and divorced, given birth, been abandoned. Now I've got a job and a 401(k) and I drop my daughter at kindergarten every morning on my way into the office. She takes dance classes on Saturday. I schedule phone calls with my best friends. I shop online because it's easier. I have a cocktail or a beer after work. I'm in bed, asleep, by 10:30 most nights.

This is what old people life is like, isn't it?

I mean, I could still go out on Wednesday nights if I wanted to, but getting five hours of sleep and being slightly drunk when I wake up is hardly worth it when all that's going to happen is I'm going to go to a bar (alone), sit there (alone) and then go home (alone). Plus, I'll probably end up spending more money than I ought to, considering I really want to figure out a way to rationalize the purchase of a ridiculously expensive dress that I have nowhere to wear, and it's really hard to do that when you just dropped $25 on craft cocktails.

So basically, it's not worth it to go out and be wild and crazy and young. I don't want to go out unless I have guaranteed sparkling conversation. Which means plans made in advance, and I am so horrible at asking people to do things and most of the time it doesn't work out anyway. So why bother? I can watch Netflix in bed or write about theater events I haven't seen or read 10,000 word articles about Dominionism instead.

I'm old, guys. I'm a fuddy-duddy. A spinster.

It won't be long until my jowls start to sag and my tits are around my knees and I wear support stockings and complain about my knees. (Actually, I already have some serious wrinkles and I am more apt to complain about my cartilage-less hips. For real. They hurt.)

I'm old. It's pretty terrifying. I'm shallow, and so being old also means no longer being pretty, and that's really, really scary. I honestly don't know if my self-esteem will be able to handle the blow of no longer being looked at by men.

But it also means that nothing I accomplish between now and my death will be as notable as it might have been. I am not a prodigy. I am not a wunderkind. Even if I manage to publish a book or write for the New York Times or really just about anything that I might want to do, it won't be the kind of show-stopping accomplishment that it would have been if I'd done it young. Somewhere in my head, I wanted to be Tavi Gevinson, and now I have to deal with the fact that I'm not. I'm not that great. Even if I manage to accomplish great things eventually, I'll not be great-great, just normal-great.

Nothing will ever come ahead of schedule. Now I'm stuck in the local lanes, slogging my way through all that detritus.

I'm old. I'm scared. I guess this is growing up.

Adventures in Internet Dating, REDUX

So lately, my OKCupid profile has been languishing. I've been in full-blown hermit mode, spending my evenings snuggled into my (brand-new, absolutely beautiful, and far-too-expensive) sheets (from anthropologie) with Netflix and hard cider. (I'm twelve episodes into the first season of Roswell. Also, The Man Who Cried is currently streaming, and I highly recommend everyone out there watch it. It's a gorgeous little gem of a movie that was terribly under-advertised and under-rated, probably because it was directed by a woman, but it is intense and beautiful and it has a great cast.)

But my profile is active and everything, so I still get email notifications of certain kinds of things, and I totally got an email when this guy that's friends with this guy that I maybe kissed a lot a month ago was checking out my profile.

I may have laughed inappropriately loudly and for an unacceptable length of time.

But it did get me to go back to the site to see what else had been up lately, and WOW. Apparently, September is the month where people scope the dating site profiles of people they peripherally know in real life.

Stop it, people. YOU ARE CREEPING ME OUT. Also making me feel like a loser. Why do I have a profile on OKCupid again? Weeks like this, I forget. Seriously. Why do I? All I want to do is lie in bed and watch Netflix. And I am not going to invite some random internet stranger over to do that with me. I mean, real talk, I've had entire relationships during which I wouldn't have invited the person I was dating over to do that. Netflix in bed is serious business. Netflix in bed is more or less the absolute pinnacle of intimacy.

But OKC. Right. It's a little disconcerting to look at my visitors list and see so many familiar faces. I mean, it's funny and all for about 30 seconds and then I rapidly go into a shame spiral for even having the damn profile to begin with, and then I become concerned that these familiar faces might want to sleep with me, and then I get all nervous and all it does is reinforce my decision to become an agoraphobic hermit shut-in who watches Netflix in bed every night.

I'm sure in a week, when my extroverted tendencies have again conquered my introverted tendencies (I am constantly at war with myself, it's really unpleasant) and I'm all social butterfly again, I will be flattered by all these creepers. But right now, I'm just weirded out.

P.S.- You should probably keep a throw-away OKC profile with no pictures so you can scope out your friends and your friends' friends without causing existential meltdowns in the people you're checking up on. I mean, I totally understand curiousity, I'm more curious than a cat that's only got one life left, but really. A little courtesy, here. It's the internet. You can TOTALLY BE ANONYMOUS if you just put a little effort into it.

Don't Settle, or, There's Enough Happiness To Go Around

Today, a friend of mine dug up a three-and-a-half-year-old piece from the Atlantic called "Marry Him!: The Case for Mr. Good Enough." I have a vague recollection of there being some kind of stir around it back in 2008, but in the early part of 2008 I was heavily pregnant and also completely in love, so I wasn't really paying much attention to tomes with dating or marriage advice.

Today, a single mama with a case of the lonelies, I read through the whole thing. Actually, I've read through the whole thing three times now (my boss really loves me today, guys) because the first time was full of so much emotional reaction that I had to read it a second time to get a rational read on it, and the second time was so full of incredulity at the terrible analytic capacity and also the extreme sense of over-privilege on display that I had to read it a third time to make sure I wasn't emotionally over-reacting again.

It's HORRIFYING. Really, truly horrifying.

The basic premise of the piece is that if you're looking to create a stable family unit, you don't need grand passion in your choice of partner. And on its face, that's a true and valid statement. A stable family unit is not the primary goal of most people out there looking for a life partner, though. The author takes issue with this fact, reflecting on her own dating experiences and those of her friends, and finally coming to the conclusion that a stable family unit is the goal that everyone OUGHT to have. Those that have made the trade off of passion for stability and complain about it now are lucky to have made the choices they did, and the author can't believe that it took her own self so long to figure out what she ought to want.

And that's where everything she says just breaks down and becomes the kind of drivel that I hate to read but can't stop myself from compulsively looking at.

Moral prescriptives about what people ought to want are always fraught with logical inconsistencies and mental acrobatics. Ms. Gottlieb is no exception. She starts with the realization that she's not happy. She then constructs an argument for why she'd be happier if she'd made other choices earlier in her life. The whole thing is the study of an acute case of Frost syndrome, in which "the road less traveled" is held up as some sort of saving grace.

But some of the ways in which she attempts to justify her position are interesting to me, a single mother in my 20s (rather than my 40s) who is also single, and also gets powerful lonely on occasion. The subtext of many of the most offensive statements in the piece make it clear that I am not the target audience for this piece. And I can't help but feel that perhaps if I could infuse some of my own perspective into Ms. Gottlieb's thought processes, I might be able to help her out a bit.

For starters, what is a stable family unit? Why is a stable family unit irrevocably and for all time a man, a woman, and two point three children living in a house with a white picket fence and a rose garden and a dog? On paper, I'm a single mother, but I live in a house with my parents (both my biological parents, in their 25th year of marriage), my biological child (concieved in a foreign country and born out of wedlock and with no legal father) and the two adult children of my oldest sister, who is actually my half sister (the product of my father's first marriage). No dog, no white picket fence. We're pretty stable, despite the tensions that sometimes erupt. I would even go so far as to call us a stable family unit. And my daughter certainly gets the advantage of all that stability and also all that attention.

The idea that two married, hetero-sexual people raising a child is the only thing that qualifies as a stable family unit is tied to the statistics about the children of single parents (specifically single mothers) that exist out there, and I'll be the first to admit that such statistics sound dismal. But I have always questioned those statistics, and not just because statistics can be manipulated to show just about anything. No, I've never been fully convinced that the relationship between single-parent households and under performance at school or behavior problems wasn't completely spurious. Because here's a little secret: most single-parent households are also POOR.

Yeah, shocking, I know. But true. And poverty carries it with a whole host of issues that might affect things like school performance and behavior a whole lot more than not having a daddy. Like, hunger. It's really hard to concentrate when you're hungry. Also, malnutrition in infants can and does lead to diminished mental capacity, period. And I've never seen a study that controlled completely for the variables that come with poverty when trumpeting the ills of single parenthood.

I'm pretty sure Ms. Gottlieb doesn't have to worry about poverty. So I think she can probably settle down a little on the desire to find a husband so that she can create a stable family unit. I'm pretty sure she can do that just fine on her own. Isn't that empowering?

But I don't really think that this woman wants to find a husband so desperately so that she can create a stable family unit. I think she's lonely.

And hey, I have a lot of sympathy for that condition. I suffer from it myself.

But here's what I don't get: she also acknowledges that most of her married friends are ALSO LONELY. SO, she's single and lonely, and her married friends are married and lonely, and it's better to be married and lonely because it's easier to manage kids when you've got a partner to help you out.

SO, a stable family unit is not actually one that's best for the kids, it's the one that minimizes stress on the parents. And sure, as someone that has a lot of help with her daughter in the form of the very non-traditional stable family unit I enjoy, I'll be the first to say that help with kids is a godsend. But again I say unto you: Help with kids doesn't come only in the form of a husband that watches them while you eat lunch and takes the trash out. (Seriously, these are her desired traits in a mate.) You've got lots of single parent friends, you imply. Why don't you all get together and crowd-source the kid watching while you go on dates and have lives?

Because the thing this woman says that offends me the most is this: "With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs."

Why don't you still do some of those things? You can. I promise.

You don't give up your life to have a child. You don't have to, and the kid will be a better person for you being an interesting, complete, well-rounded person than they will by you being a slave to them. They will be a better person even if they spend a weekend at "Auntie Em's" house now and again, or spend a week with Grandma while you go to Colombia. Really, I promise. It's not child abuse to get away from your kid now and again.

The rest of Gottlieb's dating advice, and exhortations to settle, spring from a complete misunderstanding of the difference between "lust" and "romance." Yeah, that biker that runs guns in his spare time probably gets your motor running in a way that the mild-mannered accountant with allergies to everything under the sun doesn't. But your choice is not dichotomous. Life is not black and white. And the lust you feel for the biker is not "romance." It's ADRENALINE.

Romance comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. For that matter, lust comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. And while you may not fall in love with everyone you fall in lust with, to go from that to the idea that you don't need any sexual attraction to your partner is a leap of logic that I can't even really quite follow. Yes, it's a cliche that long-married people don't have a lot of sex, but to turn that into the support for the argument that marrying someone you never want to have sex with is a good idea is just a little... off. To put it mildly.

So Gottlieb takes her own loneliness, her own frustrations with her (self-chosen, I must say) single parenthood, and turns that into a prescriptive for women everywhere. Marry a man so you don't do what I did? Settle for a man that's good enough so you don't choose to go to a sperm bank so you can have kids? Settle for Mr. Right Now so that you can be lonely with someone later on? I don't really get it.

Here's a better idea: be happy. Stop comparing your life to the lives of your friends and appreciate your life for what it is. Has it ever occured to you that you and everyone you know are unhappy because you're all desperately trying to impress each other instead of enjoying yourselves? Stop competing for happiness, because happiness isn't a pie that the world will run out of. There is more than enough happiness for everyone, more and much more than enough to go around, and you can be happy and they can be happy and I can be happy and we can all be happy. Even if we're lonely sometimes, even if it's hard sometimes, we can be happy. And if we took the road less traveled, there would still be dark places and you, Ms. Gottlieb, would have written a piece called, "Don't Marry Him!: The Case For Holding Out For Mr. Right."

Some people are never happy, and I'm sorry for that. But playing to the insecurities of single women, and exhorting young women to "settle" simply to avoid a fate that in your case actually looks pretty rosy from where I sit, is a pretty awful thing to do. Your life is wonderful. Deal with it.

On Language

I'm sort of a language/grammar/word snob. Shocking, I know, but it's true.

So imagine the actual shock I felt when I found myself in the unusual position of being the more liberal, free-spirited party involved in an argument over the (d)evoloution of language.

I guess, looking at my writing style now, it's not such a surprise. Just look at that use of the backslash, and also "(d)evolution." That's some next generation shit right there.

I use proper grammar and punctuation for everything. I use periods and commas, colons and semicolons, apostrophes and quotation marks, and I am fond of parenthetical phrases. I use all these exotic punctuation marks correctly. (I think I do, anyway. I probably mess up now and again.) Also, I always spell words completely. This is such a compulsion that unless I am seriously pressed for space (meaning, using Twitter or sending a text message) I always spell out cardinal numbers less than 21. Because that, kids, is how you do it.

I know the difference between "your" and "you're" and also between "there," "their," and "they're." (And I am an unabashed user of the Oxford comma, as you can note. I nearly cried when that TOTALLY FAKE report that the Oxford style guide had dropped it was making the rounds a few months back.)

I also have a multi-million dollar vocabulary. Why say red when you can say scarlet or crimson, or even persimmon? Why say beautiful when you can toss pulchritudinous in the mix? I fancy myself a writer, and words are thus my bread AND my butter.

Idiomatic phrases are fun for me. For example, do you know where the phrase "mad as a hatter" comes from? Let me tell you. Back in the nineteenth century, mercury was commonly used in felting processes, which means that milliners (or hatters) were constantly being exposed to mercury. Most of them ended up with some degree of mild- or moderate mercury poisoning. Low-level mercury poisoning gives you the shakes; higher levels of toxicity can cause increased aggressiveness and wild mood swings. So, hatters (by consequence of their profession) shook a lot and were prone to outbursts, both of which will make you seem pretty crazy to the average guy who passes you on the street or has to sit next to you in the bar. Thus, most milliners were thought to be crazy. Thus, the idiom "mad as a hatter" was born.

I decry people that say things like "Wat r u doing 2day?" I weep for humanity and die a little bit inside when I see someone use the possessive second-person pronoun instead of the contracted subject and verb combination.

But I don't really have a problem with the way we've turned certain things into their own parts of speech, fluidly moving from noun to verb and back again. I do not take issue with the phrases "google it" or "email me." I don't see them as evidence of a widespread cultural ennui toward language, or a deep-seated laziness. They are simply evidence of the evolving nature of language.

Language is not a dead thing. If it was, we would never have moved from Old English to the current form we use today, and all of us would be able to read Beowulf without the assistance of a translator. There would be no dialects. British English and American English would be exactly the same. Someone from Scotland would sound the same as someone from Northern California. Someone from Alabama would sound the same as someone from Australia.

There would be no slang. "Cool" would still mean something that was warmer than cold but not as warm as warm. If the word cool had ever even developed in the first place, since actually we'd all still be speaking Old English and I don't actually know if the word "cool" exists in Old English because I don't speak it.

The constantly changing nature of language does not necessarily denote a devolution. Change is not always bad. Sometimes it is just change. Sometimes it is actually good. That is as true of language as it is of any other thing. Allowing the linguistic denotations of things as fluid and multifaceted as the internet and its brand-new ways of transferring information to also have some of that same fluidity by not tying them to a single part of speech is not laziness. It is a more perfect mirror of the concept that the grouping of letters represents.

Because that is the whole point of language, is it not? To facilitate communication by providing the tools to communicate both concrete and abstract concepts drawn from the world at large. As our world becomes greater and more complex, our language must keep pace or risk becoming dead. And so perhaps we must give up the sharp demarcation between noun and verb. That is a small price to pay for what we gain in the real world by doing so.

Just don't ask me to give up the complexity of "you're" and "your" in favor of the single "your." Because I will cut you.

Reckless Abandon

A friend of mine linked me to this picture, with the commentary "No one kisses like they did in World War II. And that is a shame."

She is totally right. No one kisses with this kind of reckless abandon anymore. No one dives out of train windows to lock lips.

Well, we don't really ride trains anymore, either, which is its own damn shame, but even without the train, you see what I mean. We don't go all out for anything as simple as a kiss anymore.

Kissing has become blase.

I shudder in horror at that sentence, because kissing is the best thing ever invented. Kissing is better than sex. Honestly. And maybe we don't kiss with such wild, impromptu passion because it's not World War II and everyone isn't in the Army and on their way over an ocean to fight Evil, but also, I think we don't kiss like this anymore because we're all too busy fucking, instead.

Stop that.

Start kissing. Enjoy the moment,. Enjoy the moment when it stops. Enjoy the anticipation and the possibility.

Kiss with reckless abandon. And if you dive out of a train window, please make sure someone is there to take a picture, and let me see it. I would really like to know that people still do this.

xo!