Seriously.

Pinterest and Techie Gender Bias

2012-02-10T09:10:00.003-06:00

The hip new kid on the social media block is Pinterest. Ubiquity, thy name is Pinterest. Suddenly, the site and discussions about the site are everywhere. Someone in my twitter feed joked a few days back about how grateful they were that tweetdeck allows you to censor your feed by keyword, so they'd removed anything with the word "Pinterest" in it.

(Whoever you are, you're probably not reading this blog. Because I'm talking about Pinterest. GET IT? IT'S FUNNY.)

So. What is Pinterest? It's a virtual corkboard. You have one (or several) boards that you can theme any which way you'd like, and what you do is pin images of things you stumble upon on the Internet to this virtual corkboard. The pin includes a link taking you back to the original site. It's an image-based link-cataloging service. It's del.icio.us with pictures. There is absolutely nothing gender-specific in its concept or its design, which is oft-noted in pieces about the site with titles implying it's just for women.

Why is everyone talking about it? Well, it's proven itself in a very short time to be a phenomenal traffic-generator. But I don't really understand the techie-stuff. I get that it's a big name player because it is capable of driving traffic to sites, and that means those sites pay attention to it and its users because it wants that traffic, because I understand basically how the internet works and how to make money off of it.

(There's a reason I don't try an "monetize" this blog. I mean, I love you guys, and I love you guys for reading it, but I just don't get enough traffic. See? I totally understand the internet.)

So, I'm not real tech-oriented and that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about gender and Pinterest. Because, OH MAN.

Props to The Atlantic for writing the only gender-neutral piece on the explosive popularity of Pinterest that I can find. Credit where it's due.

And now we can get into the bizarro male-oriented world of tech blogs.

The one-liners in some of these pieces make my head spin:

"Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest."

Really, readwriteweb? Really? Are you really trying to say that things must be named in gender-specific ways so that we all understand who is supposed to use them? One, that's pretty insulting to just about everyone, and two, it doesn't actually make sense, since I cannot for the life of me come up with a way that "pin" is female-centric somehow.

"Pinterest is Tumblr for Ladiez."

Really, gizmodo? Your writer is trying to mitigate the blow of all that misogyny by claiming some sort of special privilege by sort of being ironical, and also maybe having a lot of female friends. Sort of like "I have a lot of black friends?" I can't tell. But let me just get right to the point: Ladies use tumblr. In fact, tumblr has perhaps the most even-steven gender split of any social networking site, at 51% men and 49% women.

Essentially, what is going on here is that contrary to what is generally accepted to be the case for new technology, the early adopters of Pinterest are women. Young women. Whereas Facebook is at least partially grounded in the horribly anti-women idea of comparing female faces for hotness, and Twitter's early adopters were heavily skewed towards men and coasts, Pinterest is being embraced first and foremost by young women in fly-over country.

Perhaps it's really the "fly-over country" thing that these tech blogs object to, but you wouldn't know it from titles like "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest" or even "Gentlemint Offers a Manly Alternative to Pinterest." It would appear that what galls is that ladies like it.

So, while women were capable of taking Facebook, with its petty start, and make it their own (currently something like 58% of Facebook users are female), men are not capable of doing the same with Pinterest? Or, because Pinterest has been embraced by women, it is doomed to some sort of niche-internet? How disappointing. I was pretty sure men had more creativity than that. The casual marginalization of something popular among women is both offensive and deeply disappointing.

Pinterest is not tumblr for ladies. It is not for ladies, period. It's for anyone that wants visual link-organization. And you may not be looking to plan a wedding or construct an elaborate shopping list, but you can still use the site. And you may not want to use the site, because we all could probably do with one less social network rather than one more, but the reason you don't want to use is not that it is "for girls." Or, maybe it is, but if that's the case, I really don't think we should be friends anymore.

Morality Cannot Be Defined By Any One Thing: Planned Parenthood vs. Karen Handel

2012-02-07T13:35:00.000-06:00

Can we just talk about Karen Handel for a second? Ok, maybe a couple of seconds. She doesn't merit much more than that, but as a case-study in a particular way of thinking that I cannot for the life of me make heads or tails of, she's interesting.

And then we'll talk about how she's batshit insane.

But first, the earnest and wide-eyed questioning ingenue portion of today's blog.

Handel ran for governor of Georgia some years back, and her campaign website has been archived on the internet, because the internet never forgets anything, and so we can look at her statement about Planned Parenthood while she was running for governor. The salient portion of the statement reads as follows:

First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.” The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia. Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services. In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws. Since grants like these are from the state I’ll eliminate them as your next Governor.

The sentence that smacked me upside the head and made me want to cry for the state of humanity is the last one: "Since grants like these are from the state I'll eliminate them as your next Governor."

What the what? Not, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll amend the criteria so Planned Parenthood is not the only eligible vendor as your next Governor." Or even, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll take the grant money and let the state itself administer cancer screenings and baby check-ups."

No. None of that reasonableness. As the next Governor, she would have eliminated the grants.

She's so pro-life that she's going to eliminate state spending on diagnosing life-threatening disease early! She's so pro-life she's going to make sure that poor babies don't see a doctor!

Look, Planned Parenthood is fun for a lot of people to use as a punching bag because they stubbornly refuse to stop providing comprehensive reproductive care services for women, usually women that have no other, or very limited other, access to healthcare. In plain English, Planned Parenthood refuses to remove abortion from the plethora of services it provides. Because of this, "pro-lifers" are quick to pile on, screeching at the top of their lungs that Planned Parenthood ought to be defunded by everyone and hounded out of business.

So, you don't like abortion. That's fair. I know some very lovely people who are staunchly against the practice, would never have one, would be horrified to know their daughter had one. I also know some not-so-lovely people who are staunchly against the practice.

The thing that, in my mind, separates lovely anti-abortion people from horrifyingly misogynistic control-freaks is something I call the Planned Parenthood barometer. It goes like this: I understand and respect your belief that life begins at conception and that you would never abort a fetus; do you understand and respect my belief (backed up by ACTUAL FACTS) that Planned Parenthood does way, way more than performing abortions, and can you recognize the good that they do and be happy that they do it and that they save lives? If the anti-abortion person I am speaking to can, in fact, recognize the good that Planned Parenthood does every day, then I term them a lovely anti-abortion person. Maybe they still have some discomfort, morally, with that, but you know what? Nothing is black-and-white. No moral decision will ever be simple. Being a good, moral person is to be uncomfortable for most of your life, because choices are hard, whether you're talking about an unintended pregnancy or killing a man that breaks into your house with the intent of harming you. If someone cannot understand that moral choices are fraught with gray and cannot recognize and acknowledge all the good (and I do mean, straight-up good) things that Planned Parenthood does, I mentally write them off as a horrifyingly misogynistic control freak and remind myself to never, ever trust them. With anything.

I'm not exaggerating even a little bit.

If your sense of being "pro-life" is so centered on a fetus that you are blind to the lives saved and made easier and the comfort given by poor people having access to breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, STD testing, and a general environment of non-judgmental knowledge, you're not very pro-life. You don't have to like abortion. You don't have to have one. But if you'd like to simply cease funding programs that do, in fact, save lives simply because they are being administered by an organization that does perform the perfectly legal abortion procedure, you cannot call yourself pro-life.

PERIOD. FULL STOP. You cannot do it.

Apparently, Karen Handel is one of these people.

What I learned last week, as the Komen debacle unfolded, is that contrary to what I had begun to believe about American humanity, she's the minority. People who are so incapable of recognizing nuance and the gradations that are attendent in any moral decision-making process are a minority.

You may not like abortion. You may think it's a bad thing, and a bad choice to make, and you might choose not to have one should you ever find yourself in an unfortunate position. But you don't get to condemn millions upon millions of poor women to death by breast cancer, or cervical cancer, or to lives of pain and suffering because of constant pregnancy due to lack of contraceptive access or STDs, and call it the moral, good, pro-life choice. And I learned last week that far, far more people than I thought would be able to make that distinction, DO, in fact, make that distinction.

World, you did me proud. I love all of you right now.

Then I read Handel's resignation letter this morning. The woman is batshit insane. She thinks if she says the same untrue things often enough, people will start to believe her. She thinks this even after last week very demonstrably proved that her extreme and frightening ideology and narrow focus is not shared by the majority of the people that Komen tries to help, or is supported by. Isn't the definition of insanity "doing the same thing and expecting different results?"

I thought so. The woman is nuts.

Your First Time Is Never Any Good

2012-02-03T14:48:00.000-06:00

This is a thing we tell teenagers, or young adults, about their first sexual experience. Maybe it's just girls we tell this to? I don't know.

It's totally true, though. Your first time is never any good. Mine sure wasn't. My first few times weren't very good. Possibly my first few hundred? It took a few years for me to get the hang of sex, and then I'm pretty sure it just happened on accident anyway. Now, I find myself at the ripe old age of 27, actively working at my sex life for the first time ever.

It's weird. The working at it is weird, I mean. I am not naturally a "worker." My natural state is much closer to "dilettantism." I am very good at doing nothing. I don't actually like to work at anything. That's probably why I flunked out of college (twice) and now have a mindless administrative job. So working at sex is something of an unnatural state of affairs for me, as my character is so unsuited to work in general, and that goes double for working at things that are supposed to be pleasurable.

I have been having better sex in the last year, though. So even I must concede that there must be something to this work thing.

A few months back, when I was riding high on some confidence-binge of unknown origins, I submitted a short story to a bonafide literary publication.

SCARY.

Almost immediately after hitting the "send" button, I wanted to take it back and be all like, "Oh, hai, can you just delete that? Don't bother reading it. Kthnx."

I didn't do that, of course, because that would have been stupid. Also, even though I knew I was setting myself up for rejection, I sort of wanted to see what happened. Expecting anything other than rejection on your first submission attempt is pretty much ego-suicide, and I know this. Much better, and much more deserving, writers than I have been rejected hundreds upon thousands of times.

But still, some part of me wondered if maybe I hadn't just stumbled into a good story, the way I accidentally stumbled into good sex.

I didn't. The expected (albeit VERY TARDY) rejection letter arrived in my inbox this afternoon.

And now I find myself in the distasteful position of having to work at something else. If I'm going to publish anything, clearly I have to clean up my act, write more, dedicate time to it, read about writing, all that nonsense that all those silly "get-published-quick" websites tell you to do.

How common. (I'm really a snob at heart. I don't pretend anything else, ok, so don't get all up in my business about it.)

Still, if your first try is never any good, and working at sex has made my sex better, maybe I'd better stoop to being common. Clearly I am not extraordinary, anyway, as the rejection letter in my inbox keeps yelling at me.

The Depths of Toddler Despair

2012-01-24T08:35:00.000-06:00

My three-and-a-half-year-old is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. I know that sounds adorable and precocious and like a good opportunity for personal growth for a Mama that purports to be mindful, and it is all those things. It is.

But, no jokes, no funny business, it's also hell. A three-and-a-half-year-old existential crisis involves some pretty horrendous temper tantrums. You can't really blame her, really: it's got to be awful to be in the grips of angsty ennui when you don't even know the words "angst" and "ennui." As nebulous and imprecise as they are, they at least provide some sort of structure for your feelings.

It's been a really tough week for us, these past seven days or so. She's been moody, operating on a hair-trigger that sends her from smiling and delightful to anger ball monster in a matter of seconds. There have been lots of thrown toys, lots of screams, lots of "NO!" regardless of what is being offered.

After her angry outbursts, she always starts to cry and then tries to burrow into me. If I ask her to stop crying, she'll look up at me with tear-stained cheeks and whimper, "But I'm really sad, Mama. I'm really sad."

It's heartbreaking.

But for seven days, I have been unable to get her to tell me what it is, exactly, that she's sad about. She's either ignored the question completely when its been asked, or mumbled some throwaway answer along the lines of "I don't know."

Yeah, yeah, I know: she's my kid. She's MY daughter. This behavior makes perfect sense when you think about it that way, right?

Last night, after the fourth straight dinner-table meltdown, I took her upstairs to calm down. Time-outs weren't working, obviously, so I sat with her, instead - the two of us cuddled up in the rocker in her room.

And she said to me again, "I'm sad, Mama. I'm just really sad."

"What are you sad about?" I asked, again, with no hope or expectation of a response.

She lifted her chin, and the lamplight glinted on her wet, mottled cheeks. "I don't know who I am, Mama!" she wailed confessionally. "What's my fourth name?"

I was taken aback. What did she mean, fourth name? What was this about not knowing who she is?

"You're Genevieve Anne Findley. You're my snugglebug, and you are my best girl, and you are clever and strong and big and beautiful," I said to her. "Mama gave you three names. Genevieve, for St. Genevieve; Anne for Anne Shirley; and Findley, just like Mama."

She wasn't sobbing anymore, but there were still tears making tracks down her face, and her grip on my shirt was compulsively tight.

"But what about my fourth name, Mama? I should have four names," she choked out.

"Well, you think about what you want your fourth name to be. You think about all the names you know, and all the names you've heard, and when you find the perfect fourth name, you let me know, and we'll add it, ok?" This is me trying to be supportive in my absolute bafflement.

She snuggled deeper into my chest and stared at the wall. I stroked her hair. We sat and rocked, gently, back and forth, back and forth.

After what felt like an eternity, she straightened up and looked me dead in the eye.

"Bookwriter," she said. "My fourth name is Bookwriter."

"Absolutely," I replied. "Genevieve Anne Bookwriter Findley."

She squeezed out a tiny smile, and back we went to the dinner table, where she still didn't eat anything, but at least she didn't howl the whole time.

My three-and-a-half-year-old, who can't write her own name yet, wants to be a bookwriter. And is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. Perhaps some stereotypes exist for good reason. And perhaps all writers really are crazy, right from the very beginning. It would sure explain a lot about me.

"Girl Land:" This Is What Sexual Trauma Looks Like

2012-01-19T12:55:00.000-06:00

Author's note: As you'll see in the comments, I was mistaken about the publicly acknowledged magnitude of whatever happened to Caitlin Flanagan as a teenager. I still think that the essence of her admonitions and fears seem to spring from a place of trauma, but do please take my analysis with several grains of salt.

Some masochistic, curious-as-a-cat-with-only-one-life-left part of me really wants to read Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land. Now, I'm sort of broke (well, when am I not sort of broke?) so I don't really think I can shell out $30 for a hardcover I will probably want to burn after reading, so I probably won't read it, at least not until it hits paperback.

I feel like most of the coverage I've read about this book ignores a very crucial piece of information. The book has been excoriated as reactionary, and dangerously nostalgic. Flanagan herself has been called a "cranky, (prematurely) old church lady." There's an entertaining hour with her and Irin Carmon, resident feminist of Salon, on NPR's "On Point" that's been the fodder for quite a few blogs in recent days. In particular, the bit where Flanagan goes after Carmon for not having had a boyfriend in high school is almost laughable in its ridiculousness.

Basically, the condensed version of Flanagan's ideas and thesis (if you can call it a thesis?) is that adolescent girls today are being rushed out of their girlhoods by the Internet and pornography, and parents need to protect their girls from these pernicious and worldly influences so that they don't end up having a lot of sex with men who treat them badly. There's also a lot of discussion of "princess" ideals and tropes, which Flanagan adores. There's a lot of discussion out there that Flanagan's argument amounts to: (1) men only want sex; (2) women only want to be treated like princesses; (3) sex is dirty; (4) women have to use dirty sex to get men to treat them like princesses. There's an awful lot wrong with all of that, as I'm sure most of you will recognize. It leaves out any variation among female wants. It paints a pernicious and dangerous picture of men. It precludes the idea that men and women can ever be friends. It relies on gender stereotypes that are damaging to both men and women. And it straight-up calls sex something dirty.

All pretty reactionary, throwback, damaging ideas.

But in pretty much every piece I've read about this book, the incredibly salient fact of Flanagan's rape when she was a teenager is mentioned, and then glossed over in the analysis of her ideas.

So let me be the one to say it, I guess.

This is what sexual trama looks like.

Being forced out of one's girlhood by a violent act would leave someone with a pretty negative view of sex, don't you think? And in the culture of victim-blaming and rape-apology we live in, it's not hard to see how someone would fail to heal from that. It's not at all difficult to see how all that blame could be internalized into self-loathing.

OF COURSE Flanagan wants to protect girls; she wishes, I am certain, that someone had protected her. That her recipe for protection involves giving girls no tools for dealing with men and the world and the whirlpool of emotions that is sex is no surprise. She doesn't want to deal with any of those things.

Rape is a serious and incredibly damaging act. With every word I read about this woman, and with every harsh word I read about her prescriptions, I wince a little bit inside. When Carmon admonished Flanagan on "On Point" not to make this about her, or herself, I wanted to grab my radio and shake it. This book would seem to be about Flanagan, and her intensely personal wounds that have never healed. Please, please: make this conversation about her, because that's what it needs to be. Flanagan may be a social critic, but when her criticism and prescription come from such a place as I imagine they do, it must be understood that she's not talking about the world as it is, but the world as she understands it. And while it's always true that we each of us see the world through the prism of our experiences and unique perceptions, it's also likely true that Flanagan's perspective is far more skewed than most people's.

Stop piling on this poor woman. Yes, this may be exactly the thing that misogynists and zealots and morality legislators will hold up when they try to push agendas that curtail women's freedoms. And certainly Flanagan bears responsibility for her words. But still: I can't help but be overwhelmed with compassion every time I read anything about her.

Rape is trauma. And it should surprise no one that in a culture where Ben Roethlisberger makes millions in the NFL and Dominique Strauss-Kahn goes free and women are constantly told how to dress and act so that they will not be raped that Flanagan has a nostalgic longing for a time before she ever had to think about sex or worry about danger, and that she wants to keep girls in that safe space forever.

With A Little Help

2012-01-17T12:52:00.000-06:00

I have amazing friends. I don't think I've ever taken time to publicly give thanks to all of my amazing, awesome, funny, beautiful, kind-hearted, clever, creative friends.

So let's do that, shall we?

I love my friends. I have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet and know truly wonderful people. I have been granted the grace of surrounding myself with good, interesting, artistic people. My friends are amazing and do amazing things. My friends write stories and prose poetry. My friends take pictures. My friends are artists and illustrators. My friends write about music and dream of opening patisseries. My friends are nuclear technicians and labor organizers. My friends design clothes. My friends run for office when they just can't stand how terribly awry things are going. My friends get quoted in articles about developing social networks for social activists. My friends defend children charged with crimes, and write books about history. My friends are encyclopedic pop-culture cranks.

I have great friends.

But beyond all the amazing things my friends DO, my friends are all amazing people.

Which is not to say we're all perfect. No one's perfect, not even my wild, amazing, eclectic bunch of friends. But we're all good. Basically. We all want good things, for each other and ourselves and everyone else in the world, too. We all want a better world. And because my friends are so amazing and creative, they are all making that better world in their own amazing, beautiful, perfect ways.

But beyond all the amazing things my friends do, and the amazing people they all are, the thing that I am most grateful for today is that my friends are my friends. They are people that I can drink with on a schoolnight. I can have involved conversations about totem vegetables with my friends. They will try headcheese with me. They will give me tips on turning my life into a Wes Anderson movie (that are actually very helpful). They will watch The Young Ones with me, warm on a couch and content to just gape at the screen and ask, "What the fuck is going on."

My friends are good friends. They listen and laugh and sigh and make every day so much better than any day has any right to be. Except that every day, for everyone, should have such good friends in it. My friends gift me with giggles and thoughts and ideas and inspirations and hugs every day. I have the best friends. Everyone should have friends like this.

Here's to my amazing, wonderful, beautiful friends. And yours, too!

"The Artist"

2012-01-12T12:00:00.000-06:00

Winter is my season for movies. It always has been. I enjoy a good summer blockbuster (What up, Inception? The Dark Knight? Love you guys.) but really, winter is my season for movies. Winter is the season of gems like Blue Valentine, like Tamara Drewe, like Biutiful, like jeux d'enfants, like Let the Right One In, like The Science of Sleep.

(I just realized that only two of those movies are in English and only one of them is American. I promise: I'm not actually a foreign-cinema snob, ok? Those are just the best of the best of the last ten years.)

This winter is shaping up to be no exception. Melancholia? LOVED it. Two separate social commentaries, elegantly spliced together into a single film, dealing with the reality of depression and the need to understand and accept life's impermanence. The message is strong and strongly delivered, the script is fantastic, the cinematography is lush and sparse by turns, and I cannot express to you how nice it is to see Kirsten Dunst actually *acting* again. Not to mention Charlotte Gainsbourg.

But I think the darling of winter 2011/2012 is easily The Artist. The trailer makes it look like a simple love story, and there is a love story buried in it, but it is so much else, and so much first, before it is a love story. The Artist is an allegory, an extended metaphor for Hollywood dealing with the internet. It is an admonition to adapt or die, but to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it is an artfully drawn portrait of the sort of terror and absolute despair an artist feels when they feel as if they have no voice in a brave new world, or even a tired old one.

The Artist is (with two notable, and powerful, exceptions) a silent movie, shot in black and white. It establishes immediately that whatever hokiness we may see in old silent pictures of the 1930s, it is possible to effectively tell a story and engage emotionally with your audience in the medium. The story is of a star of the silent era that is hesitant to jump on the "talking picture" bandwagon, and who is ultimately nearly forced out of show business entirely. He is "saved" by a young starlet, in love with him, who helps him build a bridge between the world of his silent pictures and the talking pictures that she is such a hit in.

The allegory is clear, at least to me: pre-Internet era production types and distribution models are the silent pictures of our era; the Internet is as a big a change as sound in movies, and requires as big an adjustment to everyone involved in the business. That The Artist is distributed by the Weinstein Company, bastion of current Hollywood that it is, at first struck me as highly ironic. Hollywood understands the need to adapt, and to change, but it is making a movie about coming to terms with the need to adapt and change under the old system.

However, upon reflection, I'm not sure that it's ironic so much as it is self-preservation. The strong undercurrent of the "adapt or die" message is to be careful not to do away with the good things about old models when you do change. It is possible to effectively tell a story silently in black and white; we didn't need sound or color to do that. The young starlet in The Artist consistently recognizes the value and emotional resonance of the aging silent star's work. She cries for him, and his ideas and his vision. She understands that her medium is the future, but she doesn't want to lose the artistry of his medium. The Weinstein Company distributing this film is a broadside against irrelevancy, and it's a good one.

The secondary message of The Artist is the existential angst and terror of an artist, any artist, when they begin to feel as if they have nothing to say. The silent film star refuses to move into "talkies" at least in part because he doesn't think that people want to hear his voice. He's never told a story that way; he's never expressed himself that way. He doesn't think he can. The Artist is also the personal story of one artist facing the need to adapt or die, to find new ways to express what is inside, to be continually searching for new avenues to explore.

We, as individuals, as artists, as creators, must also adapt or die. And that is a scary prospect. We must constantly push forward, push boundaries, find new things to say and new and nuanced ways to say them. And when we, as individuals, as artists, as creators, feel stymied in that quest, the dark depths to which we fall are frightening.

This is a movie I need to own; this is a movie I need to be able to watch once a year or twice a year or maybe just whenever I feel like it. Adapt or die. Change is not the end. There is always a new way to bring your internal reality to the exterior world. Because that's what artists do, isn't it?

I Don't Blink In Dreams

2012-01-06T08:44:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you hadn’t absconded.

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you reappeared, magic, poof, a solid reality instead of the ephemeral set of memories I live with every day.

I dreamt about you. Recently. Not last night, not the night before that. Last week, maybe. I don’t remember, precisely. My memory was never good when it came to you. You were always about the moment. I was always in the moment with you, and time and detail ceased to matter. Who needs linear abstraction when there is so much else to pay attention to, so much that is real to feel? Who knows how long a second can be? I know that it can be an eternity. The second between the inhale and the exhale can be eternity. Who needs to remember the paintings in the Tate when I can say that every busker in London played “Wonderwall” whenever we walked by?

We looked at the paintings anyway. We sat through a lecture in the National Gallery. And when the dry woman with the dead-leaf voice was done telling us things we already knew about Adam and Eve and Eve in art and the place of the feminine in Christian-sponsored art, we escaped from the auditorium like children let out for recess and we skipped down the hallway giggling like mad things and we played hide-and-seek among the soldiers of the Terracotta Army until a burly, black-jacketed docent asked us to leave in politely threatening tones.

We knew the secret to removing ourselves from the ordered world, you and I.

But I dreamt you, recently. I dreamt you to my door and into my bedroom. We stood face to face, and I put the tips of my fingers on the sharp protrusion of your cheekbone. My right hand, your left cheek. Just so. Just the way we stood when you picked me up at Heathrow, that time you were late and I called and called and there was no answer and I worried and thought about taking a cab but didn’t know where to take it.

Remember?

You finally appeared. You were apologetic, profusely, abundantly apologetic.The tumble of words from your lips was torrential, neverending. I put my finger tips on your cheek. I didn’t trust myself to touch your lips; I didn’t trust you to have my skin against them. So I touched your cheekbone, instead.

You stopped talking.

We walked to your car together. You started talking again. We drove through the City center on the way to Rose Cottage; it was Sunday, it was late, there was no congestion charge. You played tour guide. I sat sideways, my back against the car door, my knees pulled up and my toes poking at the gear shifter. You put your hand on my ankle in between gears. You circled it completely in your hand, and I felt every callous and every training cut.

In my dream, you went to open up my skull, like you used to do, to swing it back on those ivory hinges you installed yourself, but I had changed the lock. Your key didn’t fit.

You laughed at me.

“Don’t you remember, love? I’m a thief. I’m a doorman. You can’t keep me out,” you said. Cocky cockney.

And you pulled out your kit, your picks and your wires, and you picked that bone lock on my forehead, right between my eyes. I watched you the whole time. I don’t blink, in dreams. I didn’t want to keep you out, you know. I changed the lock so that you’d have to touch me, take your time. I changed the lock to slow you down.

But then you’d done it, and my skull swung back on those ivory hinges you installed yourself, and your calloused fingers were in my brain, buried deep, all the way to the palm. I could feel the weight of your heavy hand on my frontal lobe, affecting my judgment.

The tips of your nails tickled my temporal lobe, and I remembered: living with you was like living in a dream. There was eternity in the space between inhaling and exhaling. I never blinked.

I have you in my dreams. I don’t need you in front of me anymore.

Moments, Liminal

2011-12-23T11:13:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-15T20:36:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-15T08:28:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-12T10:05:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-06T10:29:00.001-06:00

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

2011-12-05T15:15:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-25T14:14:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-21T08:25:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-14T08:44:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-09T12:20:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-08T13:05:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-04T12:30:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-28T11:33:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-21T15:22:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-12T08:29:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-10T10:13:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-06T11:16:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-29T08:58:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-20T15:09:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-14T12:34:00.000-05:00

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

2011-09-12T15:15:00.000-05:00

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!

I Am A Girl Who Reads

2011-09-06T14:55:00.000-05:00

Last year, as I was in the midst of realizing that the boy I was dating had a girlfriend and was a malignant narcissist, I discovered Thought Catalog.

I discovered it because there was a post that started making the rounds of social media. It was called You Should Date An Illiterate Girl, and it made me cry. I sat at my desk with tears dripping down my cheeks, my throat so tight I couldn't breathe, holding on to that knot desperately so that I didn't sob, so that my cries remained inside and only silent tracks of saltwater tracked down my face and over my chin and onto my neck and over the knot in my throat.

It made me cry because I saw myself as the illiterate girl. I saw myself as the settler and the one settled for, as the woman that would die with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of my capacity to love.

I shared it, of course, as I am wont to do.

And later, when the boy and I communicated for the first time since my sharing, he saluted me, "Hello, girl who reads."

I was confused.

I've been thinking about that piece lately, so I read it again.

And you know what? He was right. I am the Girl Who Reads. I can differentiate between the soullessness of someone that cannot love and the desperation of someone who loves too much. I can read the lie in the hesitation of the breath. I know the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and a lifetime's worth of bitter cynicism. I have said goodbye so many times I am comfortable with it. I can close a book and look at it with only a little longing, I can go back and reread the same words with nostalgia but not regret that the story doesn't change.

I do insist that my narratives be rich, that my supporting cast be colorful, that my typeface be bold. I demand these things because life is short and without good stories and good friends and beauty it is also boring. I will not be bored. I will not live a life unfulfilled.

And I'm sure that's why he couldn't love me. And I'm sure that's why I couldn't actually love him, despite all my best efforts.

I will tell my stories. I will read and read and read until I understand and then I will tell my stories. And my narratives will be rich and my characters will be colorful because that has been my life. I will live the stories I want to tell.

And it would be nice, at the end, when I am an old woman and I am fading into the dark of my own denouement, if someone was there to hold my hand and stroke my brow and whisper that our life was good. But I won't sacrifice my stories to have that person.

I am a girl who reads. I have words. I have rhythms and cadence and connotation. I can feel love and truth in my skin and I want nothing more than to absorb beauty into my bones. And if you can really understand that, then you won't fail me. If you can really live with knowing that my stories come first and everything else comes second, you're not too weak to love me.

Worse Than the WORST

2011-09-03T22:53:00.000-05:00

You know what's even worse than that thing that's just the absolute worst? Because there are things that just rip your guts out, and they're awful. But they're supposed to rip your guts out. So, when you're destroyed by them, everyone understands.

But what's worse than those things are the things that rip your guts out that shouldn't. The things that are totally rational, absolutely the right things, that are completely spot-on expressions of maturity... that still make you want to cry. And cry a lot. Those things exist. And they are worse than the worst.

It's a really hard thing to subjugate your emotional reactions to your reason. I have spent years, more than a decade, trying to do it. And I've been more or less completely unsuccessful. I can now analyze my emotional reactions. I can say to myself, "This hurt me because of this and that" and I can see how the pieces fit together. I can do it with things that make me angry and things that make me happy and things that make me sad. I can do it all day long.

But seeing why something hurts, or enrages, or causes spontaneous spasms of uncontrollable giggles, doesn't make the need to cry, or throw something, or laugh any less. And being able to see the whys and hows of your own reactions has the side effect of making it so much easier to see why someone else's decision is probably completely rational and reasonable.

So when a very handsome, very charming, very reasonable man that kisses delightfully and drops the word "penury" into conversation like it's no big deal tells you that he's intrigued by you but he's not attached to you, it hurts. Even though the 1,000 miles and the non-existent geographic flexibility pretty much make that position the only one to take. I can understand that. Really. I get it.

I still felt very much like I wanted to cry for a day or two, though. And that's totally not valid. I mean, I feel it, so it's obviously valid in some sense, but it's not really, because being hurt by that is grounded in being such a ridiculous romantic, such a fairy-tale laden sop, that it's really just silly.

I believe in love at first sight. More than that: I want it. I want craziness! But I want craziness that's built on solid foundations. Because actual craziness is scary and leads to death threats, actually attempts at murder, narcissists, cheating, and more tears than it would take to fill an ocean.But crazy romance built on a solid foundation is the female version of the virgin/whore complex. It doesn't exist. It's not possible. I can get that. I still want it, though, so when practicality and reason assert themselves into my crazy romantic fantasies, I want to cry.

Because it hurts. It hurts not to be fallen in love with.

The Implications of Living in a Rape Culture

2011-08-30T09:18:00.000-05:00

Last week, when news hit that the prosecution in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case had requested that charges be dismissed, I will admit that I was a little upset. Ok, I was a lot upset. There was some swearing on Twitter, and there may have been a phone conversation with a lady friend of mine that included some top-quality f-bombs dropped at the top of my voice. In my cubicle. In the middle of the day.

Hey, I am a passionate person, and I can't be expected to reign in those passions simply because I have a job, ok? A job is not a life.

The gist of why I became so angry at this news is as follows. The prosecutor believed, or the prosecutor believed that the jury would believe, that it was more likely that Strauss-Kahn and a hotel maid had consensual, spontaneous, anonymous, rough sex than that he raped her. It is more believable that upon entering his room, she decided to engage in some BDSM role-play fun than that he forced her. Because no one is denying that sexual contact occurred, or even that said contact was "rough." No one denies that there was semen on her uniform blouse or that she was BLEEDING AND BRUISED when she left the room and went to her colleagues.

But, despite all that, it is still more believable that the plot of a bad porno occurred than that he raped her.

Because porno plots play out ALL THE TIME in real life, guys. All you have to do is find a maid or a female police officer or a secretary or a teacher or a nun or a schoolgirl, and you can totally act out your favorite porn, and it'll be totally consensual whether it is actually consensual or not.

Because we live in a rape culture.

I live in a rape culture. That fact is not deniable any longer. And this has serious implications for my life. I am a woman that enjoys wearing pretty dresses and high heels. Some of these dresses are short. Some of them are low-cut. If I wear these dresses in public, and something happens to me, is it my fault?

Probably, says the culture I live in.

I walk home two miles in my pretty dresses. I walk home through the downtown area of an urban environment. There are all manner of colorful characters that I pass on my walk. Most of them are men. It has been my habit for years to smile and say hello when I walk by anyone, because everyone is a human being and deserves acknowledgement and a little bit of dignity.

But on my walk last week, I found myself looking at my feet. What if my smile is an invitation?

This is the reality of living in a culture that condones rape. This is the reality of living in a culture in which a majority of people find it is easier to believe that the plot of a bad porno took place than that a woman was raped.

This morning I woke up in a bad mood. It happens. One of my most effective coping mechanisms for dealing with the doldrums is to dress up even more than usual. So I wore a party dress to work today. I posted on my Facebook about wearing a party dress to work.

An hour later, I got a text message asking about my panties.

This is the world I have to live in. It makes me sick. And sad. And sick again.

RESOLVED

2011-08-29T11:32:00.001-05:00

I find myself inexplicably sad. Well, not inexplicably. I could probably give you a really good rundown of all the reasons I'm sad today. Most of them are ridiculous. Which is why I'm not going to provide such a rundown. It's really, really silly of me to be sad about the things that are currently making me want to cry.

So, instead, a resolution. I know it's not New Year's. But I have a resolution to make. And really, we ought to start self-improvement campaigns whenever we realize what we need to do, not only at some date chosen for us by an arbitrarily imposed calendar.

Today, for now, for the next five years: I will not be a selfish mess.

I will probably continue to be a mess, because, um, well. Hi. Have you met me? I'm a mess. I am flaky, and pretty unrepentant about it. I deliberately choose to dedicate my brain space to things like that perfect turn of phrase that I constructed while ten-keying four days worth of sales and reports into a spreadsheet. I remember those words instead of the parking ticket I have to pay, or your birthday.

I am hypocritical, because when other people flake on me the way I flake all the time, I am always crushed.

I am crazy. My emotions operate on a series of mountainous hairpin turns, and I will go from sad to happy and back again faster than a ball volleys at the French Open. (Is it the French Open going on right now? Or the US Open? Whatever. I like French tennis with their old-school clay courts.)

But I will try not to be a selfish mess, which means trying really hard not to let my unreasonable expectations get the best of me. It means realizing when my hurt is valid and when it's not, and only sharing when it's valid. And keeping it to myself when it's not. Because it's really pretty selfish to be dumping on people all the time when the problem is actually within yourself. It's really pretty selfish to be demanding other people's time and attention and energy when you don't really have any claim to them. It's really pretty selfish to monopolize someone, anyone, a whole host of someones and anyones and make sure that all that's thought about and cared about is you.

That's pretty selfish.

I am resolved not to do that. Anymore. I have resolved this in the past, and done fairly well at it, but then I got lazy, and sloppy, and here I am, crazier than I ever was. The problem with this kind of attention-seeking crazy is that it's a self-perpetuating cycle. You become absolutely addicted to the attention. You become downright dependent upon knowing someone is always looking, always reading, always caring.

It is no one's job to take care of you. More properly, it is no one's job to take care of me.

And I am resolved not to try and make it anyone's job.

Here's to emotional self-sufficiency. (I'm going to need a lot of whiskey this winter.) (Just kidding.)

Oh, Milwaukee, You're Going Wild

2011-08-25T15:00:00.000-05:00

I live in Milwaukee. It's a good town, the town I grew up, the town that makes me all nostalgic still, especially in the fall which is fast approaching.

This fall seems like a hard one. I think this fall might be the hardest autumnal season Milwaukee has ever faced. If you read any news, you know that Milwaukee is in trouble. Milwaukee is now ranked as the fourth-poorest city in the nation. It's the second- (or first-) most segregated city in America. And we've seen our share, and more than our share, of violence in recent months.

But what does it all mean? Is my beloved, lovely gem of a city on the slow downward slide to oblivion? What about all the good things about Milwaukee? And there are lots of good things! Just read this awesome Guardian piece about all the great things in Milwaukee! See! We have lots of good things to go with our bad things. We're arty and cool and we don't actually care about being arty and cool, just like hipsters. Milwaukee is totally the cool hipster capitol, where all the cool hipsters are because we're not ironically not caring, we actually don't care, and also we care too much.

It's a Milwaukee thing, I don't expect you to understand.

I live in a lovely part of Milwaukee that's very near a large park (that was actually designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the man responsible for that paragon of urban green space, Central Park in New York City!) and because of our proximity to Lake Park, we have a regular rotation of urban wildlife wandering around the neighborhood. There have always been deer and coyotes in the park, along with possums, raccoons, rabits, squirrels and all those other little furry creatures that make you go "Aww!" on every street.

But this year, we've had a new addition to the neighborhood. Turkeys. Milwaukee now has urban turkeys!

I've spent some time mulling over what it means that turkeys would take residence in my fair city for the first time in the very same year that it would seem that Milwaukee is going down the drain. Turkeys, after all, are the birds that the venerable Thomas Jefferson wanted to be America's national bird. He thought that eagles were lazy poachers of other animals food, which they are, and that a more fitting symbol for the fledgingly America would be the steadfast, hardworking, loyal turkey.

He lost that battle, obviously, but I can't help thinking about him as I ponder this turkey's arrival in Milwaukee. Milwaukee is steadfast and hardworking. We are an industrial town, an old piece of the rust belt trying to make it in this modern era when there's just no industry left. And we're doing a fair job of it! Perhaps the turkey is telling us to just keep on keepin' on. I don't know. But it's something to think about.

Last night, I saw the turkey again. She's getting kind of fat on foraged fruit and garbage, but for the first time, I saw her fly. She flew up into the dying maple tree in the easement between my neighbors' yard and the street. Perhaps she was trying to fly away, to flee Milwaukee and all her problems, or maybe she was merely looking for a place to roost for the winter.

I suppose we won't know until next spring.

The Things Not Easily Forgotten

2011-08-22T12:50:00.000-05:00

The muscles in your arms. The way they rippled when I put my hand on them, when I rested my fingers just above the crook of your elbow, and also the way they didn't give when I laid my head against them. The weight of them around my waist, resting against my ribs; the way those muscles crushed me, pushed me deeper into my own skin than I've been in a very long time.

The coolness of the skin over those muscles against my cheek.

The way we didn't look each other in the eye. Maybe you tried; maybe I didn't let you, maybe I couldn't do it. But all those hours, and I don't remember the shock of eye contact. Maybe we did, maybe there was no electric tingle, maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I am creating a story of thin air, ether, fumes. But I choose to believe it didn't happen, because it must be shocking when it does. If there is no thrill, there is nothing.

I remember my belief in absolutes.

I remember sounds. Wind in trees. Possums under the porch. Confused urban robins, singing to the streetlamps in the middle of the night because they thought they saw the sun lightening the sky.

Soundless lightning.

Falling asleep. Every step in sinking down to unconscious, pinned snugly in those arms. Deciding to fall asleep. Deciding it was ok not to be entertaining. Deciding to rest. Each of my muscles going soft in a wave from my toes to my forehead. Waking up warm. Doing it again.

I Will Never Be A (Paid) Writer

2011-08-18T12:16:00.000-05:00

This is a sad realization for me. Actually, it's a downright heart-shattering, soul-crushing revelation, but I guess it's time to face facts. I won't cry forever, I promise, just for the next ten years.

And the facts are, I will probably never get paid for anything I write. And no one will ever read it, apart from you few, dear, darling readers. (I love you. Don't ever leave me. No really: DON'T. Please.)

See, generally short-form publishing falls into two broad categories these days. Ponderous and heavily-researched tracts, and essays of emotional vulnerability humored up with liberal doses flippancy.

I don't have the discipline for research. Honestly. I just don't. I had a good run in college, and I'm sure that if you managed to find a professor that remembered me at all, they'd remember my stellar research papers because I always had interesting theses and I can actually construct a proper sentence and every once in a while I was able to make dry, dull, academia not make you want to slit your wrists through the judicious use of peppy adjectives and anecdotes.

(I am still pretty proud of some of the papers I wrote in college. "America shouldn't seek global hegemony because it is MORALLY INCONSISTENT WITH AMERICA'S VALUES" is one of my best works EVER.)

But, my papers would never be described as well-researched or well-annotated. I did the bare minimum in that regard, because I just don't like research.

Also, I never graduated college, so the idea that anyone would pay me to write academia is pretty funny.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is perhaps more promise! I mean, I do personal essays like no one's business. I can write about my life forever because I am just that narcissistic, and also because I have fully bought into the maxim that you must "write what you know" and really the only thing I know is my life. Everything else is mere theoretical knowledge, and that's not really knowledge so much as conjecture, since theory is grounded in naught but conjecture.

But then there's that "funny" requirement that is increasingly being satisfied by a display of flippancy that I just don't have. I'm not flippant. I am not ironic. I am intensely, terribly, vulnerably EARNEST. I'm like a puppy that just wants to be loved. (But I don't pee on the floor. I have a toddler that refuses to get potty-trained to handle that for me.)

I'm not funny. And I'm especially not funny when I'm displaying vulnerability because the last thing I want is for people to LAUGH at my EXISTENTIAL PAIN. Seriously. Who wants to have someone laugh in their face when they're crying? (On the inside, guys. I don't cry in front of people. I'm British that way.)

SO... that's that. No more dreams of a daily byline on Thought Catalog or hellogiggles. No more wistful longings that Salon would hire me to take over Broadsheet since Tracy Clark-Flory went back to being a full-time sex writer. (Added bonus of the Salon daydream: the idea that Alex Pareene would become my bestie. That man is ACTUALLY FUNNY, and about politics no less. Also, he smokes. It would be so great to have a bestie that smokes so I didn't feel so guilty about my still-occasional habit.)

I mean, I can keep plugging away on this collection of short stories that's clogging up my hard drive (and I WILL) and sketching out the outline of a novel, but no one's going to publish it unless my name already means something and my name will never mean anything because I'm a bad researcher and I'm not funny.

Life's a bitch.

(xo!)

Oh, you wily paternalistic commentators, you.

2011-08-17T07:45:00.000-05:00

An unspecified length of time back (I'm terrible with time, honestly) I read a piece by Fox News' resident male-centrist Dr. Keith Ablow that set forth the premise that men should have veto power over an abortion.

He makes all kinds of qualifications to the kind of men that should be able to exercise this power right up front (reasonable expectation that they are the father, desire and ability to care for the child when it is born) which (as an acquaintance pointed out) is pretty much reason to stop reading right there.

Why?, one might ask.

Well, because the law is a blunt instrument and morality is as delicate as a butterflies wings. Bludgeoning with law is not the answer to any problem as nuanced as abortion. As soon as you start making those kinds of qualifications, the ability of the law to deal with the reality of any situation completely breaks down. "A reasonable expectation that that he is the father"? Really? Wasn't there a study done that says something like 25% of children in this country are being raised by men who think they are the fathers and aren't? Maybe it was only 20%. But it was a pretty high number. What if a man thinks he's the father absolutely during the first trimester and then finds out he's not? Is he still going to take responsibility for the child on delivery? Is he still as into the idea of caring for this thing that he hasn't actually been a part of creating?

(I've never fully understood paternal societies for precisely this reason: it's really difficult to be absolutely sure who the father of a child is. It is far, far easier to know for sure who the mother is.)

The law deals in absolutes. The law does not have the capacity to encompass the nuance that any moral question carries. The law does not have the delicacy to distinguish between a man for whom reasonable expectation is enough, and knowing absolutely is necessary. But both of these men could make a claim in Ablow's world.

And let's just get right down to it: people are shitty. Men are shitty, women are shitty. We all do terrible things to each other, with the express purpose of inflicting pain. When someone hurts us, we want to hurt them back. Sometimes, we just want to hurt someone for no particular reason. Pregnancy and children have been the means to control women by amoral men for, quite literally, centuries upon centuries. We have, as a society, been moving away from that circumstance for more than fifty years. You're really advocating once again codifying male dominion over women in law? Are you going to ask that women be required to vote as their husbands or fathers wish them to, next? Maybe they shouldn't leave their homes unless properly chaperoned by a male relative, just so they stay safe.

But I'm getting a little hyperbolic there. Forgive me. Hysterics won't help anyone. (And yes, "hysteria" is an incredibly mysogynistic notion. I'm one of those crazy bitches.)

People are shitty, and we hurt each other a lot. That's not ideal, but is fact. And there is no area of human life where we have the ability to hurt each other intimately and personally than in sexuality. And while I am incredibly glad that we no longer keep young women under lock and key or stone them for becoming pregnant without first getting married or punish sexual experimentation to the degree we used to, I must admit that I have become concerned that the penduluum's swung a bit too far the other way. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. And black-out drinking and a different fuck every night is not something that anyone should be doing. You really should know someone before you sleep with them. At least know them well enough to know whether basic ideas match up and should something unexpected occur you'll be able to work it out between the two of you. And probably you'll both end up hurting some, but it's going to hurt when your life is thrown into chaos, and that's not necessarily anyone's fault. That's just the circumstance of being alive. What you have to do is not hurt each other any more than that.

Ablow notes (and I have no idea where he's getting this from) that "no one" asks fathers how they feel leading up to and following an abortion.

Uh, what? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. As I've written about previously, I have had two unexpected pregnancies, and currently have one child. And I'm pretty sure I (and a whole lot of other people) asked both those men how they were feeling. In at least one case (the case of the abortion), I'm pretty sure more people asked him what he wanted than asked me what I wanted, and subsequently asked him how he was doing than asked me how I was doing. For the record, I went against his wishes in that case. And it was still the best decision I've ever made, despite the psychological turmoil it caused me and continues to cause me.

Which brings me to the doozy in Ablow's commentary on this matter.

I understand that adopting social policy that gives fathers the right to veto abortions would lead to presently unknown psychological consequences for women forced to carry babies to term. But I don’t know that those consequences are greater than those suffered by men forced to end the lives of their unborn children.

First of all, we absolutely do know the psychological and also social consequences for women forced to carry babies they don't want. It's called: read some history or take a trip to India or the Middle East, you fucking moron. Willful ignorance is possibly the worst trait anyone can ever display.

Second of all, let me let you in on a little secret. Life causes psychological pain. No, really. There is pretty much nothing that you can do to avoid being hurt in your life. There is pretty much nothing you can do that will ensure that you never struggle within yourself, that your sense of right never gets put up against your sense of duty, that what is practically possible will always fall in line with your ideal world. The world is an imperfect, messy place and we are all imperfect messy people, and living causes psychological pain and suffering. I know you're a psychiatrist and your job is to eliminate this pain and suffering for people, but you realize that if such suffering could be alleviated through the use of law and society, you wouldn't have a job, right?

The world is not perfect. You will hurt, regardless of your gender.

And perhaps this is unendurably female-centric of me, but I firmly believe that given the fact that life will hurt you one way or another, on this particular issue, the final decision should always rest with that person that will have to actually grow a child in her body and carry it around for 40 weeks. When the technology exists to implant a fetus in a man, with a womb and all so he can carry it around himself, then he'll have standing to veto an abortion. But the fact of the matter is that pregnancy is fucking traumatic even for women that are happy about it and want their children. You get fat, and slow, and dumb. And I mean that: you get dumber during pregnancy. Blood redirects from your brain to your uterus and without the blood flow and the oxygen it provides, you do not think as well. It's a hard thing to live with, having your body change without your will or consent, having your very thoughts change without your will or consent. Forcing a woman to endure that against her will is far more psychologically damaging than most of the other things that hurt us in our lives.

The law is not the forum for regulating moral questions. Morality is a thing of self-regulation, and the limits you place on yourself are always the ones that are going to hold strongest. You act in the ways that will win you the approbation of the people that you look up to the most. I'm very sorry, Dr. Ablow, that more people don't look up to you so you have to write this tripe to satisfy your power-hungry ego, but that doesn't mean the law ought to follow your example. The law shouldn't follow my example, either. The law should be written such that people can follow the examples that they wish to, and if you want more people to think and feel like you do that's your prerogative, but you have to earn their approbation. You don't get to use the law to beat them into submission to your ideas.

On Loneliness

2011-08-11T13:19:00.000-05:00

Everyone gets lonely. Everyone. I don't care how introverted or even downright misanthropic you are, at some point, you will get lonely. You will long for the sympathetic touch of another person. You will want someone to listen to you, and understand.

This is the basic problem with being single: the loneliness. Loneliness leads people to do some pretty dumb shit. I should know; I do most of it. Because I suffer from one of the more acute cases of lonely-ass known to man. I am always lonely. It's a permanent condition. There is always something going on in some part of my brain that would like to be shared, and there is never anyone to share it with.

Mostly, I deal with this by blogging. And overusing social media to epic proportions. (I've more or less got my facebook feed under control, but Twitter still occasionally ends up looking like an emo kid threw up all over it. I can't help it. It's a sickness.)

Sometimes I send drunken emails to my friends in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I compose drunken emails to loves past and then don't send them in the middle of the night. This is occasionally funny the next morning, but more often than not it's cringe-inducing. I can get really intense when I'm drunk. It's terribly inappropriate.

A side issue in all this is that I have very British sensibilities. By which I mean, very World War II-era British sensibilities. I'm an endurer. I find actually asking for things to be unspeakably vulgar. Ditto on talking about sex, or feelings. I prefer silence to most things. I think life would be way less complicated if you didn't kiss anyone unless you thought you could probably marry them. Also if people would stick out there commitments just a little better. Also if people could still fall in love through absence.

(I've often wondered if Jim didn't abandon me because he thought he was getting an American girl, and instead I turned out to be just like all the girls on his side of the pond after all. Loss of exoticism and all that.)

I also have the British terror of vulnerability. I don't cry in front of people. Ever. And when other people cry in front of me, I am usually uncomfortable. I would love to be one of those people that can offer just the right amount of sympathy and comfort and make people feel better, but the reality is that as much as I want to help, I am usually too awkward to actually do so. I'm a bungler. And I'm horrid at asking for things.

Being of such staid and constrained philosophies in the modern American world is HARD. I mean, for fucks' sake. It's ridiculous how hard it is to live under these archaic ideas of decorum when everyone around you is hooking up and confessionally blogging about their sexploits and talking about feelings all the damn time. It's a constant feeling of letting your friends down because you can't commiserate. It's living in a permanent state of offense and horror at the world around you.

And it's an unending series of heartbreaks. You get to the point where you start being bitchy to people that might like you just to forestall what you absolutely know must be coming. That's a terrible excuse for being mean to someone, but it's true.

(So hey, if I'm mean to you, it probably means I like you. Just FYI.)

A lot of this grows from this outdated notion that confuses physical arousal with romantic love. I absolutely am one of the few people left in the world that are burdened to labor under this inability to separate the two. When I kiss someone, I fall in love with them. When I'm attracted to someone, I confuse it with being in love.

I thought that I should go celibate for awhile, until I figure out how to separate physical reactions from emotional ones, but I get lonely. I'm not very good at being alone, despite having been single for more of my adult life than I've been in relationshps. Abd most of those relationships have been bad, because it takes to little to attach me and I am so very eager to please that... well, you do the math.

So. Where was I going? I forget.

Loneliness. Loneliness is the crux of just about every problem I face. Terrible affliction.

Fear and Life, Courage and Compassion

2011-08-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

Dear Every Human Being Everywhere (But Particularly Human Beings That Reside In and Around Milwaukee, Wisconsin),

I understand that it's natural to be scared of scary things. Fear is a completely normal response to things that are scary. Uncertainty. Violence. The possibility of death or dismemberment. Fear is biology's way of keeping us out of harm's way.

But we don't always give in to fear, do we? People do brave things all the time. People face down other people threatening them. People jump off of bridges and out of airplanes. People go to war.

We are more than capable of over-riding our natural fearfulness.

So let's all do that, ok? Let's let go of being afraid, and add a very small smidgeon of basic compassion, and let's stop talking about carrying guns and possibly shooting other people in crowded public spaces. Let's stop calling other human beings "animals."

There's a great deal of racial tension in my beloved city. This I know. It is known. I've known since I was just a wee tot, often the only white girl in my classes at a public school. So yes, let's all stop pretending that it's not there. It is. And it can be ugly. It is human nature to be hostile to that which is different from you. That cuts across pretty much every demographic line we in the modern age can come up with. Race, age, gender, income, education level, whatever: if whoever you're looking at is different from you in some way, your initial reaction will be one of fearfulness and hostility.

Don't bother arguing with me about that. It's true.

Now the good news! We can tame those impulses. All of us. We have the capacity to conquer our fear and see that different, weird "other" as another human being. All it takes is a little courage and a little compassion. People perform this emotional alchemy EVERY DAY because, hey, guess what? NO ONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS YOU.

Of course, the more percieved danger there is, the harder it is to practice the courage necessary to overcome the first impulse toward hostility. The more percieved strangeness there is, the more difficult it is to realize that the person you are looking at is, in fact, a person.

So when incidents like the one after the fireworks last month in Riverwest, or the one last night at State Fair, occur, they are generally seized upon by cowardly people as an excuse not to excercise that courage that is required of anyone that's going to function in society.

Similarly, the perpetrators of these actions have declared themselves too cowardly and without compassion to bother viewing the people they hurt as people like themselves.

But hey. EVERYONE. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

We're all human beings.

I know that we all have vastly different ways of looking at the world. I know that our experiences of the world and how it works and what we've learned from it are really, really disparate.

But we're all people. We can agree on that, right? So let's start by cutting out the nasty name-calling and the use of words like "animals" and "swine" when we're discussing this? We really should be discussing it, because there is a lot of racial and class-based tension in this city, but we need to discuss it constructively. And that's just not helpful. It's really not.

And hey, people beating other people up? Those are people you're hurting. They hurt and cry and bleed like you. They have problems, too. Making them hurt and cry and bleed is not going to solve your problems. It's not going to make the schools in Milwaukee better and it's not going to make your [parental unit] care about you. It's not going to get you a job. I PROMISE. So you might want to think of another route to accomplishing some of those goals.

Hell, you might want to set a few goals. Really. You can do that. I have absolute faith in your ability to look at your life and set yourself some goals. Why do I have that faith? Because I know you're human beings. You know it, too. So act like it.

Likewise, one-liners about how concealed-carry will solve all our problems is not helpful. Guns don't solve problems. They kill people.

I'm going to say that again, a little slower.

Guns don't solve problems. They kill people.

The subtext here is that killing people doesn't solve problems. Which is absolutely, positively 100% true. Killing people is a cowards way out. Killing people sweeps a problem under a rug, or sticks it into a hole in the ground. A really big, deep, dark hole. But that's not a solution, it's a burial. It doesn't do anything to address the fundamental things that allowed a problem to grow in the first place, and so there's always the chance that some other person or set of people will come along and have the same set of issues and then there will be no template for resolving them other than putting someone in the ground, and that's not a solution because it might happen again.

To solve a problem, you need to make it go away forever, not just for a little while.

So this is for EVERYONE: Shooting people isn't a solution. Beating people up isn't a solution. And fear is not a solution.

Being afraid is a natural response. I get that. Being afraid of the "other" out there is what we're hardwired to do. But we are none of us animals, and we can all of us exercise a little courage. And a smidgeon of compassion.

Going through life afraid and alone is no way to live. For anyone.

With sincere hopes,
Ryan

Adventures in Internet Dating Sites

2011-08-03T09:30:00.000-05:00

I have a profile on OKCupid. (Really. Stop laughing. Ok, keep laughing, it's pretty funny. But can you at least keep it to belly laughs and giggles, and dispense with the snickering? Snickering makes me feel judged. Thanks.)

In the year or so I've been using this only-slightly-less-cess-ridden-than-Craigs-List pool of humanity, I have met in person exactly one man. He (read: his dick) was not right for me. Really, really not right for me. Wow. Nice guy, honestly. Just not for me.

Anyway, I've had the usual barrage of online dating adventures: the polyamorous guys that are sort of sweetly earnest about wanting to maintain multiple relationships, the completely illiterate bros who refer to me as "shorty" and/or "gurl" and like to ask if I like to give head, the intensely earnest single father's who gravitate toward me because I already have a kid and then ask me why I don't talk about her at all, because obviously a child is the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and is the only thing a parent should ever talk about.

(Side rant: I actually had one of these guys tell me I was a bad mother when I calmly tried to explain to him that being an unhappy, boring person by giving up every part of my life to a three-year-old would be a terrible thing for her. He honestly didn't get it. What in the flipping hell is wrong with people these days?)

Oh, and then there was the guy who is, by his own admission, about three hundred pounds over weight and always cranky because he's in "chronic pain" but felt that introducing himself by telling me that he's better than me was a good idea. No, I'm not joking. This happened.

Lately, I've been exchanging rather pleasant, intellectual messages with an English major-turned-Army enlistee. The nature of our communiques being what it is, I sometimes spend several hours in between doing minimal amounts of work while I sit at my desk and get paid composing responses. He's really rather intelligent, and I enjoy a good verbal jousting match more than most people. We almost maybe kind of sort of worked out the nature of evil last week.

Anyway, this requires me to be logged into the OKC site for (on occasion) hours on end. Since the site design is horrificly bad, there seems to be no way to consistently turn off the built-in chat function. Every time I think I'm safe, it randomly turns itself back on (sometimes when I haven't even clicked anything).

How do I know it has turned itself back on? I get an instant message.

Some of these are too mundane and/or vulgar to even be funny, but every once in awhile I hit comic (and secret internal mean-streak gratifying) gold.

Like the other day. I got hit up by this guy. Who knows how much of what he was telling me was the truth. Being a somewhat reticent person, I have a hard time believing people that just out with all sorts of really bizarre and personal details of their lives to another person without any provocation, warning or prompting.

So this guy. He's been with one woman his whole life. She's now refusing to sleep with him anymore, so he's trolling OKC looking for no-strings-attached sex so that he can get his jollies. But he loves this woman. Oh, and they're both in their mid-20s. So, it's not like it's weird that she's refusing to sleep with him or anything. In the course of this convesration (which, I'll confess, I dragged out for some considerable amount of time because this guy was amusing) I gave him relationship advice, told him about the time I was the other woman, and apparently made him so horny with my dry, intellectual treatment of his problems that he had to go rub one out in the bathroom.

What. The. Hell.

Why are people so goddamn NUTS?

But these are all pretty standard for the wild and woolly world of looking for love in the internets, right?

Please tell me yes. I really don't want to have to face the reality that I'm just a freak magnet.

(Side note two: My paranoid-android self took over for about half this conversation because some of those questions were just too pointed for my taste and I still think maybe it was someone I know or know of that was trying to get me to admit something or otherwise embarrass myself.)

(I'm crazy, too. xoxo!)

Family Weddings Are Giant Cliches.

2011-07-17T20:12:00.000-05:00

So. It's a cliche, right? Hooking up with someone at a wedding. It's totally a cliche.

And I didn't do it. But the only reason I didn't do it is because it's a cliche. So it would be nice of everyone to tell me that it is a cliche, so that I don't feel like I threw away a perfectly decent chance to have really drunken sex for no good reason whatsoever.

I should start at the beginning. Not the middle. In media res, people. I am an ARTIST.

Family weddings are always a delicate situation. There's always a sense of wait, who are you again? And what that particular question ALWAYS means at a family wedding is "Who do you share DNA with? So I can know if I share DNA with you." This is particularly true in large families, that don't see each other often, that take extended family very seriously. I mean, the families of people that married into my father's family are regularly included at family gatherings. When my father's mother's family has reunions, there's a softball game: the Tschinkle's versus the "Out-laws." Everyone with Tschinkle blood is on one team. Everyone without is on the other.

No, seriously.

Anyway. There's this guy that is in much the same position that I am in when it comes to family: his siblings and cousins are all somewhere between 15 and 25 years older than he is because he's the product of a second marriage. Just like me. We're actually the same age. At one of these massive weddings back in the day when we were something like three and four, we were made to dance together. He was wearing a tiny tuxedo, I had flowers in my hair, it was a thing. There is a picture. It is famous. Everyone and their mama has a copy of it. And I mean that pretty literally, in this case. I have a copy, my mother has a copy, my grandmother has a copy, his mother has a copy, his brother's wives have copies, my aunt has a copy, and on and on.

FOR THE RECORD here, we aren't related. We worked shit out.

But he grew up pretty darn foxy, if you ask me. He's got a nice beard thing going on, likes skinny suits, is sort of nerdy with his cell phone tower job stuff. And really, really gorgeous hazel green eyes with that super Italian round-almond shape and incredibly great eyelashes. Holy shit, the eyes.

So we're at this wedding that includes a solid three days worth of events, and we're talking and laughing and drinking with both our generation (who are now all in their forties) and the older kids from the generation below us (who start at about 24 and range downward). Everyone's always in high spirits because, hey, it's a wedding. Also we haven't had a big family wedding in AGES. Also, this is the last of Uncle Dan's boys, so we won't have another one until the older kids start getting hitched.

And this guy and I, we're laughing and drinking and doing it up all right with everyone else, but we're also sort of scoping each other. I mean, he's cute. I look good in a dress. He's the right height for me in heels and we're both a little more awkward and a little shyer than most of the rest of the family. It works.

AND EVERYONE IS SUDDENLY TEASING US ABOUT THE PICTURE WHEN WE WERE TODDLERS.

Then we get to the actual wedding reception. Last night. It's a black tie affair. There are tuxes and evening gowns and a cocktail hour that goes on for two hours and more champagne toasts than you can shake a stick at. But when it comes to seating arrangements, they have put this guy and I together at a table with a bunch of the rest of our generation. Meaning, a bunch of 40-somethings. We are the only two under 30s at this table. Also the only two single people at this table. And OF COURSE my cousin Craig makes sure to ask me if I am actually single as we're sitting down to dinner. You know, in case I had a boyfriend stashed away in Wisconsin that just didn't come with me. And then makes sure to point out to me that the foxy guy that's not my cousin, but my cousins' childhood friend's younger brother is also single.

We roll our eyes at each other.

Dinner, a whole goddamn lot of merlot and cheap beer later, and we're dancing. There are no slow dances at this wedding reception. We do not recreate the sweet picture from our youth.

We end up in the hotel bar with a collection of other partiers after the reception. We proceed to drink more. We chat together. Ignoring everyone else. I tell myself to stop flirting. It does not work.

I could flow through the rest of the night, but it ends like this: we're kissing in his empty hotel room. He pulls back and tells me that there are at least 20 pairs of eyes on us at this moment. I tell him that's ridiculous because EVERYONE ELSE IS ASLEEP. (They totally are, for the record. Asleep or passed out in drunken stupors. Same thing.)

He says it's still weird. It's now like 3 in the morning and I tell him that I can always leave and he kind of stands there like a deer in the headlights and so I just kind of kiss him on the cheek and book it out of his room and into my own bed.

But what I realized standing there, after kissing him for five minutes or so, is (one) that he was WASTED and (two) that the whole thing was just so cliche. I mean, I hadn't seen it because I was genuinely interested in him for his beard and his eyes and his awkwardness and his mixed up Long Island/South Florida accent and his nerdiness about cell phone towers.

But I'm pretty sure he was just all like: "It's a wedding. People hook up at weddings. She's my age and she looks nice in a dress. Good enough."

So, probably walking away was a great decision. I mean, for my heart and all, given how fucked up I already am.

But then I think that I haven't gotten laid in what seems like FOREVER and I think to myself, "You've got stop not being willing to settle a little bit for a simple one-night stand, Ryan. Not everything must or even should be grand passion."

Because getting laid would be really nice. Serious.

Oh, Long Island.

2011-07-11T10:35:00.000-05:00

So, I am going to this big family wedding in about three days. The youngest son of my father's younger brother is getting married, and it's a whole big to-do and the whole fan-damily is going to be there.

I have been incredibly uncomfortable contemplating said upcoming event. Well, events, really, because in addition to the wedding there's a rehearsal dinner and a Sunday brunch that I am compelled to attend. It's really more like a family reunion than a wedding.

And my discomfort could have come from many sources. One, this will be G's first vacation/plane ride. She's three. She's not potty trained yet. She hates loud noises, is wary of new things, and is prone to temper tantrums in the late afternoons and early evenings because she refuses to nap. All of these factors tell me that this "vacation" is not going to be very "vacation-esque."

I am also faced with the prospect of sharing a single double-bed hotel room with my parents and my kid for six days, five nights because I can't afford my own room and the 'rents certainly can't afford a suite of any description.

Shoot me now. Seriously. It will be a mercy killing.

And then it could also be because this branch of the family and I, we don't get along at that well. I can be pleasant as the next person, but there's only so many veiled and unveiled racist statements, blatantly insensitive remarks about people that don't have money and generally undeserved snobbery I can take before I explode.

I may be a snob, but at least I'm gracious about it, and I have the sense to only be snobby about the things that I can back up. Like my impeccable taste in shoes, cheese, and wine.

But actually, my dread of this trip stems primarily from none of these things.

What it comes to is this: the last time I was on Long Island, G was with me. She was probably about 64 total cells just implanting in my uterus, but she was there.

Because I stopped on Long Island for a few days on the way home from that fateful trip to London.

I was so happy. I was so secure. I was getting text messages hourly. I carried around a piece of the parting gift he gave me, so that I could always put a hand on it. I was so happy.

Now what am I?

Damages.

2011-06-27T12:59:00.000-05:00

Recent (well, ok, not THAT recent, as it hit me in San Francisco which was almost a month ago now) personal revelation:

I choose unavailable and/or really terrible human beings to date because I have bought into the image of myself as a bad person so thoroughly that I think I'll break a decent man's heart simply by letting him know how terrible I am.

There's a lot going on in that sentence.

First we have the acknowledgment that I make piss-poor romantic decisions. I do. Don't argue with me about it. And admitting you have a problem is the first step to solving it, right? YEAH. So, I make piss-poor romantic decisions. Cf.: HISTORY.

The image of myself as a bad person is related to, but not wholly the same as, your run-of-the-mill low self-esteem issues. I do struggle with self-image for a variety of reasons, but the lingering and terribly hurtful idea that I am, at heart, simply a BAD PERSON is one of the most damaging ideas that has ever been pinned on me. And it has been pinned on me. I have always been a person that was in doubt of my own goodness (that's what a Catholic upbringing will do for you, folks) and that was reinforced in some ways by the absolute hedonism of my teenage years. But really: all teenagers are narcissistic hedonists, and I have largely learned to forgive myself for the mistakes I made and the people I hurt while I was figuring out how the world works.

But then I went and got married at 19 and that was a disaster for a lot of reasons but the thing that I took away most strongly from those three years is that I am a bad person. Some of that is probably deserved. I did marry him; I said marriage vows and promised my life to him and I probably knew somewhere in my heart that I was lying when I did that, and that was wrong. Untruth causes untold pain, and if I'd been honest, we wouldn't have hurt as much as we did. Ripping the band-aid off when it needs to come off often stings, but it's not nearly as bad as leaving whatever's underneath to rot and fester and be eaten away from lack of light and oxygen.

And the other piece of that period of my life is that I ended up taking a lot of flack for things that weren't really problems with me. I ended up taking the blame for a lot of things that were no-blame situations, and also I ended up taking a lot of blame for being an independent human being with thoughts and behaviors of my own that didn't necessarily jive with the expectations that he had for me. And that was incredibly damaging to my self-esteem, and also went a long way towards convicing me that I was a far worse person than I probably deserve to think of myself as.

After that, I fell in love with a manipulative narcissist of a different stripe, and in the end I failed at being his conscience. I was supposed to be. He told me that he felt like I was the only thing that could redeem him, but then he abandoned me (and our kid) and I still feel as if I failed him in some appreciable way, instead of the other way around.

So I have a lot of baggage around the idea that I'm not a good person, and it's all heavy, and I don't know how to put it down.

But being convinced that I'm a bad person means I choose bad people to get in relationships with. A good person doesn't deserve the kind of havoc that I'd wreak on their life, or their morals, or their emotions. I don't want to ruin anyone's life, so I choose people to date who's lives are already in shambles. I can't be accused of breaking any hearts if I never fall in love with people that love me back. Or are even capable of loving me back.

However, my metric for good/bad people is probably not nearly as infallible as I think it is. And it also doesn't give enough credit to good men that may want to be involved in my life. And it gives my moral denigration a little too much sway over the world.

It's pretty narcissistic of me to think that I could ever ruin someone's life simply by allowing them into my head, or my heart. Most people are not so damaged that they fall apart like I do, for one. And further, people are pretty darn resilient. No damage is irreparable. Not even the damage I currently see myself laboring under. And if I can fix myself, and my life, then anyone can.

Which is not to say that I'll be out rushing into relationships with nice guys so that they can fix me. But maybe that I shouldn't be quite so guarded all the time. And also I should really, really stop conflating genuine kindness with romantic intent. Because men and women really CAN just be friends. But that's a different recent revelation that I'll have to get to later.

The Limits of Forgiveness.

2011-06-22T08:44:00.000-05:00

Author's note: I'm sure this is moderately inappropriate of me, but sometimes you have to be moderately inappropriate. Without recourse to any other outlet, this is what I have. Sue me.

I'm not a saint. Anyone that saw me last weekend puking onto my friends' second floor porch can attest to this. But in a less concrete, and more spiritual sense, I'm not a saint. I talk a lot about forgiveness, about the need for compassion and empathy and understanding and perspective. And yes, I do try very hard to practice these precepts in my daily life.

This often makes me appear as if I am a doormat.

Let me tell you straight up: I am not a doormat. You may not step on me at will. You may not rub your filth on me. There are limits to my capacity for forgiveness. Because I am not a saint. I am still the 10-year-old girl who smashed the bully's face into the coathooks.

Don't fuck with me. I will fuck you up beyond recognition and leave you broken and bleeding on the floor.

I am not nice because I cannot conceive of any other way to be. I am not forgiving because I am gullible. I am not compassionate because I am stupid. I am all nice and forgiving and compassionate because I choose, every minute of every day, to exercise the better parts of my nature and not the worse. I consciously decide, in every moment, to be the better person that I know I can be. It is hard work. But it is ultimately far more rewarding than any of the small, petty victories that manipulation and narcissism could bring me.

But there are things that I cannot and will not forgive. There are things that you just don't do. I don't care how desperate you are, I don't care how amoral you are. There are things you just don't do.

Falsely accusing someone of rape is one of those things. Just don't do it, kids. Public goddamn service announcement, straight from my fingers to your eyes. Just say no to permanently and irrevocably tarnishing someone's public reputation because you fucked up.

I fuck up, too. All the time. But I don't do things like that, because I do choose every minute of every day to be a better person, even in the wake of fucking up. Even in the moment of knowing that I've lost my battle with my worse nature, I don't give up the war. I take stock of my losses and I look at my weaknesses and I go back into the fray better prepared to guard against those destructive, awful impulses that make one manipulative and narcissistic and a terrible fucking person.

You should choose that, too. And if you don't choose it, I will destroy your life. There are limits to my forgiveness, and if you are so far gone that you need a lesson, I will gladly administer it. I am both smart enough and ruthless enough, and I will destroy your life.

Don't let me hear that shit again. Ever.

Celibacy Sounds Great.

2011-06-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

My life is a struggle of opposing forces. That sounds so dramatic. What I mean is that I am constantly living in the tension between conflicting impulses: between optimism and despair, between ecstasy and depression, between heat and cold. I mean that last one literally: it was 95 degrees yesterday and today it is 60.

But you could say that the temperatures apply to my personality just as easily. I'm a hot tamale or an ice princess and rarely anything in between. I promise: it is not as much as fun for me as you think it is. In fact, I know you have to deal with me through it all, but I still guarantee that I like it even less than you do. Serious.

But I do. I live in this world of diametrically opposed forces. This is the only way my brain knows how to construct a reasonable story of the world: by making things absolute. My happiness is the absolute epitomy of happiness, and my sadness sends me spiraling into mild-altering substances faster than most people can blink. I am not dysfunctional in the true meaning of the word; I function quite well in the world. But that doesn't mean that I'm not dysfunctional in the colloquial sense of the word, and really, I'm sure many people will be more than eager to attest to my dysfunctional behaviors if pressed.

For example, I have a habit of falling into bed with men without fully intending to do so. I may even have some sort of vague notion that ending up in bed would probably be detrimental. But it still happens. I can't help it. Or, they can't help it? I'm not sure.

Either way, it would seem that I cannot innocently climb into anyone's bed (even while decently clothed) without ending up an object of lust.

This upsets me, somewhat. Particularly when it causes a previously, dearly held opinion to be infinitesmally altered. There are so few people in general, and in particular so few personally known men, that I really look up to as instances of exemplary human behavior that having one knocked down a peg is a traumatic experience. I have (in my optimistic moments) an intense and unyielding desire to think the best of people, always. I have a yen to believe that human beings are wonderful and can be wonderful to each other, and can learn and behave with sensitivity and empathy when they are shown that they will not be eviscerated for doing so. In philosophical terms, I reject a Hobbesian vision of the world. Life is not "nasty, brutish and short." Life is beautiful, fantastic, long and filled with warmth and love. We can be people such as that.

But in other moments, I am firmly committed to this Hobbesian vision of the world, and I despair that I cannot see my clear of it. When one of my exemplars slips, it becomes ever harder to maintain the optimistic idea that we are all good people at root. Every time my heart is prodded and left to bleed, I lose some small measure of my ability to heal myself, to buck up, to readjust my vision so that I can again see the gloriously light-filled vistas of the human landscape instead of the long, dark shadows.

Every time I encounter indifference where my wildly optimistic soul dearly desired to encounter only love, I shed tears. Tears cannot be unshed; they have dripped now, for ever, from my soul and fell upon the world, and what happens when I can't cry anymore, and I'm all dead and dry inside?

These are things I worry about. How many disappointments can I stand? I face so many, every day, because of my great propensity for believing in the absolute best. Dr. Pangloss has nothing on me, but I fear that I can't maintain his spirit as well as Voltaire could. My Dr. Pangloss requires some small measure of vindication, some small sign that the best is real and possible, and when my best hopes for it are left in a bed that I never consciously desired to make for myself, what do I do?

More awareness would leave me bitter. Less awareness will leave me broken.

I live in the spaces between opposites. I live in the space, the ever-shortening space, between the Immovable Object and the Irresistable Force. I fold myself ever smaller to fit into these ideas of the world that I cannot shake away from my mind.

I still want to believe the best, desperately, but indifference makes it impossible. Still, indifference is not malevolence, and so I cannot believe the worst, either. I cannot believe anything. All I have left are hopes, so little understood, and hurts, so little attended to.

Tell Me You Hated Fight Club.

2011-05-23T08:42:00.000-05:00

I'll tell you what I'm looking for in a relationship, in one easy sentence. I'm looking for a man that didn't like Fight Club.

Really. That's it.

The rise of "man-children" is actually a horrific event for a single mama on the dating scene. Let me modify that. The rise of "man-children" is a horrific event. For everyone. Single, parent, employer, bartender, what-have-you. It's terrible for everyone. Some men claim this label proudly, others don't even bother to analyze their behavior enough to be able to claim it, but in either case, there's a stunning number of ridiculously immature, overgrown children out there.

I blame Fight Club. Palahniuk, this is ALL YOUR FAULT. And I'm totally glaring at you from my Rust Belt bastion with baleful eyes. Take note. Don't ever come to Milwaukee, or I will give you a piece of my mind.

Ok, so it's not really Palahniuk's fault, per se. He merely wrote about an already-existing cultural phenomenon. Alienation is a common theme in modern literature, and we all feel it. We all feel disconnected at some point, we all feel cheated by the world.

However, Fight Club glamorized both alienation and anger. Fight Club made it ok to be an immature, selfish, lazy "radical." Fight Club made it acceptable to blame the world at large for your unhappiness while doing nothing at all to alter the course of your life towards something better, because there is nothing better in the world of Tyler Durden. The only solution is to blow the whole thing up. Fight Club made it cool to spout off about everything and do absolutely nothing. Fight Club, and by extension Palahniuk, are the reason these man-children are so inexplicably proud of their debilitating inability to function in the world.

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate
so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No
purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great
depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one
day we'll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're
slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

This is the iconic quote of Fight Club. This encapsulates the sense of alienation that many, many people feel in our comfortable, Western, modern era, and gives it a distinctly masculine twist. I can appreciate all those things. Palahniuk is actually a decent writer, and I do dearly love real masculine voice in fiction, because it's becoming somewhat rare.

And if the whole thing had remained a book, read by some few and appreciated as literature, perhaps I wouldn't be crafting this rant of my own.

But then someone went and made a movie out of it. And now there are legions of men in this country that hate their jobs, hate their lives, think they're meant for something more, and fucking whine about it. Constantly.

These are the man-children. They never grew up. They still look to others to get orders. They hate this about themselves. But they don't take initiative and start sculpting their own lives.

They simply get angry.

These are the man-children. They blame the clever advertisers for fooling them all these years, telling them they need this-that-and-the-other thing to be happy and fulfilled. They blame someone else for their inability to process information rationally. And they do this while they proclaim their own superior intelligence.

And then they get angry because obviously they're smarter, but they're slaving away at jobs they hate while these lucky men get to buy all these things with the money they don't really earn because they're NOT AS SMART AS ME.

Uh, contradiction much? How about a little side of hypocrisy.

Here's the truth, you man-children, you Fight Club-aficionados: You're not smarter than the world. And if you're incapable of being happy in your life, it's no one's fault but your own.

Don't want to work a desk job? THEN QUIT. Do something else. Start a farm. Get a construction job. Go build bamboo huts in Thailand. I don't care. But don't blame the world because you don't know what else to do, because you can't actually conceive of a life that doesn't involve a steady job of some sort. It's not the world's fault that you are uncreative, and that you have no dreams. That's no one's fault but your own.

And if you have bucked the desk job, don't whine about being broke all the time. Don't whine about the things you don't have. You chose this life, and if it's really making you so miserable not to have a car or a new computer or an iPod, go get a job that will let you have those things.

Want to be a rock star? Then do it. But don't whine if you fall on your face. And especially don't come crying to me when you have never even bothered to try. I know too many people that have tried, and failed, to feel any sympathy for you.

And absolutely, positively, I am through dating you man-children. I'm done trying to give my heart to men that are angry all the time. I'm done trying to be sympathetic to men that will never, ever be happy because they are simply too stupid to figure out how. I'm done dealing with men that are so far removed from any sense of self-awareness that they don't even know what will make them happy. They rely on the fantasy of some writer that they've never actually read, just saw the movie.

From this moment on, I'm holding out for a man that hates Fight Club. I'm holding out for a man that's actually happy in the life he's chosen for himself. Maybe he's always made such great decisions, or maybe he's figured it out through trial and error, but either way, he likes his life. He's happy. I'm holding out for a man that doesn't blame everything else when something goes wrong. I'm holding out for a man self-aware enough to know what he wants, what's going to make him happy.

I'm holding out for a man that hates Fight Club.

Evil Exists. But.

2011-05-20T08:13:00.000-05:00

I was raised Catholic. In many ways, I still am Catholic. It's something that will never leave me. Over the years I've gravitated towards the mystic traditions of Christianity, towards the Teresa of Avila's and the Thomas Merton's. I've found myself drawn to the notion of personal, ecstatic experience of the divine and the exhortation to "Love thy neighbor as thyself." These are the tenets of my faith. These are the central pieces.

I spend more time than most of the people I know engaged in meditation, which often makes people think I'm all Zen and stuff. I'm into balance, calm, acceptance. But I'm still Catholic.

And the thing about Catholics: We believe in evil.

We believe absolutely that evil exists. It roams the earth. The Devil is merely an anthropomorphized personification of this evil. He's a boogeyman. The evil actually exists within us, within each of us, and it is the responsibility of each of us to find that evil within ourselves and accept it, absorb it, so that we don't commit evil.

Theologically, God is our help in this endeavor. Baptism, communion, prayer, regular Mass attendance and confession are all ways in which God (through his representatives on Earth) aid us in our quest to accomplish this. We will fuck up a lot. That's why forgiveness is God's greatest gift, and such a central piece of the Catholic cosmology.

I believe in evil. I believe absolutely that evil exists in the world. I believe absolutely that it is my duty, as an aspiring moral being, to combat this evil. Because of my propensity towards mysticism, I believe that I must start with the evil within me. It's not a matter of casting it out, since such a task is impossible, but rather of absorbing it. When you are aware of the negative impulses, you can control them, and thus refrain (knowingly and purposefully) from committing evil.

To me, the "knowingly and purposefully" caveat is quite important. We can accidentally stumble into good works all the time; it doesn't take much. It is akin to what philosopers refer to as "narcissistic altruism" in which we do good things for others because we are addicted to the rush of righteousness that comes along with it. We're really doing good things for ourselves, for our own selfish reasons.

I believe in evil. I believe in true good.

But the world is not a perfect dichotomy, and there exists a whole spectrum in between evil and good.

Narcissistic altruism, for example. It's not true good. You are not being selfless; your primary concern is your self and your own feelings. But it's also not evil. It's dangerous because once you get into a pattern of doing things for the way they make you feel rather than the way they make others feel, it's hard to get out, and this prevents you from growing as a person. This prevents you from reaching stages of awareness in which you could fully embrace and therefore neutralize the evil within you.

But it's not itself evil to do good things for the wrong reasons.

Evil is far, far worse than that.

I was recently chit-chatting idly with a friend when the conversation took a turn for the serious, and this friend honestly began to put forth evidence of their own evilness. I was slightly aghast. Evil is not a joking matter, for one. I am Catholic. But also I was deeply saddened that anyone could have lived and come to the conclusion that they were evil simply because they'd made mistakes. What kind of culture do we live in that anything as human as making mistakes, even mistakes that cause pain, make one categorically evil? Evil is something I take far too seriously to classify it on par with human weakness. If human weakness were evil, there would be no salvation or comfort for any of us, and we would all be incapable of doing good as soon as we were born.

Evil is not temptation succumbed. Evil provides the temptation, and we will and do succumb. But to be an evil person, you have to look at whatever the fallout from that mistake was and not be hurt yourself by it. Evil is the inability to feel in yourself the effects of what you do.

As long as you can still feel, as long as you retain empathy, you are not an evil person, and you can grow.

The Truth

2011-05-04T12:23:00.000-05:00

Truth is slippery.

The truth is I met, fucked and fell in love with a man that was in love with someone else.

The truth is I didn't know that.

The truth is that then I did know that, and I continued to meet, fuck and love him.

The truth is that was wrong.

The truth is that I can look at this terrible ache in my chest as a punishment for wrong behavior.

The truth is that looking at this like that makes the ache lessen.

The truth is that I don't want the ache to lessen.

Slippery, slippery.

The truth is I don't actually want to talk about this, but I feel like I should. I feel like I should want to talk about it, like I should have something to say. Certainly the ache in my chest and the knot in my throat bespeak a certain level of feeling that generally, when it comes to me, demands to be talked about.

But I don't.

It was, it is no more. I behaved poorly. I was not the only one to do so. I do not feel it necessary to resolve never to behave so in the future. Why go through the drama of that kind of unkeepable, useless promise?

There is much I would give never to be used like that again, but the truth is that I'm at least as responsible for all this angst as anyone else. Probably more so. It's our own responsibility to take care of ourselves; it was never anyone else's job, and expecting a man that doesn't even love me to have such care for my heart is pretty goddamn stupid, don't you think?

The truth is people are not what I would like them to be.

The truth is that as much as I'd like people to be better than they are, they are not exceptional. People are selfish and cowardly, desperately lonely and willing to do anything to salve themselves.

The truth is that I am no exception to this.

The truth is that I knew myself in love and didn't want to be.

The truth is that I fucked other men in the last year.

The truth is that I may have loved, or may still love, any number of them.

The truth is every single one of them is in love with someone not me.

The truth is love is meaningless.

The truth is that despite knowing it's no one else's job to take care of me, I want nothing more than to be taken care of.

That's the truth. That's the thing that lies at the bottom of it all: the terrible, tender truth is that I want to be taken care of, and I suspect I never will be.

It just doesn't work. For me.

2011-01-27T10:15:00.000-06:00

It's pretty much a cliche. A friend of mine even has a joke about it. A girl who tells you she got pregnant on birth control is a liar. Because she was never on birth control.

Only, sometimes, she's not. I'm not.

I got pregnant on birth control. Twice.

The birth control pill is not foolproof. For all the things written about how the sexual revolution would never have occurred without access to easy contraceptive methods, I think it's high time that it's acknowledged that the birth control pill is not a goddamn silver bullet.

For starters, you have to take the pill every day, at the same time, to get those 95% effective rates. I suspect that's probably the source of the joke: telling a guy you're on the pill but neglecting to mention that you've forgotten to take it for the last three days.

However, the other issue is exactly what the pill does. The pill is not a condom or a spermicide or a diaphragm or an IUD. It does not physically prevent sperm from entering your uterus and possibly meeting a nice egg that it would be nice to settle down with. The pill messes with a woman's hormones, tricking the body into thinking that the woman is already pregnant, thus preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus and becoming a pregnancy.

Sidenote: this is the reason for Catholic condemnation of birth control. Morally speaking, the Church holds that a fertilized egg is life, since it contains all the genetic material. Stopping the egg from implanting in the uterus, thus causing the "life" that is the fertilized egg to be discarded, is tantamount to murder. While I find this position untenable in terms of actual living, it is a morally principled and logically sound position.

But it's universally acknowledged that most biology is not exact. Particularly when it comes to biochemistry, there is massive and statistically significant variation across the population. So trying to artificially alter that biochemistry is going to be a hit-and-miss proposition. Think anti-depressants: they don't work the same for everyone. Not even close.

Birth control pills are not much different.

I happen to be one of those people who's hormones fall waaaaay outside the norm. I should have known this, considering all the trouble I had getting through puberty and the ways in which my reproductive system still decides to punish me every month.

But I was a teenager and I bought into everything.

And I got pregnant at the ripe old age of 18. While I was on birth control. I had an abortion. And for those of you keeping score at home, my Catholic upbringing still asserts itself over that decision. I still sometimes cry for no particular reason and then realize I'm still processing a lifetime's worth of guilt and shame over having killed someone. But I do not doubt that it was the right decision, regardless. If I'd had that child, I'd still be married to an unmedicated, obsessive-compulsive control freak that liked to tell me I was worthless, didn't like me leaving the house, and had a penchant for trying to kill me. And there'd be a child in the household to worry about.

So, good decision. Even if it kills me now and again.

I put that experience out of my head. I told myself that I must not have been vigilant enough about taking my pill at exactly the same time every day. I set up a system with alarms and carrying extra packs of pills in all my purses and all manner of elaborate schema to ensure that it didn't happen again.

Well, I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old, so obviously that didn't work out as intended.

I love my daughter. I love her fiercely, dearly and unconditionally. But she was an accident, and I do wonder what my life would look like right now if I'd had the emotional wherewithal to go through a second abortion. Looking back, I think that her father wanted that, which may explain his current absence from our lives. No matter. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and men aren't an exception to that.

But these days, I put no stock in the pill. I don't even take it. I don't want to risk the temptation to fall back into the idea that I'm immune from pregnancy because I've got a silver bullet called Orthrotricyclen or Seasonique or what-have-you. Because obviously, it doesn't work for me.

Finding Equilibrium

2010-12-22T08:41:00.001-06:00

I've been struggling with the ideas of maturity versus numbness lately, and also with selfishness versus closure.

In some sense, I find it supremely selfish that we're all so obsessed with the idea of demanding "closure" from the chapters of our lives. Life is not a novel; it does not divide into neat vignettes. The desire for closure is (far more often than not) simply a desire to extract a pound of flesh. We want to watch someone bleed so we can feel better, and once we feel better, moving on is simple, so we think to ourselves that this "closure" is necessary.

Really, it's not necessary. We can move on without hurting anyone else; it just takes more effort. It require more of us to move past our own hurt without inflicting it on anyone else; it requires us to give up revenge and accept our own responsibility in whatever happened.

Here's a free insight: you are never an innocent bystander in your interpersonal relationships. A relationship is by definition a situation of give-and-take, and it always, always takes two to tango. Sometimes you give more, sometimes you take more, sometimes its an even-steven exchange, but all those various gray hues are decisions you make. You decide how much to give in your relationships, and how much to take. You decide how much to put up with, and when you throw screaming fits, that's your decision to.

Own those decisions. They are yours, and if you don't like what you get out of them, you have to own them in order to change your behavior.

On the flip side, sometimes people just do treat you really shittily. I struggle with this. I would like, always, to believe that people are their best selves. I am Dr. Pangloss. And so when I realize that someone is behaving in less than an ideal fashion, I struggle. My kind and gentle (ha!) nature would like to forgive them, show them why what they did hurt me, and believe that from that point, they'll stop doing whatever it is.

Yeah, that pretty much never works out.

So, I find myself struggling with the desire to extract pounds of flesh. Hurting someone makes the lesson stick. It's a common trope: I can't count how many movies I've seen in which the generally benevolent teacher inflicts pain on the hapless student so that the pupil will remember the very important lesson being imparted. I mean, it makes sense: we learn not to stick our hand in the fire because doing so HURTS. If I really want to teach someone a lesson, I should hurt them.

I really hate that idea.

Also, I think it's a copout. You can teach without pain. Pain is the easy way, but certainly not the only way, and really, pain doesn't always work.

Then again, sometimes I think that by not forcefully expressing myself when something wrong happens, I'm allowing that ever-threatening numbness to creep in and over take me. Perhaps it's just that I don't care enough to try. I don't care enough to let people know when I'm hurt. I don't care enough to let people know when I think what they've done is wrong.

Numbness is just as much the enemy of equilibrium as anger. Numbness is just as much a threat to a balanced life. In repudiating anger, am I merely giving in to numbness?

I don't know.

Chickenshit.

2010-12-07T13:40:00.001-06:00

I promised, promised, promised myself that I wasn't going to blog about my personal relationships anymore. I really, really did. And I meant it.

It can be seen as more than I little passive aggressive, after all. And in truth, it probably is a little passive aggressive. It's a passive way of expressing my discomfort and anger with the things that go on, a way of expressing my negative feelings while still avoiding all conflict.

I'm conflict-avoidant. Really. I'm not a screamer. I don't pitch fits. I'm really quite meek, a little white mouse. I sit and I nod and I smile and I try to understand what's being put before me, not just what's said but also it's subtext. I try to understand not just the words that are being presented to me, but the context of the lies.

There are always lies. Everyone lies. I lie, although I like to think that I lie less often and less virulently than a lot of people. Maybe that's just me lying to myself; I'll let other people make that call.

But I think I have to break my promise not to write about my personal relationships anymore. I have no other outlet. Some things have to be said, and since I'm a chicken shit, this is how I say them. Perhaps, at some point, I'll get over my pathological need for harmony enough to say them to the offender's faces, and I truly hope I get to that day. But right now, in this moment, I need to say something, and this is the only medium available to me.

Here's the absolute, God's-honest truth: EVERYONE LIES.

And, contrary to what my meek and smiling and understanding face says to you, I am not taken in by your lies. I know you're lying. I'm allowing you to do so.

I know everyone lies, and therefore, I trust no one. I don't trust you. I don't trust you when you say you really like to spend time with me. I don't trust you when you refer to your "ex"-girlfriend. I don't trust you when you tell me that you'd like nothing more than the opportunity to take care of me. I don't trust you when you tell me your marriage is in good shape. I don't trust you when you tell that you're not angry about anything. I don't trust you when you tell me that money's fine.

I know when I'm being lied to. By everyone.

Some of these utterances are the most egregious of falsehoods; others are merely stretches of what is probably a pretty solid grain of truth. They are still ephemeral promises of a solidity that will never materialize. You are not fooling me. I will not cling to your promises like rafts in the vast ocean so that I can drown later on when they disintegrate as I continue to try to clutch the dreams you've given me in cold, cramping, deadened fingernails.

I trust no one. I trust no one's words.

If you want my trust, you earn it. You earn it through action. You earn through unflinching honesty that is ugly and scarred and scary and embarrassing. You earn my trust. It's not an easy task: I'll tell you up front. Many would, I am sure, claim that it's impossible. It's not.

It is possible for me to trust. But you have to quit lying to me if you want that to happen. I am capable of unimaginable feats of forgiveness; I promise you. I have ben forgiven for some pretty awful things in my life, and I know what a gift it is and what a benediction. Because I know, I can forgive. Because I have been shown that it's possible to let go of awful things, I know that I can do it.

I've forgiven people some pretty awful things, too. I don't hold grudges. It would be disingenous to say that the things others have done to me have left me unaffected, because without a doubt my experiences have colored my extreme distrust for the words of others. But holding myself protected and remaining angry are two very, very different things.

I let go of anger a long, long time ago.

So this is what I'd like from the world: stop it. Just quit telling me falsehoods and half-truths and let me have the ugly, unvarnished, unflattering truth. I can handle it. And I'll love you even more for it than I would for the prettiest, most comforting lie.

Things Unsaid

2010-11-30T12:16:00.001-06:00

There's always things that we don't say. There's always things that just end up forever locked in our throats, because saying them would be inappropriate. Maybe saying them would be pouring salt in wounds, maybe saying them would reopen chapters best left closed. Maybe saying them would be simply childish and petty on the part of the sayer, and no one wants to be perceived that way.

But still, we all know the things we want to say. We've got them planned out and ready to go, should the perfect opportunity to throw them down ever arise. Not that it will. But we like to be prepared.

I'm a nerd, ok? I'm a girl scout. I'm always prepared. Sue me.

So here's my list. It's the current list, which means that it'll change slowly as situations develop and life grinds on. It's already changed considerably. Five years ago, none of these statements were on my list, and in the interim, I've actually managed to utter some things aloud, thereby scratching them off.

"You're a child. Grow up. I may have my issues, but I'm pretty darn glad I don't have to deal with yours anymore. You're a bad person and a bad manipulator, and all you've got going for you is a nice face and bank account."

"You, also, are remarkably childlike. Grow the fuck up. Do you really think I don't know you're lying? For someone that likes to compliment my intelligence, you sure do think pretty lowly of my critical thinking skills."

"I love you, but you drive me insane. I need far more time alone than I get. Would it kill you to go out every now and again?"

"Ignoring people is not a reasonable strategy for weaseling out of your commitments. When you say you're going to do something, either do it, or own the fact that you're not going to do it. I grow tired of being disappointed."

"The hoops you make everyone jump through are ridiculous, and no one ever does the course to your satisfaction anyway. I'm done playing."

"I love you, and I want very much for you to be happy, but we're probably never going to be close again. We're just both too bad at keeping in touch."

"Come home. Come home now. I miss you."

"We've run through our chances. You're not happy, but I'm not going to make you happy. That's something you're going to have to do for yourself. So go do it."

"You know, this could work. If both of us stopped being such chickenshits. Too bad we're both such chickenshits."

I find it therapeutic just to put things out there. I'm sure it's also passive aggressive, but whatever. I never claimed not to have issues of my own.

Fairy Tales.

2010-11-24T10:45:00.000-06:00

I still believe in fairy tales.

Ridiculous, non? Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. You'd think my history of incredibly poor decision-making would have cured me of that particular childish desire years and years and years ago.

But, the truth is, I still believe in happily-ever-after. I still believe in forever and sunsets and growing old and grand gestures and the power of love and romance and all that other 10-year-old girl stuff.

And I want a fairy tale. I want happily ever after. I want a relationship that's going to last forever, or at the very least, the rest of my lifetime.

My Prince Charming appreciates my cooking, and is perfectly willing to do the dishes. He'll indulge my ridiculous desire for low-key drama because he loves me. In return, I'll put up with whatever childishness he's still holding on to, because let's be honest, we're all little children somewhere in our emotional selves. Somewhere there's that one thing that everyone else outgrew that we just didn't. That one idea that was implanted by deep social conditioning that most people manage to expunge, but we just didn't. That one that took root real deep and isn't getting ripped out anytime soon because it's become part of the foundation of our identity.

There are so many of these messages that not everyone gets stuck with the same one. Some people get indoctrinated with gender roles, that men work and women cook and that's love. Some people get indoctrinated with holidays, that birthdays and Valentine's Day and the like are the real measure of love. Some get stuck with ideas about what good sex is, or what good sex is not. Some get materialism in full force, the "white-picket-fence" syndrome.

These are all pieces of baggage that individuals bring to relationships.

Me? I get stuck with commitment. Somehow, somewhere, I picked up this idea of committing and committing fully and that as long as two people meet as themselves and remain fully committed, they can work out anything. You ever seen that movie with Heather Graham? In a way, I'm like her. I'd really like to believe that if I ever get married again, I could get a tattoo for a wedding ring. I'd really like to find someone that understands that about me.

I guess you could say that "I'm looking for baggage that goes with mine."

And maybe that's really the key to a good relationship. We all have these little bits of social more lodged in the crevices of our brains; so much gets thrown at us that something sticks, no matter how rational and above it you like to think yourself.

So the key is finding someone whose bits of accumulated peer-induced flotsam match up with your own.

Not real helpful as a revelation, is it? No. I thought not.

And still.

2010-11-17T14:04:00.000-06:00

I had a personal revelation today. It is as follows:

Consciously protecting one's heart hurts just as much as letting it get pierced.

Seriously.

I gave this whole "Play it cool, don't lose your head, don't let yourself get too involved, don't open up until it's a mutual thing" thing a shot. I really did. I even hedged some bets, kept myself occupied with a whole slew of new projects (bread baking, cheesemaking, apron sewing, butter churning, and a variety of baked desserts) and a whole stable of interesting people.

And still, and still, and still.

My fenced and guarded heart bleeds. It just happens to ooze behind a wall this time, where it's harder to see and also harder to bandage.

So guess what? I was right all along, even though I hate that statement more than anything right now.

Wanderlust.

2010-10-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-10-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-10-18T08:43:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-10-18T07:53:00.000-05:00

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

2010-10-07T12:03:00.000-05:00

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.

Skewed.

2010-09-28T13:10:00.000-05:00

I woke up one morning last week, and my perspective was crooked.

It's been askew ever since.

Two paths lie before me, two paths through the world, and I can see each of them, simultaneously, with crystalline precision. The colors and textures of each road lay before me, tantalizingly full and rich. I can smell and taste and feel each way ahead with perfect clarity.

One eye is trained on each option, assessing, seeking. And each of my eyes have learned to operate independent of the other. They do not see in tandem, anymore; rather, each one is complete unto itself. Like the tracks that stretch before me, each of my eyes is wholly cut off from the other. There is no place where the paths meet, or cross, or where one could move from one to another.

No, once I set foot on either of these paths, the other will be lost.

Neither path is without darknesses, without those places where the trees grow tall and thick and gnarled, where branches overhang and scrape the ground and whether or not you make it past them will depend on your flexibility. I can see the difficulties.

But I can't tell how long the dark places stretch, or how quickly the difficulties arise. I can't tell how long those bucolic sunlit scenes that beckon to me last. I can see happiness and I can see sadness, but I don't know when or how much.

It's the combination of your two eyes, you see, that allow you to percieve such things, and I no longer have one pair of eyes, I have two eyes. I have two eyes.

This is why my perspective is skewed. This is why I cannot move forward, this is the source of my paralysis.

I can see two different versions of my best self.

How can I possibly choose between them?

I keep bumping into things in the here and now, because my eyes are divorced from each other. I keep banging the tender parts of myself into harsh corners and sharp edges because I can't tell where I end and where the world begins.

Switching off.

2010-08-25T09:10:00.000-05:00

Much has been written about the amount of connectedness we have in this brave new digital world. Cell phones, smartphones, text messages, facebook, twitter all enable us to keep in more or less constant contact with the people and institutions in our lives.

Most people find this indispensible, and simultaneously obnoxious. "Unplugging" is as hip as iPhones, but everyone still has their iPhone. Or BlackBerry. Or Droid. Or laptop. Or basic mobile telephone.

The point is, we live in a world where getting in touch with someone is easy, instantaneous, and can be accomplished from anywhere. This is has fundamentally changed the way we view interaction. When you call someone on a cell phone, the expectation is that they're going to answer. It is a cell phone, designed to be with you at all times.

Twenty years ago, when you tried to call someone, they may or may not have been home. And if they weren't, you shrugged your shoulders and tried again some other night, or afternoon, or whatever.

But a cell phone is always with you, and it has caller ID and a call log in addition to voicemail, text messages, and picture capabilities. So, you call someone, and they know who's calling. They then make a conscious choice to pick up the phone or not, which is it's own can of worms. And then if they don't answer, there's a record of that fact that you called, when, whether you left a message.

This makes the phrase "sitting around by the phone" both obsolete and replete with new meaning. There's no reason to stay home waiting for a call these days, because your phone is with you. So you never have to sacrifice to stay in touch. But on the flip side, you know damn well whether or not that call you were waiting for ever came in. You can't distract yourself by going out and having a good time, because the phone comes with you. So you can sit around by the phone, while ostensibly out having a good time.

Way to kill girls' night, cell phone. Thanks a lot.

Let's not even touch on the politics of call frequency, message frequency, text frequency. I often feel like I don't really know those rules well enough to function in the world; I'm often accused of being overeager.

But what really gets me is how much I, personally, have invested in my phone.

My phone is a gauge of how much I am loved.

You laugh, but I'm perfectly serious.

My phone tells me how often and how ardently people want to get in touch with me. My phone tells me if someone is reminded of me by some occurrence in their day.

When several hours go by without my phone beeping at me even once, I feel unloved. I feel unconnected. I feel as if I matter to no one, no one at all in the entire world. No one's thinking about me, I am affecting no one, no one gives a damn.

This is patently, ridiculously unhealthy. I realize this. Not getting phonecalls, text messages, emails, facebooks or what-have-you does not mean I am not loved. But not getting them certainly does have an incredible, immediate and negative impact on my self-esteem.

But I don't know, exactly, how to tackle this one. Should I give up my phone? Should I live without a cell phone? Should I downgrade to something extremely basic? (Hello, Jitterbug!) Or is that just getting rid of the symptom without actually tackling the disease? Why do I put so much emphasis in whether or not other people are trying to contact me? Why do I want to be so important to people that they tell me random, ridiculous things whenever they occur?

Why am I so NEEDY? GAWD.

But seriously, I'm at a loss. I realize that I have to change something, because being hurt because I'm not getting enough electronic interaction is ridiculous, but I don't know what. Or how.

Miscellany and other hodgepodge

2010-08-18T08:51:00.000-05:00

1.

I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World last night, and while I was marvelously entertained and giggling maniacly throughout the film, the ending left me more than a little deflated, and also a touch offended. The whole premise of the movie, right, is that in order to date the girl of his dreams, Mr. Pilgrim has to defeat her 7 evil exes. (Not ex-boyfriends. Exes.) There's all manner of fun video-game hilarity along the way, some pretty chuckle-worthy band-geek humor, and the whole thing is very visually appealing.

And, for the first 6 exes, Mr. Pilgrim's need to fight them is just an interesting plot device. The girl in question (Ramona, which I had forgotten is really a pretty awesome name) has moved on from all of these men, learned her lessons, is over it.

But then we get to the last one. This one has some sort of creepy hold over her (she just can't control herself around him) that's explained in the film as a mind-control chip he's implanted in the nape of her neck. She leaves our hero for this guy, despite not really wanting him and thinking he's a creep. He treats her more like a pet than a girlfriend. At one point he's actually PETTING HER HAIR IN PUBLIC as she sits TWO STEPS BELOW HIM on his throne-like pyramid, wearing what looks suspiciously like a dog collar from a distance and with the most wooden, unhappy expression on her face you've ever seen. (Shades of Star Wars, anyone?)

In short, this guy is every creepy, controlling, bordering-on-abusive boyfriend that every girl has had at least one of.

And Scott Pilgrim defeats him. Not Ramona. Scott Pilgrim. He forever robs her of the chance to face her demons, figure out why she was ever attracted to this creep, and then cut him out of her life HERSELF. This is the point of bad relationships: so we can learn. And she doesn't get to, because Our Hero Scott Pilgrim takes it on himself to DO IT FOR HER. Equally creepy and controlling, for the record.

And then, as my friend (who is male, which I only bring up because it's interesting that he was most offended by the end because of how it left the male lead and I was most offended by how it left the female lead) pointed out, after all the personal growth that Mr. Pilgrim experiences while fighting Ramona's evil exes, he turns around and walks off into the starry morning with her. The whole point of personal growth is you MOVE THE FUCK ON. And, instead, he walks off into fantasy land with a woman who is now, for all intents and purposes, permanently broken. Obviously, his personal growth was a sham. All that warm fuzzy shit about "self-respect" that allows him to defeat Ramona's one TRULY evil ex is a lie. He's still just a pud trying to get in her pants using whatever means necessary.

So, great movie, until the last 15 minutes. I would like to completely rewrite the ending.

2.

I never thought I (or anyone else, for that matter) would ever utter this sentence, but WHY didn't I get a degree in something useful like Nonprofit Management?

Seriously. There's a job available here in Milwaukee with an awesome, awesome organization that I would be GREAT at, but I don't have the degree or the experience. Because I didn't do something useful in college. Like nonprofit management.

Perhaps this is just an expression of my subconscious need to move and travel, because I have been at this job for 18 months now and that's a long time in my life, but I really, really, REALLY wish that I had a shot at this job. I would like to move on, and this is perfect. Fundraising? Development? Event coordination? These are all the things that I am fucken fantastic at. And, you know, Urban Ecology Center. Great people, great mission, something I can really get behind and sink my teeth into.

Also, I need new challenges. See above re: 18 months/travel.

3.

Personal revelations of the week: I am ridiculous and also impatient and also hopelessly, incurably romantic and girly. Don't let the snide and snarky veneer fool you.

In Defense of Emotional Adolescence

2010-07-25T21:53:00.000-05:00

I think I've developed some trust issues to go along with my intimacy issues.

While I think this is decently revelatory, considering my epic and on-going battle against the cynicism of the wider world, apparently it's not. The exact quote from a friend of mine who I made this revelation to yesterday:

"Of course you have? I mean, shit. You'd be a little dense not to have put up some walls."

I find this heartbreaking. Not for her; cynicism works for her. It doesn't work so well for me. Cynicism makes me bitter, nasty, small-minded and downright mean. I don't like being any of these things. I want to love the world, the whole world, every shining, beautiful, dark and dirty part of it. I want to be a good person. I want to make life better.

Life is hard for a dyed-in-the-wool romantic. You laugh, but I'm serious. It's hard. It's hard to care so much, to want to share so much, and end up with egg all over your face. Or, something that has a somewhat egg-white-esque consistency.

What? Was that dirty? Get out of the gutter.

It's difficult for me to acknowledge that I don't really trust anyone's motives and intentions anymore. I'm endlessly concerned with why someone is doing something: do they like me, does he just want in my pants, is she just trying to figure out if I'm a threat to her? I throw that last one in there for the sake of balance, but really, this is about dating. This is about men.

I don't trust you, penises. You're wily little buggers. Slippery snakes, if you'll pardon the alliterative allusion.

And despite the generalized life-angst I feel when I realize that I don't trust people anymore, there's a really very specific set of issues that come with not trusting those people that you're into dating, whatever that subset may be. Men. Women. Dwarves. Whatever.

Insecurity. Oh my god, is insecurity a killer. Insecurity will kill attraction faster than bad poetry. No joke. You might think that nothing kills attraction faster than a few bad sonnets, but you would be WRONG. Insecurity unleashes "the crazy" on the relationship. Insecurity makes you question motives and actions, not just the other person's, but your own AND the other person's interpretation of your own. This leaves you doing things like calling and/or texting all the goddamn time because you just have to explain yourself. And then explain your explanation. And then apologize for being so persistent. And then explain your continued persistence.

Ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

Attraction is based on mystery, you see. It's based on that thrill of the unknown. This is why people together for years have such a hard time maintaining their sex lives. Without any mystery, the attraction disappears. And without attraction, well, fucking just isn't any fun.

Luckily for me, I'm a chameleon. And a crazy person. So there will always be mystery.

I jest.

Ok, I sort of jest.

Attraction is based on mystery, and constant contact makes mystery impossible. Not only that, constant contact is annoying. It reeks of attention-whoring, it screams for validation. And when you're an emotional adolescent (like me!) two of the things you would desperately like to get from a partner are attention and validation. Preferably a steady stream, with a strong current of flirtatiousness.

Recap: I have trust issues. I don't like this in a generalized way, but I particularly don't like it when it comes to dating because mistrust in love leads to insecurity which leads to crazy.

In discussing this with another friend of mine, the necessity of wearing flame-retardant gloves after one's been burned a few times came up. (By the way, great tag line for a public ad campaign about using condoms.)

And this is where we really, really butt up against my emotional adolescence. I don't want to wear flame-retardant gloves. Being closed off to the world, barriering myself against it, is not something I ever want to do. It hurts to be vulnerable, but I really, REALLY don't like the alternatives. And this is the crux of why having developed trust issues is so bothersome to me, personally. It shows me that despite my best efforts, despite my active desire to remain open to the world and capable of showering love on everyone I meet, I'm becoming a cynic. I'm strapping on the armor and approaching every day as a battle to be lost or won. I'm protecting myself without meaning to.

And everyone's right, and I've got every reason to do so, to which my response is a (very mature) fuck that noise. This isn't what I want to be. Nah-nah-na-boo-boo, la-la-la, I can't hear you. And it's about as effective as slamming the door on your parents when you're 13.

Self-preservation is a bitch.

Can't we all just get along?

2010-07-06T12:28:00.000-05:00

I've been a parental roll, lately. I suppose a solid four days off of work spent with my kid will do that to me.

But, it's been an enlightening (and awesome, for a variety of reasons) few days.

First, there I was, washing the dishes with my parents, and explaining to them the meaning of the new vernacular "helicopter parent." My dad got it immediately: he sees them every day on the playground when he takes G. He, himself, is a very hands-off parent. So hands-off that his theory of childrearing has been lovingly nicknamed "benign neglect" by my sisters and me. Or maybe he made that one up himself; I honestly don't remember.

So anyway, Dad gets it. My mom needs a little more explaining. She's the type that totally would have been one of these parents if a) the technology had been available and b) my dad hadn't been around to point out how silly she was being. But she does get it eventually, because when I get into the stories of parents calling their kids' college professors and employers (or again), the lightbulb goes on.

Then Dad and I backtrack and explain to her how the whole thing starts when a kid is two and you don't let them climb on the playground equipment without holding your hand. Literally. Two-year-olds that can't climb up to the slide.

There's a great article in Time (or at least, on their website) that touches very briefly on the benefits of allowing kids their space, their messes, their sneakiness. The author is referring to teenagers and adolescents, but I think that it applies to the little ones, too, in a way. Letting G throw the egg cartons around the dining room, and then explaining to her that she has to pick them up (and helping her do so, because she is, after all, TWO) is a valuable lesson. And if I didn't let her make the mess, she'd not learn it.

This is something my father understands instinctively, and I credit him with passing that knowledge on to me. Maybe it's part of the genes he gave me, or maybe it's that his upbringing did me so much good, but really, I think he's right on this one.

On the other hand, there's so much that we put into parenting these days, and how competitive it is, and how very rigid we get with our notions of what a good parent is and does. I cannot tell you how many shocked looks I get just walking down the street with mine. Do our unshod feet bother you that much? Or is that when she stops in the middle of the sidewalk and asks to do yoga, I lead her through a sun salutation or a triangle pose? Or perhaps it's listening to me explain to her that people often use the word "ironic" when they mean something more like "coincidental" or "serendipitous."

This offends people, apparently. I'm sorry. If you don't want me to lecture my two-year-old about the proper use of ironic, START USING IT CORRECTLY.

Oh, but that's not where I was going with this.

TOLERANCE. My point is tolerance. There's a lovely article on Salon about the dangers of rigidity and intolerance. Do we really need to make something as terrifying as being responsible for the growth and development of a human being into a contest? Are our tribal instincts so overpowering that we must throw to the wolves anyone that doesn't conform to our worldview? Or, childview. Whichever.

It's ridiculous. I'll do the best I can, and so will you, and I guarantee you that your best and my best do not look anything like each other. And that's cool, honestly. I may think helicopter parents are kind of sick, but maybe there is something to the whole "security" argument. Still, I couldn't pull it off. Not my style, and I'd be miserable, and if there's one thing I think almost anyone would agree with it's this:

Miserable parents raise miserable kids.

So be happy.

And let's all cut each other some slack, yeah? Sounds great.

I was born for this.

2010-06-28T22:02:00.000-05:00

A few months back, someone told me that I was the most dramatic person he knew.

I scoffed, of course. And balked. Me? Dramatic?

You must be joking. I'm totes down-to-earth. I'm the chillest of girls-next-door. I'm the anti-drama.

Yeah, you can stop laughing now. I realize how defensive I'm being.

I *am* dramatic. I was born for drama. I was born to live through a war, a foreign occupation, an apocalypse, the gosh-darn Second Coming. Take your pick. I'll take any of them.

I was born for the long silences. I was born to inhabit a world with more time to think than anyone knows what to do with, and more work to do than can possibly leave time for thought. I was born to gaze at empty horizons and listen to wind whistle, unimpeded by voices. I was born for those moments when time and the spinning of the world stops and you can hear the pulse in someone's throat, the closing of a door down the street, a dog barking in the park.

I was born for the meaningful gazes, for the mindless chatter that covers up those gazes. I was born for Austen's repressed Regency or Chang's occupied Shanghai. I was born for Bombay after the British left, London in the late '30s, Kyoto in the '40s. I was born for Paris during WWII. I was born for Johannesburg when Mandela was coming to power, or Elroy's Los Angeles. I was born for Catherine's court, or for Rabat's Terror.

I was born to play these roles. Elizabeth Bennett, Wang Chia Chi, Nitta Sayuri, Anne Boleyn, Mary Magdalene: I was made for these archetypes. I was born for intrigue. I revel in betrayal. I delight in picking apart the personality and piecing together the puzzle. I was born to stand immobile in the face of unyielding pressure.

I am the most ridiculous of drama queens. And I love it.

Consider this my resignation.

2010-06-21T10:26:00.000-05:00

I am resigning from the human race. I'm done being a good person.

Effective immediately.

So, the next time you want me to care about something, you'd better pull out your big guns. A text message isn't going to cut it. A phone call probably won't, either.

No, if you want me to care, you're going to have to show up on my doorstep, in the rain, soaking wet and probably catching pneumonia as you stand there and plead with me. Kneeling in a puddle that is six inches deep will not be going too far.

Visual aids are required. You must produce your crazy friend/injured cat/broken down car/alcoholic family IN PERSON. If they are not present, you can forget about getting anything from me. My heartstrings will not be tugged.

And really, because it's me, I want eloquence. I want simple, powerful prose that tells me whatever story you want to tell effectively. This means that you must choose the correct words, they must make sense, and they must be strung together properly. Any attempts at overblown alliteration/assonance/rhyme will be laughed at and mocked mercilessly. Likewise for grammatical errors, pronunciation errors and any other error I may think of as you beg me for compassion.

I have no mercy, world. I'm done with it. It's useless.

My conscience is in effective stasis. It will not be making any more appearances in this life. I will feel no guilt while I stare at you with steely eyes and joke about your dead babies, your health problems, your broken hearts.

I am a statue. I am stone. Nothing touches me, and nothing ever will, until I'm finally worn down by the nature of the world that kills us all.

Trying asking the rain for understanding. You might have better luck.

Jeux d'enfants

2010-06-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

I watched a movie last night that I've been putting off watching. I was concerned about what this particular film would do to my rather delicate emotional equilibrium.

And good lord, was I right.

You know what I'm talking about. Those movies that you watch and think the entire time, "This was me. This could have been me. This could still be me."

It's unsettling, particularly when there's death, dismemberment and/or epic romance involved.

I think that the movie is supposed to be a cautionary tale against the dangers of the adrenaline rush, of the relationship that pushes you to ever-greater heights of outrageousness, that pushes you past caring about anything other than "What next? What now?" I mean, they do end up dead, buried together under a ton of concrete. And while the end of the movie flashes back through all the choices they could have made and shows them happy together, the fact remains they didn't make those choices and spent their adult lives completely miserable.

It's romanticized and beautifully filmed, but still, I think it's supposed to make you realize how unhealthy those kinds of relationships are.

Too fucking bad.

Have you ever played a sustained game of truth or dare with someone? Where you didn't get to pick whether you gave a truth or did a dare, but the other person did? One in which you had to finish the game?

I have.

"Buy a plane ticket, right now." No money, no job. Do it anyway.

"Pick me up in a company car." Could get fired, and who else is going to hire someone with a criminal record a mile long? Do it anyway.

"Lay in Anne Boleyn's bed."

"Fuck me in the choir loft of Temple Church."

"Roll this joint on the train so we can smoke it as soon as we get to the car."

"Let my spastic American ass drive your car through London traffic."

"Would you let me cut your feet off?"

"Would you teach me to fight?"

"Would you wait for me, if I got sent away again?"

And on. And on. And on.

And all the movie made me realize was how much I miss it. No one plays enough anymore. Everyone takes things too seriously, and not the right things. Even me. I've lost it. I've lost that absolute confidence, that unshakeable direction, that true north.

Now I'm ordinary.

Sex Appeal

2010-04-22T10:04:00.000-05:00

Everyone has a "type" that they attract. Mine has always been "unavailable men." Usually, this takes the form of married men, but I've had a few "emotionall unavailable" thrown in there for fun, as well as the requisite number of "distance relationships."

But, married men love me. They flock to me. I have, at any given time, a veritable stable of them paying me sly compliments. I have always thought this is because I am a good flirt: I am playful, but I know where to draw the line, and how forcefully to draw it. This makes me fun, but invariably safe. I am not going to allow anyone to fall in love with me; I am not going to fall in love with anyone. I am not going to push things any farther than simple flirtation, ever.

As a side note, my problem with the "emotionally unavailable" has always stemmed from the fact that I will fall in love with them, and want them to reciprocate, because they should be available, and so I don't follow the strictures I usually place myself under. They, then, of course do not fall in love with me, and all manner of heartache ensues.

I like this explanation. It says that there's nothing inherently wrong with me, that I attract married men like flies. It's even pretty flattering of both my skill with manipulation and my self-control.

And who doesn't like a good ego-stroke, even if it is self-administered?

But I've been faced with the possibility lately that this explanation may be complete horseshit.

Certainly, the fact that I'm "safe" is probably the root of the reason that I seem to have so many married or otherwise involved or unavailable admirers. But my safety may have nothing to do with anything I consciously do or not do.

I may just be sexually unappealing. Period. Full stop.

It fits just as well. I'm good with words, I'm occasionally very witty, and I can be a lot of fun to be with. At the same time, lack of sex appeal would make me undeniably safe.

It also works with some of the more disastrous of my relationships. My ex-husband, for example, never wanted to lay a finger on me amorously. I always attributed this to his hang up, considering the other issues we faced. But maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was, in fact, me. My very first serious relationship was with a man when I was a senior in high school, and we didn't have sex for the last three months of our time together. I have always thought that that was because I stopped wanting to have sex with him, but maybe it was mutual.

And then there's the nebulous and hazy baby daddy. We had a very intense relationship, but we were very far apart for most of it. Perhaps ultimately he abandoned me because while our correspondence was intense and enlightening and thought-provoking and full of all manner of wonderful discovery and sparkling dialog, there was no corresponding physical spark.

It's an interesting possibility. And I say "interesting" in the most euphemistic way possible. Intellectually, it's interesting. Personally, it's pretty devastating.

Just A Man

2010-03-31T10:37:00.000-05:00

Genevieve's father has been on my mind a lot recently. There is more than one reason why this might be. Certainly another failed attempt at a relationship will call him to mind, but I think that it's rather this incident:

Genevieve likes to play in "Mama's room." We go up to the attic, I sit on my bed with a book or a magazine or a newspaper and play music on the BlackBerry, and she runs around, pulling things out of drawers and off of shelves and hangers. Sometimes I don't read like I'm supposed to; sometimes I watch her frenetic activity, driven to fever pitch by the sheer delight of playing around in "Mama's tings."

I keep a picture of Jim in my nightstand. It used to be on the nightstand, but when he disappeared, I moved it into the drawer and there it has stayed. I hadn't actually thought about it in quite some time.

Last week, my little girl found the picture. It was buried amongst the accumulated detritus of a year and a half, but she found it. She is nothing if not tenacious. I was actually reading, this day, so when she held up the picture and announced loudly, "Picture of man!" I had to look up to see what she was talking about.

My breath caught. I literally could not breath in for a full five seconds. She brought the picture back down, so she could study it again. She did so for a good length of time. Then she looked back up at me and said, "Just a man."

And then she tossed the picture to the side.

I burst into tears. I couldn't help it. Genevieve was incredibly startled; she climbed up on the bed, leaned against my back, and stroked my hair and exhorted me "No sad, Mama. No cry."

I'm the mother-of-the-year. Letting my not-yet-two-year-old comfort me.

I did pull myself together pretty quickly (for me, anyway) but he's definitely been on my mind since.

Something I've never really told anyone: I'm not actually sure I know anything about the man. I was deeply, completely, hopelessly, helplessly in love with him, and I realize now that I might not even know his real name. That's the real reason I've not made any serious attempts to find him. I did quite a bit of investigating on my own, a year and a half ago, and what I discovered rocked the foundations of my world.

His house, might not be his house. His name, might not be his name. I may know nothing true about the man whose DNA composes half the genetic material of my child.

I may have been quite thoroughly duped. He may be sitting somewhere, laughing to himself about how easy that dumb American girl was. It is a possibility I can no longer fully ignore. I'd like to think that if he is out there somewhere, he feels some pang of regret for what he did. To that end, I do still email him once a month (or, maybe once every other month) with a few pictures and some choice anecdotes.

This unbroken stream of unreturned communication has turned him into something of a priest, or a god, for me. I confess my sins to him. It's something I always did; he always did know all my secrets. But this is different. I have no expectation of ever hearing from him again. He is a non-entity, but one I still feel immeasurably close to. I tell him everything now without hesitation, without remorse, without anything at all except relief. Knowing that he can never, never pass judgment on me because of what he's done, I feel absolved after each of these missives.

I imagine this is how people feel when they talk to God. Or go to confession. I do neither, these days, but I do email my daughter's father.

A Mini Me.

2010-03-29T08:25:00.000-05:00

While I may still be a little apprehensive of this whole motherhood thing, I must confess: I love my baby.

She's not really a baby anymore, which might account for the outpouring of affection I feel for her at this particular juncture. She's a toddler now, a tiny little person, with enough personality for something 10 or 15 times her size. And it's a personality I like.

My baby is brash and assertive and fearless. She runs, she jumps, she climbs, she recites at the top of her lungs without the least hint of timidity or caution.

My father is the one that spends the most time with her, and he took her to the playground last week. The weather is finally getting warm enough for that to be a pleasant experience again. Thank god. This child needs about the same amount of space a wild horse needs to be truly happy.

Anyway, they're at the park, and she's on the swings, swingingswingingswinging and giggling with delight. When, all of a sudden, her giggles give way to spontaneous recitation. At the top of her lungs, while her grandpa continues to push her in rhythm, my not-yet-two-year-old (apparently) recited her alphabet (only missing three or four letters) and the first two verses of "Rock-a-bye Baby In A Treetop" (without missing a word).

What. The. Hell.

According to my father, other parents within earshot stood agape. I don't blame them; I would have, too. (I have since had the pleasure of hearing her recite "Rock-a-bye Baby In A Treetop." It is a thing to be hold, I'll have you know.)

And I believe the alphabet bit of the story, too, after this weekend. We get home from grocery shopping, we're putting the groceries away. My mom is having a medical test done this week and she's going to be on a broth-and-jello diet for few days, so we bought lots of Jell-o. Lots. We never have Jell-o in the house.

Genevieve has never seen a box of jello before. But she picked one up and announced to me (again, at the top of her lungs- we're still working on the "inside voice" concept) that is was "jelly."

I think my jaw actually dropped.

Yeah, she got it wrong, but she was damn close. SHE'S NOT TWO YET.

What. The. Hell.

My baby is brash and fearless. My baby takes no prisoners, asks for what she wants (ok, she demands it, but we're working on needs first, manners second), likes to be read to, dances, and has begun to try to sing along with me when I sing nursery rhymes at her. This is a child that I can get into.

And she's sweet. Despite the brashness and the boldness and the demanding, she's so incredibly loving. We've been dog-sitting for a friend's black lab; her and the dog have become fast friends. She has spent the last 24 hours announcing that "Moonpie needs a hug" and then proceeding to walk up the dog, wrap her arms around whatever part she can get to, and lay her had on Moonpie's back. She does it with particular alacrity whenever Moonpie cries, which is frequently, since she's been dumped in this strange house for the weekend.

Her empathy takes my breath away.

She knows when I need a hug, too. And she usually brings tears to my eyes when she wraps both her little arms and her little legs around me and squeezes and tells me "Don't be sad, Mama."

Indeed. What on earth do I have to be sad about? I have the best little girl in the world.

Work-in-Progress

2010-03-06T11:38:00.001-06:00

I am a work-in-progress. There's nothing at all complete or finished or polished about me. I say the wrong things at the wrong times, I stay out too late, I don't get enough sleep, I can be unbelievably crass and at other times inexcusably thoughtless. I let go too easily, or else I hang on too long.

Most notably, I make the same mistakes, over and over and over again. Each time, it feels like a new mistake. But it's not. It's the same one, dressed up in new packaging so my poor pathetic and remarkably insecure head can fool itself into thinking that it's not about to do a real number on my long-suffering heart, who always seems to bear the brunt of these mistakes I make.

(If my body parts were relationship archetypes, my head would be the wife beater and my heart the battered wife. Right down to my head always telling my heart, "This is your fault. You deserve this." No joke. Ha.)

But I do. I make the same mistake, time and time again. I think that if I care enough, someone will care about me. I think that if I can just give enough, I'll get something back. In a far less positive light, you might say that I have a tendency to attach to anyone that shows me the least affection. God knows why, but I seem to be starved for attention. I just want someone to notice me, care, and continue to do so in perpetuity.

Isn't that what love is?

But this is not about love. I don't want to talk about love. Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.

This is about my eager-puppy syndrome, the one that keeps coming back after it's been kicked. This is about my attention-whorish bids for attention when I'm feeling down. This is about the fact that I seem to have no boundaries. I will give anyone whatever they ask of me, if they just hint that they might, at some point, maybe, in the future, reciprocate.

That's just bad business sense, right there. Can you believe I work in accounting? I can't. It's a good thing I don't set policy, just balance accounts. We'd be bankrupt.

I am bankrupt. I've given away so much for nothing but IOU's that turned out to be not worth the ink they were written with. I've given away huge chunks of my heart, of my self-respect, of my energy. And I don't really have enough left any more to cover my responsibilities. I am emotionally bankrupt. Also exhausted.

But how does one unlearn the behavior patterns of a lifetime? I don't even know where they come from; I got plenty of love and affection and attention as a child. I was not an abused youth.

How do I unlearn this impulse to give and give and give and hope that someday it'll come back to me? How do I forget everything I believe about karma and do unto others? And do I really want to?

No.

Why don't the rest of you join my world. Because, while I may be occasionally needy and while I may be occasionally childish and while I may occasionally display a level of immaturity that shocks the senses, we would all be much better off if we all gave instead of taking, if we all sometimes or even often did things without having a firm expectation of reciprocation in mind.

A little naivete goes a long way towards making the world better.

Riding the Rollercoaster

2010-02-04T06:43:00.000-06:00

I've been sick lately. I don't know what's up with that, but for a solid month, maybe even a month and a half, I've been unable to eat hardly anything. My stomach is constantly doing flip-flops, I feel nauseous, and the smell of most food is enough to make me sit and push it around my plate rather than consuming it.

This has been great for my appearance. I'm down to 128 pounds. Only eight more to go, and I'll have gotten where I've been trying to get for five years. I think this is the first time I've been under 130 since I was just barely pubescent.

And everywhere I go, people ask me, "Have you lost weight? You look fantastic!"

It's very gratifying to my ego.

On the other hand, none of my clothes fit. The jeans I bought less than six month ago? Falling off. The great taffeta party skirt? Requires a belt. My cincher belt? Slips and slides around. And I don't currently have the funds to replace the entirety of my wardrobe. I did just go to Mexico.

Also, I feel ILL all the time.

Every moment of every day is a little battle not to pass out, vomit or just put my head down and cry because it's exhausting to feel so crappy all the time. My head spins, my stomach dances and still, I have to concentrate on what I'm doing and get it done and smile while I do it, because it's now been so long that I just have to function regardless of how I feel.

I hate being sick. Generally, I take to my bed when I don't feel well, and don't get out until I feel good again.

But, I cannot be an invalid schoolgirl forever, and a month and a half in bed would not only be impractical given my life, I'd also probably have lost my mind from the boredom by now.

Who knows what's wrong? I certainly don't. All those ridiculously expensive tests they ran in the ER 5 months ago didn't tell anyone anything. The only way to find out is to subject myself to another battery of ridiculously expensive tests, and really, the upshot is that they might not tell anyone anything this time, either. Unless I'm actually in the grips of the severe cramps and the nausea and the heart palpitations when I go in, and that's hard to schedule. Even I, as German as I can be, know that much about bodily processes.

And, as always, I must consider the possibility that this is all psychosomatic.

More than most people, my mental and emotional state has effects upon my physical being. This is something I've struggled with for more than half my life: being upset makes me ill. Always has. I learned to control my temper as a child mostly so that I wasn't getting sick everywhere, at the drop of a hat. Crying gives me headaches, anger makes me nauseous, bliss leaves me light-headed and dizzy.

There are indications that perhaps this is nothing more than a response to extreme stress. The whole thing started when I was putting myself under a great deal of pressure for having lost Genevieve's father, and since then, it's flared up from time to time. I can correlate most of the major episodes with events that certainly were not pleasant to deal with.

However, this is has been ongoing and constant for some time now. And while I am more emotional than I was six months ago, that's as likely to be a consequence as a cause. Always feeling like I want to sit down and cry has made me more apt to actually sit down and cry.

And lately, there's certainly been a rollercoaster around. The ups and downs of it are unpredictable and numbing. Small wonder my stomach is doing flip-flops: it's being thrown around like a lacrosse ball, up and down and sideways without rhyme or reason. This is the point where I say to myself, "Get a grip and just get off the damn ride."

But I don't want to. Even if it is throwing me willy-nilly and bruising parts of myself that really can't take anymore abuse, rollercoasters are fun, too. The thrill and the danger and yes, even that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when it drops out are all pleasures of their own, to be savored.

And, I refuse to get off before the ride is over. Even sick, I'm stubborn as a bull.

Love and Mexico

2010-01-17T10:17:00.000-06:00

I'm going to Mexico in two days.

This is the highlight of my year, and by "year" I mean the preceding 12-month period, not the short time that 2010 has been around.

There's this man, you see, this man that I'm almost certainly completely in love with, although I would never say that out loud. (Whoops. Did I do that?)

Anyway, there's this man, and he wanted to go somewhere warm. Before he takes off for London for three months. Which is it's own story. So he tells me... "I'm either going to Mexico, or Thailand. I want to go to Thailand by myself."

Then, the next day, he tells me he's going to Mexico. Then I tell him I'd love to come, but I don't want him to take it the wrong way. Because we're not dating, you see. We're both single. We're just friends. And he says ok, he won't, but that I should have my own reasons for going to Mexico.

Which I do. I mean, I haven't left the country since the Snugglebug was conceived, and I have a serious problem with wanderlust. Also, I live in Wisconsin, and I'm being offered a trip to Mexico in motherfucken January.

That right there is a reason to go, man or not.

But he's been down there for a week, now, and he's called me every day. Also, we spent the three days prior to his departure in pretty much constant company.

But we're not dating.

Last night, the idea that I should cancel my hostel reservation and just stay with him in this beach house that his friends have rented was floated.

But we're not dating.

Also we're going to spend the last couple of days of this trip in Cancun together. Alone.

But we're not dating.

Also I was awakened by my phone notifying me of a message yesterday at 5:30 in the morning. The message was, "I can't wait until you're here."

But we're not dating.

I am crawling out of my skin here, though. I had enough to keep me busy for the last week, getting ready to take a week off of work, then Gallery Night debauchery, then my parents' 25th anniversary party. But now I'm just... waiting. Waiting to go to Mexico. Waiting to find out whether being almost certainly completely in love with someone that is playing at being unavailable is going to pay off.

Now I have nothing to do but analyze the last week and wonder to myself whether I'm completely in over my head, and this man is just really good at playing me, or whether perhaps something has healed in him, between the move to London, the sunshine, the patience.

I have nothing to do but pore every word and every expression and every inflection and wonder what is going to happen.

He called me this morning, when he woke up. I am almost certainly completely and hopelessly in love.

2009-12-21T12:11:00.000-06:00

Why, why, why do I have to be the kind of person that can't just leave well-enough alone?

Why, why, why do I have to be the kind of person that falls in love at the drop of a fucken hat?

Why, why, why do I have to be the kind of woman that falls in love with men that don't or won't or can't reciprocate?

Why, why, why do I have to crave intimacy so goddamn much?

Seriously.

I suppose I don't actually *have* to be any of these things.

We are all infinitely malleable, and we can alter whatever we'd like to about ourselves if we are willing to work at it. Sometimes the work is hard, and long, and we want to give up and we do give up before we accomplish the change, but that doesn't the change was impossible, just that we were frail and weak.

Which is also human nature, but that's another story.

But I guess what it comes down to is this: despite seemingly endless heartache and hurt that are no one's fault but my own, despite conflicting imperatives from my body and my mind and my heart, I just really, really don't want to change.

Giving up the parts of myself that leave me vulnerable to falling in love, eager to know other people, desperate to be known, would mean giving up the last bits of innocence I've got. I really, truly believe that giving up the optimism and the idealism and the drive that make me so goddamn easy to hurt would leave me so jaded I'd never love anyone ever again. I'd end up dead to the world.

And I don't want to do that.

I don't want to do that because it's not fair to my daughter to leave her with two parents that are both so self-absorbed and hedonistic they can't care about anyone. She's already got one. He took that road; I can't follow. I can't do that to her.

So here I am, stuck between a rock and a hard place, feeling like I'm getting my heart stomped on and the only way I can think to stop it is to kill the damn thing myself.

And it's no one's fault but my own.

And if anyone is nice to me, I'm going to collapse in a puddle at their feet and cry and cry and not stop until I've drowned myself and then I'm going to love them.

So don't be nice to me.

I can't handle it.

I had an epiphany today.

2009-11-23T20:38:00.000-06:00

I'm talking on the phone with this man, this man I've been on a date (or two? It's often so hard to tell) with, but haven't yet slept with.

And he lays on me this speech about talking it slow, and getting to know each other before we become intimate. About how he doesn't really know me.

And that he's also sort of, maybe, kind of dating another woman, too.

He is quick to assure me he hasn't slept with her, either.

My first reaction is actually a kind of gut-wrenching dread. I've never, ever been chosen over someone else, not in my entire life. This is my insecurity.

My second reaction is indignation. Why is telling me this? Is this supposed to make whatever he does ok? This is my feminism.

And my third reaction is, "Why on earth am I at all concerned about whether he'll pick me?" This is my epiphany.

Why on earth am I concerned whether he'll want me?

I haven't really decided if I want to pick him.

I don't know him that well, either. I don't know what he believes, or where his politics lie. I don't know if will be disgusted by the fact I spend most of my summer running around barefoot, and that I have to slather myself in sunscreen to be outside for longer than an hour.

I don't know if he cuts his toenails in bed, or refuses to wash dishes.

I don't know how he feels about children.

These are all important things. Some of them are actually monumentally important.

And here I am worrying solely over what he thinks of me.

I really am a pleaser.

And this is not a good thing.

I vowed years ago that I would never again sublimate my identity to someone else's whim, but I have done it over, and over, and over again. I have done it repeatedly and without a second thought. I have not actually learned from my mistakes, as painful as they were. I have not remembered the lessons.

I am, at heart, a silly romantic girl that wants nothing more than True Love. Capital T, Capital L. I have never outgrown that fairy-tale stage of emotional development. And quite frankly, I don't want to. I don't want to give up on that dream. I don't want to develop skin so thick it can't feel when someone touches it or a heart so guarded I can't get out of myself.

I don't want to be bitter. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to give up on the human race as a whole, and it seems to me that giving up on love is the first step on that treacherously slippery road.

But maybe, just maybe, I don't have to.

It must be possible to remain open, without grasping at whatever is put in front of you. It must be possible to love, and still choose to bestow that love where it is wanted and appreciated.

So this is my task then.

This time, I choose.

FoodInc.

2009-07-24T13:28:00.000-05:00

Everyone should go see this movie. Run, do not walk, to the nearest theater, and watch it. It's short (only an hour and a half) but well, well-worth the price of admission.

For those of you not hip enough to work for natural and organic food retailers or otherwise inclined to know anything at all about the American food supply business, FoodInc. is a rather disgusting look at the ways we produce food in this country, and all the things that are wrong with that process.

Up front, I will say (because I am a natural skeptic) that I am not convinced that 100% of everything presented in this movie is true. Like other documentaries of recent years (say, everything every done by Michael Moore) I'm sure the filmmakers cherry-picked the footage that made it to the finished version, and that means that the finished version is probably decidedly one-sided.

Still, there are some gems of facts in there.

For example, did you know that there are only 12 slaughterhouse/meatpacking plants left in the country? TWELVE. Forty years ago, there were thousands.

The Smithfield meat packing plant is operated almost exclusively by illegal immigrants... but no more than 15 a day are picked up by immigration officials.

Junk food is cheap on the shelf, because we subsidize the hell out of corn and soybeans. So it isn't actually cheap.

There are fish farms out there that are trying to teach fish to eat corn. Why? Corn is cheap.

Trying to food cows corn is what has produced such lovely fuzzy things as hemorrhagic e.coli backeria.

I told you it was scary.

However, it also got me thinking about a few things, tangentially.

For example, so many people I know say they don't bother to pay for "organic" food because the label is meaningless. That's actually completely false. "Organic" as a food label is very, very strictly monitored by the FDA. In a nutshell, foods labeled organic must be from non-genetically modified seeds that have been grown in fields that have been free of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for at least three years. Meat labeled organic must be from animals that have not been genetically modified and that have been fed food that could be sold to consumers as organic under FDA guidelines, and cannot have been exposed to synthetic hormones or antibiotics.

I think that most people think that the organic label is meaningless because they have a romantic vision for organic farms that is very similar to the romantic vision of conventional farms- individual farmers using common-sense, sustainable practices to produce good food without the addition of all the technology that is available to agribusiness farms.

But farming practices are not regulated by the FDA, and quite frankly shouldn't be. Furthermore, organic certification for a farm is expensive. For the kind of small farmer that we envision, it is prohibitively expensive. And it's a yearly expenditure- you have to renew certification every year.

This means that the only people who can afford organic certification, and thus sell their food as organic, are the same kind of large-scale, disgustingly unsustainable agribusiness farms that produce conventional food. It's trucked around the country and around the world before it makes it to your supermarket and then your dinner table.

And so people think the label is meaningless.

It's not meaningless, it just doesn't mean what many people think it ought to mean in their pink-rose-colored-world.

If you really want good food grown well, you should be buying direct from farmers that you can see and talk to and visit. Go to farmer's markets. Sign up for a community supported agriculture share. Can and preserve what you can't eat fresh so that you have food all year round.

It's really that simple.

You don't get to have the wholesomeness we've lost in our food supply and retain the convenience that it's been replaced with. You have to pick one or the other.

Which would you rather have?

Men are from Mars...

2009-07-23T12:48:00.000-05:00

There is no space travel here, FYI.

So recently, the Manfriend informed me that one of his friends (not a good friend, but an old one) is getting married later in the summer and that he assumed I wouldn't want to go and that he's taking his mother as his date.

That's actually a very truncated snapshot of the whole picture.

He assumed I wouldn't want to go because his ex is standing up in the wedding, and she and I (or rather, her sister and I?) have already had one completely bizarre and moderately unpleasant run-in in recent months. Looking back, the whole thing makes even less sense than it did at the time. I ran into the two of them at a baby store, and the sister threatened to "punch that bitch in the face." She was looking at me when she said it; I assumed she was talking about me. But, the ex is happily married to another man and has (a really rather adorable) baby boy, so I don't know why any of them would care that I'm dating the Manfriend.

No sense, I'm telling you.

Maybe she wasn't talking to me. Even though she was looking at me.

Anyway, there was this incident a few months ago, so he assumed I wouldn't want to go to a wedding that his ex would be at.

I don't think he should have assumed that.

And if he doesn't want me to be at an event she's at, why doesn't he just say that, instead of couching it in pseudo-considerate and mildly condescending terms?

On the other hand, his mother has known the groom for upwards of 20 years, and didn't actually get her own invitation to the wedding, so maybe he just wanted to take her to be nice to her.

But if that's the case, why not just say that?

And furthermore, I was supposed to attend another friend's wedding with him previously, but he backed out of that one, too.

Which leaves me with this icky idea at the back of my head that I'm like the red-headed-step-child of girlfriends and he's hiding me. I don't think there's anything so wrong with me that I need to be sheltered away from polite society. Really, I'm nothing to be ashamed of. I have the requisite number of limbs and brain cells.

So I'm curious about the full reasoning behind the decision-making process, both assuming I wouldn't want to attend and immediately inviting his mother to be his date.

But I've been informed by several (male) friends that doing so would be "cling" or "controlling" and that I should "pick my battles." I'm not trying to fight a battle. I'm curious. And he is perfectly welcome to go without me, but I would really like to know the why. And have it explained to me.

My female friends tell me to just ask, because there's no harm in satisfying curiousity.

Is this a gender thing? Should I ask, or should I bite my tongue? And if I do inquire, how do I go about it in such a way as to make it clear I'm not picking a fight, not demanding he take me with him, not being clingy or controlling?

Creative juices.

2009-07-05T17:03:00.000-05:00

Creativity is a finite resource. Or, at the very least, my creativity is a finite resource. It runs dry. I have none left.

Or, at least, I have none left for blogging. My creativity is being spent in various other pursuits at the moment. I'm decorating a room. Also plotting an installation piece for a hallway. Also helping my mother with her decorating projects. Also helping my father completely remodel a bathroom.

And then there's the baby, who requires ever-more-creative entertainment with each passing day. I swear to god, she gets bored of things more quickly than I do. A thing will engross her completely and utterly for an hour, a day, sometimes a week, but then its over, and something else must be found.

On that note, the current entertainment is walking the block. We must have made 50 trips up and down yesterday. My leg muscles are so fatigued they quiver when I stand.

Dodging the family's questions about the Manfriend is requiring more and more creativity as time goes on, too.

And then there's this fundraiser/clothes swap that I've been designated the organizer for. Does anyone have any creative ideas on where to get 25 or so clothing racks that doesn't involve the outlay of any money?

I think that the difference between an artist and a hobbyist is how the creative juices flow. Hobbyists are like me. There's a finite well, and it can only be routed into so many channels before all of them end up dry. Artists, on the other hand, feed on their own creative energies. The expending of those energies generates more energy which can be used to feed more channels and it just keeps multiplying and multiplying, and never runs dry completely. This branch or that branch might wither away, but the tree as a whole remains healthy and flourishing.

(Did I mix enough metaphors there? Trees, rivers, brain conduits. I could probaby have used a fourth if I weren't so burned out.)

It's kind of depressing to realize one is just a hobbyist.

Then again, I work with spreadsheets all day, keeping books and balancing bank accounts. It shouldn't really come as a surprise to me that I'm not actually an artist.

Big City, Little City

2009-06-04T20:28:00.001-05:00

So, despite a metro area population of somewhere around 1.5 million, Milwaukee is really a very little town.

VERY LITTLE.

Case in point.

Facebook.

Yesterday, there was a flurry of activity on Facebook. Since the number of my friends on said interface would not populate a football team, much less a third world country, this is a rare occurrence. But yesterday, there was a lot of activity. My BlackBerry was blowing up, as they say. Probably without that "g" on the end.

Blowin' up?

Still not right.

Moving on.

There was a lot of activity. Posting, commenting, planning, all that stuff that people who hate the phone (like me) really love this social networking shit for.

And then, I get this comment notification.

Now, if you've ever tried to use the full functionality of Facebook on a mobile device, you know that it doesn't always translate. Sometimes links don't take you to the right place, and you're left wondering what exactly someone else is commenting on, because it just doesn't quite make sense. This was one of those moments. I scratched my head for awhile before getting to a full-fledged computing device.

But that's not the point.

The point is that a friend of a friend saw a comment I had made on the wall of our mutual friend, and followed up with something to the effect of "We work together, I think, even though we only ever speak on the phone." (I'm paraphrasing like mad. The exact comment would reveal personal information I'm just not ready to share with you people yet.)

But that's still not the point! Everyone knows that coworkers will eventually find you on Facebook, and then you have to decide what to do- accept the requests and set their group permissions so that they can't actually see any part of your profile, or just ignore them.

The point is, that this chick is dating this kid I went to middle school with who subsequently became really good friends with one of my coworkers at the job before this one.

Yeah.

It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon up in here.

And since Mark Metcalf lives in Milwaukee and I've met him, all of these people can actually be connected to Kevin Bacon in six degrees or less.

Not the point. But funny nonetheless.

It just floors me that there is so much interconnectedness in this city I live in. Every once in awhile when something ridiculously over-the-top like this happens, I have to just sit back and marvel at the human condition. We are such social beings, despite our violent tendencies and our power struggles and our egos. We're social, under it all.

Also, it makes me go ick when I think about the fact the bulk of the people I have slept with in my life are Milwaukeeans. I could probably do a six-degrees thing and get myself to having had intimate contact with about half the 1.5 million inhabitants of this town.

Ew. If the Manfriend and I don't work out, I think I may have to only date people who live 100 miles or more away.

Paralysis.

2009-06-02T12:07:00.000-05:00

My younger cousin (I was incredibly tempted to refer to her as my "little" cousin, but she towers over me by at least six inches these days) recently graduated from design school. She has a summer internship in London that lasts three weeks; she leaves on Thursday.

I spoke to her on Sunday, during my drive back up from Indianapolis. She offered to play sleuth for me, to try and ferret out the baby daddy's status (live vs. dead) and possibly even his whereabouts.

I find myself paralyzed with indecision.

On the one hand, there's "God yes, do whatever you can, find out what the hell happened, absolve me of this burden."

On the other hand, there's "This is not your responsibility and you should be focusing on your own shit while you're there."

On the one hand, there's "Who the fuck was he and why did he do this to me?"

On the other hand, there's "Do I really want to let someone else in on the depth of my shame and the completeness of my goddamn stupidity?"

On the one hand, there's "A child deserves to know everything she can about both of her parents, even absent ones."

On the other hand, there's "What is knowing anything going to do for her? He obviously doesn't care to be involved with her at all."

I find myself, in other words, completely paralyzed with the worst kind of indecision. This is not indecision by apathy or ambivalence; no, this is indecision by seeing too far in conflicting directions. I both want to know, and don't want to know. I both want to share this with someone, and don't want anyone else to really know any of the details. I both want to share with my daughter something about her father and don't want his narcissism touching her in any way whatsoever.

In the end, this is one of those situations where indecision is itself a decision. If I don't tell her anything, she can't play sleuth, and nothing will be discovered. I realize this.

I suspect the overriding factor in my decision to remain indecisive is a combination of ego and altruism. I don't want her to know how stupid I was, and I also don't want her to have anything less than a glowing experience on this opportunity. Her trip should be for her, not for me.

So another year will go by, and maybe on down the road I'll see my way to how to find out. Right now, I don't even know where to tell someone else to start looking.

Playing Hooky.

2009-05-26T20:27:00.000-05:00

So... the Manfriend and I had a date on Sunday night. We spent Friday night out with other people. And I am going to be out of town all next weekend.

So we made a date.

Then there were technological issues.

And I couldn't get ahold of him. Because his phone battery wasn't in properly.

And he couldn't hear me knocking on his front door. Because he was in his attic bedroom.

And the dog didn't bark. Probably because the dog knows who I am.

It was a bad night. And there was no date. But I'm still going to be out of town all weekend.

You see, despite my advancing years and supposed emotional maturity, I don't deal with disappointment well. It makes me angry. I get all tensed up, I grind my teeth, my stomach ties itself in knots and then sinks into a pit of its own making. Kind of like a black-hole in my intestinal regional.

And I usually I get all tight in the throat and there are prickles in my eyes.

I'm really a very emotional person. Really.

Disappointments, especially ones in which there is no blame to be assigned, make me unbelievably nervous. I believe in an anthropomorphized Universe, you see, a Universe that acts and thinks and feels and attempts to push me onto paths that it thinks I should travel. Disappointments with no obvious source of blame are the work of this anthropomorphized Universe.

Why does the Universe not want me to get any?

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE HATE ME?

I have decided that the Universe was instead offering me an opportunity to do what he and I have not done in this latest round of dating: spend time together in daylight.

So tomorrow, I am going to take advantage of all of this luxurious paid personal leave I have with my grown up job with grown up benefits, and I am going to play hooky.

This is what grown ups do with their sick time, right? I mean... they don't actually save it for when they're sick? Do they?

Intimacy.

2009-05-19T12:35:00.001-05:00

I have discovered that, despite my long record of thinking (and claiming) the contrary, I have intimacy issues. There are things I will not discuss, not in any personal sense, not when it matters, not when it's important that they be discussed. This reticence stems from a fear of opening up. It's a fear of rejection and of judgment and of being poked and prodded in soft places that just won't stand up to long and/or intense scrutiny.

I have been able to avoid this realization for the previous 25 years of my life because I can be what others describe as a very open person. I will talk about a whole range of things that most people don't discuss in public. But I will discuss them in the most academic, intellectual, abstract terms. My "self" (such as it is) is never involved in these conversations, just my brain. This is evidenced by the very language I use, the terms, the connections, the dime-store psychology that is injected in pretty much every conversation I have that touches on matters personal. I strive to remain unemotional, objective, viewing a subject or a problem from all sides, empathizing with any point of view presented to me.

Of course, of course, this doesn't always work, but compared to the emotional tumult that constantly rages through my head, down my spinal cord, and seeps into every molecule of my being, right on down to the marrow in my bones, I'm the picture of serene calm.

(I think this might be somehow responsible for why I am such a sap, why I cry at movies with even an iota of emotional resonance, why beautiful music and lyrics make my throat tight and my eyes burn.)

In simple terms, then, my penchant for abstraction is an emotional defense mechanism.

And this is why, despite all my sharing and seeming forthrightness, I have intimacy issues.

I don't tell anyone my fantasies. I don't tell anyone my dreams. I don't tell anyone about my heartaches. I don't tell anyone about the moments in which I'm overcome with joy, either. I don't tell anyone, not even the people responsible for those joys, those heartaches; not even the people who inspire the dreams and the fantasies. I don't tell anyone about my beliefs, the things I feel in my soul when I see new leaves on trees and sunrises and all those other wonderous, every-day occurences that can't but leave one with a sense of awe at the absolute perfection and beauty and complexity that is creation.

I'll talk about sex, but only with people that I'm not having any with. I'll talk about God, but only in the abstract, only in the broadest and dryest of terms. I'll talk about love, but only with my head, never ever with my heart.

One of these days, I'll have to take the plunge, and break the hermetic seal on my emotional life. One of these days, I'll have to let someone in.

What's in a name?

2009-05-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

So this morning at work, some chick called because she didn't understand why her debit card had been charged upwards of $60 when she only bought a bottle of water and some cookies and maybe some sushi.

Of course, this shit gets forwarded to me, so I start digging into it, and as I'm wading through receipts, trying to find the one for her transaction, I start looking at the names. Apparently, both Colin Powell and Robert Smith shopped at the Capitol Drive store on Saturday morning. Also, they were checked out by the same cashier about 15 minutes apart.

That must have been some morning.

But in addition to Mr. Powell and Mr. Smith, I came across some names that just made me giggle.

"Mohammad Dehbod." Oh yeah, that prophet had a hot body!

"Mark Music." Um, really? This guy must be in a band. A bad pop band. For eight-year-olds.

"Michelle A. Everage." This is just cruel. I hope she's actually a very exceptional human being.

"Algeria Peoples." My peeps be from Algeria, yo.

"Suzie Hammer." I don't actually know why this one makes me giggle, but it really, really does.

What's the funniest real name you've ever come across?

Battlestar Galactica and the Idealized Gender-Bending of R&D

2009-05-13T14:00:00.000-05:00

Most people that know me, know that I am a big nerd. Like, a really big nerd. Part of the manifestation of that nerdiness is my deep and abiding love for the SciFi network (and I will refuse to call it SyFy for the duration of my life), for science fiction in general, and for Battlestar Galactica in particular.

This show was the best show on television.

I am not kidding. Or exaggerating. At all.

One of the many, many reasons that BSG was such a stellar example of what television can be when done correctly is it presented a vision of gender relations that, while idealized in that it was better than what we've got now, was still realistic and believable. You watched it and thought that we *could* get to this point, that it was possible. You watched it and thought, "This is the way it should be, warts and all."

Because there were warts. Human nature being what it is, there will always, always be ugly spots. And Battlestar Galactica acknowledged that.

Exhibit A: Coed Barracks.

Ah, yes. The Coed Barracks. Nothing says "gender equality" like stripping down and sleeping in a room with 20 other people, of both genders. Nothing gets you more used to the idea of the opposite sex as your equal than sharing a bathroom with them. I know. I went to a college that had nothing but coed dorms. With coed bathrooms.

When no one bats an eyelash over bodies like that, you know you're onto something. Sexual politics is the arguably the largest single obstacle to true gender equality. We are always sizing up anyone of the opposite sex that we meet; we are always thinking about them in sexual terms, and this prevents us from seeing them as human.

Also, it's pretty obvious that living with someone decreases this propensity towards viewing another as a sexual object- just think about all those failed marriages. And sexless marriages.

Exhibit B: The Coed Boxing Match

And then there's this. Men and women, equally pummeling the shit out of each other. A girl can take her hits, and dish them out, too. And she wins as often as she loses. (Actually, in Starbuck's case, she wins way more often than she loses, but we're going with generalities here.)

When two people of the opposite gender can beat the living shit out of each other, you know gender equality has been achieved. The End.

But, on the flip side, there were examples of gender relations that the producers opted not to bend. For example, the only Cylon prisoners that endured rape as an interrogation tactic were female models.

It was also only the female characters in the show that used sexual manipulation- from Six to Ellen. None of the male characters ever did, not even Baltar, who was the ultimate manwhore of television. He was manipulated by sex, but he never used it to manipulate.

So it was ugly. But it was still better than where we're at.

I guess this is growing up?

2009-05-10T16:58:00.000-05:00

S0 apparently I can no longer hold my liquor.

I was never one of those tough chicks that can drink the rugby team under the table, but I had a very good sense of my limits (learned largely in one night in which gallons of rum were consumed) and I could pace myself well and in general keep up with most normal people at the bar. Or the party. Or the park. Where ever.

No longer.

Because oh-my-fucking-god was I hungover yesterday morning. Actually, I was hungover the night before whilst still drunk. I was in bed by 1:00 am, after having puked twice. Once nothing but water.

Then I got up and did Mother's Day with my mom and my dad and my daughter. Then I gave the baby to my mom and said, "You guys go to church, I won't make it through Mass." And went upstairs and puked again (coffee and cinnamon rolls are actually not the most unpleasant things to vomit, by the way) and then slept for another three hours.

Then I woke up and I was fine.

Went to MAM with my mom and the baby. We saw a lovely exhibit of portraits of teenagers. We wandered the regular collection. We chatted, we drank coffee.

Lovely afternoon.

I wonder somewhere in the back of my head if I wasn't trying to sabotage my very first mother's day. I'm still a little ambivalent about the whole "motherhood" thing, even if I do love the Snugglebug. Because I do love her. She's wonderful and amazing and the most interesting, littlest person.

But I will own that I am not sure how feel about myself as "mother." I'm not a mommy. I'm not a mama. I'm not a mother. I'm not really all that maternal. I'm too analytical for maternity.

But I still love her. And she's still amazing. So all I have to do is try really, really hard not to screw her up.

Right?

Repudiation.

2009-05-02T20:52:00.000-05:00

I believe words have power. That in itself is a long, long thought process.

But I believe words have power. However, for me, this power is only potent when the words are said. They have to be out there, in the world, floating in the collective unconscious. They can't just be kicking around in my head. They can't just be in my unconscious.

Words in my head aren't yet words, you see. Words in my head are only thoughts. They are only the first stirrings of an idea, an action, a plan. To be put down, said out loud or committed to text is a sort of birthing process for the idea embedded in the words. Only after birth is the thought, the emotion, the idea REAL.

So sometimes I say things I don't mean. I attempt to only put forth the words that I can stand behind, but sometimes, an idea has to be tried out, to find out if it's true or false, real or imagined, good or bad.

Because something is only real after it's said. And in my head, I can't know how wrong something is. In my head, chasing around my own brain, I can convince myself of anything. I could convince myself the sky is orange if I really wanted to, if I did it all in my head. If I never said anything out loud.

Those things that turn out to be wrong, imagined, bad- they are the things I regret saying.

And I've said a few such things.

But I can know that they're wrong. I can know that I've moved forward from them, beyond them, to a better realm where I'm a better person and things are better.

I've moved forward. I won't go back. Not that I couldn't, but that I would not. I don't want what's back there anymore; I want what's in front of me. I want to keep moving forward.

Metaphors.

2009-04-26T13:21:00.000-05:00

So my good friend tells me that when you've got the time and energy to come up with extended metaphors for the relationships in your life, it's pretty much a sign that the shit is about to hit the fan.

I don't necessarily agree.

She tells me I should write it down, anyway, because that chick that did "He's Just Not That Into You" is making bank now. And she's sympathetic to my frantic attempts to start saving for the baby's college education on my $12/hour salary.

So have you ever waded into a cold lake to go swimming?

You put your feet in, it burns, you keep going. The water rises higher and higher on your legs, to your knees, mid-thighs, and then it's kind of hanging out there right below your crotch.

That's a moment of truth, right there. Up till this point, you were testing the waters. But now you're either going to dive in and go swimming, or turn around and give it up.

How cold is the water? Do I really want to do this? Oh shit, this is going to suck.

Alternatively, you think "This isn't so bad. I got this."

I'm hanging out in that cold lake. I've got arctic, icy water lapping at my nether regions.

I thought that the Manfriend was right there with me, in the frigid waters. And we'd plunge or turn around together.

Now I find out that I'm out there all alone and he's still getting his toes wet in the surf.

It's kind of awkward.

So I'm in the process of backing up and heading to shore. Maybe we'll try swimming again when the water's warmed a little.