I Am A Girl Who Reads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!)