Behind the Times

I sometimes make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.

2012-01-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

Wow. I almost lost an entire night to an internets' comments section. Again. God, I'm such a sucker for arguing with random strangers in an anonymous format where people can't even appropriately measure sarcasm unless you actually say, "I WAS BEING SARCASTIC!" because tone of voice doesn't exist. These are the arguments punctuated by emoticons. These are the arguments where EVERYONE takes EVERYTHING to the most extreme conclusion because they can. These are the conversations we're starting to have more often than the regular kind...and people wonder why Tea Partiers actually get elected!

I mean, just as an example of how ridiculous these internet comments discussions are: The post in question is on the topic of why older men are attracted to younger women. Of course, we can't think about this in any other terms than "SEVENTY YEAR OLDS LOVE FOURTEEN YEAR OLDS, OKAY?!," so it's automatically a whackadoo conversation, most especially since I've been led to believe that a lot of 70-year-old men only have fond, wistful, and vague memories of sex when they see 14-year-olds, not actual boners. The argument twists and turns, and several commenters mention how age is all relative an' shit. Like what we think is young now was like how old grandmas were in the 1200s. At some point, a commenter says this: "Most animals die before becoming old." Okay. I'm not really sure what that means? I googled life expectancies for animals (seriously, just like that: "life expectancy of animals"), and there's a kind of parrot that has the average life expectancy of 104 years. Sounds kinda old, right? Sure, your cat will probably only live to be maybe 20, and your dog, if she's big, could only live to be nine (the larger the breed of dog, the shorter the life expectancy), but PARROTS, MAN! They live to be OLDER THAN PEOPLE DO ON AVERAGE. So that commenter did what people do in internets' comments sections around the virtual globe: he said "most," and then made some really vague argument based on some seriously generalized, vague knowledge of the world. Some other commenter said at some point that until recently, people only lived to be 20, at which point I'm thinking, "DEFINE RECENTLY!"

But let's discuss the topic of the actual post. Older men think younger women are hot. Real yawnfest. One of the things I noticed was that the author of the post points to research that shows that bonobos like established females, not young ones. Why is this important? Well, if you follow this stuff, many people like to claim that we can learn a lot about our sex drives from the bonobos, our "closest evolutionary relative." We're actually just as close to chimpanzees as we are to bonobos, but they're jerks, so we try to forget that as much as possible. Chimps are like our weird uncle Joe Bob who wears overalls with no shirt underneath and makes meth in a trailer near a lake. Meanwhile, bonobos are like your slick uncle Rick who has a different date EVERY SINGLE NIGHT with some HOT BITCH. People love to point out that BONOBOS ARE NOT MONOGAMOUS, like, constantly as proof that we are not meant to be monogamous. But here we see that they also like old ladies. Hmmm. What's so interesting about this is that a lot of the same commenters to this post who immediately cry, "WE ARE HUMANS, NOT ANIMALS!" have previously said, "BUT I CANNOT BE MONOGAMOUS BECAUSE BONOBOS!" I mean, make up your mind, folks.

I know that because they're all regular Savage Love commenters, an internets' comments section with which I'm very familiar.

As I started to get REALLY WORKED UP about a lot of stuff going on here -- the complete inability of the privileged to admit to their privilege, the fact that people say "MANY" and "MOST" like that shit is SCIENTIFIC FACT, the fact that people so very much want to believe in their autonomy that they refuse to admit to the influences of society on their thinking, the fact that our constant framing of everything sexual in terms of the male appetite even when discussing the female appetite just allows the male appetite to continue to dominate the discourse -- I realized something. I'm tired of this conversation. Men like young women. SO WHAT. Most older ladies I know either have dates or have husband or don't want either. I don't know that it necessarily damages women for me to find younger women attractive. Now, if a man over the age of, say, 30 actually wants to date a woman under the age of 25, I say, "Good luck to you!" While it's not unheard of for this arrangement to work, it's...generally tenuous. The reason we have this conversation is because it's indicative of a historical power imbalance And research has shown that in societies where men and women have more equitable relationships, the age differences in couples will begin to diminish. In other words, most of the cultures in which we see 58-year-old husbands of 12-year-old brides are the ones where women can't legally drive, either. But for the most part, the average age of first marriages for men and women are fairly close in age, especially in the United States. What does that tell me? Older dudes may be jacking off to porn of younger ladies, but they aren't really pairing up with them.

So, really, it's a STUPID ARGUMENT THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. And focusing so much attention on the sexual preferences of males who can't have the 14-year-olds they so ardently desire and the supposed damage that does to American females (this conversation has to be had in terms of western culture and specifically American culture, as the article and corresponding comments section were generated in the west) just continues to put the focus in the worst place. The underlying message here is that I am supposed to care that "most" men prefer "young" women...even though this bit of information has absolutely no discernible bearing on my life whatsoever unless I WANT TO BE PERCEIVED AS SEXY ABOVE ALL ELSE.

Having a conversation wherein it appears that women have something to gain by "proving" that men are attracted to older females instead of younger ones keeps us objectified. It tells us that we must prove our desirability in order to prove our worth. Why not simply say, "Who cares?" This is supposing simply that men find young women attractive. It does not allow that a 40-year-old man having sex with a 14-year-old should therefore be legal or moral. It simply supposes that as long as the average trends hold true -- most adult Americans seem to be in relationships with other adult Americans relatively close to their own age -- then it doesn't matter what men think. Countless jokes I've seen on shows such as Arrested Development and Community make light of the fact that women with low self-esteem are more amenable to focusing solely on male pleasure at the abandonment of their own (it would stand to reason both sexually and non-sexually). Going, "It isn't faaair that men like young women!" keeps us right where society wants us: amenable to abandoning other pursuits in order to pursue the most important pursuit -- desirability.

The best counter to this conversation is to promote discussion of what females find sexually preferable. Which is a lot of different and varied things, and this discussion will probably require many more years of the, "Yes, women can like sex, too!" conversation (as elementary as that fucking seems to me). But let all of this be a lesson to you guys.

Next time you feel like taking shit up in an internets' comments section, write a blog instead.

The American Delusion

2011-09-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

I listen to NPR on the way to and from work every day. In case you were wondering, yes, I'm white. I also own a Navy pea coat. I can't help it. I was born this way.

While listening to NPR, I've watched my blood pressure slowly rise as I hear again and again that Obama's approval ratings are abismal, and they're even lower when it comes to the specific question about how he's handled the economy. Now, my problem with this has nothing to do with my personal feelings about Obama, although I suppose it does have something to do with my politics. I need to get that out of the way because everyone, on both sides, seems to be propaganda-spewing machines when it comes to this stuff, even if they don't realize it. Bring this up to one person, and they say, "Yeah, but the Republicans..." while the next guy will automatically respond with, "Yeah, but Nobama..."

For all intents and purposes of this post, everyone who talks about the parties is missing the point.

People talk about the economy like it's a governmental department. They ask why the government hasn't created jobs. They ask why the government hasn't increased incomes. They ask, they ask, they ask, and the answer is, "Because they can't." Oh, sure, the government can hire people, but they're just like every corporation in America: they can't hire EVERYBODY. And they can't make the economy do anything. They can pass legislation that they believe will influence the behavior of the economy, but they. Can't. MAKE. It. Do. Something.

Clear?

And when I say that the government cannot fix the economy, what I DON'T mean is, "The government has no business telling me or corporations or anyone what to do with their money!" Those people are also missing the point. I feel like when people say they don't approve of Obama's efforts (or lack thereof) in regards to the economy, what they're really saying (almost certainly unknowingly) is, "Why hasn't he fixed it?" And. He. Can't.

When we all sit around going, "Why hasn't the government fixed the economy?", we're not taking responsibility for our part in the economy. The economy is us. We each have a different role, but some of us--some of us with jobs and businesses and stuff--need to stop waiting for this magical economic upturn and spend some damn money. Some of us--most certainly not all of us, but some of us--have a little extra money to spend and don't, and we do it under the guise of being responsible. We have no faith in the economy, so we must pinch our pennies. But every time a penny is pinched, that's one less opportunity for the economy to recover. What's the saying? You've got to spend money to make money? And lest anyone be confused, the people whom I believe should seriously spend the money are the small percentage at the top of the heap. C'mon, guys! No one NEEDS billions or even millions of dollars! Use that shit to create some damn jobs! It's okay to let your bank balance dip below even the $100,000 mark. I know. It. Sounds. NUTS. You fucking work HARD, man. But people having more money than they can even spend in a lifetime? That's just greed, plain and simple. And it may be your right to be greedy, but it's a dick move nonetheless. Plenty of people are out there working twice as hard making not even a fifth of what you have.

I have no idea why I'm writing this in second person, as if million- and billionaires are reading my blog. If so, "Hi guys!"

But I'm not even advocating for an increase in taxes on the rich here. I don't particularly care how the money gets back into the economy. In fact, taxes might make the least amount of impact because THE ECONOMY IS NOT A GOVERNMENTAL DEPARTMENT. You could pump a ton of money into the government and the economy might STILL suck. But. I do think that people have to overcome their natural inclinations to be dicks in order for this to work. Which I guess means I have no real feasible solution.

I just really want everyone to stop talking nonsense on NPR.

Being at Home

2011-08-12T10:52:00.001-07:00

My husband and I love our couch.
Well, actually, I want to get a new
couch, so I guess I should say we love
what the couch does, anchoring us
in our house,
with our dog,
and our cat
And ourselves.
We watch entire seasons of Mad Men
and The Wire, and when he’s not home
I sleep on it.
Every once in a while he will come in
and say, “Want to meditate?”
We pull the cushions into position
so we can breathe easier.
I appreciate that he doesn’t do this often—
I never was regular with anything.
Sometimes he walks in the door
and sits down next to me,
and I can just tell that I need to
close my computer,
put it aside,
scoot over closer.

I used to wonder as I drove to the bar,
or the dance club,
or the coffee shop,
who these people were, the ones
with cars in the driveway
and lights on in the windows.

Now I know.

My Solution for the Economic Crisis: International Do-Over Day!

2011-08-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

While listening to NPR during this whole debt crisis situation, I thought, "So, basically, everyone in the world owes everyone else in the world money." Perhaps it's more complicated than that, but that's the gist. You'll have to forgive me--monetary concerns were never my strong suit.

Which isn't to say that you should completely disregard the rest of my argument.

Seriously, once money gets up into the trillions (Hahaha, okay guys, you got me! that's not a real number!), I pretty much start to feel like we all moved to Monopolyland or something. All this shuffling of bits of information that represent money back and forth between computers. It's MIND BOGGLING! And just when I was starting to think that I was the only one on the whole planet who realized that money is this totally crazy made-up thing, This American Life did a whole episode on it. Scroll all the way to the bottom of that page and listen to it. It's fantastic.

So anyway, money is made up. And some people have waaaaaaaaay more of it than other people. Problem is, when one guy finally has all the money and refuses to share it with anybody, nobody can buy that guy's--or any guy's--products, and no one can pay their debts to anyone else, bringing us to an economic showdown wherein BARTERTOWN. TWO MAN ENTER, ONE MAN LEAVE! Don't worry. I know what you're thinking. "This girl is about to go totally socialist on my ass!" Um, no. I'm going to propose something even more radical. You're going to think it's crazy, but I beg you to let it soak in for a minute before you decide that it's a stupid way to take care of economic problems. I know you have a lot of top quality choices when it comes to debt solutions.

What is this mind-blowing solution, you ask? I don't know why you would ask that since I put it in the title of this piece but: INTERNATIONAL DO-OVER DAY!

What would happen if we just erased all debts? Everyone's debts? So tomorrow I wake up with exactly the same amount of money that I have now, but I don't owe anyone anything--and no one owes me anything, either. Then we start from baseline. Perhaps there would be SOME debts allowed to carry over. My employer still owes me a paycheck, and I still owe the IRS. Maybe? Maybe not? I'm not an economist! All I know is that on a larger scale, if China owes Argentina (do they? I made that up as an example) a gagillion dollars and Argentina owes the United State a gagillion dollars, what you end up with is some kind of circular standoff. It's like when the mob offers to sell you protection and then breaks your legs if you don't buy the protection. In other words, the money is like the protection--a MADE UP THING! And if you don't want to be involved with made up things, then can't you just decide not to believe in them? No. The mob still comes for you anyway. Maybe this is more like the emperor's new clothes.

MY POINT IS that it's kind of ridiculous to keep letting money wield all of this power over us when WE'RE THE ONES WHO MADE UP THE FUCKING MONEY. Money is whatever we say it is. It's not some inherently autonomous, uncontrollable force like God or your mother. It's fucking MADE UP, YOU GUYS! I think I've made my point.

International Do-Over Day. Think about it. Make a Facebook invite or something. Viva la revolucion! And remember what Jesus said (according to the Presbyterians): "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." See? JESUS is all about International Do-Over Day!

Is domination the name of the game?

2011-08-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

I just read this line in a piece at the Good Men Project about how men are doing in what sounds like our “post-feminist” society:

Most sexual relationships (if not all) involve a power exchange, including some degree of domination and submission. How does this basic human need fit in with the discourses of gender “equality” that prevail today?

This is an oft repeated stock idea that you’ll hear a lot all over the place. Sex is about power. When I was 21 and thought I knew everything about everything (and was a somewhat insufferable little shit), I would’ve said the exact same thing. It sounds like such an intellectual way to discuss the down and dirty deed, especially since intellectual types never want to sound too hopeful or sweet. It just wouldn’t do for us to say anything equating sex with love. And I would never say that all sex is about love—anymore than I agree with the idea that “most sexual relationships (if not all) involve a power exchange”. Emphasis mine.

Why is this the prevailing narrative? I can tell you, I’ve had lots of sex that didn’t seem to be about power at all. Two willing participants getting together and doing something that is mutually beneficial doesn’t sound like a power struggle to me—it sounds like a good time. Even when two people get together and one says, “Hey, can you boss me around for a little while? That’s hot!” it’s not really about a power exchange because, well, one person asked for the illusion of a power game. When one person is willingly submitting to another’s respectful domination, it’s fake power exchange. The person on bottom is just as much in control of their sexual experience at that point as the person on top.

The only other instances I can think of when power is at play during sex aren’t so pretty. They’re either situations in which the couple is at odds in other aspects of their relationship and each is using sex as a tool or a weapon, or they’re rape. “Maybe if I give him sex, he’ll like me.” “Maybe if I give her my love, she’ll give me her sex.” See what I just did there? I quoted the story before we get to the conclusion that all sex is about power. We’re taught to believe that men want the sex and are engaged in an elaborate ruse or, worse, all-out battle to get it. But, again, is that true? Like, is it inherently true, or is it just what we’ve been taught and therefore what we act out on the regular?

This idea that sex is inherently about power supports all sorts of unhealthy sexual attitudes. It scares women into trying to control men with sex. It gives men the impression that they have to be dishonest or forceful in order to get what they want. But, again, that isn’t inherently true. That’s just the traditional narrative. Why don’t we ever say that sex is about fun and connecting with another person? It doesn’t have to be about love for the long haul—it doesn’t even have to be about love for the night. But it can be a mutually pleasurable experience, and I just don’t get how that’s about power.

The Golden Age of Never Was, Part II

2011-07-18T18:19:00.001-07:00

Recently I had a conversation with my father about whether or not gay people should be given the right to marry. We discuss this topic often. It's laughable, really. It's not as if either of us has changed our minds yet. I supposed maybe he finally budged a little when he admitted gay people are probably born that way.

During the course of the conversation, he mentioned that kids were better off being raised in two-parent households made up of a mother and a father. This then spiraled to the point wherein I said, "I love it when people point to some magical time when all families were made up of a mommy and a daddy and things were perfect and everyone was happy." That time, of course, never existed. My father claimed that it did because that's what his childhood was like. Well, so was mine. I certainly wouldn't claim that my experience is representative of all experience or even average experience. I wouldn't even claim that it's the only valid or right way to be raised. It sure did beat having abusive, neglectful parents or being raised by wolves (although sometimes I claim that I was for all the proper household care and maintenance my parents taught me).

I was thinking about all of this today after reading a thing at the New York Times (which I would link to, but they've cut me off for the rest of the month) about the decline of editing at publishing houses. Books, it would seem, are being published containing horrendous numbers of typos. The writer of this piece seems to think it wouldn't be such a problem if modern writers were better spellers and spellcheck hadn't ruined everyone's life. Reading the comments cracked me up. The pearl clutching! Over typos! I mean, I cringe when I see a typo on a website when I've done the copy. But life goes on and stuff. I certainly do not think WE ARE ALL GOING ON A SLOW RIDE INTO HELL when I spot a typo.

However, as internet commenters are wont to do, everyone freaked out. Some people were extremely pro bad spelling (or, you know, pro the fluidity of language and all that stuff). Others were militantly anti stupid people. It was the anti crowd that really got me going. Commenters harkened back to some ideal era in which 12-year-olds wrote spotless essays on the importance of being earnest. A time when all people everywhere could fucking SPELL, goddammit, and also never jaywalked. And all had awesome jobs with pensions and were set up in one of those "fat guy/hot wife" situations. ALL OF THEM.

The other day my mother said something about their being more sociopaths in the world today than ever before. My father and I started shaking our head slowly from side to side at the exact same moment and said, "No." I guess we agree on something. I said I would assume that the percentage of the population that is sociopathic is roughly the same over time. So, too, the percentage of bad spellers. There's something really satisfying about screaming, "We're all gonna DIE!" in a crowded theater. I just never understand how anyone thinks it's at all helpful to say that we used to have everything right but we don't anymore. It has only just now dawned on me that this phenomenon is just like the story of Adam and Eve: life was perfect, then people started up with their people-y ways, we got fucked, and now we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. I'm totally about to listen to "Woodstock" on YouTube. Funny. One of the comments on the YouTube video is, "Groovy! I miss those days...easy living and no worries!!" IT ALL COMES FULL CIRCLE.

I've never had much patience for people who are still pining away over some long lost love more than a year after they and that person parted ways. Seriously. No. Patience. It's one thing to say even after a long period of time that it's somewhat sad that it ended. But to pine away--to believe that the person who is gone was the only person who will ever be so perfect in the entire universe--makes me want to hit whomever is selling that schlock right in the face. It's just not honest. It may feel like the truth, but people who think this way are unwilling to actually look at the world straight and see it for what it really is: a very mixed-up place. It feels safe to believe that perfection existed at some point in the past because if that's true, perfection is both possible and possibly attainable. We can just follow our steps backwards, do now what we did then to make that magical time reappear.

But as long as we're betting on the past, we're not creating a future that might actually really be different. At the very least we're wasting a whole lot of time being dicks on the internet.

Freedom 2011

2011-03-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

I've spent the morning reading, well, a bunch of stuff. I'd love to link back to all of it so you could see the wanderings and how they lead me here, but alas, I can't even trace it myself. That'll teach me to leave myself bread crumbs instead of stones! You can, however, go here and read Hugo Schwyzer's response to Ross Douthat's piece at the New York Times about "Why Monogamy Matters". The link to that piece is embedded in Schwyzer's post.

Douthat is excited because new statistics show that "American teens and 20-somethings are waiting longer to have sex." Then he says this crazy thing:

Why is this good news? Not, it should be emphasized, because it suggests the dawn of some sort of traditionalist utopia, where the only sex is married sex. No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married), and not even in Mormon Utah (where Brigham Young University recently suspended a star basketball player for sleeping with his girlfriend).

But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

Okay, sure, the idea that casual and promiscuous sex is bad is not terribly inventive or novel, and I appreciate his nod to the fact that we can't ever hope for the perfect world in which the only sex is married sex, even if it feels somewhat obligatory. Pre-marital sex is okay if it's happening between two people who are going to be married someday. My father said as much when he informed me that my boyfriend and I moving in together would be made retroactively okay if we eventually tied the knot. I thought that was crazy-time logic then, and I still think it's crazy-time logic. I also do not see how the percentage of Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 who are still virgins going up six whole percentage points signals a coming age in which more pre-marital sex is of the okay variety, but hey. If people didn't take statistics and write lengthy opinion pieces about how those statistics support their worldview, the internet would be a boring place indeed--except then we could focus on all the porn.

I appreciate what Schwyzer has to say on the subject. I'm going to echo some of that sentiment here. When Douthat says that "earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock," my initial reaction was, "Of course they did! Marriage was an economic institution geared towards the raising of children and the sharing of resources. It wasn't that love and sanctity mattered more then; it was that sex was treated as a good, and assuring paternity for the sake of figuring out who owed what to whom was paramount." A woman couldn't have too much sex with too many men lest she be shunned by society and left with few economic choices to care for her babies if she got knocked up whilest out having all that sex. Women's sexuality was (and still is, to a large degree)comodofied. When people talk about some magical time wherein at least more people, if not all people, waited to have sex because they believed in the power of commitment as some spiritual goal, I think those people are delusional. Not that commitment isn't an awesome spiritual goal; it certainly can be. However, let's not hold up some previous era as the poster child for Godly love. That time, my friends, never existed. Some people in every era have always been built that way. Love has existed in every time period. But I would never say most people were ever built that way.

The article goes on to talk about how women who've had fewer sexual partners over the course of their lifetime and are currently in happy, stable sexual unions are happier than wanton sluts--oops, I mean women who've had more sexual partners. It's asserted that this has something to do with self-respect. I prove how special my sexuality is by sharing it with as few people as possible. It's kind of like how fewer people drink Christal than Asti Spumante, which makes Christal more special and therefore more of a status symbol. I'm sure Christal has more self-respect than Asti Spumante.

Now I'm going to zoom way out and take a very broad view of this kind of thinking. If you want to know what I think of this in specific terms of gender relations, go read Schwyzer's post. I endorse it. But the reality is that the commodification of people has been an issue in many a realm and many a way since, oh, forever. Some say this is an outgrowth of capitalism, but I disagree. If the state holds all the resources and people work for the state, people are still commodities in the eyes of the state. That's communism. Whatever school of economic thought to which you ascribe, there is a certain inarguable truth: there are a certain number of resources on this planet, and we're all trying to secure at least a portion of those resources, sometimes at the expense of others. We're also built to share, but mostly because there's so many of us that if we didn't share at all, we'd all have to constantly watch our backs for the have nots chasing us down with big sticks and bloodthirsty eyes. If we want to know how to fix the problem of society trying to control sexuality, we have to look at the cause--this commodification of humans as capital.

The cause isn't our economic system. The cause is deeply rooted in human nature, and the problem is that none of the economic systems we've dreamed up to try to fix it have worked. The problem is that we think we can fix our hearts and our minds through economics.

Now, let's bring all that back from the macro to the micro. If you give people control over their own sexual choices--if you give them comprehensive sex education and let them make their own decisions knowing all of the facts, for instance--you lose control over their sexual choices. That sounds scary, huh? Visions of people effing in the streets whenever the fancy strikes them come to mind. If you're in a relationship, you suddenly start to fear that without social constraint, your significant other will start doing it with every man, woman and goat who crosses his or her path. Because we've been told that humans are hard-wired to act like monkees, we believe that we have to keep a tight grip on how other people feel about their choices. Somehow we don't trust that the very good guides of honesty, compassion and trustworthyness will work, so we turn to the very bad: shame, deception and manipulation. It is not okay for a woman to enjoy casual sex, because that woman may one day be my wife. I recently read a thing that was talking about why men prefer "innocent girls" to "bad girls". It said that no one likes a promiscuous person because no one likes to be cheated on. The logic escaped me. If I had three or four one-night-stands before meeting my fiance, what does that have to do with my ability to be monogamous if that's what I've told him I'll do? People cheat because they like sex and are okay with having the casual variety? If that's true, then the rates of cheating should be much, MUCH higher than they're reported to be. Just because I was bored, horny and single on a random Friday night in 2001 doesn't mean I can't honor my promise to my soon-to-be husband.

I did not have sex until I was 19. I did this out of self-respect. I say that because having sex with boys in high school was not something I wanted to do, so I did not do it. That is self-respect. It had nothing to do with some universal idea of self-respect. It did not have anything to do with protecting my cow lest my milk lose market value. It didn't have anything to do with a desire for any spiritual goal, either. I respected my body enough to not do a thing I didn't want to do. Not that anyone was begging for it, but hey, I'm sure that had I wanted to, I could've found a taker. And when I finally did have sex, the thought of what my future Mr. Right might think never crossed my mind. I didn't know that guy then. He certainly had no agency over my body. I was mostly thinking of what I wanted to do and trying to do that in a way that was respectful of all the people involved at the time--not the imaginary ones who might never appear. I would one day want to meet a man who was compassionate, honest and trustworthy. Nowhere on that list do I see "slut-shaming". I didn't want a man who was looking for Christal but was willing to settle for Asti Spumante. I still don't.

Mostly because I think I'm more like a hot toddy. Or should I say a nice blend of Tazo tea and Jack Daniels?

Take it away, George!

The Golden Age of Never Was

2011-03-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

Gray morning. It was a gray morning,
the painted dotted lines beating steadily
against the edge of the car window. So many
gray mornings lined up like the lines down the
center of the road, seemingly straight
and leading somewhere out of sight.
Maybe endless? Clean. Alone, glass and steel--
blue-sounding songs for driving, sleek
like sterile luxury car ads that speak
of sexless women built like money.
This was how I liked it, gliding along
on concrete, surrounded by neon facades.
Alone. I still love alone. Perfectly hungry for
nothing. It's a myth I wrote about myself when
I was a dripping dog wandering the desert,
my ribs pressing into my flesh as the sun
turned the whole world washed out.

Our Bodies, Our Boobs

2011-03-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

It's Fat Tuesday, and somewhere a woman is probably showing a bunch of strangers her boobs in exchange for beads. You go, girl!

Meanwhile, here at the ranch, there's something that's been coming up a lot lately that I would like to now discuss. I just got done reading this at Jezebel. It's about how everyone is so worried about how thin Megan Fox is! But also, she makes a living being thin and hot! What's a girl to do!

Society believes that it owns women's bodies. I cannot tell you how many times I've been standing in line at the grocery store and noticed a magazine that said, "Tori Something-or-other is TOO THIN! But also, LOOK AT BRITNEY'S FAT ASS!" Have I talked about that before? I feel like I've talked about that before. The message is two-fold. One, women have about a five pound range in which we will find their bodies acceptable. Two, we (meaning everybody) get to discuss women's bodies publicly because what we think of their bodies is very important. More important, oftentimes, than what we think of their work or their character.

The other day I was telling my boyfriend the reasons I used to hate having big boobs. One of them was that people felt like they could just tell me I had big boobs. All. The. Time. I could never figure out why this was a thing we needed to talk about. Believe me--if a girl has big boobs, she knows. Next subject! When a man's body is commented on in the course of the conversation, it's usually somewhat functional. "You're slim, dude, and I was at this store the other day that had clothes that would look great on slim dudes." Not only is it typically functional, but it's also much more rare. For every time my boyfriend has to hear about his slimness, I've probably had to listen to comments about my body from friends and family members 30 times over. Why do we all feel it is so okay to tell a woman what is up with her body?

The message is that women's bodies don't belong to themselves--they belong to the group.

Women comment on women's bodies, too. Let's get that out of the way right now. This is a societally conditioned thing. It's something we all fall into. And believe me, there is nothing wrong with the occasional, "You look nice," or, "Have you done something different with your hair?" But when someone has to listen to five people in one day make a joke or comment about her boobs, it's time to look at what's really going on. When a woman is both praised for, paid for and shown concern over the state of her body, it's time to question why we're talking about these things.

And this isn't about attacking what anyone is attracted to, either. Let's get that out of the way as well. I'm not saying you can't be attracted to a woman. I'm asking why is that a news flash? I'm asking why we have to discuss women's bodies in what I think are inappropriate situations? You want to tell me you like my boobs when we're in bed together (honey, sweetie, fiance, love of my life only)? Have at it. Knock yourself out. You want to talk to me about my boobs at all during a conversation about Linguistics class? Fuck off. You want to comment about my figure while we're at work? Who do you think you are?

You are part of the society that says, "I own you. I get to express my pleasure/concern over the state of your body whether or not you've asked for my opinion on this subject because my opinion on this subject is inherently important. Because you are a woman, and, therefore, just a body."

My tattoo says, "I am not a body. I have a body. I am a soul." I got that tattoo when I felt like I'd successfully recovered from anorexia and bulemia. I got it to celebrate the fact that I'd taken my body back from all the people who felt like it was okay to tell me what they thought of my body. Make no mistake. It was me who chose to listen. But, "I have a body." That means this body--it's all mine.

They didn't know I was there.

2011-03-01T16:19:00.000-08:00

Something sinister...

2011-03-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get this feeling like something is out to get me. I look, and...there's nothing there.

You're Hot, Dammit

2011-03-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

This episode of "Ask a Fat Girl" by Tasha Fierce (btw, that's a PDF in that link) is all kinds of right on. When one girls asks how she convinces herself that the person having sex with her doesn't find her disgusting, Tasha replies:

I immediately assume that whoever is having sex with me finds me attractive and I concentrate on feeling good.

It's like I used to tell my friends: "It's not like he thought you looked super skinny in your clothes and then got you home only to find some magical flap of fat he never knew about fell out when you took your clothes off."

The male equivolent of the fantasy slumber party:

2011-02-23T12:34:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or were people into weirder stuff back in the day?

And how come I can only picture this in grainy sepia tones?

Birds do it. Bees do it. But you don't want to be birds and bees, do you?

2011-02-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

This morning, I stumbled across this piece at Jezebel discussing the seeming lack of female sex addicts.

Oh, boy. Where do I begin?

I don't really know where all the female sex addicts are. I went to a couple of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings about five years ago (don't judge, and no, I don't want your phone number), and the room was pretty much half-and-half at those meetings. There seemed to be plenty of female sex addicts in Dallas, Texas, at least compared to the number of male sex addicts. I will say, several of them were more comfortable calling themselves "love addicts" as opposed to "sex addicts", which was something I could never understand. "Love addict" sounds like someone who is willing to be treated like shit as long as they get to be in a relationship. "Sex addict" sounds like someone who gets laid. A lot. Which would you rather be?

That's exactly what I wanted to talk about from this Jezebel piece. Female sex addiction, when it does occur, is framed as a desperate desire to be intimate with another person gone awry. It's a good impulse--it's just all out of whack. Meanwhile, male sex addiction is framed as the objectification of women and desire to fool around...on steroids. When you walk into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, they don't tell you that male alcoholism is any different than female alcoholism. We're all alcoholics for basically the same physiological reasons. Welcome. They'll point out that people often have a harder time accepting that a woman is an alcoholic because it's just so unfathomable that a lady would do those things! But once you're there, you're just one big club, all the same under the skin. When women and men start to talk about their sex addictions, we all just automatically place them in two different categories: women with low self-esteem who really! just want to be INTIMATE!, and men who are just livin' the dream and got caught by their wives.

I'm now going to lower the boom. The odds are much, much greater that a woman who is suffering from "sex addiction" (if such a thing exists) doesn't want anything to do with intimacy. The same could be said of the male "sex addict". We refuse to see women as just wanting to get laid. It's like a gnome or a unicorn--it's just not possible! They must have daddy issues! They must be looking for love in all the wrong places (and too many faces)! A line in this piece that Jezebel quotes from the Times of London says that sex addicted ladies don't understand boundaries, and that must be the culprit. They just don't understand how normal people act! That's why they're sex addicts! This is completely reverse from the truth. No addict of any stripe understands good boundaries. Lady "sex addiction" isn't just a case of, "Oopsie! Bad boundaries! Sorry. My daddy didn't love me enough." If sex addiction is real, it will come from the same place in both men and women. It will be physiologically precipitated. It will stem from a biochemical urge that becomes extremely difficult if not impossible for the addict to control without help.

But the more that I read this piece at Time, the more it became clear to me that so much of what we think of sex addiction is wrapped up in what we think about sex. Alocholism isn't purely defined by the number of drinks you have on a regular basis. It's defined by the consequences of those drinks. Whether or not a person should get sober is defined by how willing they are to suffer those consequences. I've said that if someone is okay with losing friends and effing up their job for the sake of the drink, they should go forth and drink it up. Anyone associated with them should feel free to walk away or be supportive as they see fit and as they determine is best for them. The Time piece seems all too eager to make sex addiction purely about the numbers--TIGER WOODS HAD AFFAIRS WITH 12 WOMEN! 12! WOMEN! Sure, he suffered consequences, but the consequences of sexual behavior are not the focus of this piece. The behavior is. At some point it is mentioned that sex addiction has been defined as having seven or more orgasms in a week. I just call that lucky. What if you're having those seven orgasms with your spouse? Are you a sex addict? That question is posed in the piece but never answered, and there are more subtle clues throughout that illustrate that our real problem with sex addiction is our real problem with sex.

Toward the end of the Time piece, the author describes a sex addict he's interviewing.

When I was with Melinkovich, I sometimes felt he was a normal guy who didn't quite know how to deal with the many women who find him attractive. Other times, like when he got a lascivious look in his eyes while reading a text from a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, he seemed like a guy with a debilitating illness.

Let's look at that. First it's, "Poor dude is just overwhelmed by women throwing themselves at him!" Uh, okay. Then, when the man makes a "lascivious" face, he's got a debilitating illness? So it's fine to be the unwitting victim of others sexual advances, but the minute you start to like it, you're a sick person. Many might not approve of that man's behavior, but that's a moral issue, not an issue of an illness. We'd love to frame it as an illness, wouldn't we? To show that "normal" people would never act that way? To distance ourselves from desire? To show the line between being in control and out of it? I've never been encouraged to see myself as the unwitting victim of all that vodka that just threw itself at me. You cannot have it both ways, and this bit of copy just sounds like the struggle between our moral problems with sex and our ideas about what is and what is not appropriate behavior. The language used in this piece is problematic.

There were many people in those meetings I went to who seemed genuinely troubled by their own behaviors and appetites. They'd lost things they cared about. They felt like maybe there were better uses for their time than internet pornography. They were addicts. I don't doubt that our sexual appetites, just like our appetites for virtually anything else that creates physical pleasure to the point that it takes us into our bodies and out of our minds, can get out of control to the degree that they actually cause us pain. But if we're going to talk about sex addiction, we have to talk about that pain. That pain that is being caused by the action, not just the action itself.

When we're talking purely about the action, all we're talking about is sex.

The Melodrama

2011-02-21T19:11:00.000-08:00

They told me just to be
still, quiet. Release and relax.
Breathe in these qualities,
these states of ease, and simply
exist.
They said that is was being cured.
I did it, and now all I want
in life is to die.

Being Boring

2011-02-16T17:33:00.000-08:00

Everyone has heard the saying, "Only boring people get bored!" It's a phrase used by manipulative mothers to make their children shut up. It's boisterously propelled from the mouths of type A people by the energy of their insecurities. In case you hadn't picked up on it, I hate this phrase.

I was thinking about this phrase today after reading this week's Savage Love column. A man wrote in to complain about his boring life with his boring wife and their boring kids. That phrase--"Only boring people get bored!"--popped into my head immediately. While driving home from work (a place I find inexorably boring) hours later, I found this phrase rattling around in my head. I spend about 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, bored. I try to get excited about whatever it is I'm doing. When that doesn't work (as it will never work when I'm having to deal with Excel spreadsheets), I try to find interesting things to read on the internet. When that fails (did y'all know there's a ton of worthless crap floating around on the internet?), I...am bored.

I read in a book once that man has been struggling with boredom since the beginning of time. I've been known to argue that the only reason we've made life so goddamn complicated is because of boredom. Often, when I'm driving on a highway, I will contemplate the complexity of the system of the roads, all those cars converging onto the same stretch for a moment before they diverge. I contemplate other complexities that feeds--the complexity of our economic system, which is built on the idea that each person is a cog in a greater machine. Think about the levels of organization that requires! And truth be told, I can see no reason for creating complex systems other than to combat boredom. There isn't any overarching goal for any of this. If you asked people why they thought society needed to be more complicated in these ways, they would say, "To make the world a better place." But while our world has gotten progressively more complicated, we've made little progress toward anything resembling a "better place". People love to talk about the past as if it were vastly different from the present in some substantive way, but the truth is that all we've bought ourselves with this complication is more time on this earth for a few extra people. I'm not really sure this is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. You're going to have to do better, progress, before I'll believe in your inherent value.

And, it struck me, a higher standard of living for a greater number of people--which creates even greater levels of boredom.

One of the comments on that Savage Love column said something to the effect that all people are boring, and if you don't want to be bored, you should give up your cushy job and go be a single parent supporting five kids by working two jobs. I thought this to be perhaps one of the most brilliant comments on the whole column. The letter had been about sexual boredom to a large extent, and most of the comments got down in the trenches with the "men do that/women do this" arguments as usual. This comment got to the real heart of the matter, though, without even mentioning sex or anything sexy. When people say, "Only boring people get bored!", they're completely missing the mark. The implication is that if you were an interesting person, you'd feel constantly stimulated. You'd be interested in any and everything. You'd be able to find the awesome in the mundane, and if you couldn't, you'd get up and do something. But this completely ignores the way the world works and the way that humans operate. Everyone gets bored, and the only people who don't are those type As who fill their lives with so much activity to avoid that aching feeling of not being good enough or the people who are still struggling to make life even livable. To be human is to find yourself lying on your couch, staring at the wall, wondering when you're going to die because you've run out of shit to do or the energy with which to do it. Once all of our basic needs are covered, we run out of hard work to do, and then we start to look around for other kinds of stimulation. Once we've exhausted those (our wives, our credit cards, our kids), we start looking for still others. Boredom, man. That shit is life.

If only boring people get bored, then we're all fucking boring. In fact, this thing you just read? It's pretty fucking boring. But at least it kept me from being bored, if only for a little while.

Even Better Than the Real Thing

2011-02-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

We've been hearing for decades--nay, eons--about the evils of pornography from the religious right. They've told us that pornography is evil, that it erodes the sacred bonds between one man and one woman. Many feminists don't much care for the porn, either. They say it degrades women and encourages violence.

And now we're being told by yet another group about the dangers of pornography, and that group is...men who like porn?

Now, one wouldn't usually think that a man who watches a lot of pornography would find himself in bed with the religious right and Gloria Steinem. The good news is, though, that once he finds himself in that bed, he won't be able to seal the deal anyway. Why? Because we're in the middle of an epidemic. The availability of porn on the internet has basically made it impossible for the modern male to do anything but jack off to pictures of women with surgically enhanced waist-to-hip ratios that are never found in nature, and all this jacking off has in turn made it impossible for men to want to have sex with real women.

Oh, and we're supposed to feel sorry for these men because the big bad pornography grabbed them by the balls and is refusing to let go.

I don't want to talk about whether or not porn is evil, though. I want to talk about the article by Davy Rothbart at New York Magazine. Specifically, I want to talk about why men still don't ever feel the need to take responsibility for their sexual issues. According to this piece, it's porn's fault (and therefore the fault of the women found in the porn)! It's their girlfriend's/wive's fault! As usual, all sexual evils are the fault of the women. Men would love to control themselves, you see, but all these sexy womens! They will not let thems!

I can break down my problem with this piece by simply dissecting this little bit at the end:

Men, oversaturated by porn, secretly hunger for the variety that porn offers. Women, noticing a decline in their partners’ libidos, try to reenact the kinds of scenes that men watch on their computer screens. Men, as a result, get really freaked out. They don’t want their real women and their fantasy women to inhabit the same body.

Essentially, the men we're talking about here would rather watch porn than have sex with their real-life partners. This is causing a huge problem, as one might imagine, both for the men themselves and the women who want to eff them. But when the women try to act like porn stars, the men freak out! What we see in the language used here is the tired old saw about Madonnas and whores. "There are women men want to marry and women men want to eff, and they are not the same women!" I remember hearing this in college. Talk about a no-win situation. That statement above, though, pretty much lays the blame for this conundrum on the women. Girlfriends and wives should not act sexy--it spooks their men. Men won't be able to get turned on by anything other than strange, unattainable women who wear crazy outfits and let you stick it in their poopers! So deal, ladies. Deal, but don't try to compete. And certainly don't try to operate anywhere outside of the cultural framework for relationships that says that good women are loving, understanding, and not sexual while men are dogs and only want to have sex with strangers.

Sex is a feelings thing. Whether those feelings are loving or lusting or a little of both, it's always about feelings. Feelings are volatile things. We don't want to mess with them sometimes. We cast women as the seat of emotions and then throw them to the hounds. Let them pay for our inability to be constant and disciplined. Let them pay for our feelings. All of us, even women, blame women for all the evils of not feeling as we should. Can't control yourself? You must be having a feeling, and we all know who is associated with feelings.

All I wanted to hear was that this man recognized his part in this whole problem. He kind of does...right at the end. He unplugs for a week and, ta-dah--he gets it on with a real flesh-and-blood lady! But everything leading up to that moment is whiney, poor me bullshit. Three pages worth of a different dudes saying, "I want to watch a woman get it on with farm animals, but I don't want that woman to be my girlfirend! Feel sorry for ME!"

And you know what? I kind of do.

Behind the Times

2011-01-12T19:34:00.001-08:00

The reason I chose to call this space Behind the Times was initially because I never seem to be up on the latest internet meme. Most blogs are about posting the most recent viral videos or commenting on the latest lol cat. I had trouble even crafting that sentence because, let's face it, lol cats are so 2 years ago, and I don't know the term for those things where there's a picture of a wolf in the middle and copy that reads "Killer Wolf Says: Kill 'em all!!!!" or some shit. Seriously. I'm not good at the internet.

I've been trying to think of something to write for a blog that's maintained by a friend of a friend. It's the typical bloggy format, providing commentary on the news of the day. It's feminist-leaning. To really fit the format, I'd have to pounce on a news item and come up with an opinion in the moment to share with the world. Whenever we're sharing opinions, we're trying to change the world. And while thinking about why I ultimately am not really cut out for this kind of thing--this sharing my opinion on a news item that happened five minutes ago in an effort to change the world--I realized a different interpretation of Behind the Times.

I prefer to take the long view. I prefer to sit on something, ruminate, put it through some logic tests, and challenge my own presuppositions. When the shooting happened in Arizona, items from friends blaming Sarah Palin began immediately appearing in my newsfeed before anyone knew anything. When emotions are running high, reason is running low, and while I completely advocate for the having of emotions, I'm not sure I want to put myself in a position where I have an automatic response to everything because of certain biases and emotional responses. My emotions do not need to be reasoned. My responses to things, however, most definitely do.

Yesterday a friend and I were discussing a proposed ban on pit bulls in Texas. A mother was pushing for the legislation after her son was mauled to death by pit bulls. I'm a little biased in the opposite direction, knowing more than one person who has a pit bull. The ones I know are amongst the sweetest dogs I've met. I think what this mother is doing is typical. Her child has been killed, and someone must pay. Someone did pay--she sued the owners of the pit bulls and won. But she, in her grief, has taken up the crusade to make sure this never happens to anyone else's child. As I told my friend, she's coming from a place of emotion, not reason. The problem is not the pit bulls. To some degree this kind of thing just happens--animals, no matter how domesticated, are still animals, and they're unpredictable. Life is life. Some things cannot be 100% prevented. And the owners are generally a huge part of the problem. Any breed can be trained or treated in such a way that they become aggressive. Pit bulls are desirable to people who like their dogs this way, but that doesn't mean a ban on pit bulls is going to even make a dent in the problem. But my main point is that the mother is blinded by her sadness and desperate to fix a problem that is unfixable--namely, the death of her child.

When I pointed this out to my friend, she said that it takes a certain level of apathy to be reasonable. I think apathy is a strong word for it, but I like what she was getting at. It takes a certain ability to separate oneself from one's emotions just enough to check in and weigh everything. Look at the situation with a wider lens. Look at the philosophical underpinnings of whatever it is you're advocating and make sure they line up with your values. I don't like to make public commentary on things that just happened five minutes ago because I don't know what my opinion is on whatever that is yet. I can make a public statement of my feelings--sad, happy, angry, disgusted, excited--but my opinion is another matter. It's best to arrive at my opinion through an evolution involving discussions and reflection.

And ultimately, I'm not sure that many situations warrant my opinion. In most situations, there are no sides. In a tragedy, all sides deserve sympathy because we're all human, and we all deserve sympathy. None of us know what we're doing. None of us have figured out the formula for preventing tragedies yet. Some of us may have ideas, but most of our ideas are created by deeply seated biases that we might not even know we have. Yes, we all have to pick sides sometimes. But I'm extremely turned on to the idea of trying something new--turning the other cheek. Not getting riled up. Not trying to make someone pay for the sadness that is inherent in this world. Crying instead of talking. Being instead of fixing. Praying instead of preaching.

My jury is still out on a good number of things, but maybe there's a good lol cat that could help me figure them out.

Quiet Time

2010-12-13T18:37:00.000-08:00

I wonder what I could hear if I turned everything
off; my mouth, the television, yes, even the music.
I wonder what i could hear under the weight
of such silence. It would weigh nothing, of course,
but be even heavier than my voice, the sound of trains,
the videos of cats falling off tables. I can hear
a nothing streaming under all of this, and it sounds
like eternity, a set of syllables in unknowable time.
I think about locking myself in a hotel room,
alone, forgetting the phone and the washing machine;
forgetting the beat of my heart at home. Forgetting to listen
to even my own breathing. What wondrous noises exist
in nothing?

Maybe I prefer not to know.

I'm always the last to know.

2010-12-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

I can't believe we're still talking about this. Am I going to have to wait until every lady of the baby boom generation is dead and buried for it to stop? Is this conversation still relevant? Was I raised in a barn--some progressive barn somewhere where a woman can embrace her desire to wear nail polish and also be "successful" and not ever even think twice about the fact that she's practically walking and chewing gum AT THE SAME TIME!

Seriously, ladies. I would like to talk about other issues here, but you keep bringing up moot points and forcing me to rehash topics best left in the tombs. Ladies can be feminine without giving away all their power to the menz. We can be pretty and still make lots of money! We don't have to choose between smart and hot. We can be both. Or neither. Whatever. Whatever we want. Hell, we're redefining what the term "feminine" means. We're that good--we can completely change the way a word is perceived simply by existing. What I don't understand is how this is effing worth discussing. It all just seems so...obvious.

I'm not going to drag this out for the five of you who actually read it. You can't fight mental masturbation with mental masturbation. Instead, I'm going to go fight the power by putting on makeup and then reading Tolstoy. I'm glad someone told me it's okay for me to do both! Girl power! Redefined.

Tiny Spots, Almost Unnoticed

2010-12-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

While sitting on the toilet, I look closely at my fingers. I see that the pores around my fingernails are all a faint gray. It looks like mold. My first thought is, "I wonder if this is the beginning of the end?" It's probably just dirt that's worked it's way into my skin, attached itself to the oil in my pores. I always think, "Is this the beginning of the end?", though, in seemingly innocuous situations like these.

It happens all the time. A small spot on somebody's leg turns out to be flesh-eating bacteria or skin cancer. A pain in the chest turns out to be the preamble to a heart attack. What appeared after dinner to be heart burn was actually something deadly. I don't want to be overdramatic, but these things happen. My mother works with dying people. She once told me a story about a man who went in for heart surgery. When they opened up his torso, they discovered that he did not, in fact, have heart problems--he had five huge tumors spread throughout his chest and abdomen. Had they caught it earlier, he might've been saved, but they'd concluded his health problems were just the usual heart problems of a man his age. No one ever thinks, "This is going to be the pain that kills me." Or, at least, most people don't. When it happens to me, I will have thought it. I will have thought it about a thousand times over.

I know this is dirt in my pores, but what if...what if it isn't?

I know this is silly. "That's no way to live!" says the proverbial "they" who live in my head. I remember some nonsense about life being too short. But how are we supposed to remember that life is too short if we don't stay in close contact with the understanding that at every moment we are separated from death by the thinnest veneer? I know this is silly insofar as absolutely no one wants to read me write about it. These spots on my fingers? I feel compelled to remember that they could be deadly. I feel it would cheapen the act of living to brush off the possibility of dying so flippantly. Within hours, whatever this is could take over my entire body, or it won't. I don't believe in impossibility, so it's impossible to do the mental tricks necessary to forget.

In a world full of numbers, I am but one.

2010-11-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

About four days after I got engaged, a friend sends me this blurb. "Is marriage irrelevant?" says the headline. I'd already seen the piece earlier in the day and was just waiting for the link to come over my IM. I know how she feels about marriage.

Essentially, according to polls and sociologists and people in general, marriage is becoming obsolete. As usual, lots of statistics show up to "prove" this. Fewer American adults are married now than in 1970 (click through to the Time piece if you want all the statistical details). More children born out of wedlock. People are waiting longer to get married, which I suppose is meant to illustrate a certain level of ambivalence (although I think it's just good business). What I find so interesting about all of this is the fact that anyone would try to construe these numbers to determine marriages relevance. Relevance is determined by the individual. Fewer people may find marriage relevant to them, but this does not render marriage universally irrelevant.

This is just human nature, though. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and we make these decisions socially. We're social, relying on each other for survival. Therefore, the opinions of our peers are extremely important. We're wired to believe that making the wrong decision in the eyes of society is to risk death (because no one will help you survive if they think you're a bad person). This isn't to say we all agree. Western ideology revolves around the individual, and we've developed the skill of forming opinions. What we haven't developed is the ability to tack on "for me" at the end of the, "I think this is right," statement.

Reading another article on the "co-sleeping controversy" (i.e. parents apparently have very different and strong opinions on whether or not parents should let their children sleep in the parents' beds with them), I came across this quote: "A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, this isn't right for our family, but it might be right for another family.' No. There's no gray area: There's a natural way to birth, there's a natural way to parent." I was stunned. I can't imagine how anyone could say such a thing. It's just insane. Admittedly, I was raised by parents who said, repeatedly, "I am your parent, and how I raise you is my business!" This meant that they let me skip school whenever they thought appropriate, school officials be damned. Jealous? A quote like the one above stuns me because I just can't fathom how anyone thinks it's any of their business how anyone else raises their children as long as those people doing the raising are not breaking any laws. There are times when opinions are in order: child abuse is an example. Co-sleeping, like breast feeding, is not one of them. And questions over what constitutes abuse even vary. Cultural leanings color our personal perceptions. As of 100 years ago, it wasn't considered child abuse by pretty much anyone to marry off your 13-year-old daughter to a 40-year-old man. In some cultures it's still not considered abuse. As of today, most people will have a gut-level reaction to that situation that tells them it's wrong--it's a form of abuse. I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not sure I can say that I'm cosmically justified. That's the thing. When we're forming all these opinions, we're subconsciously saying that we're each on the side of God, whether we even believe in one or not.

It is scary to open ourselves up to the idea that there are different right ways of living one's life. If I can't hold other people accountable for their actions, how am I supposed to protect myself? Also, if I can't determine right and wrong, how am I going to elevate myself above others? This problem spills over into our forming of opinions even on matters that do not affect us personally. What difference does it make to anyone's life if I get married or don't? My choice may fly in the face of what you believe to be logical, but it doesn't have any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of your opinion in this matter. Many people think marriage is silly. I have no problem with this. Hell, I used to be one of those people. But if life has taught me anything, it's that my opinion on this matter affects me and only me. Perhaps it affects my intended, but he and I seem to be in agreement on this matter. That's the thing--you can choose to associate only with people who agree with you. This seems logical enough. This is how I protect myself from the actions of anyone whom I view to have differing moral leanings from my own. The problem is that we believe on some level that we all have to get down with the same standards because OMG BANISHMENT FROM SOCIETY! The threat is not the same today as it has been in the past. No one is going to drag you out in the forest, tie you to a tree, cover you in honey and leave you to the ants if you do or do not get married. At least not in America. However, we're all still very much attached to our opinions and their supposed universality.

I'm currently reading Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. According to this book, statistics are pretty much always hopelessly skewed. All measurements of data in the real world are flawed, some more so than others. Survey data are some of the most virtually meaningless numbers out there. People lie. Also, their answers depend on the exact wording of a question. Change one word and the same person will change their answer. An example is that if you ask a person, "Do you think it's acceptable to smoke while praying?" you will get a different answer than if you ask, "Do you think it's okay to pray while smoking?" Knowing this, why do we even keep trying to figure out something as complex as the relevance of marriage (which, again, I would argue is a personal, not societal, matter) by using statistics? Raw numbers of people who do or do not do a thing tell us nothing about what they think of the thing (life circumstances being what they are, shit happens), and survey answers are going to be skewed because of systematical errors inherent in polling. But we keep looking to the statistics for answers to what we believe about the world. Why? Because we like the comfort of believing that we know, even when it's clear that certain things are unknowable.

And certain things are unknowable. We hate to admit it, but we've been chasing our tails on understanding certain things for millennia. To some degree, we have a deeper understanding of the mechanics of our universe. However, the whys of things generally escape us. We feel driven to turn feelings into facts, and we're looking for the numbers to back up those feelings so that we can prove to everyone else that they're facts. But even if my intended and I were the last people on earth who believed in the relevance of marriage to our lives, it would change the feelings. The reasons I believe in this marriage have nothing to do with facts, really. Scary? Oh, yeah. But at the same time, my gut tells me it's right. I have philosophical reasons to back up my gut, but nevertheless my gut doesn't operate on facts--they may teach philosophy in school, but even philosophical ideas are not facts. Survey says: many Americans believe marriage is irrelevant! My gut does not care. Comparing my feelings to the "facts" of the matter is an apples-to-oranges proposition.

And we all wind up statistics in the end anyway. In a world full of numbers, I am but one.

A Wild Hair

2010-10-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

At this moment, I'm embroiled in an intense debate...with myself. These are the worst kinds of debates to be involved in, really, because THERE'S NO WAY TO WIN! It's like arm wrestling with yourself.

This debate is about a haircut.

There was a time in my life (read: most of the time) when I would go out and get all kinds of crazy haircuts on a whim. In desperate need of a change? Get a haircut! And I've had them all. Spikey, long, bangs, no bangs, long in the front and spikey in the back, bob with bangs, bob with no bangs, red, black, red and black AT THE SAME TIME, blonde (oof--MISTAKE), buzzed completely off, and every stop on the growing out train between. I just get a thrill out of doing shit to my hair, and I'm a big fan of the big change. When I was a senior in high school, I had long hair. The dress I bought for prom was a short black fringed number--think flapper. I saw a bob-with-bangs wig while shopping, and when my mother refused to buy it for me to go with the dress, I decided to cut my hair that way instead. Not one to ruin a perfectly good reveal, I got the cut the day of prom so that the haircut and the dress were seen as a combo package. In fact, when one of my friends passed me while I was getting gas on my way to meet up for pre-prom activities, I DUCKED BEHIND MY CAR. Pumping gas into your 1982 Ford F-150 pickup truck is no way to make an entrance.

I have a hair appointment on Saturday. I've rounded up a couple of cuts I like and I'm kind of excited. I'm excited but nervous, and here's where the debate comes in. I'M AFRAID OF WHAT MY BOYFRIEND WILL THINK. I tried to come up with all kinds of lead-ins to that statement so that I could go ahead and excuse myself for being so lame right up front, but then I just took a deep breath and put it out there. I know. It's AWFUL. It's MY HAIR and I can DO WHATEVER I WANT WITH IT. I'm an INDEPENDENT LADY, DAMMIT. I am, however, reminded of the time in college when I told my then boyfriend that I was thinking about buzzing all my hair off. His response was a very strong and emphatic, "NO!" and I felt like I was facing the possibility of a breakup over a haircut. I didn't get the buzzcut. It didn't seem worth it.

Not that I think my now boyfriend would break up with me over a haircut. I think he's better than that. But he still might not like it, and this can cause a very strong reaction in men. As much as they try, they tend to still be relatively superficial creatures. They can love you and think you're great and still feel the need to be totally upset if they don't like everything about the way you look. Not that all have the same preferences. Not all men need a girl to wear makeup all the time. Not all men need a girl who dresses up. But if you do something to your appearance they don't like, they'll get all hung up on it. It's not that women don't also have preferences about the way their men look--we do! But a woman can sit right in front of her big fat husband and say, "I DON'T FIND FAT MEN ATTRACTIVE!" and he will simply think she's referencing some other fat guy. If a woman's man does something to his appearance she doesn't like, odds are really good that she'll just let it go. It won't have any long-term bearing on the relationship. She'll note all the other reasons she loves him and move on.

I kind of hate myself for all that gender stereotyping I just did.

The message is everywhere, and it's subtle. "Ladies! Change your appearance even a hair (haha!) from his preferences and suddenly he won't be quite so satisfied with you!In fact, he will still be telling his next girlfriend about that time you got a bad haircut and it made him not like you so much three years after you broke up!"

I don't want to talk about the biological imperative argument ("We're driven by the instinct to mate with the prettiest lady! Get over it!"), and I don't want to hear that tired line about how people-have-preferences-and-you-need-to-get-over-it-you're-probably-just-pissed-because-you're-ugly, either. I also am not going to defend the whole, "It's my body and I'll do what I want, so FUCK YOU, BOYFRIEND!" argument. I want to look nice for my boyfriend. This isn't something I begrudge him. But I want to look nice for my boyfriend while still being able to be myself, and this can be an extremely land-miney kind of territory when you're a girl. I got an "over my dead body!" look when I mentioned that I MIGHT want to get a mullet. A cool, Joan-Jetty kind of 80s rocker mullet. I'm not talking Billy Ray Cyrus or anything. But I didn't really want the mullet anyway, so I'm happy to let it pass.

I could run the pictures of the haircuts I'm considering past him and get his opinion, but this takes some of the fun out of it for me. Remember, I'm a big fan of the reveal. So, here I am, about to get a haircut (a haircut, not a complete facial reconstruction or a new job in another state), and I'm FREAKING OUT because it might completely destroy my relationship!

I do tend to overreact to things just a little, but I think there's a valid argument in there somewhere. Or maybe not.

Thing is, no haircut is worth completely destroying a relationship. That's the real point in all of this. All relationships walk that fine line between feeling completely free to be yourself and being concerned with the feelings of another person. And, while I might not get how one could have such strong feelings about one's love's haircut, I know that some people do have very strong feelings about this. I want to respect that (actually, I don't really want to respect that--I want to say it's ridiculous--but I'm TRYING to be UNDERSTANDING), but I also just want to go get the damn haircut! I feel at this point like I should mention that this really is about a haircut. It's not a metaphor for some other possible relationship issue.

Or maybe it is. It's representative of how even the easiest of loves can be difficult to navigate when we start pitting our individual preferences against the concerns of our lover. We tell the people that we love that we just want them to be themselves, and this is great when they're being awesome. But throw in one decision we don't like (like a bad haircut or liking Katy Perry), and we're suddenly not so sure we want to encourage such individuality. And while I believe that in most situations it's best to put the concerns of my lover on par with my own concerns (and then let them fight to the death in a cage match--just kidding!), this time I think I will simply go get the freaking haircut and stop arguing with myself (and my boyfriend's reaction in my head) about it.

It's just a haircut, after all! How upsetting could it possibly be?

Faith without works is dead.

2010-10-14T09:29:00.001-07:00

Well, let's change gears completely!

I had what some would call a spritual experience last Friday. Fear not, dear readers--this is not going to be a call to arms for Jesus. Make no mistake, I believe I saw God, but I don't think I saw Mary in a pancake. I simply had a moment when the physical world sort of...fell away. What was left was God. Make of that what you will.

What I took away from this moment of seeing God was that the number one aim of my life is to praise and serve God. This isn't an easy answer, but it is one that makes complete sense to me somewhere in my bones, whether or not I understand what the specifics entail. However I am called back to a quote from, yes, The Bible: "Faith without works is dead."

Some believe that we do good works as a way to buy our way into heaven. Some believe that no amount of good works earn grace. Grace is offered to all, and the only way to receive it is to accept it. But if one believes in this second version of grace--and that would be me--one still believes that there is a difference between a said faith and a lived faith. I invite anyone reading this to dispose of the idea that the God of which I speak must be of a particular kind. I have so far quoted a Judeo-Christian text and spoken of grace, but these concepts need not be limited. We find versions of them outside the faith.

I could say it is a comfort to me that I have experienced the presence of God. If I believe, though, that faith without works is dead, then this is more than a simple state of grace. If I truly believe what I say I believe, then I will feel called to be a better person. Again, not going to argue here about what that means, but think of it this way: If I claim to love someone, I believe I am then called to act as if I love them. Saying, "I love you," to someone and then treating them awfully (willfully breaking promises, disregarding their feelings, wishing only for them to please me without a thought to their own desires, refusing to be of help when they need it) is an example of a said faith rather than a living one. How many times have we said these words when what we really mean is that we want to posess the other person? It does us no good to love without trying to cultivate the fruits of love.

Explaining my experience to someone, they responded that I should "soak it in." I should revel in the feeling of what I call grace. However, I walked away from it with a new desire to serve God as a due course of my faith. I love to talk about the ideas of what we should and shouldn't be doing. I, like almost everyone, prefer to keep this conversation going in such a way as to let you know what you should be doing. I fail at these things myself. I am not an awful person by any means, but I could work harder at holding myself in line with what I believe to be God's will for me--that I should be honest, trustworthy, loving, helpful, kind, conscientious, compassionate. I have a tendency to waste my employer's time. This is not in keeping with any of the things I listed above. It is in matters like these that it is easy to slip, and make no mistake--I do not believe that I should be given the lash for such transgressions. I do, however, believe that my faith in those aforementioned higher ideals can help me make better choices if I keep them in mind. It still won't be easy, but who said that the things worth doing in life were all easy?

Even I, an ardent proponent of taking time to enjoy this life, know that some things are worth working for.

Of course, here comes the argument that one need not believe in God to be a better person. I do not argue otherwise. It is much like the rectangle/square thing. A square is a kind of rectangle, but a rectangle is not necessarily a square. One can believe in all of those listed ideals and NOT believe in God. However, one who believes in God but is not actively pursuing those ideals is not bearing the fruit of his faith. This isn't to be taken as a condemnation but as a jumping off place for growing as an individual. It is a wake-up call, not a declaration of evil. We have every moment of our life available to us to make even the slightest change in how we choose to live. Sometimes we need our attention called to these matters. We don't ever need anyone to tell us what to do.

Right Now

2010-10-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

I thought of something
I wanted to write about
yesterday,
but I forgot
what it was.

It seemed really important
at the time.

In fact, if I recall
correctly, it was one
of those moments
when I could see behind
everything--the people,
the trees, the air--
and it felt like I knew
something unknowable.

But now I don't know
what it was.

They say, "Never forget,"
but I think everything
I've forgotten, which is
almost everything, was
stuff I didn't need
to know.
I once saw a picture
of myself five years previous
and I couldn't remember
if I was ever her.

I can remember right now.

Settling "The Score"

2010-10-11T10:55:00.001-07:00

On Friday, I received The Score: The Science of the Male Sex Drive in the mail from Amazon. By early Sunday morning, I'd finished reading it. Yes, it's that good--and that compelling. In fact, I'd venture to say that it's changed my entire life.

Looking at issues related to human sexuality is a hobby of mine. I've read a lot on the subject, but I've never felt much smarter for it. It's a loaded topic, so even when you read one article that provides evidence from studies to back its claim, you can find other articles quoting other studies to refute that claim and swing the argument in the opposite direction. This is true whenever you read much on any topic, but when it comes to most of what's been said about human sexuality, everyone seems to reside in one camp or another, and each camp is wildly and extremely different from the others. Either porn is contributing to the downfall of all humanity, or it's got no negative side effects and may even be saving relationships. Either women don't like sex or they're all just a bunch of wanton harlots who've been waiting for men to pull their heads out of their asses and actually turn them on for once. Monogamy is natural. Oh, wait--no, it isn't. Everyone just picks the outlook that most jibes with their own sexual preferences, but am I alone in feeling like that hasn't taught us anything?

I took two things away from this book. One, most of what we think we know about human sexuality is wrong. We tend to look for the most "natural" mating strategy to answer a good number of our sexual questions. Human beings have developed a wide range of mating strategies, so there's no natural way of being. Some people are inclined toward monogamy. That's their mating strategy. Others are inclined toward polyamory. That's their mating strategy. Some fall anywhere on the spectrum in between. These are just the ways they've developed through evolution, and each mating strategy has it's pros and cons (at least insofar as the goal of passing genes along to future generations is concerned--if you just want to get laid on a Friday night, I can't really tell you which strategy works best). We often look to our ape ancestors to tell us what's more "natural"--I keep putting that in quotations because, honestly, I think most of the time when people are looking to prove what is more "natural", they're really trying to prove that their strategy is best. Our closest ape relatives are the bonobo and the chimp. When I read about the research done on these animals mating strategies, what I found was that we're not really substantially like EITHER OF THEM. I'm officially done listening to anyone who wants to use an ape study to tell me what sexual behaviors are natural for humans. No, I'm not retarded. I can get down with evolution. But we split off from those two species of apes thousands of years ago, so in believing in evolution, I also believe that we need to stop looking at them for "proof" of "natural" human mating strategies. Especially since the bulk of the evidence from studies of actual modern-day humans show that there is such a variety in behavior as to illustrate that a norm may not, in fact, exist.

The second thing I took away from this book is that a lot of our understanding of humanity's past is grossly distorted. Think your life is soooooo much easier than that of the caveman? Think again. They probably only spent about 4 hours a day really working. Once they found their dinner and cooked it up, they had lots of free time. And women weren't just some weak animal who traded sex for protection from their big, burly mens. That's an idea that was unsurprisingly born during the extremely patriarchal Victorian era, yet persists because most of us get our understanding of such matters through popular culture instead of doing actual research. Women were often protecting themselves. The reason they liked the bigger, burlier dudes was because they thought it was sexy, not necessarily because they saw themselves in need of protection. Prehistoric relationships were probably extremely egalitarian. In fact, the description I found in this book pretty much mirrors the relationship I have now except my boyfriend doesn't make my shoes and we don't eat roadkill. Male and female humans are not nearly as different as we are similar. Most of the differences stem from the fact that women have to invest so much more in the reproductive process. Our sex cells are bigger, so it takes more energy for us to house them and expend them. We also have to manage the gestation period. That's why men have to work so hard to get the sex in the first place. It's sort of biological payback. They have to invest more on the front end because we have to invest so much more on the back end.

Ultimately I learned that it's entirely possible that my boyfriend is telling the truth when he says he's perfectly happy being monogamous.

Cat Fight!

2010-10-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

I recently ran across this infographic explaining the so-called changes in size of Playboy models from the magazine's inception in 1953 through January of 2009. As you can guess (because we all know what everyone will say is going on already without the graphic), it supposedly illustrates that Playboy models have become much skinnier through the years--while somehow maintaining those big ole tatas. As my mother used to say, "If you want the tits, you gotta have the hips as well." Basically, Playboy models today are a bunch of anorexics who've gotten surgical breast enhancements, but they used to be bodacious babes with plenty-o junk-in-the-trunk and everywhere else besides.

Meh. As is pointed out in the comments on the infographic, it's a little weak as far as evidence of any kind of substantial change in this area over time. I think we can all agree that anecdotal evidence lead us to that conclusion before any of us even looked at the thing, but it's neither here nor there. What I really want to adress is some of the language used in the blurb surrounding the infographic. Specifically this part:

Playboy's Playmate data sheets (you know, where they claim to enjoy cupcakes and The Deer Hunter) provide height and weight, among other stats. Our analysis shows that models are shedding pounds and gaining altitude at an alarming rate. To be fair, Playmates provide their own measurements, so they could be exaggerating. Plus, we wouldn't put it past the editors to stretch the truth (i.e., Miss March 2008 may not actually want to write "comedic short stories" — or have a 21-inch waist). But who cares? What's interesting isn't the veracity of the numbers, it's what the magazine thinks its readers will find ideal.

I've been noticing this a lot lately, and it is nothing new. This specific piece was written by a woman, but it sounded so mysoginistic that I actually assumed it was by a man--until I remembered that women talk shit like this about women all the time. What's worse is that we do it in a misguided attempt to defend womanhood from all the other women who are doing it wrong (and, let's be honest, possibly stealing our menfolk in the process). What's so offensive to me about the above? It's the part where the author mocks the idea that a Playboy model might actually have aspirations that don't include taking her clothes off or being sexy for money. She might "actually want to write 'comedic short stories'", but, hey, we all know that's not possible because women come in two kinds: those who can and do (take their clothes off and otherwise exploit men for money), and those who can't so they actually learn skills and work hard at accomplishing "real" goals. Most of the people with whom I discussed my ideas about women posing for porn (see a couple of posts ago) all asked the same question: "Yeah, but would women actually do it?" My response? "Not when posing for some silly naked pictures comes with so much stigma on so many levels!"

Girl-on-girl crimes such as this one are nothing new. I suppose one could argue that I'm in no position to claim that it's a crime in the first place. If the author of this blurb is anti-porn, for instance, then her judgments about the women in porn would simply be part of her value system. Ultimately, I think it's impossible for us to demand that others make no judgments. We simply have to be prepared for the fact that whatever choice we make, there will be those who deem our choice unacceptable. I tend to have a more "live and let live" philosophy, but even within that ideal I bump up against my own prejudices. My hope is that I will notice those prejudices in the way that I choose to describe the "kinds of people" who make certain choices and work to change those prejudices. Often the way we explicitly describe our beliefs don't hold up to the ways that we discuss certain topics in more casual situations. The words that we choose tell us more about what we actually think than what we say when we explain what we actually think.

We often don't even know ourselves what we actually think.

The Missing Link

2010-10-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

According to an article I read yesterday at Psychology Today--if anyone has any suggestions on other websites I could add to my visiting repetoire, please, by all means, leave 'em in the comments--from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology (controversial, I know), a woman will never be truly happy if she doesn't have children.

I have a lot of questions for these people.

At the most basic level, evolutionary psychology provides theories that on their face make sense. The problem comes in when we start looking at specifics. When we talk about genetics, we hear a lot about the desireability of genetic variance. This is why it's better to make babies with a stranger than our own brothers and sisters--we end up with more genetic varience, and this creates healthier humans. However, when I'm reading the theories of the evolutionary psychologists, it appears that we're all motivated to want the same things and to do the same things to get those things. Case in point: I read another article about why men like big boobs. Problem? What about men who DON'T like big boobs? This theory, while plausible (that men like big boobs because they sag more with age, making it easier to spot the young ladies of best childbearing age), is based completely on the assumption that men like big boobs. But when I consider the variance in booby preference, I end up feeling like the explanation isn't really all that helpful or interesting within that larger context.

It's hard to trust a social science field whose theories use words like "always" and "never". I'm NEVER going to be truly happy if I don't have babies? Before anyone thinks this is a knee-jerk defensive move on my part because, in case you haven't heard, I do not want babies, I fully anticipate that I will probably spend at least one Saturday afternoon when I'm, oh, 45 bed ridden and crying because it's suddenly dawned on me that I HAVEN'T HAD ANY BABIES! People who do not have any children by choice often do experience some regrets around that choice at some point in later midlife. But doesn't everyone experience moments like this about some choice or another they've made at some point in later midlife? Absolutely no one is doing any and every thing they want to all the time, and we're all making choices everyday in favor of one thing at the exclusion of another. Those of us who aren't are even worse off--at later midlife, those people will be regretting having done NOTHING. But to make the oversimplified argument that because I'm a woman I will never acheive any "true" happiness if I don't have babies seems a little short-sighted, even if it does fall completely in line with evolutionary logic. It is, from an evolutionary standpoint, the only reason I exist.

But, then, what does evolutionary psychology contribute to the conversation if all it can tell me is that, yup, it's exactly as it's always been.

Actually, I think evolutionary psychology does contribute something to the conversation about meaning, making meaning, and finding actualization (assuming we believe such a thing exists and that it's possible). What evolutionary psychology can tell me is about some of my most basic impulses and motivations. A lot of people get off track when they take evolutionary psychology as an explanation of the way things should be. Even evolutionary psychologists will tell you that. People go, "See? These people are saying we're motivated by sexual impulse and mating and therefore we're built to cheat!" The truth is that understanding these impulses allows us to then outsmart them. I read about a study wherein they showed one group of men a rather small number of Playboy photographs (8) and another group of men the same number of pieces of abstract art. All the men rated their girlfriends' attractiveness before looking at the images. As you can guess, after looking at the images, the men who looked at the Playboy photos rated their girlfriends as less attractive than they had before. Our views on this are heavily influenced by comparison. A man's girlfriend may be attractive, but she may not be "as attractive" as that other lady. Her attractiveness doesn't set its own standard, and it isn't a static, objective rating. This is why porn could conceivably be damaging to a relationship. If a man doesn't understand this basic phenomenon, he might beging to have a lower opinion of her girlfriend even if nothing about her has changed. However, if he understands this phenomenon, he can do things to avoid it. He can look at images of other women less often. He can remember that if his girlfriend is suddenly seeming a little less sexy after a particularly enjoyable session with an issue of a spank mag, it's probably just a trick of the mind. And if he REALLY understands evolutionary psychology, he'll know that we live in a society where sex is based on female choice, so he's better off sticking with what he's got then taking his chances that another woman will even say yes. According to evolutionary psychologists (and evidenced in bars and marital beds all across this land), the woman decides if sex is going to happen. Just because you can see her doesn't mean you've got a shot in hell of getting her to get it on with you, hot stuff.

This is the true purpose of evolutionary psychology. Otherwise it's just so much mental masturbation. Taken as evidence that "boys will be boys and girls will be girls", it seriously short-changes us and flies in the face of the things we see played out around us every day. It doesn't even makes sense in light of the fact that most people act in opposition to the way our ancestors acted. According to statistics, for example, most men don't cheat. They may, however, be less satisfied with their partners just from looking at a few pictures. By understanding these most basic impulses, we can increase satisfaction with our choices.

And that, in and of itself, would be an evolution.

On Tits and Tats

2010-09-30T14:42:00.001-07:00

It is often said that women should not freak out about their men looking at porn. "Men need visual variety!" cry the proponents of porn. Advocates say that porn may help keep men from actually cheating because it allows them to feel like they got their rocks off with another woman in essence if not in reality. It gives them a release when their women aren't interested in sex. And these arguments are not completely without merit.

However, I started thinking about something. A reader of Dan Savage's column recently queried, "What's the female equivalent of porn? Where's our activity that might bother our significant other but, hey, girls will be girls?" The answer Dan came up with was cupcakes, which was decidedly lame and not in the least equivalent. The other day in the car, though, it hit me. The female equivalent would be MAKING porn.

According to studies that overgeneralize everything, women are turned on by feeling desirable. If the argument for why women shouldn't freak about their men looking at porn is all based in the idea that men are very visually stimulated, then it stands to reason that the female equivalent would be being in positions to be desired. Stripping for strangers. Posing for some nude photos and placing them on the internet where they can hear all about how sexy they are from commentors. Walking into a bar and flirting it up with other men just to get the feedback about how hot they are. If you're one of the aforementioned people who believes in the previously stated reasons for men to look at porn, then this idea shouldn't be all that unsettling. Is it? Because if it is, there's a problem.

Now, of course, many will argue that "women aren't like that." I always love this line when I hear it. Men are allowed to be sexual AND emotional. Sure, we talk about how men aren't as emotional as women all the time, but when it comes down to brass tacks, many of us will admit we've seen men fall in love. Men can love AND they can want to fuck. A man looking at another woman while with his significant other, we're told, is not a sign of his desire for infidelity. It's just the way they're built. But this culture is still in serious denial about female sexuality. The idea that a woman would be turned on by anything purely physical is immediately dismissed as preposterous. Women's sexual and emotional lives are assumed to be completely intertwined. I would argue that just as with men, women's sexual and emotional lives are like a Venn diagram: two separate circles with some overlap but also separate properties. Women want to eff the one they love--but, then, so do men. Women also get turned on by things that have nothing to do with the one they love. They're just conditioned to not even recognize when that's happening because we're taught that it's ludicrous. Studies have shown that many women are so mentally detached from their bodies that they can be experiencing full-on arousal reactions and not even know it.

How many men--men who look at porn on a regular basis and still love their wives and girlfriends because, hey, men can do that--would be comfortable with those wives and girlfriends posing naked or stripping? Some might argue that it's not the same thing, but I actually would argue that the two are strikingly similar. They're both situations in which two people are interacting without actually engaging with each other. So, what's the difference?

I point all of this out to show that there are still huge discrepancies in how we treat men and women's sexuality. Specifically, the ideas we have about women's sexuality seem to hem them in and make them seem controlled; the ideas we have about men's sexuality seem to allow them the maximum amount of freedom. We're told that these are natural states arising from our biology, but the biology of the female actually contradicts that. In different times and different cultures, it wasn't unusual for women to pair bond with the man with the most resources while having sex with the man with the best physical genes on the side. These women would pass these offspring off as their mate's because that's how they gained support. What does that tell you about women's natural sexual desire?

I don't point all this out to say that I'm in favor of or opposed to open-relationships. When it comes to one's relationship style, I think it's every man for himself. Some people (men and women alike) cherish monogamous relationships. Some people (again, men and women alike) cherish open relationships to various degrees. I'm also not saying that I think men shouldn't ever look at porn or that I'm going to run out and pose for Playboy. Sorry fellas. Actually, I'd probably be more of a Suicide Girl. Anyway, what I'm saying is simply that we need to further question the sexual assumptions we make along gender lines. Are some things typical of a specific gender? Certainly. But some things are not, and some ideas have been actively generated by a culture that is STILL afraid of letting women own their sexuality. Look at the idea that a woman only wants to have sex with someone she loves. This essentially makes her sexuality her beloved's property. She can't even help but give it away and allow her beloved to own it--she's built that way. I would argue that just like men, her sexuality is hers, and she makes the conscious decision about who to share it with. When a man is monogamous, we all act like it's this really conscious decision. When a woman does it, we act like it's just the way she is. Some women make this choice easily, almost without effort on any level--but, then, so do some men. But some women have sexual desires that are not fulfilled by their beloved. Hell, for some of us it's still hard to understand the first half of that sentence.

Again, I am not looking to advocate a specific lifestyle. I would not take the evidence culled from biological imperatives to advocate for an "anything goes" ideology. Neither would I condemn anyone for HONESTLY AND OPENLY pursuing an "anything goes" ideology. This is about general ideas we have about sex that, to my mind, just don't add up.

Seems to me that if men get to look at other women's tits, we should get to show other men our tats.

Celebates and sluts living together--it'll be...anarchy!

2010-09-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

And what's anarchy but another word for freedom? Today is National Sexual Freedom Day, and I shall now mark the occasion in the appropriate manner. Or, at least, one of the appropriate manners. The others are not available to me at the moment.

The other day I read an article about research into women's sexual desire. It was mostly talking about how to unleash it. The elusive desire of women. How, oh how, do men convince us to have sex with them?

The story is seemingly as old as time. Man and woman meet. Man and woman have lots of sex because they've just met and damn, that shit is awesome! Man and woman fall in love. Man and woman get married. Man spends the rest of his life trying to touch woman's breast and getting told, "Not tonight, honey. I have a headache." Man slouches off to watch porn in his office while the woman watches crappy woman-centered television shows about women and their feelings. The moral of the story was always thus: men love sex; women love feelings (and don't want to have sex later in the relationship because they never really cared much about sex to begin with). Women use sex to get love; men use love to get sex.

We were all raised with this story. Maybe we saw it first-hand in our own households. Maybe we just saw it on sitcoms. As we grew up, we didn't realize it, but this narrative became a central part of how we viewed male/female sexual relationships. Some of us--maybe even most of us--recognized at some point that this story didn't match up with our own feelings about sex. Maybe the men recognized at some point that they love to cuddle or they like women-centered television shows about women and their feelings. Both of my brothers love Gilmore Girls. Maybe we women realized we love sex. The problem was that while we were able to question what we'd been told about our own genders, we carried on believing whatever it was we'd been taught about the other.

The aforementioned article came with some information that rocks that cultural myth. Research is showing that women lose interest in sex as their relationship moves forward because they aren't particularly turned on by familiarity. Once they know they have a man in the bag, they find him much less sexually attractive. What?! But wait! I thought it was because women are these pure-minded souls who just love love and do not care much for sex and certainly don't care much for sex with anyone other than their beloved! Oh, my, how this information flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

Apparently men and women have more in common sexually than we care to believe.

It seemingly serves men to believe all that claptrap about women, love, and sex. It allows them to believe that their women would never want to sleep with someone else. It also allows them to believe that they hold a lot of the power in the relationship. Men supposedly have women under their thumb because women will do anything for love, including never leave and never cheat. Tell men that their wives have "headaches" because they're bored with their husbands and all hell will break loose. Men will actually have to work for it or, worse, won't be able to do anything at all to win back the sexual favor of their lady love.

Meanwhile, women are told that men have a sexual thought "every seven seconds." Actually, according to the Kensey study, 54% of men think about sex every day--which could mean once every day. 30-something percent think about it every week. Some only think about it every few weeks or once a month. That seven seconds statistic? That's just a cultural myth as well. I shared this interesting information with my boyfriend the other day, and he seemed relieved. He said he'd always wondered about that because he's not even sure he has a thought--any thought, sexual or otherwise--every seven seconds.

Men!

That seven seconds thing has always perplexed me. Here I am, a woman who loves sex, wondering how it is that so many men aren't in the mood all the time! When women are told that men are thinking about it constantly, what are we supposed to think when they don't want to do it with us? We have no choice but to think a) there's something wrong with us, or b) there's something wrong with our partner. But only about half of men think about it every day! That's a huge discrepency.

Another phrase that's trotted out and treated like science is the old "men are more visual." It's essentially used as an excuse as to why men just can't bring themselves to date ugly chicks. Men also use it as a way to prop up their egos. "Luckily for us dudes, we can get fat, lose our hair, and wear sweatpants and our ladies will still love us!" This might be true--love is crazy like that--but it's got nothing to do with women being less visual. Just like you men, your lady love checked out the hot piece of ass she saw wandering the produce section of the grocery store while you and your sweatpants were across the room in frozen foods. Women are visually stimulated. Don't believe me? Check my internet history. The argument here is not that we need to fight against the idea of men being visually stimulated. We just need to understand that a lot of people are visually stimulated. And we can be visually stimulated by all kinds of looks. And people--people, not men and women--have all kinds of sexual tastes and desires.

However a woman will not want to have sex with a man unless he has lots of money. That shit is the truth.

I kid. What we're seeing in that tale as old as time is the idea that relationships are power plays. For most of human history they were. Women and men needed something from each other. The modern belief that she controls the sex that he needs so badly because men love sex and he controls the love that she needs so badly because women love love is just the modern version of her having the womb in which his genes will survive and he controls the resources that will feed her while she's busy having babies. As people have become more independent, this outmoded power play no longer serves us. It causes more harm than good in the post-modern relationship.

Is there a place in all this for love? Is there a place in all of this for mutually satisfying sex? Is there a place in all of this for both simultaneously? Certainly. I'm just saying that some men like to cuddle and some women like to fuck. My love of sex has been met with varying levels of shaming on every front. Even progressive types like to imply that maybe I love sex because I have a desperate and unnaturally strong need to feel attractive or have security issues and will do any "sordid" thing to feel loved. You know, because that's the only reason women like to fuck. We need to challenge these deeply ingrained gender beliefs about sexuality. We all seem to think that just because women now pose in their underwear on album covers a la Britney Spears that the sexual revolution won, as if the only issue was whether or not it could be okay for women to be portrayed as sexy. But the old cultural trope of "men love sex, women love love, and the two are mutually exclusive" is still at play, and until it's played out, we won't have anything resembling a sex-positive culture.

And why would we want that? I think the term "sex-positive" speaks for itself.

A dream is a wish your heart makes...but hearts were made to be broken.

2010-09-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

If you read Psychology Today online religiously (as I do) and have a self-help collection that contains more than three titles (as I do), then you have come across the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. If you're not nuts or are nuts but haven't had any realizations yet about that fact, let me fill you in on what this is. Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from within a person. "I paint because I just love painting!" Extrinsic motivation comes from without. "I go to my shit job everyday because they give me the money I need to live." Pretty simple concept, right?

Well, just moments ago, I was sitting in the bathroom at work contemplating possible tweets I could post on my Twitter page when I came up with, "shaved my legs last night and didn't even get laid." That's when it hit me--most modern psychobabble is horseshit! I'd been duped AGAIN! I've got to stop reading Psychology Today religiously, but I get so bored at work and besides, sometimes I find good instructive articles for my boyfriend in the relationship section.

What does one have to do with the other? Well, I only shave my legs because I believe it will get me something I want--sex. I suppose one could argue that this is a mixture of motivations. It's somewhat intrinsic because I'm motivated by something I want (again, sex) to do something I otherwise would not care so much about doing (shave my legs). Honestly, I can still get the sex without shaving my legs, but I figure it provides a more pleasurable sensation for my partner during the act, so I try to keep up with it. But I find myself trying to calculate when I shave my legs around when I'm most likely to be having of the sex. "We had sex two days ago, which means tonight is probably a sex night, except he's not going to get home until late, and..." But this is pretty much the textbook definition of extrinsic motivation. It's certainly not like I shave my legs because I just love shaving my legs. Hell, I don't even do it for the wearing of the skirts. I will shamelessly go unshaven in a skirt if I haven't remembered to shave in a couple of days and that's what's clean.

Essentially what you've just learned is that I only care about people's good opinion of me when it leads to me getting laid.

Anyway, after thinking this about my leg shaving, I started thinking about how much of what we do is extrinsically motivated. Again, this means we do not do it for sheer love of the activity but because we have to do it in order to get something we want or need. But I've read so many freaking articles and books that hinged partially on the idea that we should be doing what we love! Ever heard the question, "Ask yourself what you would be doing if money were no object, then DO THAT!" Yeah. Whoever came up with that question is a) a marketing genius who has not only sold a lot of whatever he or she was selling but also helped a lot of other people who ripped off that sentiment sell a whole lot of something as well, and b) the ruiner of life. People read that in an article on a website, and the next thing you know they're trying to think up ways to move to the middle of nowhere and write the next great American novel (for instance--it's a hypothetical fantasy scenario). Problem is, imagine how realistic it must be that we can all write novels (or become painters, dancers, musicians, nuclear physicists) or do whatever else it is we love to do just for the sheer love of it while still getting paid a living wage for said thing.

If the minute you start to imagine that you panic, it's because it's IMPOSSIBLE--or, if it happened, it would lead to chaos of such proportions nobody would be doing any of those awesomeamazingwonderful things after about three weeks because we would be living in a Mad Max movie.

This philosophy--this "anybody can be anything and should only do that which makes them happy" thinking--is so hopelessly flawed, I don't even know where to begin to address it. First, it's classist. You know who came up with that thinking? Some rich 50-something white lady whose husband did a fancy job that allowed her the cash to go teach yoga in her very own ashram. Second, it's in full flight from reality. Hello, person who came up with this thinking--I'd like to introduce you to the American economy. I'd also like to introduce you to the social constructs that determine how much money people get paid for certain kinds of work and all the people who have been in bands their entire adult lives but never made a cent off their music. I'd like to introduce you to the concept that there are only so many positions available in any certain field. No, we do NOT need that many more internet content writers on the block. There's enough useless crap on the internet already.

Moving on...

Really, though, this philosophy sounds so wonderful! And it comes in even more subtle forms, like when we see Rachel suddenly go from coffeshop waitress to Ralph Lauren la-di-da on Friends. Hope that reference made sense; I never really watched that show. This idea that almost every action we take SHOULD be intrinsically motivated if we're GOOD people and we play our cards right is everywhere we turn...and it's harmful. I'm not a dream squisher. People ultimately do what they want. It's just that for most of us, eating and having a place to sleep are more important than quitting our jobs we hate in order to follow our dreams of not ever having to do anything that isn't fun EVER AGAIN. The reason that this thinking is harmful is that it sets people up for feeling like failures--perfectly successful people who've managed to make great art (even if they've never sold any), have fulfilling relationships (which, contrary to popular belief, are really important to a person's overall happiness and satisfaction with life), maybe write a screenplay that sits in a drawer but is nonetheless amazing, or raised a couple of kids whom they love. People who are good at their jobs, as much as they hate them some days. People who have managed to live through seriously tough stuff--and so much of life is tough stuff. I'm actually still amazed sometimes at the fact that I've been a grown-up without supervision for over 10 years and haven't been arrested or died yet. Everyone who knows me is nodding in agreement.

Ultimately, this philosophy is also tied up in the idea that money equals measurement of success. It isn't explicit, but what they're saying is that this is how you choose what to do for a living. So if you can't MAKE A LIVING out of your dreams, you've failed in some way. Because, you know, we should all be doing what we love FOR A LIVING. And I'm not discounting the fact that this does happen. We just have to be prepared in the event it does not happen for us. We might find perfectly awesome lives in the meantime, but only if we're willing to be okay with the fact that some very specific dreams didn't come true or, at the very least, that we never made OUR LIVING that way.

So follow your dreams. Just don't quit your day job yet.

Buzzwords

2010-08-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a friend who works in advertising said, "I don't want to work in advertising anymore." She then sent me to this ad agency's website. I read the "About Us", and I immediately felt disgusted. I know that's a strong word for such seemingly innocuous copy, but I hate buzzwords. I find myself reading stuff like that and thinking, "I'm not even really sure what that means anymore!" even though I know good and well what it means. Each of those words should mean a lot, but within the context of advertising copy, they become jibberish.

According to their "About Us", this company "delivers the smart business strategies and creative ideas that clients need to increase market share." This sentence makes my skin crawl. At this point, every marketing company "delivers" the "smart" "strategies" and "creative ideas" clients "need." These are words and phrases used in all marketing copy everywhere. These words are used because of their power. In fact, if you've worked in this industry, you've been asked to use "power words" when working on a project. When everyone is repeating these supposedly powerful phrases over and over to describe pretty much everything, though, they lose all their power. How powerful can it be to describe an advertising agency as "creative" when every advertising agency is supposedly "creative"? Ever repeated the same word to yourself over and over until it starts to sound really weird and you're not even sure if it's a word anymore?

That's how I feel about buzzwords.

I got in a fight with someone recently over the meaning of a word. We agreed on the approximate meaning, but I feel like there are subtle differences in the meanings of words that mean approximately the same thing. Even though two words might be synonyms, I don't consider them to neccessarily be interchangable. It became clear to me at some point that the person with whom I was having this argument thought I was being a real jerk. And, really, I'll concur. All that to say that I find myself overly preoccupied with the meanings of words at times. I'm not just talking about the dictionary definitions. Those are fairly static and not really up for debate. I'm talking about the connotations of words. I've had arguments with people where it became clear that we didn't really disagree about the fundamental points within the topic we were discussing--we were essentially arguing about the connotations of the pivotal words used in those arguments and we didn't even know it. My father and I do this all the time. Language is fascinating like that. Marketing copy is all about the meaning of words. Or, at least, it should be. What I don't understand is how people can read a sentence--let alone write one--like the one referenced above and not want to throw themselves off of a 70-story building.

We live in a world where we're surrounded by marketing copy all the time. It's so pervasive that it makes up a large chunk of our reality. It simply is a fact of our lives, not separate from our lives. What happens when such a large chunk of our environment is so devoid of any meaning? I completely admit to the limitations of words; it's one of the characteristics that makes them so interesting and so very fun to play with. But I will also say that words are one of the tools we use to explain ourselves. They are one of the ways in which we seek connection with each other. They fail us, but it is at their very point of failure that they also spur us to desire even greater understanding. If they're rendered meaningless while still playing such a fundamental role in how we perceive our reality, how will we share our experiences in a meaningful way?

I will admit that I've come to the conclusion that the most meaningful things that happen in life often cannot be explained in words. I had a dream last night that I was at the mall with a bunch of my brother's friends. I was trying to explain to them my newest theory on spirituality, and it sounded rather trite. It didn't feel trite. It felt very important. It felt important in my body. That felt like truth. But when the words were coming out of my mouth, the looks I was getting were the same kind of looks one gets when one is five and trying to tell an adult something very important. I remember feeling very frustrated because it even sounded stupid to me in the dream, but I couldn't think of any other way to explain it. I can admit to the fact that the meanings of words can fail on many levels in many situations. I can even admit to the fact that the things we might be trying to describe with those words are themselves ultimately meaningless. I don't know that I can believe that one hundred percent, but it's a proposition I cannot rule out.

So perhaps I simply love words too much. Perhaps it is merely that marketing copy is abusive to language. It doesn't play with it. It beats it up to the point where it is no longer even recognizable. Maybe marketing copy and it's place in the framework of our reality isn't a threat to our survival as a species or our ability to figure out the meaning of life. But it's possible that by kicking meaning in the dirt and dragging it through the mud like that as a matter of course, we're missing out on something really special.

Something like...meaning.

The Little Boy and the Rattlesnake

2010-08-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

The little boy was walking down a path and he came across a rattlesnake. The rattlesnake was getting old. He asked, "Please little boy, can you take me to the top of the mountain? I hope to see the sunset one last time before I die." The little boy answered "No Mr. Rattlesnake. If I pick you up, you'll bite me and I'll die." The rattlesnake said, "No, I promise. I won't bite you. Just please take me up to the mountain." The little boy thought about it and finally picked up that rattlesnake and took it close to his chest and carried it up to the top of the mountain.

They sat there and watched the sunset together. It was so beautiful. Then after sunset the rattlesnake turned to the little boy and asked, "Can I go home now? I am tired, and I am old." The little boy picked up the rattlesnake and again took it to his chest and held it tightly and safely. He came all the way down the mountain holding the snake carefully and took it to his home to give him some food and a place to sleep. The next day the rattlesnake turned to the boy and asked, "Please little boy, will you take me back to my home now? It is time for me to leave this world, and I would like to be at my home now." The little boy felt he had been safe all this time and the snake had kept his word, so he would take it home as asked.

He carefully picked up the snake, took it close to his chest, and carried him back to the woods, to his home to die. Just before he laid the rattlesnake down, the rattlesnake turned and bit him in the chest. The little boy cried out and threw the snake upon the ground. "Mr. Snake, why did you do that? Now I will surely die!" The rattlesnake looked up at him and grinned, "You knew what I was when you picked me up."
-Old Native American Fable

A Few Forgotten Things

2010-08-08T22:16:00.001-07:00

Disappearances

Where have you gone?
I believe I saw your back
disappearing over the black
hill, but I cannot be certain
it was you. Maybe it was myself
I saw, or a ghost of myself,
so murky and muddled I
could not make out the particular
features that made it unique.
All that I know is that you
are not here now, and I want
to believe you are gone,
not left, for it is so much
better for the both of us.

Letter to the Editor

I know what you're doing, you harlot--
you think I don't know, but I know it.
You think I am dumb in my silence;
you think you're escaping my notice.
You've never seen me:
I climb down in between things.
I've always had a talent for sneaking
unseen through even the most well-lit
rooms. I can hide in plain sight,
and at night I need not even cover
my head with the blankets. No one
knows me here. No one knows me anywhere.
I am only a faint feeling. People recognize
I have a face, they just aren't sure
whose it is. And the invisible, the ignored
see everything, the same way you can't
bullshit a bullshitter.

I know what you're doing, you overgrown
ingenue. You think you're still slick, but I
know that sickness. I had it once, a fever
in the middle of a summer morning,
bright and sharp as a burning red stamp.
My dear, you don't scare me. You are me--
I was you. I feel so tricky remembering your
tricks as I watch you perform them. You pull
a rabbit out of a hat, but I can see the hole in
the bottom and the man under the table.
So leave me be or don't, it doesn't matter.

The end is the same either way.

The History of Humiliation

2010-07-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

It works like this: you get humiliated first. Someone decides that you're not it. Somebody leaves. Somebody purposefully says something awful to you, about you, because they were there first. They were humiliated first. Because they are you, but they don't want to be you. They don't want to be humiliated, so you get humiliated first. Then you find someone to humiliate. First you think you find someone who won't humiliate you, but you don't realize that even in thinking they can't humiliate you, you humiliate them. Then you decide they're not it. You leave. You purposefully say something awful to them, about them, because you were there first. You were humiliated first. You are them, but you don't want to be them. You don't want to be humiliated, so you humiliate them first...

I have a memory of something I never saw:
you, broken, laying on your bed in the middle
of a sleepless night. You can't go outside--
they might see the shame on your skinless
frame, your muscles aching with it, glowing
with it. I see it like I'm the ceiling, the walls,
the floor. I can feel the steam collecting
on me from where you are burning--your fevered
pitching about in response to memorized voices
that all left you behind. You are pressed into
place by the weight of all that you have been
seen as, the idea of yourself. You believe
that you are being pressed upon by the air,
something real, something all around inescapable.
You turn out the lights so that you are invisible,
physicality a reminder that you are. That you are
is a punishment. She told you so. You don't know
that for her to be is a punishment. She wakes
with an ache that pushes against her skin so forcefully
that every movement causes her insides to shriek.
For relief, she pressed herself against you like
an iron rod, bruising you to make it true.

This is the history of humiliation.

It's a Sickness

2010-06-28T15:08:00.001-07:00

I see you looking at me with your odd-shaped eye.
I hear your black voice fall on the back stairs,
faint but particular,
weak but distinct.
The clatter of falling bricks
rises from the pavement--
I'm anxious, I've dropped everything I carry.

Your face doesn't change in the sudden chaos.
Your eye, still odd-shaped,
is deeply blank, a stone.
My skin trembles;
I know what it is to shake,
like a snake in a field,
shadowed by hawks.

I am like the man from Morel,
unseen, in love with the presence
of you. Invisible to your odd-shaped
eye. Invisible or feeling your
indifference. Suspended
in the iris of your still,
stark eye.

Bound

2010-06-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

Put me in a tight dress, pull the strings
to make it tighter. Bind me in boning,
constricting fishnet hose. Feeling
my skin pressing against the fabric, it
works like a concrete casing, holding me
in and intensifying the sense I'm about
to explode. I can feel my pulse more clearly--
My feet begin to hurt on these heels.
The sensation of existing is sharp.
My stomach flutters when I breathe because
breathing has become more difficult,
suffocated. My skin becomes kinetic
with the restriction of my movement.
An anxiety attack is a panic at needing
to flee and being unable. An anxiety
attack is an excitement, no different
from falling in love--it is exhilarating,
and I am grateful when I am bound.

8

2010-06-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

It feels like I've been doing this forever--
have I? How many times have I seen
the sunrise exactly? I don't remember the
first one precisely, but maybe there wasn't
one. It doesn't feel forgotten, either. What
I can't explain is how I got here. Everything
before this is all black, but clear. There are
shapes there, but there is nothingness there.
I remember names but I cannot feel their skin
or hear their voices. I still love them, but they
do not appear in dreams to tell me things
like how they hurt or where they sleep.
I think they used to. I think they used to
come to me because they were real--
weren't they? Aren't I? It feels like
I've been doing this forever--have
I? How many times have I driven this
part of highway? It seems like I've never
been anywhere else. It seems like I've
been everywhere all the time. I look out
across the skyline of my city. I was born
here. It looks weird. It's as if I've been
looking at it every day since--since when?
When was I born? I don't remember the first
breath precisely, but maybe there wasn't one.
Maybe they're all the same breath, different
same breaths in a row--maybe they're not
in a row, I don't know. Where is this going?
I started it three days ago I think. I don't think
I had any idea.

A Summer Evening Song

2010-06-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

Sunday evening in summer, the sunset sinks slowly,
heavy, in silence. The only sounds are sprinklers
and the occasional car passing by. No one is out.
Somehow the glow is a baking cold, a feeling of dead
grass in patches on the lawn. I am glad no one is here
to see me like this, sweaty and stumbling, my arms
awkward at my sides. I can feel the darkness coming.
I am dizzy drunk with the idea of death. Don't worry--
it is a seasonal sense of dread that brings me back
to this place, strolling alone writing broken-hearted
songs. Renewing my vows that I will once again
live through this.
Hang on,
hang on,
hang on.
Like a leaf clinging to a branch, slightly scorched,
withered around the edges from the heat,
I will slowly burn down
til I become so small I can be reborn.

Summer Weather

2010-06-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

Something sinister.
I see something sinister.
Flashing or lingering,
depending on the day,
the hour, the light--
that moment at night
when the heat gets too
still, and my throat
gets dry. The fan cracks
my lips. My wrists get
limber with the press
of the pillow. My body
feels boneless, dripping
on the bed. I cannot move
my mind quick enough to
stay ahead. I hope this
something sinister was
a hard, hot dream I had,
for I have so much trouble
between waking and sleep.

Foolhardy

2010-06-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

I might as well be a fool
if this is being a fool.
I quite like this, so how
foolish can I be to be
this? I could cut it off,
become cold, and never
possibly be a fool;
But then how foolish
would I be!

Separate But Equal

2010-06-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

I drove to my parents' house to celebrate Memorial Day with a pool party. In honor of fallen soldiers, we listened to loud music, some people drank beer, and my sister floated in the middle of the family pool with a cigarette dangling from her fingers.

"You ashing in the pool, Kate?"

"Sure. It's not going to hurt it!"

My parents' house is in a relatively rural area about an hour from the urban area where I live. As I drove from my place to theirs, I watched the landscape go from downtown to suburban shopping centers to scattered country businesses like gas stations and trailer retailers. Around the midpoint I saw a billboard advertising golf course houses for sale. My first response was to scoff slightly. I am not the kind for golf course living. I am the kind who associates herself with noble poverty. But then I had a thought. A week before, I'd spent some time on a golf course for a work function, and remembering the houses that backed up to the golf course, I thought, "What's so bad about golf course living, anyway?"

I didn't suddenly want to live on a golf course. I did, however, have a moment in which I understood just how much I defined myself as not being the kind of person who lives on a golf course. There's a difference between simply not being into golf course living or even just never considering it on any level and my mocking reaction. I thought about making a joke about the billboard to my companion, another individual probably even more defined by his anti-golf course nature than I. I didn't make the joke, however. In that state of mind, I recognized it as just making conversation by parading about our mutual disdain. Instead, I got to thinking about personalities.

While at my parents' house, an old family friend asked me about work. I'm extremely unhappy with my job. I said as much and asked if we could not talk about it anymore. Then she asked me about my "aspirations." I've never had much of a stomach for this requisite conversation, but I figured that at 31 I wouldn't have to have it anymore. People who aspire to live on a golf course also aspire to work hard at certain kinds of jobs to get there. As a lifestyle, it's the antithesis of freedom. People who live on golf courses shoulder all kinds of responsibility--mortgages, giant electric bills, home owners' association dues. This is why I'm ultimately not a golf course girl. I'm constantly trying to arrange my life in such a way as to have as much freedom as possible. Maybe that's why I feel the need to turn golf course living into a judgment call. Honestly, if someone wants to take on the burden of such a lifestyle, I'm sure it's got nothing to do with me. Perhaps I feel in some way like it's a spotlight on my desire to take on as little responsibility as possible.

As if that is a bad thing.

People who live on golf courses aren't a threat to my freedom. My freedom isn't a threat to their golf course lifestyle. We see ourselves at odds only because when one person sees another person living a different kind of life from the one that they themselves have chosen, it brings to mind several possibly uncomfortable questions. Questions about why we each want the things we want and whether or not we even really want those things. Maybe we want those other things. Maybe we don't. Maybe we don't know what we want, and maybe we need to be pro-this and anti-that to hide from that fact.

After all, it seems like there are a lot of up sides to golf course living. I'm just pretty sure I don't want to do the things I'd have to do to live there.

Near and Far

2010-05-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

The other day I ran into an acquaintance at the grocery store. We used to work together at a restaurant. Anyone who has ever worked in the service industry knows that working together in that environment makes for fast friendships. Waiters, waitresses and bar tenders are a motley bunch who share all of life's dirty details after a few short shifts together. Lifers learn to be reserved at some point, but they'll still get sloshed and spill their guts on some random evening when their guard is down.

This particular girl and I had little in common. She's a single mother, a regular church goer, and from a small town in Alabama. I'm not any of those things. I remember that she would make me Jack and Diet Cokes in to-go cups at 10 am on a Tuesday when making it through a shift seemed like death. After long Sundays of waiting on the brunch crowd, our group would gather like hurricane survivors in the bar next door. I've gotten drunk with this girl. Under such circumstances you're likely to share everything with a person.

She transferred to another store owned by the same company, and I hadn't seen her since until the other day.

She walked up to the Starbucks counter inside the grocery store where I was picking up some snacks for a work thing. I was surprised to see her. I'd heard she was moving back to Alabama. She said that she's leaving in 8 weeks. We chatted a bit about her. We chatted even less about me. I tend in those situations to give the stock response of, "Same old, same old," when asked what I've been up to. As we hugged to part company, I said, "Nice knowing you."

She said, "Nice knowing you, too."

It was so oddly perfect. So rarely do people feel that comfortable acknowledging exactly what they've been with each other. Neither of us tried to draw out the conversation out of guilt over neglected friendship. We both essentially said, "I'm never going to see you again." As I walked out of the store, I felt extremely touched by the simplicity of the whole thing. It is okay that this is impermanent. It is okay to admit that very little belongs to me.

I have recently been contemplating the importance of family. I don't want to have children, but I want relationships in my life that feel somewhat permanent and secure. It's odd because I've always been such a proponent of making sure everybody knows that security is an illusion, so when I finally admitted to myself that, yes, I want commitment, I had to carefully consider what that really means. It seemed silly in light of my general attitude. The conclusion that I came to was that it all still fit together. I can still acknowledge the true transient nature of life and seek some feeling of security while I'm alive. I was raised in a family--a family that is a family no matter what. I find it comforting that I know that we've all of us hated the others at some point but we never thought about not loving each other. I can honestly say that I've hated my mother more than an other person I've ever hated. But she was always my mother, and I always loved her. That commitment means I stayed until I didn't hate her at all anymore.

There is a depth to that kind of experience that rugged individualism just cannot accomplish.

Someone once told me about a man he knew whose wife had multiple sclerosis. He said that this man was one of the happiest men he'd ever met. He said he faced all manner of extra burdens simply because of all the things his wife couldn't do. And this man helped her, gladly. The person who told me this story said he could never do that.

I watched that same man care for his aging mother in the same way, though. He was doing it, too. He just thought that because he had moments of anger and frustration about his situation, it wasn't the same. He thought that diminished his love. We are none of us saints. It probably made his love that much deeper. And the man who took care of his ailing wife probably had the same moments. Nobody said this stuff would be easy all of the time. They only said it would be good. They only said it would be better than the alternative. We want people to be there when we need them. We have to be willing to be all that we would have them be for us.

It is important to know what we mean to each other. It is important that we mean something at all.

DEATH!

2010-05-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

I'm driving along on the highway when suddenly I'm struck by visions of my own toes being bent so far back that they break. I'm sitting at my desk at work, and I see myself held hostage, being tortured in any number of gruesome ways. My fingers are being cut off with pruning shears. Or I imagine that I'm in a car accident, my body bent in a position that mangles me beyond recognition.

This is how it's been lately. These scenes come on from nowhere. My body will tense up and feel cold. All I can do is wait for them to pass. It would be easier if I could convince myself that these things aren't likely to happen today, if even at all. How many people ever find themselves kidnapped, tortured, murdered? The problem is that some people do find themselves kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and who among them ever thought it would happen to them? And the idea of my getting into a car wreck is even harder to escape. I believe in improbabilities, but I've always had a problem convincing myself of impossibility. A head full of this stuff is no way for anyone to go about their life, so I try to let those thoughts go.

The other day a friend and I were discussing our funerals. She asked me to read her blog at her funeral. I asked her to prat fall into my open casket, spilling my dead body out onto the church floor. As soon as I'd asked her to do that, it dawned on me that we will not both be able to attend the other's funeral. One of us will not be there to celebrate the other one. All of these things we take for granted. Some things I wish I could take for granted, at least for a little while.

I contemplate my death because something in me wants me to. I do not wallow in these visions, but they come. I touch them and let them go, but for a moment they are very real. I have dreams, too, during which I'm faced with very difficult choices. Last night I was faced with the decision to either kill my entire family or kill someone else very close to me. Moments before I woke up I was staring at the heavy gun in my hand, weighed down by the responsibility of a single decision that couldn't be avoided. What do dreams like this and my thoughts of death have in common? They've brought me into constant contact with the idea of living in the moment, the importance of choices, the meaning (or lackthereof) of everything I do. They force me to contemplate what I think of my own importance, my lack of importance, my impermanence, and how all those things fit together.

It's been said that you are the most important person who has ever lived, and five minutes after you're dead almost nothing you ever did will matter.

What I can say is that the visions have been awful and terrifying. They have also created in me a level of comfort that I haven't known before. Certain things used to cause untold pressure within me--what I might do for a living at any given moment, what I might or might not be accomplishing, what my life looked like compared to what I thought it should look like. These worries seem almost obsolete now. I still feel motivation, but it's coming from a completely different direction. I feel inspired now to make those decisions on a moment-by-moment basis. I feel that it's best if I allow myself to live spontaneously, in tune with the new information being handed to me on an almost constant basis. It feels good to not make any big plans. I plan to take a single step--I don't hold on to where I think that step should take me six months from now. And living that way used to make me worry I was flaky or irresponsible, but I don't feel that way, either. I suppose this is freedom. I almost do not want it.

I can also say that it makes a lot of things seem weird that never seemed all that weird before. Like billboards.

The Oldest

2010-05-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

I remember the oddest things.

Small things, things hardly worth remembering.

It was picture day in elementary school, maybe 4th grade. My parents were out of town, and my grandmother was staying with us. She was a take-charge kind of woman. That's almost all I remember about her. I also remember that she made the girls take naps well past nap-taking age while the boys got to stay up and watch television with her. She was raised at a different time in the small-town south, I suppose. It always made me angry on principle, and I would spend the entire nap time coming up with elaborate schemes to escape as if it were Vietnam.

It was picture day, and my parents were out of town. My grandmother gave me the order forms and the money. I set out for school. When I arrived, I learned that it was not, in fact, picture day. We'd been confused about the dates. I freaked out. I was convinced that I would get in trouble if I returned home with the money and the order forms. I suppose I thought I would be blamed in some way. I think I thought I'd be accused of being wrong--that she would think it was, in fact, picture day and I'd simply screwed up. That was me at that age, constantly worried that I was messing everything up and would eventually be caught, even in situations where there were no mistakes to be made. I've always been what they call "hypervigilant."

I panicked and threw the money in the trash at lunch.

What I don't remember is how I got out of that. I just have this memory of me walking toward the trash can, determined yet full of self-doubt. As far as I could tell in that moment, it was my only option.

I have always, always, always believed that if I can't be perfect I will die.

Safety First

2010-05-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

Never write a poem in pen--
you can't erase it, the shavings
of rubber rubbing away
your mistake. Like a half-done
flubbed crossword, your thoughts
will be permanently bared and
mocked by those who know
better than to even begin.
It's like dancing in the middle
of the street naked, dangerous
for others will gather
on the sidewalks and point.
"What madness!" they'll shout,
fingers coming for you from
every angle. No, don't write
naked poems in pen with
cross words while dancing.

You'll die.

When is a raven like a writing desk?

2010-04-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

Friday night, my friend Matt and I were perusing the furniture at West Elm. I happened upon a desk that I loved and, tah-dah, it was on sale! Only $200! This seemed like a pretty fantastic price for a desk that bordered on perfection, especially since I'd been doing some shopping online and found not a single desk I liked at such a decent price. I couldn't buy it at the moment--I had no way to transport it home. But I left the store feeling elated and excited at the prospect of a new, fabulous desk.

About one minute after leaving the store, I felt sad.

I told Matt that buying any item that costs more than about $20 often makes me feel sad. I still felt elated and excited about the desk, but those very emotions were already stirring within me feelings of hopelessness, disappointment and depression. Buying stuff--especially really awesome and amazing stuff that I love--often brings me in close contact with the temporal nature of the physical world. I start thinking about all the awesome and amazing stuff I've purchased in the past and how I either neglected it, broke it, lost it, or loaned it out to never see it again. Next thing you know I'm contemplating my own death and the mound of stuff I will inevitably leave behind.

I don't think I'm going to go back and get the desk.

Stuff generally depresses me. People have commented that I rarely buy stuff for myself, and my response is that this is because stuff stresses me out. I once read something by C.S. Lewis that said we should not say we "love" stuff like pens or computers or shower curtains. He said that it demeans love. We like those things. We love living beings--people, animals. He didn't have to tell me twice. Any time I've become convinced that I love an object, I know what's coming. I'm going to feel some level of indescribable loss. I'm not going to really be able to pinpoint why it is that I feel this loss in that moment. I'll think I should be happy. I'll think, "I love this thing, and I have it. Why am I not happy?" I will not be happy because, ultimately, what is an object but a momentary stimulant? I can love a person even when that person is not with me. I can love a person even when that person has let me down. I cannot love a desk I've owned for six months even if it is sitting right in front of me. I'll enter the room and leave the room and I won't even notice the desk I once fingered with joy a week into its first arrival in my house.

Then I will hate myself for being an ungrateful bitch.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I love the desk even more when it's just part of my daily experience, a beautiful object that has become entertwined with my life to the point that we're being together. Maybe I love the desk even more when it's not just an object to admire but instead becomes an active object, an object that exists with its own purpose, does it's own thing. Maybe really loving something only begins when all that infatuation with it ends.

A woman I used to know used to say that she would always leave people after she'd done her three songs and dances. Once she'd run out of her three songs and dances, she figured they wouldn't find her interesting anymore, and if they didn't find her interesting, they wouldn't love her.

Maybe I should go back and get the desk.

Man vs. The Machine

2010-04-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

I just read this article about education reform at Reason.com. If you're not going to read it yourself, let me share the gist: our attempts at education reform (higher public school spending, vouchers, charter schools, magnets, etc.) have not lead to increased overall performance.

But this is America! We practically INVENTED progress! How could it be that we cannot come up with a workable solution that will make all of our kids test-acers and over-achievers! This just isn't possible! Everyone should be SMART, and everyone should be smart IN THE SAME WAY! That's how you build a nation of successful people!

My basic argument is that the fact that we even see this as a problem is a sign of our real problem. Modern thinking is that people should be like robots, and there is only one right worldview on what it means to be "successful." When I initially started thinking about why the idea that there has to be some way to turn us all into standardized test-acers rubs me wrong, my own argument made me sound like an elitist asshole who believes in a free market aristocracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. While I think it's true that some people are just naturally better at certain things than others and there's really no hope for changing this by influential degrees either way, that argument reads a lot different than it's meant. Why? Because I think that the real problem isn't that people are different and there's not a lot we can do about that. The real problem is that we live in a society that sees these differences as weaknesses.

Case in point: me. I'm bad at math. I'm unbelievably bad at math. My boyfriend will write down a list of amounts of money that I owe him for bills, and I'll add them up. Then, when I show him the piece of paper upon which lies my sum, he'll look at me bewildered and say, "Where did you get THAT number?" I'll be $30 for no reason. It's addition. People who are not tall enough to ride carnival rides can do it with no effort. I spent the greater part of my work day today (7 hours) trying to add numbers and coming up with a different sum every single time I added them. I consider the parabola my arch enemy. (Get it? Parabola? Arch? It's a math joke, so I could be off.) When I was in school, I had to rely on the kindness of teachers who were very understanding of my difficulties and liked me enough to let me retake the tests over and over until I at least passed. They knew I wasn't going to be building an entire life around this stuff. It wasn't like my poor math skills were going to be a danger to anyone. One teacher even told me when I was retaking an Algebra test for the third time that Einstein failed Algebra.

I'm pretty sure this is the only reason Algebra didn't lead to my committing suicide.

No amount of "good teaching" will ever change my math deficiency. I don't even really consider it a deficiency. It's just the way I am. I am a non-linear thinker. I look at most things from every angle. In math, there's one right way to do things. There's a point A and a point B, and you're supposed to go straight from one to the other. My mind cannot handle this. I think it's a dumb way to do things. I believe ANYTHING is possible. It's easy to see why this doesn't reconcile with the way addition works. Reconcile! Addition! I could make puns all night. You could send me to a charter school, give me a voucher, throw money at my education from all sides, and still I'd be horrible at math. My head is still in shock from today's 7 hour add-a-thon.

But when I was in college, the teacher once came to the answer 1066 for an equation. He asked, "And what happened in 1066?" I was the only one who raised my hand. "The Norman invasion!" I'm not completely useless after all.

I believe in the idea of multiple intelligences. Different people have different intelligences. Looking at this list, I'd say I'm verbally and existentially intelligent. In other words, that's how I see the world, therefore making it my strength. It's not good or bad--it just is what it is. "Gardner's theory argues that intelligence, particularly as it is traditionally defined, does not sufficiently encompass the wide variety of abilities humans display." When you standardize learning and what are considered successful outcomes for that learning, you ignore the way the natural world really works. We do this in the name of supposed progress, but what would cause far more progress would be to be open to the idea that everyone has strengths, and they're different for a reason. Nurture each child's strengths. That's what will really change the American educational system for the better.

This issue is extremely nuanced. There isn't just the problem of intelligences. There's the issue of temperament. A person could be very intelligent in some way but also have a very sensitive disposition, causing him or her to experience stress to such a degree that he or she cannot work as much for the same length of time as people with a higher tolerance to stress, for example. And there are environmental factors at play. Do the child's parents talk to him or her on a regular basis? Does he or she live in a poor neighborhood or an affluent one? And why is there such a disparity in what people are paid for different types of work? There is an idea in this country that intelligence is good, therefore "mentally taxing" jobs often pay much higher than physically taxing ones. But why should this be so? I would argue that it's just the idea we latched onto at some point long ago. It's arbitrary, really, what we value in this case. All of these factors and more are the reasons that I cannot wrap my mind around how we could possibly believe that there even could be one standard for measuring educational and, ultimately, life success, let alone why there should be one.

If there's one thing I've noticed through the course of my life, it's that whenever a single standard is set, things become hopelessly inefficient and unnecessarily hard. A lot of time goes into trying to herd people to the standard, and this is inefficient and hard because many people rightfully can't or don't want to go there. In all actuality, I don't see "low test scores" as a problem at all. People fail at things. People do well at other things--many of which aren't even considered part of the standard because our society has lost all respect for that which does not make you money. Are you a good friend? Who cares? The robot has love for no one. He can work and produce ad infinitum, making things and more things without analyzing this action. There is an idea that the robot is a perfect being.

But people are not robots, and I can't imagine why we'd want to be.

I don't blame the dicks...

2010-04-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

Last night I went with my friend Brandi to see Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a documentary film about (stating the obvious here) Jean-Michel Basquiat. Afterward we were discussing how cool it would be to just give up on life and go be homeless like that. Okay, that's paraphrasing, and it was mostly me thinking it would be super kick-ass to give up on life and go be homeless. Brandi commented that it made her want to do something. She said the homeless part was easy because he was famous, but there was a scene in the film where he says in an interview that at the time he was homeless, he was prepared to be homeless forever. The fame and riches never figured in during the homelessness part. The part I admired was the willingness to give up everything and take a risk. It's entirely likely at the time that he would die poor and a nobody. That just happens to be not what happened.

I'm not a fan of the idea that eventual outcomes justify actions. Had he died poor and a nobody, would his decision to take the risk have been less worthy? My dad likes to say that if my boyfriend and I someday do get married it will justify the fact that we are now living together without being married. Is that true? Does "all's well that ends well" hold up? As a fan of the idea that it is the motivations for an action that are most important, not necessarily the outcomes, I think taking a risk and failing is just as valid as taking a risk and succeeding, but this is not even really the point of my story for today.

Brandi commented that it was worth it because he became famous. Then she said, "But it's easier for men." What she meant was that it is easier for men to live on nothing, take said risks, and, ultimately, become famous. I said, "You think so?" rather naively.

Just the other day another friend of mine said the same thing, and, again, my reaction was a sort of wide-eyed, "Really? You think so?" This morning I was reading some blog posts at feminist websites, which is something I do often partially just because some of these ladies write some really great, snappy, witty commentary. But I have to say, I just don't really feel all that oppressed. In fact, I don't feel oppressed by men at all. I think there are some real douche bags out there, to be sure, but I also think there are some ladies with whom I'd rather not associate, either. The existence of douche bags--even female-hating ones--does not equal oppression, though. Oppression is when someone else actively makes it impossible for me to try to accomplish whatever life goals I've got going on, and, really, I think someone can only make this impossible by passing a law that says, "You, ladyperson, cannot try to accomplish your life goals." Notice the use of the word "try." That's all I have a right to--the right to try. Women failing at something is not proof of sexism. Plenty of men fail at things, too.

My father loves to trot out my grandmother as the original feminist. He points out that she did what she wanted to do, period. I know this is true because I remember her, and I remember exactly who was in charge whenever she was around. It was her. I don't think I ever even heard my grandfather speak until she died. My dad likes to point out that she worked and was very, very opinionated about pretty much everything. That stuff runs in the family. All of the women in my family are opinionated, pushy to varying degrees, and ultimately make our own decisions. In a world full of men I've managed to get a college degree, get jobs, have relationships, and mostly do my thing with the amount of setback I'd expect anyone to face. I will say that I think modern life is kind of a bitch, but I think it's pretty much a bitch to everyone in some way or another.

I just don't feel like anyone's sexism is holding me back. People can have opinions; those people don't necessarily have power over me.

I'm left wondering if maybe we've come to define ourselves by these ideas for so long that we just continue to believe they're true even when they're not. I was raised with the same ideas. I believed them for a while. I used to get into heated arguments with people over every single seemingly lady-hating comment or action, believing these things to be evidence of my oppression. Then I got wrapped up in trying to accomplish my own goals--a motley and rag-tag set of goals to be sure--and woke up one day to realize that at no point had I been beset by sexist foes. Could it be true that maybe men don't hold as much power over my ability to try my hand at life as I once thought they did?

Being empowered doesn't equal having sway over the outcomes of anything. It means understanding that you can do whatever you want. It means understanding that you might not succeed easily or even at all, and, yes, this struggle or lack of success might be due partially to the fact that there are douche bags out there. But unless they pass a law saying that women don't have the right to pursue their own goals, then I'm just not so sure it's as hard as we really like to think it is.

Yoga for Flexibility

2010-04-02T18:29:00.000-07:00

Tonight I did headstand for the first time in years. Whenever I do headstand, I think of Dan Paul.

When I first met my friend Dan Paul, he was very into yoga. We worked together, and because of the free-for-all nature of our internet-based company culture, we would do yoga during the afternoons sometimes. I never imagined I could do a headstand. But after a while watching Dan Paul do headstand, I wanted to try.

What always stands out about the hardest yoga poses for me (tree pose, seemingly so simple, caused me undo fits for years) is that I can't do them when I push myself. When I go in with the competitive and ambitious attitude that this time I will do it, I invariably fall over. After years of struggling with tree pose, one day I just did it because I was asked to by an instructor. I'd given up on the idea of being able to hold the pose without putting my foot down early or maybe even losing my balance completely while struggling to maintain control. I felt light and free from any ideas about what the outcome would be. And then I just did it. When I lowered my foot, I felt elated as if a miracle had just occurred. It didn't feel like something I had done consciously. It felt like something that happened on its own through me. I once heard a yoga teacher say during tree pose, "If you begin to sway, don't give up. Trees sway." This perfectly illustrates acceptance.

After years of doing it again and again and failing in frustration, I gave up and opened myself up to any possibility. Then something changed and I was let in.

If tree pose was so hard, headstand seemed truly impossible, a pose for the big boys and girls who were much prettier than me. I have no idea what looks would actually have to do with such a thing, but that is usually how I translate my sense of deficiency. Dan Paul was always so light. That's the word I would use to describe him--light. Light in the sense of glowing and radiant, but also light in the sense of unfettered. I know there are times when he feels weighed down, but I always experience him as light. It is his gift. Having Dan Paul there made me feel like it was at least worth trying. After a few failed attempts, which are to be expected with almost anything, I performed headstand. I wasn't propped against a wall. I was in the middle of a room on a wood floor, and I was doing headstand.

Moments ago, as I did headstand, I thought of Dan Paul. The immediate impulse was to think, "I never would've done headstand without Dan Paul!" As I became conscious of this thought, I countered with, "But aren't I the one doing it? Is there really any credit due to anyone but myself? Isn't it possible that I might've learned it from somewhere else eventually?" Then I thought about change. I've read and heard a lot about change lately. People wondering if they change themselves or if life's events change them. People wondering when the change they so desperately seek will happen. People wondering how they can change and why they cannot seem to will themselves to change, and people wondering why other people won't change their minds so that they may have the change they seek.

The truth is, every single moment and event, no matter how tiny, changes us. When we're asking all those questions above, what we're really saying is, "Why won't reality bend to my will?" or, "I refuse to admit that I've been affected by anything other than my own conscious decisions!" The truth is that what happened is what happened, and Dan Paul influenced me to take on headstand. I do headstand without Dan Paul, but I do headstand because Dan Paul helped me. It's not an either/or proposition. When someone and I interact and after that interaction I am never the same again, it is because this is the nature of change--two forces bumping up against each other, exchanging molecules or changing trajectory because of the collision, after which neither are the same again. Even if we don't notice the change immediately, even if it is only a tiny shift, it is happening within and without us. As with tree pose, the change isn't about bending anything to our will. It is about becoming flexible and open to the change.

I do know that I like it very much that I always think of Dan Paul when I do headstand.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

-Max Ehrmman

True Love is in Awareness

2010-04-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

The summer after I graduated from college, my family went to Galveston for a family reunion.

At some point in the afternoon, my mother, brothers and sister were all in the ocean, leaving my father and I alone on the beach. At some point, my father turned to me, and I've never forgotten what he said.

"If you want to sing in a bar band for the rest of your life, I don't care as long as it makes you happy."

I'd been singing since before the moment when memories are formed. As a very small girl, I sang and hummed incessantly. I loved it. It drove most everyone else crazy. I once stood up in the middle of a lesson in kindergarten, pushed in my chair ceremoniously, and began to sing for the class with my head held high. I was told this story by my mother, and, knowing me, I'd probably been sitting there for ten minutes fantasizing about performing as a famous adult and completely forgotten I was actually a five-year-old in class. It was an integral part of who I was--both the singing and the dreaming. So when my father told me he'd be happy with me singing for nothing for the rest of my life, it struck me as one of the sweetest things I'd ever been told.

And it was one of those rare moments when one feels completely seen.

Singing for nothing wasn't my father's dream for me. I knew that, given the option and complete control, he'd have chosen I be a lawyer like him or something similar. But my father knew me. To this day, some 13 years later, he still refers to me as his "artsy" daughter. "Artsy" is code for "unconventional" in pretty much every way. He knew me then, at 18, and he still knows me.

A few years ago I got sober. I'd been drinking for so long I didn't know what anxiety felt like anymore. One day I was sitting in my parents' den with my father when I realized I felt anxious. I was shocked. Drinking always made me feel "laid back." I said, "I feel anxious!" out loud because I was so impressed with the level of anxiety and the alien experience.

"You've always been anxious, even when you were a little kid."

It was in that moment that I realized again how well my father knew me. It felt almost as if he knew me better than I did, or at least was able to remember things about me that I'd purposefully tried to forget. I always thought I'd done such a good job at pretending like I didn't care to cover up all the anxiety, and as far as most people were concerned, I probably had. My father had noticed it, though. His little artsy, anxious daughter.

I remember these moments because there was no judgment in them. Would my father have wished me less anxious? Would he have wished I be more ambitious in making money? Would he want me to be more like him in these ways I was different? One would think so. This is what we always hear about parents. But he pointed out these things as matters of fact. I remember these moments because they were the ultimate acts of love--he saw who I was without putting the limits of his own opinions or wishful thinking around what he saw. He wasn't blinded by denial, and he wasn't admonishing with disappointment. He was simply pointing me out.

No one feels more loved than when they are simply noticed when they think that no one is looking.

I try to remember this. I want to give this to other people. At times I fail. I'm sure that at times my father failed. What's interesting is that I can so clearly remember these specific moments when he saw who I really was, but I can't think of a specific instance in which he failed. This isn't to say he's always approving, but even in his disapproval I can feel the love in that he will still care about me even as I do the thing of which he disapproves. It is not in his approval that I feel loved. It is in his awareness of the reality of me that I feel loved.

So much of what we think we see in people is actually what we make up about those people based on our own assumptions. When we see past those assumptions, we give people the ultimate gift--the freedom of being in love.

A couple of months into our relationship, my boyfriend and I celebrated his birthday together. As we sat on the couch at the end of the night, he leaned in close and said, "I like you just the way you are." I almost cried because a simple, "I like you," can mean so many things. It can mean, "I like who I think you are," or, "I like you, but I have a few reservations." It could mean, "I like you, but there are a couple of things I'd change." It was the "just the way you are" that struck me, partially because years before I'd been asked to whisper into someone's ear the thing I'd always wanted to hear, and he'd said it word-for-word.

Just the way you are is all of you, and all of you wants to be loved.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

-Mother Teresa

Happy Birthday, 31

2010-03-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

I remember when my friend
threw my 21st birthday party.
Someone threw up on the back
step. Someone spanked me
with a frying pan. We almost
had to go to the hospital because
someone took the wrong kind of
drugs. I was thinking about this
as I returned home from
my birthday lunch, 31, with that
same friend. She'd come from
three hours away to be with me.
We slept in the same bed. We had
lunch in the neighborhood where
we lived eight years ago now,
when I spent most of my days
with the blinds drawn in total darkness.
I was thinking about this as I returned
home, from my birthday lunch, 31,
crying. I cried because it's all gone.
I cried because people showed up.
I cried because I was sad about
what's been lost. I cried because
of what's been found. I cried because
I don't know.

And I'm crying right now
because I'm alive.

...and then the world imploded.

2010-03-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

So, somewhere along the way between yesterday and today, I realized that I respect blogging as a medium.

This is crazy. It is also crazy that I am conveying this message in a blog--and not my first blog, and not a blog I started somewhere between yesterday and today. But let me be clear on a few things. One, I'm a person, so sometimes my actions are contradictory to my own beliefs. Sure, in a perfect world, it never would've come to this, but it did. I blogged. Which brings me to my second point: I've got an ego. I could write things and save them on my hard drive where they could then languish for all eternity, but then I would never get to bask in the glow of the occasional complimentary comment from someone or another. Really, my blog is a sign that I've got a big old ego but very little faith in my ability to ever get published.

Which, you understand, I've always seen as vastly different from blogging.

I don't know that my argument against blogging was all that unique. I viewed it the same way I viewed the idea of people paying to have their own book published: lame. I suppose there's a very absurd idea at play here, that idea being that unless one is somehow discovered and plucked from the wastebasket of all the people in this world who think they can write (and, believe me, I've read enough bad writing to know that there are lots of people whose writing belongs in a wastebasket) by another person or entity outside of themselves, they're a hack. Anybody can jump online, set up a blogger account, and start posting whatever they like with no controls. That just doesn't seem very impressive. And what, you might ask, about the blogs that take off and get popular? Aren't they "chosen" by another person or entity outside of themselves as worthwhile? Well, that's problematic for people who believe that most people are idiots and can't be trusted with their own taste.

I guess you could say that just this morning I realized that I've been an elitist asshole with an inferiority complex. And, for the record, this whole "blogs are bullshit" argument doesn't apply to blogs hosted on sites for marketing or journalistic purposes wherein the blogger has been hired to write said blogs--although, really, I'd rather these be called "columns", as they are just what would be a newspaper or magazine column hosted online instead of in print. I mean, remember print?

So, when did I have this great epiphany? I was trying to come up with something to write about and absolutely nothing was inspiring me. As usual when this happens after about five minutes of hopeful pondering I started to spiral down into the idea that I was NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO THINK OF ANYTHING TO WRITE ABOUT EVER AGAIN. I was finished. I'd said all I had to say. Since I was obviously never going to be able to come up with any of my own ideas and would subsequently have to shut 'er down and quit the game, I'd have to come up with other ways to pass the time until my eventual death, so I decided to check in on one of my favorite blogs--www.hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com. As expected, there was a new post, and it was, indeed, funny. And the girl who is responsible for Hyperbole and a Half posts frequently. Like almost daily frequently. Of course, they're not all pitch perfect, but most of the posts are either hilarious or some approximation of hilarious. And that's when it hit me. Somewhere between my complete demise as a writer and the realization that someone out there probably goes through that on an almost daily basis but pushes through it and perseveres, I recognized that blogging is totally legit! Because the real problem in writing is not whether or not you ever get plucked from the wastebasket by publishing Jesus and singled out for recognition. To some degree, that is a crap shoot. Plenty of great writers have gone to their deaths completely unrecognized, and I've read a lot of shit someone actually plucked out of the wastebasket and paid to have pressed on paper and sold as something pretending to be a good book. No, the real problem is between the writer and the writing.

This whole question of blogging's validity as a medium is really a question about standards. Today I was having a conversation with a coworker about standards of a different nature. It started out as a conversation about linguistics--specifically, the idea that language evolves over time. When I was in college, there was an English graduate student who worked at the video store near campus. Whenever I would go to check out, he would ask me how I was doing. I would always respond with, "Good," and then cringe because I knew what was coming next: he would actually correct me, pointing out that I was, in fact, "Well." I used to see him around the Language Building on campus, and he didn't appear to ever be with anybody else. This little habit might explain why. If we all stuck to such formalized rules of speaking, we'd all still be speaking Elizabethan English like the folks from the furthest reaches of Appalachia. My coworker and I both agreed that there is a difference between the standards in spoken language and the standards in written language, and within that difference there are several other differences. It's fine to write, "How r u 2day?" in a text message, but please, for the love of God, don't write it in a high school English essay. But if there is a need for some kind of standard, where is the line? Blogging is a completely rogue entity. It's the exact thing that the internet was designed to accomplish, namely that anyone could say anything he or she liked. That implies very few, if any, standards. Can something be meaningful without externally imposed standards, or are our standards just another trapping of our egos and an expression of man's drive to survive by getting rid of the competition? Really, the question comes down to this: does everyone get to have a say? Is everyone's viewpoint valid--even if, as a friend of mine once said of someone's blog, his or her writing makes me wish I was illiterate?

I really meant to bring the book with me, but I didn't. I was going to quote Chuck Klosterman here, but I guess I'll have to paraphrase or approximate. In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman talks about how sometimes writing is easy and sometimes it is like trying to tear down a building with a ball-peen hammer. Sometimes it feels impossible. Sometimes it feels like I'm not up to the task of saying it, and I'm afraid it will be lost. Sometimes it feels like all of my body is shaking with something to say that just cannot be said. Sometimes it feels like it might not even need to be said. And if I can overcome this block--the incessant self-questioning that brings me back here again and again--it is a real feat.

Why would I not want to share that with someone else, even if it is only in a blog?

The Veil of Illusion

2010-03-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I want to be invisible.

A few years ago I noticed it. It was a Sunday, and I wanted to go to the dance club I've been frequenting for twelve years now. I haven't gotten to know many people there in twelve years, but I've gotten to know a few. When I really cherish a place, I usually don't want to know many people there. I guess it's too sticky. I guess I don't find other people in my freedom.

I wanted to go and dance, but I felt a violent reaction in my body at the thought of having to talk to anyone. The thought of a nameless mass of people surrounding me didn't bother me. Sometimes it's easiest to be alone in the middle of a people who are all paying attention to something other than you. It was the thought that I'd run into someone I knew and have to interact or risk them thinking me strange or a bitch that paralyzed me. I thought, "I could wear a veil! A huge black veil coming down off a hat, covering me to my hips!"

Sometimes I wish I could wear a burqa. I wish I could wear a burqa to work, to the store, around my house when I don't live alone.

I want to be able to slip through the world unseen, free from everyone's watchful eyes and their judgments. It seems that everyone has an opinion about some aspect of who I am. I don't mind that people have opinions. I just wish they wouldn't share so freely sometimes or act as if their affections were so tied to my ability to adhere to a certain set of superficial standards. If I want to stay up all night eating candy, does that mean you have to subtly threaten to leave me?

I know this is just how it feels. It feels like there is all this pressure. It feels like there is this choice to be made. I can't decide if this is just an illusion or something I have to learn to live with. I hear so many different things about the way the world works, and when I've tested each of them they only seem to be true to a point. I am told that I am the one who is too hard on me. "She would not go into company because of the ill-at-ease feeling other people brought upon her. And she never could decide whether it were her fault or theirs. She half respected these other people, and continuous disillusion maddened her. She wanted to respect them. Still, she thought the people she did not know were wonderful. Those she knew seemed always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that irritated her beyond bearing. She would rather stay at home and avoid the rest of the world, leaving it illusory."

This passage from Lawrence's The Rainbow reminds me of when I moved in high school. I was 16. I complained because that is what you do when you are 16. I complained because I was given the subtle impression that I would be perceived as an unfeeling person if I didn't. Even with my feigned complaining I ended up getting a lecture from my brother because I didn't miss my friends enough. But secretly I was elated. I was happy to be leaving what I saw as the confines of the people I'd known since I was a very little girl. I felt free, like I'd been limited by supposedly being known as a certain kind of person and could now be any kind of person I wanted. I immediately cut my hair. It was as if I'd felt I'd had to respond to what was expected of me because no one would believe otherwise.

This is why sometimes I want to be invisible, wear a veil, don a burqa. Because even though just yesterday a friend pointed out that I have always done what I wanted, others be damned, sometimes it gets tiring feeling as if those are two opposing forces--myself and others. And since I cannot make others stop putting their expectations on me, I guess my only option is to cease to exist.

At least in theory.

Let's just move to Detroit!

2010-03-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I came home from work feeling a little defeated. Why? Because a scant 2-and-a-half months into my new job, I've come to a realization: I cannot stand sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day! Which is what I do! Which, therefore, is the end of the world! I realize that I am just like 98% of the people in this world, but I'm more sensitive than most. Most people can just suck it up and accept their fate, sit at a desk all day and get stuff done. After about two hours of the stuff, my brain starts to freeze up and I find myself perpetually refreshing my Twitter feed, praying for some catastrophic world news or a funny Onion headline to break up the monotony, and beating myself up for being such a worthless sack of crap.

At times it even feels like I can hear myself slowly dying.

I started this job with all the enthusiasm in the world. I know that at 30 I'm way too old for idealism, but I can't help it. Even though I know everything is meaningless, I want to believe in stuff. So I came to work at a non-profit. I help raise the money that keeps this operation afloat. But the youthful (read: delusional) idealism I brought to the job has quickly faded as reality has set in: modern life is absurd and ridiculous and, yes, meaningless. I still believe in being helpful above being a dick, but that's hard to remember when I find myself sitting at my desk at 3 pm fighting the urge to just give up alltogether and stare blankly into space.

So I walk into the house yesterday and find my boyfriend working on a freelance article. Then he starts talking. "Well, today started off strong. I did this, this, and this," he says. "But...then I took an hour-long nap and watched Fletch." I knew he was thinking I'd be horrified by his wasting of time. Mostly I was just horrified at his choice of movies. But as soon as he got out the words "nap" and "Fletch", he started spewing out a very specific list of all the productive stuff, large and small, he'd done as a defense. And I thought, "So, I'm not the only one who feels a little lost at times as to what to do with myself AND beats myself up for it! Sweet!"

I then went on to tell him that I've now decided my dream job is some combination of farmer, professional student and misanthrope. "I've decided that I'm going to stop trying to be a productive member of society!" I declared.

"You do that?"

It would appear not. While I did graduate college in December of 2002, I didn't get a "real job" until, well, January of 2010. I define "real job" as the kind my parents would want me to have--the kind that comes with health insurance and doesn't make people think your child has a drug problem. In other words, not waiting tables or writing for an internet-based business with four employees who all work out of someone's loft in downtown Dallas. My work history is very, let's just say, counter culture. I spent many years thinking that this was somehow causing me misery.

Nope! Turns out I'm just a miserable person! And, hell, if I'm going to be a miserable person, I might as well do something that gives me all the mental and emotional space needed to be miserable without the threat of getting fired!

Today a friend put through a Facebook status update saying that he's comforted when his friends write blogs about how they don't know what they're doing with their lives, either. So, this one's for you, Donald! When I saw that, I thought, "Okay, I get it. EVERYONE, if given the option, would probably be doing something other than what they are doing. EVERYONE has a bit of the old insecurity about what they're doing with their life. Nan, don't blog about this because, at this point, the topic is redundant." I thought that last bit about halfway through this and, quite honestly, don't want to waste the copy. It left me thinking, though, that maybe the key is to accept my fate and just try to focus on the parts of my life that make the drudgery bearable.

But then I think, "Hey, if life really is meaningless, why not go ahead and give this whole misanthropic student farmer thing a try?" If everything is nothing, what have I got to lose?

Want to know what eternity sounds like?

2010-03-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

This morning I woke early. I like to get up before anything else gets up. I laid in bed next to my love, my belly pressed to his back, my legs curved to fit with his legs. I placed my open palm to his belly. I prayed. "Thank you," I said.

I got up and started the coffee. I exercised. I stretched. Then I poured myself my first cup of coffee and sat down on the couch. I like to take my mornings slow, allow time to stretch out in front of me, to circle me like a halo and stand still before it suddenly snaps back like elastic and becomes taunt once again. When you're the only thing awake, it feels like waking up after the bomb.

I was sitting on the couch, still and quiet, when I suddenly recognized the voice in my head. There is always a hum in the background. Often I don't even notice what it is. Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's chatter. Most of the time it's both layered on top of each other, incoherent and constant. It pretends to be white noise. But somehow, against the quietness of my morning, it managed to stand out in high relief from the blankness and become clear.

The voice was talking shit.

It was jumping from person to person like a bee travels between flowers. "He does this. She does that. They do this. They do that." Each statement might sound like simple fact save the tone. Judgments are hard to see. They are not colored by our worldview; they are our worldview. Judgments are what we have come to believe to be good and bad. If asked to write down on a piece of paper what we believe, most of us would lie. Most of us wouldn't even know we were lying. Is telling an untruth lying if you don't know you're lying? If you believe what you say, aren't you telling the truth?

If you want to know what you really believe, get up before the rest of the world and try to be quiet. Your mind will continue to work with very little effort. It will say things without your conscious attempts at crafting interesting sentences. It will tell you what you think of as good and what you think of as bad. It will tell you things you didn't even know you thought--and some of it will be stuff you don't want to know. Let your mind wander. Sometimes I am shocked at what my brain will tell me I believe if I let it go off unsupervised.

I have to hear this voice before I can begin to understand or change myself.

Over the last week, I have had the honor of being in the great well of sadness. It is a feeling I wouldn't describe as depression. It is like being in contact with the reality of suffering. This morning, when I was sitting on the couch and eavesdropping on my thoughts, I realized that these thoughts cause so much of that sadness. I am held down by them. I am also grieving what is lost when I buy into them. I believe the sadness may come from my soul observing my mind.

There was a Grimm's fairy tale about a forrest where all the roads lead back to the middle. If someone set out to escape the forrest, he might think he was heading the right direction until he found himself inexplicably back in the middle again. So I follow these thoughts and they lead me back to the middle again. I've unhooked myself from the world only to get hooked again. Again and again and again we do this if we're seeking to raise our consciousness. And it's just when you think you've gotten to the top of the mountain that you look up and realize you're actually back at the bottom.

Time snapped back taut when I heard my neighbor fire up his old clunker to go to work. I don't know that I learned much of anything this morning except that maybe I know even less than I thought I did, which was a great deal less than I knew when I was twenty. I find myself more and more in awe of how little I know the longer I stay alive. And they say that it is our thoughts that create our feelings! What am I going to do!

Why, think less and listen more, of course!

Sense and Nonsense

2010-03-03T12:31:00.001-08:00

Last night I painted. Now, I’m a writer. I’ve always painted, but mostly because there’s something soothing about the process and sometimes I come up with something I actually like (enough to hang on my own walls but would never pretend to be able to pass off as “art”). I was even an art student for about a year, which is laughable considering I make art like I shoot pool—I’m either completely on or completely off and have very little control over which state I’m in at any given point.

So last night I painted. I painted a copy of a piece by a famous artist I had made into a slide and then projected onto a canvas. It’s a lot more fun and affordable than ordering prints, and the piece ends up looking “real.” I will put it up on my wall and feel an odd mixture of accomplishment and pride over the fact that I now “own” a knock-off Beardsley.

Human emotion is a funny thing, but sometimes you have to just play into it.

There are two camps when it comes to creatives: writers and everybody else. A specific kind of person becomes a writer, and there’s a reason they become a writer as opposed to a painter, sculptor, performer, dancer, actor, photographer or musician. A real writer doesn’t become a writer because he or she shows any proficiency for the skill or writing—lots of people are grammar nerds and not writers. Writing is the act secondary to the need. While every other medium requires some sort of physical interaction with the subject while the piece itself is being made, writing requires none. In fact, writing automatically separates the writer from the subject, drawing a hard line from behind which the writer can more clearly observe and define. I can describe the physical sensation of the need. It’s very much like the reason I started smoking. It’s also why I often suddenly wish that I could walk around wearing a veil so that no one could see my face. I have a simultaneous need to exist in concrete terms while being invisible. Smoking is an action that allows me to do something while also blocking intrusion by the outside world. Wearing a veil would be much the same. Writing is exactly the same.

I’ve noticed that I’ve lost my taste for writing.

Yesterday I was reading about Cosey Fanni Tutti, a member of the music projects Throbbing Gristle and Chris and Cosey and a performance artist. I’ve always wanted to be a performance artist. It seems like a really good way to get to be naked in public. I realized at some point while reading about her that right now I want to make physical art. I use such a broad term because I’m not tied to the idea of what kind. For me the process of making things is what is most important to me, so what is made is secondary to the process of making it. There is something very different about the process of making things from the process of writing. When I am writing, I’m trying to bring some sort of truth to bear. Writing poetry is a little more like creating visual art for me in that I feel like I’m taking a picture of a place that doesn’t exist in physical terms when I write a poem, but it’s still ultimately about taking a picture of a word that represents a feeling or idea. The making of physical art is a physical experience. My whole body gets involved. At some point my brain actually stops thinking, and I move from trying to bring some sort of truth to bear using language as a representation to actually bringing an experience to bear in real time using the experience itself. Writing is about meaning. Quite frankly I find most writing that isn’t trite. But making physical objects can be about the space between meanings or the space that isn’t meaning. It can mean nothing. It can simply be about physical experience in a way that writing can’t because writing is not itself a physical experience.

Ultimately I’m a writer because I’m ambivalent about whether or not living life is a worthwhile endeavor. I’m here, so I’ll make the most of it. But had I been given a choice, I don’t know that this would’ve been my first one. I still form attachments to this world, but I like to remain a little detached. I’m the kind of person who likes to think about things to the point that it’s questionable whether I’m actually doing anything. Writing is mentally active but physically passive.

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong,” said Joseph Chilton Pearce. I find that this is precisely why I am having such a hard time with writing lately and feeling so much more drawn toward making things. I have no problem with the idea that other people might not like what I write or agree with what I say. It is not this kind of being wrong that I have a problem with. I have a problem with the fact that writing is about a concrete idea, and I am unwilling to stake a claim on any one idea at the moment. It is the fact that I have come to lose interest in almost every kind of subject upon which one might make a judgment and the wrongness that might ensue from this dilemma with which I have a problem. I do not believe in power struggle anymore; power is an illusion. There is nothing left to fight. I also believe that almost everything is meaningless and that which has meaning is something I cannot ever ferret out completely. So what is there to say?

At this point I must pause to point out that I’ve written a page-and-a-half of copy about how I have nothing to say. “We say little if not egged on by vanity,” said Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld.

Which brings me perfectly to my point. For years I have tried to move beyond vanity into meaning. Now I have found meaning wanting—or, at the very least, explored meaning to the point at which it has lost meaning. Now I want to play with vanity. When the world was full of meaning, vanity seemed superficial, the antithesis of everything I believed to be important. And, oddly, I find that superficiality is still abhorrent, but in a different way. I find that those who ascribe a deep meaning and importance to superficiality are generally wretched individuals. While I said most things are meaningless, I do believe there is a meaning which I have not yet discovered. I believe this meaning has something to do with the overcoming of the ego and the movement into oblivion. But I am intrigued by the idea that we can flaunt our vanity simply for fun. I’ve always been a very serious person, even as I was an adventuresome and frivolous person. I took everything seriously. I feel like making things instead of writing things down will open me up to being completely unserious about everything. It will allow me to put aside my fear of being wrong because I won’t have to stake any kind of claim. I will not have to make an argument.

I will just have to make a thing, and what are things but nothings?

Them Babies Got Scabies

2010-03-01T16:44:00.000-08:00

I once heard the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron compare addiction--anything that binds us and creates a compulsion--to scabies. She says that we are like a child with a bad case of scabies. If the child goes to the doctor, the doctor will tell him not to scratch because this only makes the scabies worse. The itch is so bad. The child wants to scratch. The child knows that if he scratches, he will get temporary relief. But this ultimately makes the itch worse. But, she says, if the child loves himself enough, he will not scratch...

Read about shenpa and the art of staying here.

The Myth of the Insidious Marriage Plot

2010-02-28T06:26:00.000-08:00

Friday I read this article at The Daily Beast. It's about how Tiger Woods is now seeking treatment for sex addiction after his string of affairs and how sex addiction doesn't really exist. The author, a doctor of psychiatry, says that sex addiction is just society's way of reconciling its uncomfortable feelings about a man's biological imperative to have sex with every woman he possibly can.

To hear this guy tell it, sex addiction is a female conspiracy against men, our attempt to make them into our relationship slaves.

My issue with this article is not that I don't believe in the biological imperative. I know men want to have sex. I know that men look at women and think about sex. I understand that this impulse comes from the need to spread genes. I get all of that. I am also unsure how I feel about the diagnosis of sex addiction and, in this specific Tiger Woods case, can see how he may only be entering sex addiction treatment to cover his tracks and make up with the rest of the world. I don't believe he owes the world that kind of--or any--apology, but the guy does have to make a living. What I take great issue with is the tone of the article, the sweeping generality that every man wants to cheat on his woman, and the fact that even though the author is a doctor, he sure does sound awfully defensive.

Me thinks he doth protest too much.

First of all, explaining sex addiction as another name for the male biological imperative ignores all the women who identify themselves as sex addicts. While I find the diagnosis of sex addiction dubious at best, I think it's ridiculous for a doctor to talk about sex addiction as the male sex drive. I won't go into details as to how I know this, but there are as many women at meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous as there are men. I also watched Celebrity Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, and there were more women there than men. So, what, they're just there husband-hunting? I'm not even going to be-leaguer this point as I think it speaks for itself.

Second, this idea that all men are miserable in their marriages because marriage hems in their ability to have sex with all the other women of the world. "But in between these two extremes reside garden-variety marriages wherein the wife may complain about the husband’s sexual demand, and the man may seek lovers and/or prostitutes." He's supposedly talking about the marriages of sex addicts, but he's already established that sex addiction is the way that women reconcile the normal male sex drive. So you're telling me that all men seek lovers and prostitutes outside of their marriages or, at least, want to? He also refers to the "typical" female complaint about how often husbands want to have sex.

Honestly, at this point I started thinking maybe this guy based his research on the average American sit-com.

I have no doubt, again, that this is true in some cases. I heard about a book a female psychologist wrote in which she implicates wives in their cheating husbands activities. She says that women who figure that once they're married the man should stay faithful out of obligation even if the women don't want to give it up are delusional. She says that women should take one for the team--it's all part of the give-and-take of a relationship. And, honestly, I agree with her on some level. There's never an excuse for cheating. If you're planning on having sex with someone other than your wife, dump your wife first. I do believe, however, that which ever partner has the lower sex drive should sometimes have sex despite his or her lack of desire if he or she is really interested in making the overall relationship work.

I say "he or she" because it's been my general experience that I'm always the one in my relationships who wants to have sex more often than my partner. This is part of my argument against this article. Who says women always complain about their husbands' sexual appetites?

This idea that all men feel oppressed by marriage ignores all the ones who don't. I was talking to a man on Friday night who married his girlfriend of 13 years. He said he loves being married. He said he feels we have an innate need to partner up. He feels that partnering--long-term relationships, marriage, co-habitation--is instinctual. But what about his supposed sex addiction? If he's feeling his wings have been clipped and he wishes he was able to go out and fuck everything that moves, I couldn't find that feeling anywhere in his overabundance of enthusiasm for his marriage.

Marriage isn't a plot perpetrated upon men by women. I never buy the "societal pressures" argument when people are talking about marriage and family. I know there may be perceived societal pressures. If you're that weak that you can't resist the nagging parents, the friends who look at you like a loser or a leper, or the movies and TV shows that show having a family as the norm, than that's your problem. Don't come crying to me about it. Life is about making choices, and there may be no perfect choice, but if a man has decided he really wants to be married and have children for whatever reason, he needs to suck it up and deal with whatever feelings of ambivalence may be left over on any issue within that construct. "I want children, so I'm going to give up having sex with other women."

What really struck me was that this article was written by a psychiatrist. That lends an air of credibility. But the tone of voice is so over-the-top and one-sided that it can't possibly hold water.

Personally, I'm guessing he likes to have sex with prostitutes.

On Fish and Bicycles Revisited

2010-02-27T12:53:00.001-08:00

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. Women have a more accurate sense of reality; they are physically and spiritually more complete. Culture, I said, was invented by men, because it is by culture that they make themselves whole.

-Camille Paglia

Le Petit Mort

2010-02-27T10:46:00.000-08:00

I am no longer charming,
for, if I am to be evil, I will
have to be evil all the way.
I have retired my cold external
disregard; it stirs too many feelings
I am unwilling to cut free.
To be evil woman must forget,
cut herself off from even herself
as she serves herself, for
everyone feels a tug of doubt,
remorse for the small child
left dying in the gutter out of
neglect. I once read that even
women who do not want children
must prepare themselves
for the inevitable sting of guilt.
Unless completely severed,
our minds cannot forget our biology,
our cells crying out with primordial
messages that call us to act.
So I have left my charm behind
because to feed it I must have
others to sacrifice. I recognize
I am less charming without it.
It is, after all, charm. But I walk
a sharp edge between dark and light;
one cannot be whole any other way.
I hear my charm calling to me
from the closet. I don't console it--
I must treat it like it is dead.
I cannot forget things I still finger,
even listlessly. I make my mind
a blank slate. I stare hopefully
out the car window, hoping
to see it pass me in another car,
to simply catch a glimpse of my
oldest love and my old enemy.
I cannot bury her because she
will not appear--she stays hidden,
avoids the shovel like a knife
that would make her disappear
completely. I let her stir, clamor
in her little box, keep her like a
pair of baby shoes behind
the door.

I am through with her, but she
is not through with me.

A Transmission Ran Round the Sun and Came Back to Me

2010-02-24T21:25:00.000-08:00

I decided to peek into my saved e-mails. I found a couple from around 2003 between me and someone who then dropped completely off the cliff. In these e-mails I found this poem. I remember this poem. I remember how the themes of heat burning ran like a conjoining ribbon through everything I wrote then. I forgot, however, about my "no capitalization ever" period. It had no title on it, and I'm going to leave it that way.

white light for children,
for the hot water warming pink
skin, stocking cotton putting them down,
doughy. white light for the soft,
locked away in piles of pillows,
kept keeping dreams, the feel of mink
for hair and empty towns,
carless. like a time before cars.

yellow light for flies and sweat.
poker chips and palmettos reclining,
referencing ancestors, loosening laughs,
thighs. yellow light whirrs fans with jagged blades,
blowing on wet skin, blowing on each other,
but still kept in heat, the shining
dull and drowsy eyed, but fired,
thoughtless. like moon songs and minutes.

yellow light is for fever;
a slow burn, a dripping heat.

The Lost Blog, or On Fish and Bicycles Revised

2010-02-20T10:43:00.000-08:00

I wrote an entire essay entitled, "On Fish and Bicycles". It was about the difference between men and women. Then I found this quote, and it pretty much said everything I wanted to say in three sentences.

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. This is the difference between the sexes.

-Oscar Wilde

Damn you and thank you, Mr. Wilde.

Blizzard

2010-02-19T11:13:00.001-08:00

The snow here has disappeared
so quietly, exactly as it fell.
I hardly heard it leaving; simply
turned and it was gone. The thickest,
greatest snow since forty years ago
is gone, and I can hardly tell
that it ever even happened. The hush
is still with us, a silent reverence
settled into our chests. I see
the occasional hard mound of a
memory of a man, perhaps his hand
or foot, and then I believe
in everything only dead people know--

soon there will be flowers where bare
but snow-flowered trees once stood.

Entropy

2010-02-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

According to elementary school science teachers the world over (and, by the "world" I mean America, and by "America" I mean at my elementary school in Dallas, TX), entropy is what makes a top slowly decrease in speed and eventually come to a rest after it's been set spinning. It's the desire of all things to reach a homogeneous state of death.

Everything is trying to die, all the time.

Today I learned that one of my coworkers has flesh-eating bacteria. When I heard the news, I felt as though I was going to vomit. I'm not being overdramatic when I say that my three biggest health-related fears are aneurisms, brain cancer, and flesh-eating bacteria. What scares me so much about flesh-eating bacteria is that it might appear to the less-knowledgeable observer at first as just a skin irritation or rash. Not wanting to appear hyper-vigilant, the sufferer might not go to the doctor. Next thing the sufferer knows, they're dying of flesh-eating bacteria.

It's a reminder that for all that we know, so much is out of our hands. It's also a reminder that no matter how smart we think we are, we're really not any more ahead of the game than we ever were. Nature always wins, and nature wants us dead.

I was thinking about all of this while doing dishes. I was thinking about how we all try so hard to fight the mundane nature of life. And I was thinking about how this is fine, of course, and even probably necessary. Can you imagine how horrible life would be if we weren't struck down with aneurisms or flesh-eating bacteria or brain cancer for 97 years and hadn't once tried to fight the mundane nature of life? The problem arises, though, when we fight so hard we actually come to believe we can do anything about it. People have become so consumed at times by this obsession to get beyond the mundane nature of life that they've left behind dear, precious, wonderful things and destroyed themselves on the altar of excitement. They've been cruel to others. They've been cruel to themselves. They've done too many drugs, had too much booze, and had fleeting affairs based on even more fleeting attraction to the superficial. They drive recklessly for no reason other than to feel the thrill of what they consciously deny as possible death. This has been presented as nobel by some, and, I have to admit, it's one way to go. A death is a death is a death. It's funny that I'm so freaked out by aneurisms, flesh-eating bacteria and brain cancer. In fact, I should welcome an aneurism. It's quick and, from what I understand about aneurisms, painless.

What struck me about this while doing the dishes wasn't that there is some great argument to be made in favor of a particular way to go. I stopped debating that with myself a while back and am not particularly interested in convincing anyone either way. To some degree it's simply a matter of picking one's poison. I would prefer to have people in my life who want something good to come from all of this, but even that is simply my own judgment about what's good in the first place. I want to be a person who wants the best for others. I want to be a person who doesn't actively disregard the impact I might have on another. I want to be honest, whatever that means. I want people like this in my life. I tried things the other way, and the truth is that it just wasn't killing me fast enough. I figured I might as well try to do it a different way while I'm here.

But I don't believe I'm beating entropy either way.

What really struck me while doing dishes, though, was that I was enjoying doing the dishes. I wasn't enjoying it in that it was like doing a bunch of cocaine or driving recklessly. I was enjoying it as a feeling of being one with the inevitable fact of my death. It felt like an acceptance. It felt like a sacred act of reverence for nature and her dictates. I could hear my love's footsteps in the other room as he prepared to run an errand. We'd just finished dinner he'd cooked. This is what we do. I wash the dishes. So many might find it boring, but those people are in denial of what is an ever-present fact of our lives. There will be time enough for distractions--novels, movies, dancing, painting. Playing. Making.

But one day all that making will slowly revert back into being unmade.

Exploring the Ocean

2010-02-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

I wonder, if I know you for the rest of my life,
will I ever be able to touch all of you?
I've been trying for over a year, and I'm sure
there are spots that I've missed.
Perhaps a small scrap of skin on your shin
has gone unnoticed, or a single string of hair?
Maybe a place at the nape of your neck,
a crease in the crease in your elbow?
I've wandered around the inside of your thigh,
but have I gone far enough up?
I stick my fingers on your back, draw lines slowly
down--sometimes furiously with fingernails dug--
and I question whether I'm getting it all in
or simply retracing patterns, getting stuck in ruts.

I know that your skin is falling off,
being replaced with new skin to touch.
I'm always falling behind.

They say we've only explored one-onemillionth
of the ocean, this vast body that makes up
most everything. We don't pay close enough
attention to less-traveled routes; we stick
to the most convenient courses. So much lies
underneath the surface; we rarely dive
far enough down.

If I could sink my fingers beneath your flesh,
what would I find besides meat and bone,
dripping sinew, bubbling hot blood? This vast
body that makes up most everything?
I hope that I am not forgetful of such rarely
traveled routes.

And even if I only explore one-onemillionth
of your skin in the time that I know you,
I know you.

Nobody Lives in Novels

2010-02-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

I used to have this nasty little habit.

I would kinda date (read: make out with a few times and lead on) my male friends. Then I would just disappear, turn cold, or generally treat them badly and make it clear it was never going to work. Then, as soon as they got a new girlfriend, I would suddenly be overcome with a sense that I'd messed up the best thing that had ever happened to me, lost out at my one shot at love, and go to them, telling them how wrong I'd been and secretly hoping that this information would make them turn around, dump the new girl, and take me back.

The truth was that my fragile and all-encompassing ego couldn't take it that they had moved on. I'd treated these men as if they were beneath me, and here they were, falling in love with someone else seemingly so easily that I had to try to prove that I could turn them around once more. It never worked. Solid and sane people do not fall easily for the bullshit of the self-centered, boundaryless and emotionally immature.

I was the only person at the time who was unnaware that I was self-centered, boundaryless and emotionally immature.

And then there was Nathan, who tried so hard but could not handle all the poison seething through my body and brain. For a couple of years after we broke up, I would occasionally try to contact him to find out what he was up to, again secretly hoping that my newfound sense of what I'd done would cause him to recognize that we really did belong together and take me back. I was never overt. In situations where my pride has been hurt, I've always found it most natural to approach with a calm, self-possessed and interested-yet-indifferent air. I am not a lady who enjoys looking stupid, so overt displays of, "Please, take me back!" begging were never my style.

Except that one time, and I was furiously drunk.

I was a very troubled young adult, and our relationship was ridiculous for so many reasons. We both did a lot of drugs together on a regular basis. He was 18, and I was 20. There were a whole set of factors at play that spelled disaster or, at the very least, inevitable breakup. And did I mention I was a very troubled young adult?

During the course of our relationship, I developed another nasty habit. Unable to express in words the kind of internal torture I was feeling on an almost constant basis at that point, I started cutting. And while it felt to me as a release, I realized later after the dust had cleared and I'd worked through a lot of stuff that it had also been about manipulation. I remember slicing my entire arm from wrist to shoulder. That night several of us were going somewhere, and I ended up in the passenger seat while Nathan ended up in the back. It was winter, and I was wearing long sleeves. Nathan hadn't seen the cuts yet. Slowly and dramatically I lifted my arm so my sleeve pulled back and set it down on the back of the driver's seat. My cuts were right in Nathan's face. And we all rode in relative silence, no one else aware that I was making Nathan stare for the first time at the horror that was going on inside of me. I do not belittle my feelings from that time period, although some may think me flip when I toss it off as "crazy" and even label it now as "bullshit." It was all valid from my limited perspective at the time. I had no control.

But that still doesn't make it okay.

I could go on about the episodes from that relationship. Suffice to say I was hell on him. Eventually--not very long after the whole thing began--he came to me and informed me that he'd been down that road once already with another girl and he could not handle it again. He was very sorry. I knew that was sincere. Still at first I was incredulous. How could he leave me in that state? I might commit suicide!

But I knew I wasn't going to commit suicide.

When I couldn't get Nathan to love me in the way that I demanded--although he loved me as much as he could and I wasn't even sure what exactly I was demanding--I turned to self-torture as a manipulation. I got drunk, did drugs, and cried incessantly. I acted as if the whole world was against me, as if the tiniest slight were proof that I was unloved. It wasn't just love I wanted, either, but adoration, and looking back I don't even think that all the adoration in the world would've helped me in my sorry state. I was a bottomless pit of sucking need.

Bottomless pits can never be filled.

In fact, it was Nathan's leaving that probably helped save my life. Who knows if another event would've come along eventually to help me, and it was still a few years before I truly got to the bottom of that previously bottomless pit. But had Nathan stayed, he only would've reenforced my self-destruction. My game would've worked. And I never would've felt all of the regrets that finally forced me to take responsibility for myself.

True regret isn't the same as self-pity. Self-pity is self-centeredness at its most disgusting. Some people admire it as beautiful tragedy, but no tragedy of one's own making can be beautiful. It is useless, a waste. We all die in some way, and all deaths are pretty much the same. But self-pity is a living death, an internal hanging, and it produces nothing. Until it does. Sometimes very lucky people are able to awaken to their own self-centered degradation and feel true regret. True regret takes into account the other. There is compassion mixed in. It is not feeling sorry; it is feeling that you have wronged another as well as yourself.

It is being willing to let that thing go out of love.

Looking back, what I wanted when I tried to contact Nathan all those times and secretly hoped I'd win him back wasn't love. It wasn't love because it wasn't loving. What I wanted was absolution. But I have found those things elsewhere by getting beyond all the things inside of myself that caused me to act the way I did in the first place. I had to go back, way back before Nathan or the cutting or all of the self-pity, and then go forward with a resolution to be different. I still fail. But I forgive myself these failings because it is through the discipline of regret that I am able to live more openly, little by little, every day.

I'd wanted to be a saint and, when I couldn't, I'd tried to be a martyr.

But I am neither.

you being in love...

2010-02-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"

they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."

E. E. Cummings

Powder Keg

2010-01-30T16:32:00.001-08:00

The weather here is fickle.
One moment it is springtime in January.
The next it is snowing in March.
The changes come more quickly than that,
a sudden switch from green to gray
taking place between days, minutes.
No one can know how to dress,
and we leave our houses in short sleeves
to find the world has frozen.
We forgetfully wear sweaters in the searing
heat. We wear layers, shed, add, as needed.
Most find it unnerving, the inconsistency
a memory of migration. Constantly being kept
on our toes is disquieting, as if we've been flung
out of the womb, weened, fallen out
of our mothers' arms in less than half a lifetime.
It is a great feeling of betrayal,
this being left out in the cold.
And the heat. And the desert.
And the sleetful rain.

What I don't want to admit is that I find
a small spark-filled moment in between switches
that sounds like slithery blood sliding through
veins. It sounds green like life. Up and down
like pulse. The weather here swings wide
open. It is what makes light of dark.

You're Nobody Til Somebody

2010-01-29T16:48:00.000-08:00

I have had the distinction of being friends with a lot of somebodies.

I have a knack for having interesting friends. Doers. People whose lives are imbued with a magical quality created by their own talents and actions. Creators. Producers. Actors.

By “actors” I mean people who take action. Those drama kids aren’t really my style.

I was thinking about this while clicking through the photographs done by a photographer friend of mine on Facebook. I tried to be a photographer. My parents bought me a really nice camera many birthdays ago—a camera that has subsequently been stolen and perhaps been put to better use by a homeless man in Deep Ellum. I was terrible. I constantly had that experience of getting my shots developed and thinking, “What was I trying to take a picture of here?” They always seemed to lack any kind of definable design. I would occasionally get the good shot here or there, but I figure this was always just dumb luck.

I also tried my hand at fashion design, but, alas, I cannot sew. I studied it for almost an entire academic year, but I eventually had to withdraw in an attempt to avoid failing. And growing up I took piano lessons, but I always lacked the discipline to become anything other than a girl who played only at her lessons and the yearly recital. I wasn’t awful. I could’ve been a whole lot better if I’d ever tried. But, again with the alas, I was not much of a tryer in those days.

Based on the feedback I’m getting from spelling and grammar check right now, though, I am apparently quite the sentence fragmenter and word maker-upper.

Sometimes when I look at my friends, an amazing group of impressive people who do really cool stuff, I feel a little like I don’t know what I do. What do I do? I paint, but I don’t paint well enough to consider myself an “artist.” I dance—at the club. I sing--in the shower, in the car, in my house when no one is home. Mostly I think--a lot--about a whole bunch of stuff no one wants to talk about. Heck, I don't even want to talk about most of it. I think in Socratic reasoning, which is a good way to deduce things in theory but mostly just frustrating in practice. Every question leads to another question. This is one of the things I love most about life. We know virtually nothing about it. But that's why most people would rather discuss the more concrete concepts presented by Jersey Shore.

That last comment makes me sound like a smarty-pants asshole, and it should. For the last few weeks I've been feeling kind of like a smarty-pants asshole.

The other night I was furiously working on an essay about pubic hair. As I worked on it, I could feel myself getting more and more worked up over the feelings of injustice around my subject matter. That's right. I've been oppressed by pubic hair. More specifically, I've been oppressed by certain people's opinions of pubic hair and what those opinions symbolize. I swear, it doesn't take much for me to feel like the bottom of the shit pile. And I may still finish said essay because, hey, who doesn't want to hear about how oppressed I am by pubic hair? But I suddenly ran out of direction about halfway through, a sure sign that I'm not sure if I totally believe in whatever it is I'm furiously saying.

The next morning I found myself thinking, "Hey, asshole, why are you so worked up over pubic hair?" I applied a little of the Socratic method to the problem and realized that I'd started taking myself way too seriously lately.

It all made sense! The rather didactic essay about how personalities are bullshit? The strange and growing obsession over whether or not I seem "interesting" to other people? The comparing myself to others, feeling personally turned out as a lame person because other people have cooler pictures on Facebook? By the way, I still stand behind the core argument in the previously mentioned essy--I just wish I hadn't sounded quite so preachy and accusatory.

Once again I'd forgotten what I learned.

What I have learned is this: I love it that I know so many awesome people. And I'm okay with the fact that I tend to be more of a chronic appreciator than an accomplisher. I love it that I do what I do because I love it, not because I'm good at it or because it might gain me something in return. I love it that I don't place those kinds of restrictions on my actions or make choices based on the accumulation of wealth or status. I don't mind if other people do their thing to accumulate wealth or status. Everyone should go after what they value most. I don't value those things. I value love in all its forms, and that's why it feels good to see my friends as such amazing people. I hate it when I start to forget these things because even the simple self-pity schtick of comparing myself to others and feeling like they make me look bad feels like my begrudging them their awesomeness.

I feel thoroughly snapped out of it for now. As soon as I realized what was happening, I had a good laugh at my own expense. It only takes about three seconds of that to evaporate all the seriousness that had slowly settled down around me, making me feel put-upon and turning me into a downer. Who cares if I'm awful-to-mediocre at a whole mess of stuff? At least I can enjoy the process of sucking.

Bad choice of words. You know what I mean.

And at least I have a talent for knowing a whole lot of people who are amazing enough to pick up my slack.

Oh, and don't worry. As soon as I finish that essay about pubic hair, you'll be the first to know.

Synesthesia

2010-01-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

This song is red glass,
the way acid is the sound of ice between
my back teeth. I hear music in physical
sensations. I see sounds in colors
and steel. The lines on the highway
are beats to me.

I have given up on anything being
what it is.

Who Are You?

2010-01-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

"Blake and Wordsworth wanted identity without personality; but personality is ultimate western reality."

-Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Neftertiti to Emily Dickenson

I am no longer fascinated by insanity, the build up of a persona based on impulsiveness and reckless abandon. The buildup of any personality, really, no longer seems interesting to me. Those people you see, the ones who seem so extreme in their look and have integrity, a sort of til-the-death idea about who they are and what that should look like to the rest of the world? They are the emptiest shells, the least sure of themselves. The more "personality" a person has, the less you're seeing of his or her "identity."

But personality is ultimate western reality. The western idea of who you are is what you look like to other people. According to Gestalt psychology, you cannot know yourself completely without the knowledge of what other people think of you. It's all part and parcel of a whole. We define ourselves by where we shop, where we live, who we know, what we listen to. We don't just take pure pleasure in these things--we need for them to define us. We need for other people to know that we enjoy these things, which actually deteriorates our ability to enjoy them. If part of my enjoyment of something stems from your ability to appreciate and admire my enjoyment of that thing, I can't be fully free to enjoy it until I've received the validation for the enjoyment. That's the trap of personality.

That's why we create our personal brands.

Personality and identity are not interchangeable. Having a personality is inescapable unless you choose to move to nowhere and live completely alone. There are aspects of who you are that are visible, and these will always be captured by others and turned into your personality. But the molding of a personality, the shaping of a specific image that you want others to see in place of any real identity--this is what does not fascinate me.

I remember sophomore English. We were discussing Shakespeare, and my teacher informed us that when the schism between a person's persona and his or her actual identity is too great, that person is more likely than anyone else to commit suicide. I remember that this stuck with me; it scared me. It made me wonder if I was going to commit suicide, partially because I felt like I had plenty of identity but that everyone else had it wrong on my personality. I knew that personality was how others saw me. So I set out to create a specific personality.

When it was all said and done, I think I'd created five.

I remember reading my father's aunt Mayhew's yearbook profile. When asked to describe Mayhew, someone said, "Still waters run deep." This stuck with me because I always figured nobody noticed the still waters or, at the very least, didn't think them exciting enough to be interesting. I know it's a stock phrase, but what struck me was that someone recognized her through her quiet exterior. They must've believed there was something there beyond a lack of discernable personality. She must've had identity. Adventurers don't go still-water-rafting. They go rafting on the churning and somewhat dangerous white water. This is excitement. Excitement is interesting. If you live an intense internal life and have difficulty translating that to your external life, or are bored by the idea of even trying, is there any room for you in social discourse? Do you count? Will anybody notice you and, if nobody notices you, will they be able to love you?

People who are less-than-loud often admire the loudest in the room, thinking the loud ones have something they lack. People who are not crazy admire crazy people because they seem so fun, so vivacious, so willing to throw off the shackles of convention. I remember being the loudest in the room, an image I'd cultivated for myself after growing up so completely alone. What is so funny is that the very thing that was supposed to help me feel less alone made me feel even more alone. I wandered through situations feeling frustrated by a lack of understanding--a lack I'd created because I presented nothing I wanted understood. The more personality I cultivated, the less identity I seemed to have. A few people saw me anyway. These people saved my life.

Recently a friend told me about an advice column he'd read. The person seeking advice wanted to know why her insane artist friend seemed like such a bore since she'd given up drugs and gotten sober. The person seeking advice wasn't the type to do drugs; she was a "normal" person. What she doesn't realize is that what looks so interesting really isn't. It is interesting to explore the nature of reality. It is interesting to constantly try to get to the bottom of things, see what they look like, explore the possibility of living them as they really are. I have a much greater admiration for people who can see themselves clearly and live that comfortably than I do for anyone who can run away from that into extremes. Doing drugs and being "interesting" is easy. Real life is much more difficult to understand, define and live.

I am no longer fascinated by people who destroy themselves, but this is probably because I understand them.

I've never liked fantasy fiction. At certain times I've considered this a personal failing, a sign of a lack of imagination. But I find them uninteresting for the exact same reasons I find people's personalities so uninteresting. We don't understand the nature of reality. In fantasy fiction, even as the realities seem so foreign to us, the creator understands every bit of the nature of that reality and can meter out that information to us as he or she sees fit. Pages upon pages of detail describing how gravity may work, what the plants might look like, how people speak and what they wear. All of it perfectly in order, even if gravity works backward or the sky is hot pink. There is nothing about the nature of a fantasy world that cannot be understood. How can that be interesting? What is there to explore there? It's a stilted and static situation, an escape route for people who cannot handle the ambiguity of identity in the mysterious world of reality. And personality is a fantasy land we create around ourselves, everything in perfect working order, even if that working order doesn't match up with the reality in which it is operating. Personality comes with hard-and-fast rules. All things are this way. No things are that way. I always do this and I never do that. They're easy enough rules to live by except when you can feel the pulsing of identity underneath the skin of your personality. Identity is nothing hard-and-fast. It is all ways and no ways all at once, a mingling of these things that brings us in touch with our surroundings and somehow creates reality.

I can remember moments thinking, "I wish I could escape this person I've created, but no one would believe me if I showed up any different." This is the trick of personality. What is at first meant to make my ego more comfortable eventually becomes a place of disease and discomfort. It becomes a point of misery because, deep in the night, the personality is left alone, and alone it becomes obsolete. In the moment I love myself when I am charming because I see my success reflected back at me from others, but afterward I always feel it is myself who has been fooled.

It is said that "the measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out." There is no room for character in the world of personality. Nothing happens there that isn't seen by others. No action is taken by the personality that isn't a performance for others. Even if no one was there, the personality must recount for all the harrowing adventure or the angelic decision. But the personality can keep secrets as well. It doesn't want to mar its own appearance by admitting to wrongdoing, whatever wrongdoing might mean in the constructed world of that specific personality.

And "this is the disease of western love." Paglia talks about the "susceptibility to the glamour of charismatic personality." "But the person invested with so much hieratic energy is coldly discarded when he or she proves humanly frail." There is a crack in everything God has made. Everything that man has made is plastically perfect and a complete falsehood. Here comes the caveat to my original statement. Everything that man has made is a complete falsehood, but this falsehood can be fun. It can be fun right up until the moment it is mistaken for identity.

It can be fun right up until the moment we become so consumed with being the falsehood that we believe it is true.

But Narcissus looked into the pool and fell so in love with his own reflection he drowned in it, and so many people fall so in love with the idea of themselves and become so enamored with the personalities of others that they wake up alone, whether in a room with another or not, and find that the night is most black when one has betrayed who one is.

"All my lies are always wishes. I know I would die if I could come back new."
-Wilco

Some of the People, All of the Time

2010-01-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve, my boyfriend, brother and I were watching The Hundred Greatest Songs of the 90's on VH1. We made it to number 97 before we had to change the channel for fear that our collective adolescences would be turned out as the artistic wastelands that they were. But before that happened, my boyfriend did manage to project that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" would be number one.

I have no idea whether or not he was right, and that has no bearing on the rest of this story.

When he said this, I told him that I remember the day Kurt Cobain killed himself the way people who were alive in the 60's remember the Kennedy assassination. I remember Kurt Loder breaking in to MTV's regularly scheduled programming to deliver the news. I remember all those people--mostly dirty-looking teenagers--sitting on the front lawn of his mansion in mourning while Courtney Love tearfully called him a jerk and rhetorically asked him why. And I remember all of this so vividly because it defined so much of who I was at the time and who I would continue to be for many years after. In fact, the event of Cobain's suicide and the subsequent cultural impact would be the crux of an intense internal struggle that would almost destroy me.

But not for the reasons one might think.

It's not that I was an ardent Nirvana fan. I liked their music, and I respected them as artists. But at the time of his death, I owned none of their albums. Actually, I still don't own any of their albums. I thought they were important, but more because of what they stood for than for their actual music. Nirvana was the voice of disenfranchised youth. They were the voice of teenagers who dressed like homeless people as an outward symbol of their inward feeling that they'd been rejected by society for being different. When I describe them that way, it's hard to believe I wasn't more into them than I was, seeing as I wore steel-toed combat boots with skirts. But Cobain's death didn't represent the ultimate demise of all my youthful ideals. Quite the contrary. What happened afterward defined my ideals and gave me an image to go with a yearning that would then become a goal. I remember thinking, "My goal in life is to have that many people sitting on my front lawn when I die." The aftermath of Cobain's death defined meaningful celebrity for me, a fact which I'm sure he would detest. In a way, the idea that he defined meaningful celebrity for not just me but a whole bunch of other people was part of the reason he committed suicide in the first place.

Essentially, I wanted to be so famous that complete strangers would show up in public and cry over my death, just like they did for Kurt Cobain.

Cobain committing suicide didn't shock me. It was the only possible ending for the story, really. What else was going to happen? Cobain was going to grow old, eventually releasing a Christmas album? Nirvana was going to breakup and get back together several more times for reunion tours? It couldn't happen like that. And before anyone thinks me cold for essentially arguing that suicide was the only ending Cobain's persona would allow, let me say this: I think suicide is the least sad way to go. People who die in plane crashes and burning buildings didn't want to die. That's sad. People who commit suicide are the only ones who didn't die against their own will. The rest of us--the people who don't commit suicide--think it's sad because we don't want to die and can't wrap our minds around the possibility that anyone would. But as someone who used to want to die and managed to grow out of it before acting on it, let me assure you--if I'd committed suicide then, I wouldn't have been sad about it at all. My life now is just an alternate route in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I appreciate it now, but that's only because I'm still here to appreciate it. If I weren't still here, I'd have nothing to lament.

And trust me when I say I somehow come across as much more cynical in writing than I do in real life.

But there were no possible alternate endings for Cobain, and I suppose that might be why I didn't feel sad when he did it. His flannel-wearing followers were sad, but I honestly can't understand how they didn't see his death as somehow justified. He died their martyr. He died on the cross of their ideals. "See?" one can imagine them saying. "The Man ate him alive. He was too much of a genius for this place. This society kills its rock stars. It eats its young. It destroys everything that is different and unrelenting. It sucks." They would definitely use the adjective "sucks." But, then, I suppose without their sadness at the inevitable demise, the demise would then stand for nothing. Like most demises.

So I needed for Cobain's fans to somehow be saddened by this unshocking event for it to be so meaningful for me because that was what gave it meaning for me. I wanted future people to be so saddened by my own passing, even if I died an equally inevitable death. If I jumped out of a plane without a parachute and made an announcement that I was going to do so to the entire world a week beforehand, I wanted people to be standing on the ground when I landed ready to light candles and talk about how unfair it was that such a brilliant light had been snuffed out too soon.

There are certain things that are inevitable when a person reaches a certain age, and these inevitabilities extend beyond death and taxes. One of these inevitable things is that whomever one is dating at the time will have dated someone else before and might possibly also have a former spouse. This is something I hadn't ever thought a lot about (except in my previous relationships where the person I was dating was very clearly still in love with a former partner, which would be almost all of my previous relationships) until recently. My current boyfriend loves me a lot by all appearances, and he's never turned up any songs by Third Eye Blind in the car while talking about how they remind him of his ex-girlfriend and then started crying. As far as our relationship is concerned, his ex-girlfriends are mostly nonentities. But I find myself more and more consumed by a wish to believe that he's never been with anyone before me. I type that sentence, I look at it and I realize how ridiculous it is. It's like wishing that I would never die or could somehow escape taxes. I've never been consumed by this desire with anyone else. Even when I was dating someone who was obviously still in love with someone else and that upset my ego, I understood as a given that there would have been someone else before me. I wasn't completely insane. But I think part of the reason that him having previous loves bothers me when it never bothered me before (and bothers me more now than it did when we first started dating) is because this one feels special. I knew a week to a month in that none of those other guys was going to last. I might have loved them, and I might have tried beyond the point of all sense to make it work with them, but I ultimately knew that we weren't going to make it. I don't know how to explain how I could expend emotional energy on suicide missions other than to say that I was young and conflicted about how relationships worked. I knew I had a longing for one, but I also knew that I couldn't seem to do them right or find the right person to have one with. Other much more complicated explanations were proposed, and some of them might've been true. But I also think that human beings have an innate need for companionship and sex and will do the darnedest things to procure both, especially in their early 20's.

But this one feels different. Which makes him special. Which makes me want to feel like I'm special. It's why I want to believe against all sense that I'm the first girl he's ever said things like, "I'm so glad you're here," to when laying in bed together at night. It's why it bothers me when his ex-girlfriend "likes" his status on Facebook, even though I would generally consider myself beyond such petty concerns--I don't want to ever be reminded of her existence, let alone the fact that they ever knew each other. It's why I went on this tangent after having talked about Kurt Cobain's suicide. I think the reason that my boyfriend having exes bothers me is the same reason I was so affected by the death of Kurt Cobain.

All of my life I have wanted to feel special.

Some people say everyone is special, and these people are elementary school teachers who don't understand that this sentiment doesn't make sense (or at least are given to oversimplifying things for the comprehension of five-year-olds). Some people say that no one is special, and these people have incomprehensibly low self-esteem or are anti-social and try to dress one or the other of these problems up as philosophy. The truth is that most people are special to at least one other person, and no one is special to everybody except for a handful of extra special people like presidents and rock stars. The fact that I wanted to be like Kurt Cobain and I wish my boyfriend didn't have any exes he actually loved speaks to my desire to be not just special but extra special. My therapist once told me that a lot of my problems stemmed from the fact that I was the oldest of four children and the second in the line was born so soon after my birth that I never got to feel like the center of someone's universe. I was always chasing that feeling. And I've come to terms with the fact that there will be no strangers at my funeral other than the ones brought as the date of someone who knew me. I also know well enough how silly it is that I wish my boyfriend had no former loves--at least I know it enough to keep it from affecting my feelings for him or making me believe that his feelings for me are disingenuous. But sometimes I still sing along with the radio in my car while imagining that I'm performing for thousands of people, and sometimes I still internally bristle at the mention of my boyfriend's ex's name. These feelings don't drive me like they used to, but they're still there, like some vestigial organ that doesn't do anything but could still get infected.

None of this feels as depressing as the artsy movies I grew up on made it seem like it would. I was raised on art that sent the message that mediocrity--letting go of childish fantasies and living the same life as 98.7% of the people on the planet--would eventually make me want to kill myself or develop an addiction to Valium so as to forget how un-special I really am. But, honestly, getting okay with being one of those people who is only special to a few other people (and I feel like I'm making a bit of an assumption there) and not extra special to everybody feels a lot less miserable than holding on to childish fantasies about what it means to be special ever did. The truth is that it turns out I was wrong. This life does feel special to me. I don't need a multitude of people to think I'm extra special to validate that experience. What I understand intellectually but can't always seem to understand emotionally is that the specialness of others does not preclude me from being special, too. I used to absolutely hate it when people would try to console me by telling me that God loves me because God loves everybody. This fact made God's love seem irrelevant to me. I wanted to be the only loved person. I suppose what I'm really saying is that I can be kind of an ego-driven jerk. But this is one of those moments when it kicks ass to not be special: We can ALL be ego-driven jerks.

I suppose I have utterly failed at my childhood goal. Or, I should say, my adolescent/early adulthood goal, although that feels more embarrassing. There will be no Courtney Love-esque person sitting on the lawn of my house, hanging out with my fans and making it appear that I had tragically bad taste in women when I die. And as much as my ridiculous need to be extra special makes me want to be overdramatic about the ex-girlfriend issue, I know my boyfriend loves me. I know that the existence of previous lovers in my life doesn't detract from my feelings for him at all, so why should I assume the opposite would be true for him? If anything, the existence of my former lovers strengthens my feelings for him because they were all just so not right that he feels extra right. And what all of this is making me realize is that being an adult is awesome. Most people under the age of 25 (including myself when I was under the age of 25) are delusional about everything and think that they're right in their thinking. Now I understand enough to know I don't understand much, and it feels more like reality--and I like that. It doesn't make me want a Valium. I guess when you dive so whole-heartedly into acting on all of your most insane impulses when you're younger the way I did, it ceases at some point to be interesting. Settling down into what most people would describe as a lack of specialness feels magical and special to me.

Absolutely nobody prefers reality to delusion, which means I'm probably special after all--even if my song isn't projected by anybody to be number one on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 90's countdown.

But if my boyfriend ever turns up the Third Eye Blind in the car and starts crying, then I'll be worried.

Odds and Ends

2009-12-23T06:45:00.001-08:00

I used to have visions. Strange and often disturbing images would suddenly arise in my mind. The summer after I graduated high school I would be driving along and be overtaken by the mental picture of my car wrapped around a tree, my body smashed between the car's metallic side panel and the bark. I could almost feel the scraping sensation.

Another recurring image was of my naked body hanging in a black space. My wrists were bound, the binding hung on a giant metal hook suspended from a chain. The space around my pale white body was blank, and my imagination never bothered to dream up what the chain was hanging from or where I might fall if the binding should break. It wasn't hell. It was a void. The point of the image seemed to be the feeling of being stretched to the limit, being acted upon by the opposing forces of the hook and gravity. It didn't seem to matter where I would fall. Falling wasn't the fear.

The image would just come at the oddest moments. Being plagued by the sudden onslaught of disturbing images that one cannot then let go is a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have no other symptoms, but I wondered for years if I had it because the number and strength of the images was so great. I could be walking down a flight of stairs and have a flash of myself falling face first, the impact pushing my teeth up into my head. Some images were like that--describing a possible catastrophic experience that might occur while going about the mundane. Others were like the hanging--elaborate, jarring and symbolic dreams.

I have had occasion recently to visit a ghost. Actually, the only occasion I've had for such a thing was pure nosiness which I like to dress up as curiosity. It's the ghost of myself when I was in my early 20's. That's what got me thinking about all of these visions I used to have. The vision of my car wrapped around a tree was a recurring theme that specific summer because at the time I wanted to die. The image of me hanging from a hook? It's tied to a time in my life when I felt conflicted. Not mildly conflicted about which major to choose or which boy to date, but seriously conflicted about whether I wanted to follow the self-destruction all the way down or pull myself back up. Ultimately I chose to do the work--the work everyone does when they grow up, but with a little extra credit because I'd fallen so far behind on my studies. I was born with the handicap of an extra appendage of crazy. Maturing is a natural process, and most people do it almost effortlessly. They experience a few hard lessons and learn them because humans have a natural inclination to save themselves. But some people are born with a nagging feeling that they're not quite sure they're worth the saving. Some people are born with the knowledge that they probably are, but they can't escape the feeling that they might be wrong.

I don't even know what it's like to be that way anymore. While visiting the ghost, I'm struck by two very disparate emotions. I'm grateful I've gotten past all of that. I'm glad that my default setting is no longer emotional turmoil. But I also miss it. The wildness of it. The sheer exhilaration of feeling something over every single event, a single sentence uttered by another person capable of sending me into flights of rage, fancy or depression. But I suppose the biggest difference between me now and me then is that now I can miss something and know that I don't want it back. Quite a bit of my insanity was due to a need to reconcile everything. If I had a feeling, I had to act on it until the outcome was satisfactory, shove it in someone else's face until they worked it out for me, or labor over it until I exhausted myself and became paralyzed with doubt or regret. It's a hard way to live. Now nothing has a box, and everything is neater. Cleanup is simpler. Messes just don't even get made half the time. And that which I cannot reconcile in an instant I simply leave alone. Things that would've become overwhelming dramas in the past are minor skirmishes at best now. My mind went from a fist clenched tight to unfurled and occasionally half curled.

The other day I was telling my boyfriend that I'm actually kind of sad that I will soon be leaving waitressing behind. I got my dream job. This should be the last thing to lament. But after getting so many things on track, waitressing feels like the last link to my old self. An old self I purposefully changed into a new self. I feel like I want to have a funeral or something. A funeral where the eulogies would contain remembrances like, "She always ended up with her dress over her head," or, "She was always drunkenly crying at parties." I haven't done that in a long time, but waitressing represented my former life as a complete fuck up. It has represented the part of me that never wanted to take on responsibilities because I never thought I was deserving of them. No commitments. I could quit at any time. Guilt-free.

In letting go of so many made-up meanings, life means more now than it ever did. Old visions have been replaced by a new reality. And as I let her go, at least I know where I can find her if I ever want to go visit.

Missing Persons

2009-12-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

About four weeks ago I lost my phone.

To be more accurate, I woke up to discover that I'd left my phone sitting dangerously close to my fountain drink on the coffee table, and the condensation from said drink had bled all over said coffee table, enveloping my phone its destructive moisture.

That's the longer, more dramatic way of saying I lost my phone.

Apparently, when you get a new phone, your old phone has to be able to stay on in order to transfer all your old numbers into your new phone. So along with losing my phone, I'd lost all my old numbers as well. No matter. I would simply put up a notice on Facebook announcing my dilema and asking all my friends to text me their digits.

I think I've managed to get a whopping 5 of those old numbers back in the ensuing weeks.

I'm a loner by nature. If you watch me, you'll see I'm mostly observing. I tire quickly of too many people, and I usually cut out early. At the very least I'll recede into the shadows. I feel a little sad about all my lost numbers, but something stops me short when I think about reaching out directly to the few people who never responded to my mass call.

I think perhaps it's better I just let them go.

When I was a kid, I used to circle the blacktop alone at recess. I would walk around the perimeter thinking, singing songs only I could really hear, lost someplace else. I had one friend. I don't even really remember what we did together. Mostly I just remember being alone. I liked it. And I could provide the myriad reasons why I pushed myself to gather all those phone numbers and ritualistically hang on to them long after each of those relationships had simply ceased to exist in real time and space for no apparent reason, but I already did that. Years ago. With my therapist. To tell those stories now feels kind of silly.

Besides, they're the same reasons anybody does anything outside of his or her character. Shame.

I couldn't think of how to explain the shame in any way that didn't sound trite until last night while watching an episode from season one of Mad Men. In the episode, Don Draper's long lost brother shows up out of the blue wanting to rekindle the relationship they'd lost many years before. The brother, Adam, had no one left in the world. Don, wanting to shut the door on his past completely, gave Adam money instead of a relationship and asked him to never come back. I cried. I cried because Adam seemed to be a tacked-on person, a person who was floating alone through a life where no relationship ever really stuck. And I cried because I realized that for so much of my early life I felt the same way. Tacked-on. Was I a loner by nature, or was I a loner because I'd become comfortable with the fact that I received no empathy or understanding from my peers and would have to take care of myself? I don't say that with any anger, and I don't point to a lack of understanding as proof that I am somehow more complex or genius than anyone else. I was simply an anxious and inward person, and I couldn't ever seem to properly translate my insides to those on my outsides.

So I set out to surround myself with people to prove that I was okay.

Yesterday my boyfriend asked me how I knew the person to whom he was sending an e-mail inquiring about a job. I replied that I knew him through an ex and old friend. As soon as I said that old friend's name--one of the many old friends whose numbers are now gone--I felt a pang of nostalgia and loss. It would be easy enough to contact him directly through e-mail, but something stops me. While I will always think very highly of this person, we just don't have any reason to continue having a regular relationship. I feel that pang of nostalgia and loss whenever I think of any of all the people I've lost--when I pass the places I used to party with people who now seem like strangers, when I think about the days working with a team of like-minded individuals who've now been flung to the farthest corners of the country. I was at a bar where I used to work the other day having dinner when I ran into one of the old regulars. I used to sit for hours with this person and drink. We used to make plans to go to the strip club together. We had each other's phone numbers. And standing there talking to him, I couldn't even remember why.

The other day a new friend and I were talking about age. He said that growing up meant being able to recognize that life sucks and being okay with that. And in a way I think he was right. At some point we have to recognize that more ends are untied than tied, and we'll never be able to tie them all up. There are people who at different points in my life have made it clear they felt abandoned by me, but my disappearance was never an easy thing. It felt cold, but what was the alternative? A constant stream of messages implying that we should make plans to catch up soon--plans we never make, let alone keep?

I don't think I've been able to translate how all of this makes me feel properly. This piece feels messy, mostly because this situation feels messy. I think about different people as I drive through this city and see monuments to excellent evenings and lost, lazy days. I think about me when I was 18, 20, 21, 25, 27. I think about the people I knew when I was 18, 20, 21, 25, 27. I think about the feelings I had at those times in my life that will probably never be replicated--and I think about how they've been replaced with new feelings. I cannot square all of these things away, and I relish that feeling of not being able to completely put my finger on where everything goes. Almost all of the people I've lost just slipped away. There was no catalyst for an ending. There wasn't even an ending. Just a slow fade and then the screen goes dark.

Until they occasionally pop up in my Facebook feed.

I don't want to give the impression that all relationships lack permanence. There are people I just seem to keep on knowing. There are people who I seem to know in my bones. There are people I can lose track of for a few months but always know. Whenever we talk it's as if we were always right there. I suppose my messy feelings about everyone else come from a desire to keep them special. I used to fear being forgotten more than anything else in the world, and I don't want anyone I've ever cared about to feel that way.

So I guess I'll just have to always remember, at least a little bit. Even if I can't call any of them to tell them I do.

The Cutter

2009-12-09T13:12:00.000-08:00

I bought the cheap razors.
I was busy passing from one place
I call home to another place I call
home, and I had no time to stop.
I took what I could find.
I am shocked—I thought I would slide
the blade smoothly across my skin
and see the blood pool up in one great tear.
Instead it makes my skin bubble
and bleed. It causes bumps
on the tender insides of my labia.
The gleaming edge turns my legs
into jaggedly hacked meat, throwaway
scraps from the butcher’s table.
Why do I buy them?
I’m sure I have time enough to find
razors that don’t scrape open older
wounds only freshly closed. Razors
with guards that leave my lips smooth,
unblemished. Blades that will make him
swoon when he slowly slips himself
inside of me. But this torturous sting,
this shame, this embarrassed, searing
lack of sense is comforting. It has been
with me since my first day.
I’m now so comfortable with slinging the blade
against myself I forget myself and
slide it from stem to stern,
slice open my sternum, lace my fingers
through my ribs like a speculum,
popping myself open, strings of thick
blood hanging between my bones
as trails of spit from a kiss.
Dirt and ash seep from my veins
until they run clean red.
The steam from the bath ritualistically
cleanses my chest cavity newly emptied.
I hardly remember the baby I killed,
and I emerge from the bath beautiful
as a woman should be.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

2009-11-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading an article in The Philosopher's Magazine about the Twilight phenomenon. This book series and the movie it spawned have gained so much cultural attention from feminists that I'm tempted to go and rent the DVD right now just to experience what all the fuss is about.

But then I remember that I avoid Twilight for the same reasons I've mostly avoided Harry Potter: those tricks are for kids, and they sound like bad tricks. I say mostly avoided Harry Potter because my family seems to be hell-bent on watching all of those movies, and I got dragged along to the Prisoner of Azkaban during the holiday season of 2004.

They also once tried to make me watch Armageddon, but I chose to go drive around town listening to music and smoking cigarettes instead. Those people have the worst taste sometimes.

Anyway, the article by Bonnie Mann, an associate lecturer in philosophy at the University of Oregon, is about how she as a mother discovered her daughter's love of Twilight and subsequently lamented it. Apparently Twilight is all about a girl who is devoid of personality, attractive only for her ability to service others, and the virile young vampire who loves, protects and saves her. She goes on to say that Twilight is a stunning example of what Simone de Beauvior described as society's expectations of women in The Second Sex. That is to say, women are valued in relation to their connection with a man. He goes out to create and conquer, and the woman gets the praise for being awesome enough for such a man to love her. It's like that scene in Party Girl when Parker Posey's character Mary tells her boyfriend Nigel that he lowers her worth when he pees in the shower. She says that a woman can be seen with a man and that man raises or lowers her worth.

The idea that women's worth should be independent of the men with whom they're involved is not what I take issue with. Immediately after I read the Twilight article I read a review of the documentary film Who Does She Think She Is? in Bitch magazine. The film is about how women struggle to be both artists and mothers. Common themes between the two articles reminded me of one of my biggest problems with mainline feminist thought.

It is essentially us buying in to a cultural ideal that is faulty for everyone. It comes across as women wanting to be selfish just like men.

The quote that stood out to me in Bonnie Mann's article was at the very end. "But in her insistence on resurrecting the promise that a meaningful life comes through self-annihilation in the interests of others, comes through appending oneself to one of the special creatures who lives the adventure of life first hand, she promises our daughters the same things our mothers were promised." And, of course, what our mothers were promised was a life of self-sacrifice to a man--and that's a bad thing.

The other day, while jumping on the mini trampoline, I watched the Sex and the City movie. There's a scene I've seen a thousand times wherein the ladies are wondering if it's better to be shit on in their relationships or be all alone. Samantha says, "Is it all about the other person? Is that love?" Every time I watch this scene, I get perturbed. The implications, much like the implications in the above quote from Mann, are endless and wrong in their extremity.

Self-annihilation in the interests of others is a spiritual practice recommended by the majority of spiritual traditions for both men and women. The harm that I see in these arguments is that they follow the American cultural ideal of self-centered independence. They present harmful gender identities for both men and women. Men, we are led to believe, are just a bunch of selfish assholes who will take advantage of the weak-willed woman. Women need to be selfish just like those assholes if they're going to get anywhere in life. Being selfish is manly and, therefore, the path to success.

So, in America, our idea of success is being the best at cultivating the worst traits in ourselves.

The idea here, too, is that giving is always opening oneself up to being taken advantage of. This is only true, though, when we have skewed views of what it means to give. If you see relationships as 50-50, you're opening yourself up to "being taken advantage of" because you look at relationships as a transaction. "I'll give you this now, but I expect that later." A woman gives the man her steadfast love and support in exchange for his paycheck. All of this ignores the beautiful transformative power of giving for giving's sake. A phrase that comes to mind is, "For fun and for free." Everything I do for others I do with no strings attached. This doesn't leave me open for being taken advantage of. If anything, it alleviates the risk because I didn't have any expectations of return. And what if I'm constantly giving to a person who doesn't appreciate the receiving? Well, I always have the option to stop giving.

If another person truly appreciates what they've received, it will show in some way. And if I truly appreciate the giving, I can't be taken advantage of. When I feel as if I'm being taken advantage of, I'm being selfish. I'm abdicating my responsibility for the choices I've made. I always have the option to say I can't do something.

So, is it all about the other person? Is that love? The reason this statement is false is only the presence of the word "all." No, it's not all about the other person. But if you're keeping score and resenting all the giving you're doing, I would propose you don't know much about what it means to love someone. Love is such a tricky word. It means something different to everyone. But I believe it does not mean possession, which is really what someone is aiming at when they're more concerned with what they can get out of it than what they can put in.

And this brings me to my other problem with these statements. They make it sound as if independence and self-sacrifice are mutually exclusive. In reality, I believe you have to be a wholly independent being to truly self-sacrifice. It is something you choose to do, not something you do because you are enslaved to the idea of what you will get if you give. It is a capable person choosing to take interest in the happiness of another, not a desperate person trying to buy the security of another's interests.

I always leave these kinds of arguments from feminists wondering why they're trying so hard to turn me into the kind of person I don't want to be. I don't want to be the image of the silent housewife popping Valium to numb out and forget her complete absorption by the identity of her man, but I don't want to be reactionary and therefore become...well, what I was: a woman so afraid of being taken advantage of that she cultivated her own selfishness and self-centeredness, which only fed a growing sense of self-loathing that, in the end, was more destructive than comforting.

I mean, really--are these my only two options?

Found

2009-10-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

These were all found while I was going through some things. They're from fall of 2007.

Unexpected Fall

The bugs should be dead.
It is November, and the first freeze
of the season should have killed them
off. But I am getting bitten, sitting
outside in a sweater, sweating.
One bites me on my forehead,
and I'm reminded of my loneliness.
I am a great well, and I am empty.
Do they not know it is November?
The crisply cracked leaves let me
think winter is fast approaching;
I see visions of blank black branches
marching up from under deep, smothered
lakes. But these mosquitoes show me
spring can come in autumn. What great
God am I to ask them to stop biting?
Why should I begrudge their confusion,
this ancestral longing to drink
the stuff that makes me run?
But I flip through faint voices on pages,
my makeup sliding down my neck, thinking,
"The bugs should be dead..."

Heater Cold

Here are all the stars strewn boldly on the ground—
man's desire to make his own heaven, held tightly
on anonymous mattresses and in stacks of slightly
solid moans. Singing, we're here on the backs
of each other. Weaving in and out of the concrete,
we search for soft somewhere in the metal. Why did
we build it? Fortresses, hardness to enclose those vital
organs we guild with patina so flimsy, a skeletal mass
like a viral infection. We mimic the body.
We search for the place where the feminine thigh
slides sublimely into the round of the back, obscuring
our desire with a contour of charcoal—flat masked,
as if we weren't the apple, at our core all the seeds.
Here all the beds are made hospital corners—
what would we do without the mess
of sex, the dripping proof that our insides exist?
I want you to know that my thigh slides sublimely, albeit blemished,
into the round of a back, some back like somewhere
blurring this box. Melting my skeletal mass.
Let's climb the stairs to the roof and stare out over
the meshing of stars blocking out all the sky.
Let's jump because clearly here all down is up.
Man's desire to make all heavens different, blindly forgetting
he's just one.

Compassion

Strangeness,
in the back of my head like black diamonds.
I know you. I was you.
I am you.
I have the same small crease in my forearm.
I know better than to burst the bubble of illusion
by studying your skin--
it takes precious light to make every pretty photograph,
all this faked falling down stairs.
Nights made more fabulous by memory,
or horrible disasters that weren't half bad.
How many times did I cry to forget that I'd laughed?
Sparkling ice, tinkling like giggles in the back of my throat;
they were really stones, blocking my esophagus
from sobbing, cold but not melting.
I have the same pictures.
I burned them when they developed blank.
I miss you already.
You think you're still here.

The Moon Reflected in a Pool

2009-10-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I stopped believing in God.

I was thirteen. I was so tired I could not think, but I had an anger welling up inside of me, pushing hard against my skin, forcing my hands into fists that wanted to punch holes in walls on their own with no will from me. I had started my first period. I felt helpless, as if something were being done through me. This something was using me. This was something I hadn't asked for.

I think that might've been the part that made me most angry. While everyone around me seemed still blissfully free, I was confined alone in my house, lying on the couch in a kind of pain I had never experienced. I placed my feet on the arm rest at one end and pushed against it as hard as I could, sending my pelvis shooting up in anguish. I hoped that flexing my muscles as hard as I could would give me some release. I screamed as loud as I could. And I felt strange. I was afraid that I would feel strange for every moment of the rest of my life.

I have never been some moon goddess, dancing around a fire each month and singing praises to my womb. I hate that thing, and I'd just as soon have them take it out of me now, even childless and only 30.

I have spent every moment since trying to expel this demon woman inside of me. At 16 I would sit in the kitchen at Thanksgiving, watching the women prepare the meal while the men sat in the living room watching football. I was a conscientious objector, refusing to participate in my own subjugation. I didn't like football, but I would not cook. Instead, I tried to convince the women around me--my mother, grandmother, aunt--to throw off their chains and go sit down, too. And what I never said--what I never told a single soul--was that my greatest fear was that I'd be just like my mother, sacrificing myself while pandering to male need, being irrationally emotional and not being taken seriously. To this day I am nothing but a horrible mess in the kitchen most of the time, and when I successfully make something I chalk it up to pure luck.

And because a girl sees her mother as the archetypal female and her father as the archetypal male, my greatest fear was that I'd be just like a woman.

I have been feeling a strange sense of shame growing in me over the last month or so. For the longest time I could not pinpoint exactly where it was coming from, but I knew that it was triggered from somewhere inside my relationship. And then the other day, driving around having a conversation in my head with myself about something I cannot even begin to explain, it hit me--I am ashamed that I am a woman. My relationship forces me more and more to bump up against this fact. I have most everyone else fooled. I say something, and someone else exclaims, "God, Nan, you're such a dude!" But here, in this place where this person sees me on so many levels, I am running out of places to hide my woman. All I've ever wanted was to be seen as completely rational, logical, like a man, and the shame grows the more I cannot escape my woman, with all her emotions and insecurities, her desires to be submissive.

And it's not even that she "desires to be submissive." That is how my politics have taught me to talk about her. This feeling does not know the word "submissive", but after years of sticking her in the closet, this is the only word I have for what this is.

I hate her so much that just typing that has made me cry those kind of violent tears that appear almost without clear explanation because they come from some original wound. He's sleeping next to me. I hope he does not wake up. More reason for shame.

For as long as I can remember I've secretly wanted to be a woman. I've wanted to be the muse instead of the writer. To be adored instead of respected. Be loved simply because of my beauty, not because of how accomplished I might be. Part of this shame is that I've never thought I would get to be a woman. I've never thought anybody would love me that much. I've always thought that I'd always have to sing for my supper. Other girls may be able to get away with being cute. I have to do tricks.

This is where all of this gets hazy for me. This is not about logical argument or politics. These are all feelings that came spilling out of me whenever whatever it was finally pierced the dark place in my mind where all these things hide. I certainly would not take back the way that I am. I certainly wouldn't argue that the portrait I've painted of gender identities are universal or encompass the sum total of the way genders are defined, either. What's funny is that the relationship that sent all of these things bubbling to the surface isn't even a picture of oppressive gender roles. That's the thing. He doesn't seem to look down on me for being a woman. I do. And what's bubbling to the surface isn't a string of philosophical thoughts. It's a string of somewhat incoherent feelings.

And I suppose that's exactly what I'm afraid of.

Changes

2009-10-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

Chemical Change

My grandmother died when I
was eleven; an age when each event
is a lightning strike, an irreparably split tree.
Constant chemical change.
I walked through the viewing room
like a smiling spook, a specter
already dead.
Why else could I not cry?
Had I not silently passed from one form
to another and back again seamlessly
so many times by then?
At least she wouldn't wake up screaming
in the middle of the night anymore.
Not like me.
Wandering into the sanctuary on fire
from all the sunlit stained glass,
full of bodies, their chests still swelling,
I wanted to shout over their pathetic air sucking,
tear down their faces, rip up their lips.
This was not love to me--
to wish the worst for someone.
Small, fidgety in the pew next to my father,
I stared at my palms.
Balls of fists and back open again.
Not quite so transparent as I'd believed them to be.
I felt my father shake, heave, so slightly;
I realized he was crying.
So very large as to make it a discordant sight.
New enough to be perverse,
like seeing his intestines.
I looked down, averting my eyes.
My hands began to tremble,
my whole body boiling as my insides melted,
mixed, refused in a different position.
Constant chemical change.
Suddenly, my open palms
were wet.

Physical Change

When water freezes, the molecules
slow down, lose energy--
move less and less until
they stand stick still.
Fused together.
But it's only a physical change--
they were together before,
slowly flowing over rocks
or sitting pooled in a deep white
bathtub. A gang of great waves
breaking down soil, causing canyons,
looking innocent in plastic bottles.
On the stove of the sun
they speed up like helicopter propellers,
begin to levitate. Break apart.
They get high as transparency,
make hissing sounds from kettles.
Gathering, they hang in loose conglomerations,
barely touching.
When there are just enough of them,
they begin to get heavy, these fizzy
little children. They stop dancing, bead up.
These feathers of water, they fall like bricks.
It rains.
But it's only a physical change.

When words need to be less like words and more like pictures...

2009-10-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

How to Write a Love Story

I had an idea the other night
while we were laying in bed
to write a poem about the way
our fingers looked, laced together;
the way our skin looked side
by side—like the same skin,
like I couldn’t tell whose skin
was whose. A beautiful line
or two slid into my mind
as I looked at the way that we
felt each other. But I couldn’t
get up to write them down.
I can’t remember them now.

They won’t be missed.

Lame

I work in a hospital for wounded animals,
sick as a dog myself—cold, shivering fever
I feel goes undetected against bleeding fur.
I lay my hands on those weak beings,
their beating breathing bringing me
back to life. I walk with a limp unnoticed,
believed to be born out of tired dedication.
I read the illiterate mules bedtime stories
they cannot understand; they seem to smile
anyway as I read aloud of war and shame
in a docile voice. They fall asleep easily,
and I stay up all hours listening to the wheezing
of the horses in the barn; they all caught cold
in the middle of summer. I can hear them
coughing, keeping me awake whispering
prayers. “Help me, help me, help me.”--
the only words I know, the only cures I have
in my feux lab coat made of dinner napkins
I found in an old unmarked box.
“Help me, help me, help me,” I scream,
but all the sick dogs have gone deaf.

One Moment I Am

I'm wading in wanting tonight,
neck-deep, not quite drowning, in a river
of waiting. I'm wishing for nothing tonight;
sitting on the quivering fault line
between me and not me--my skin
containing a quake but lying still
as an empty bed.
I finger the sheets, brush unclear memories
as if viewed through a prism, fusing
and splintering you and me and you and me
until we are only a beige blur behind
a crystal sheet--and I cannot tell
who is here. I cannot even tell anymore
if I am here.
My face as soft and watery as a dog's belly,
fine. Not fighting.
For there is nothing here to fight.

Do This in Remembrance of Me

I tried to bury you in business,
break you down to brokenness,
make light of you, my bruises,
as if you never fell from my fingers,
breaking the blankness. I don't
want to forget what is gone from me.

I want to forget that it was ever with
me.

But it would seem that all my spells
have been cast, have been flung far
out to sea, unfindable. They never
brought back fish in their nets;
I stood on the shoreline for years, starving,
singing so they could find me.
They must've swum somewhere else.
Must've heard some other siren.

In so doing they saved my life.

But I secretly miss them--see them strutting
on someone else's back; they must've
washed up on her shore. She must've
marveled at these big bright balloons
filled with black ink. Her fingers are
dirty, covered with the contents of my
silliest wish. I set them sailing;
they never came back. They must not
have been mine.

And I secretly wonder if I was spared.

But I found something of hers washed
up on my shore one morning; years
of waiting, invisible to even my own eyes,
forgetting that it was ever even with me.
She sent me a message. “Remember to go
where you are going. I love what you left
for me. When I am done with it, I will leave
it for someone else. And, time being what
it is—not straight like on clocks but
bendable like backs—here is something
that you left for me but I'm giving back to you.”

That's when I noticed the note had been tied
to my finger for years. It was never washed up.

I just wanted to forget that it was ever even with me.

On the Offensive

2009-10-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

Warning: This post may contain offensive material.

Today, while clicking through the headlines of interest on Twitter, I came across this at Bitch Magazine's website. As one might imagine, it seemed more than a little offensive.

But getting offended raises certain questions.

About a month ago some coworkers of mine were angry because a busboy had informed them that he was offended when they said, "Goddammit." He's a baby-faced Hispanic boy who is Catholic and saving himself for marriage. They were angry that he'd taken offense. Cries of, "Lighten up!" and, "What's the big deal, dude!" rose from the service well with abandon, and everyone had a good laugh at the busboy's expense.

These same people all get very offended when he makes it clear that he's not okay with their homosexuality.

Always the antagonist, I raised a question to the girls who'd given the busboy offense: "Why is it okay for you to offend him but NOT okay for him to offend you?" This question was coming from a girl who rarely, if ever, gets offended. Even the iPhone app featured in the Bitch blog didn't really offend me, although five years ago this blog would've been about what assholes men are. Thing is, it doesn't offend me because I already know a lot of men are assholes. I've just given up and decided to get okay with that. That's the secret to not being offended: realize that what other people think has nothing to do with me and quietly go on about my business.

When I raised the question in the well, essentially I was called a stick-in-the-mud. But one of the girls, a lesbian, was given pause and responded that I was kinda right. My point was that if you're going to get offended about things, you have a responsibility to take steps to avoid giving offense whenever possible.

It's pretty much impossible to never give offense, partially because some people are offended simply by the existence of people who are not like them, even if those people keep completely to themselves.

When I was in college, my friend Joseph wore a shirt for a (death? heavy? black?) metal band featuring a nun masturbating with a crucifix. It said, "Fuck Jesus." Clever, no? Well, he wore it to Wal-Mart one evening and was asked to leave. The whole situation was hilarious because he was offended that they were offended, and he went on a rant about how the existence of Christianity was so offensive to him that he should be allowed to ask them to hide all evidence of their existence. I told him that his request would kind of put him in the same boat with the people who were offended by his shirt. And to some degree, if Christians never want to see that shirt, I suppose he's right. He should be allowed to ask them to hide all evidence of their existence.

And now it becomes obvious what a slippery slope this whole, "Don't do things that offend me," thing really is.

In reality, I think that if something offends thee, thee should cut it off. In other words, if something offends me, I should avoid it, not the other way around. And in situations where I absolutely cannot avoid it, I should let it go. Getting all, "You need to cut that offensive shit out!" is just my way of getting on a high horse of some nature and trying to make the other person feel bad.

It's always really funny to me, too, how so many people are quick to point out just how much they hate it when Christians get all judgmental and take offense but are so willing to be okay with doing the same thing. I guess it's okay to have sensibilities as long as they're not religious ones?

I think that the responsibility rests with me. It's my responsibility to both avoid situations in which I'm likely to take offense and avoid giving offense whenever I can. Not that I'm always great shakes at this. Knowing the right action and taking it are two different things. I'm notorious for dropping f-bombs at work, usually within earshot of a customer or two. But I do know that if I'm not going to be more careful about giving offense, I do not get to turn around and get all offended.

Essentially this argument revolves around the idea that the person whose behavior with which I need to be most concerned is my own. But it's most people's belief that the person with whose behavior they need to be most concerned is that asshole at the Wal-Mart in the "Fuck Jesus" shirt. Or that asshole at the Wal-Mart wearing a "God hates fags" t-shirt. Or that guy I once saw at the Kroger in Denton wearing the "Amateur gynecologist" t-shirt.

I am not arguing that we should not watch what we do and say. Far from it. I'm just commenting on how we all prefer to watch what someone else does or says and then bitch about it. But let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Wait a minute. Scratch that. We all seem to think we're each without sin, and I don't want to get caught in the crossfire.

"Outraged"? More like "In"raged.

2009-10-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Before, after, or during this post, you should click here and read Bill's post. I'm the unnamed coworker. It's almost like being famous!

So, last night I was thinking about my response, considering my argument. Just in case you haven't yet clicked on the link and checked out what I'm responding to, I'll give you a brief break down. Bill and I were discussing the HBO documentary Outraged, which chronicles a man's journey to out closeted gay politicians who consistently vote against gay rights legislation.

I argued that this man's actions probably made for riveting documentary film-making, but they were ethically tenuous at best. Sometimes politics have the propensity to turn us all into drama queens. I should know. I used to be one of those feminists who figured having a penis was an automatic qualifier for being sexist. Talk about having an agenda.

Now, my feelings on the outing have nothing to do with what I think should be done politically. I am a woman who believes in the legalization of everything. You wanna do heroin bought with the money you got for giving a blowjob in a back alley? Go for it. Same goes for gay marriage. Not that gay marriage is anything like doing heroin with blowjob money, but my point is that my political leanings are such that I pretty much think that as long as you're not forcing anyone else to do something they're not interested in doing, you should be allowed to do whatever you want. No stealing. No murder. No rape. Otherwise, bring on the trans fats and supersize it, please. I don't think it's the government's job to save us from ourselves.

Or keep us from getting married to each other. Some people might argue that the two are one and the same.

So, at any rate, if you read Bill's post, you know that I argued that it was not ethical for this man to out these politicians. I argued that it was not ethical even though they're being hypocritical. I argued this because they may have many different motivations for both their voting records and their decisions to keep their homosexuality (or varying degrees thereof) private. Part of my argument was that, as elected officials, their duty is to vote the way the majority of their constituents would have them vote. This argument was backed up by a conversation I had with another gay friend about a Texas state senator he knows. She's a conservative elected in a majority conservative district, and she once told my friend that she disagrees with the way she votes on gay issues, and she votes that way because that was the job she was elected to do. If she voted the way she wanted in spite of her constituents, she'd be acting as if she knew better than they did how they want their community to run. And, like it or not, that's just not the way our government was designed to work.

In theory, it's a government for the people, by the people.

But on some level I felt that his decision to out these people was unethical because it just seems malicious. It almost seems downright childish. All it will really accomplish is the embarrassment, grief and emotional upheaval of a few politicians lives. It will not change much of anything else. If you believe that hurting these people puts us any closer to legalizing gay marriage, you're insane. Effectively all it will change is which politician holds their seat come next election.

You know, from a closeted gay one who votes against gay rights to a hopefully really straight one who votes against gay rights.

During my argument with Bill I posed the question, "So, if you knew your friend's boyfriend was cheating on him, would you tell him?" We both initially agreed that it would be none of our business, thus supposedly strengthening my argument. I love it when that happens. But he has since changed his position and said he would tell his friend. Well, guess what. I'm changing my position, too! And I've actually decided that question is different than whether or not it's ethical to out a politician.

I would tell my friend if his or her boyfriend or girlfriend was cheating on him or her. Man, gender inclusion really lengthens a sentence. I would not, however, tell an acquaintance. I have intimate knowledge of my friend's situation. I do not have intimate knowledge of my acquaintance's situation. Therefore, all of my acquaintance's private matters are none of my business until he or she makes them my business. Relationships rely very much on nuance.

But even if I decided to tell an acquaintance, it's still different from the political scenario. If I tell an individual that his or her boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on him or her, I've given that individual full working knowledge with which to make a choice. He or she can stay or go knowing the truth about the situation. But that is not the motivation behind outing these politicians. Odds are good that if they lied about their sexual orientation and vote against gay rights legislation, they ran on that platform--the anti-gay-rights-legislation platform. So did they lie in a political sense? Nope. They said they would do X, I voted for them because I wanted them to do X, and then they did X. Sounds like doing their job to me. Outing them doesn't give anyone a choice to do anything about anything.

Whenever one finds oneself pondering an action, it's best to ask oneself, "Is it helpful?" If the answer is, "No," then one really should reconsider said action. Even if said action will make one famous.

Outing people--any people, even politicians--against their will is just mean. It isn't high-minded. It doesn't open the floor for constructive discussion. It just hurts some people, pisses some other people off and allows some other people to shout, "Fuck yeah! Stick it to the man!" at their television sets on a Saturday night.

And I don't think any of those things are on the to-do list.

Driving Home

2009-10-02T21:16:00.000-07:00

I remember this stretch of highway as I experienced it alone.

Now, riding along with my lover driving, it feels like a foreign place. I cannot count how many times I drove it alone, at 5 pm., 3 am., every hour by the time I was done with these places. This stretch of highway is an in-between place, a place that gets me from one place to another.

I see the Whataburger where I bought toquitos and Diet Coke, drunk and depressed, searching for something to ground me in the middle of the night. I am not able to experience that place now, but for some reason it comes back to me as a strong place. I know I experienced it as a lonely place, but it was all me. I was the one doing the driving. I was in a quiet spot between meeting people here and meeting people there. It was a space where I could meet myself.

This is how memory works—this re-feeling. I know there was the period of time during which I wanted to kill myself. Then there was the period of time when I could remember wanting to kill myself. I would be watching a movie, and suddenly someone would be hanging from a light fixture. I would be able to feel that in my body, my entire being having a reaction to something I understood so completely. It wasn't like longing. It was remembering someone who I used to be. It was empathizing with myself. Now I look at pictures of me and think, “That was during the time I couldn't stop imagining my car wrapped around a tree every time I drove.” I know those things really happened, but I cannot remember them. I look at those pictures and cannot bring to mind the way any of it felt. It's as if I'm looking at someone I know I know but cannot name.

I cannot remember her.

I'm thinking about this as we drive south on 35 from Denton to Dallas at one in the morning. I can feel that sudden memory. My body says I should be here alone. He is not supposed to be here. This is supposed to be my place. I wonder if I really want to invite him in to all these places. I want to defend my right to posses something I know I didn't want—my body has forgotten the memory of the loneliness. I suddenly miss something that I'm certain I hated at the time. I miss it as if it were freedom. This is how memory works. It brings back events and rearranges them to meet a new person. I can't really have memories, can I? I feel like I've died a couple of times, been completely destroyed once or twice. In little ways each day something is gone and something new comes in to take its place. This is how memory works.

It's a thinking about something that doesn't exist.

I remember driving this exact piece of road the night before my 24th birthday, drunk and crying about how old I was. I felt ancient. My body felt like I was on the brink of death. I was bloated and hysterical, constantly grasping at moments hoping that one might anchor me. I was ancient, and when I stuck my hand out to hold on to something, there was nothing there. This is the funny thing about memory. I remember it that way right now, but I know that I grasped a lot of things, letting them go the moment I got them. My days were like rivers that flowed over my hands, through my fingers, but never yielded any fish.

I was always conflicted about wanting a life. It's not that I wanted to die, although at times I translated it that way. It's more that I didn't want to be wrong. I didn't want to choose something and fail at it or, worse, have it fail me. I didn't want to be a fool. And then one day I woke up and realized that all of that had happened. I'd been wrong. I'd been a fool. But I still woke up. When I was 18, my mother told me that I shouldn't have sex before I got married. She told me that I might have sex and then meet another man. This other man might be the man of my dreams, but, if I'd already had sex with someone else, he might not want me. I laughed. And I've had sex with more than one man since then.

What's funny is that last night, as I made out with my lover, I kind of wished that neither of us had ever kissed anyone else. But that doesn't mean I don't love him because he did.

I miss the wildly dramatic expression of youth, the pressure on each moment. I miss the way that describing life always seemed to easily come out poetically, the hyperbole in describing such vacillating, frenzied movement. I wish that I had words like that for my life now, but I don't. I know that all of that hyperbole was born of the same place that gave birth to immense misery, to that wanting to die. I used to sleep walk a lot. I once woke up in the middle of the kitchen floor, on my knees, holding a huge knife to my stomach and shaking with sobs so deep they forced screams. I was 9. No one came. The house was too big; no one could hear me. Where did that come from? I don't know. I have cycled through cells too many times to remember on anything other than an intellectual level that it even happened. I didn't outgrow that impulse until I was almost 30.

This is no more living than that was living. It's just more of a life.

I think about all of this now, at 1 am., riding in the passenger seat while he drives. I think about who I have been. I think about who I am now. And I think I'm finally ready to admit that I like it that he's here, driving me home. It means I can be still.

It means I can sleep.

Mixed Emotions

2009-09-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

My parents didn't go to prom together.

They were dating. It was the late 60's in a small Texas town. The town was untouched by the radical politics of the age. My father waited until two weeks before prom to ask my mother to be his date. I can imagine her frustration and confusion. I can hear her wondering, “Why isn't my own boyfriend asking me to prom?” But with it being the 60's in a small Texas town, it was still a more formal time. I know my mother. She never would've asked him. She's far too traditional. I can imagine my father, too. I can imagine him assuming that his girlfriend would never accept the invitation of another man. I can imagine him simply putting it off or having a bit of a commitment issue. I can imagine him making too many assumptions. Another man asked my mother to prom before my father got around to it, and she accepted his invitation out of fear. It was the late 60's in a small Texas town. No girl wants to miss her prom, and no girl like my mother in that time and that place could go alone. I am not my mother's daughter or my father's daughter; I am a strange mixture of both. I went to my prom alone. But I went alone in the 90's in a small Texas town after having been raised in a big Texas city, and I always was a rebel.

My father spent prom night in the parking lot with his best friend, the both of them getting drunk and lying on their backs looking up at the stars.

My parents have been married for 35 years. They are perfect for each other. They are perfect for each other, but they are not perfect. The first time I heard the story about prom, I felt very sad. How wonderful would it have been that these two people, together since high school, had shared one of those pivotal teenage moments. How romantic would that have been? But I actually like their story better. It illustrates the awkwardness of life, the unknowing. Sometimes we have an idea that if things are right they will go perfectly. If they do not go a certain way, they must not be right. I'm so very glad that my parents didn't give up on each other after having things go imperfectly.

I'm so very glad that they love each other.

My father's mother was engaged to another man before she met my grandfather. He died in a plane crash in World War II. I know very little about this story because it makes my father sad. In fact, my grandmother never told my father this story; she told my mother. She came from a time when you picked yourself up and moved on with your life. She came from a time when people understood that life was something that happened to all of us. I don't doubt that she loved my grandfather, but I believe she always thought of her first fiancée as her true love.

But I don't think she ever felt sorry for herself. I also think I could believe she thought of her first fiancee as her true love because it makes a more interesting story for me.

When I was 11, my father's mother died. My father adored his mother; he was a mamma's boy. Her death crushed him, and his response was to snap shut tight. He didn't want to talk about it. He doesn't believe in depression, and to admit the way he was feeling would be to admit that he was wrong. I have trouble with not knowing things as well. My mother took it personally. She thought that if he loved her, he would tell her everything. She believes that to love someone is to have them let you crawl underneath their skin and have every part of them. I get this from her. On good days this is why I am a poet. This used to be what I hated about her until I saw it in myself. It's harder to hate someone when you see that you are them. She started drinking more; every night a box of wine. I thought that they should get a divorce because it didn't look pretty. He was making her hate everyone because he was making her hate herself. That's how I saw it when I was 11. I tell this story as if I knew that his coldness was the result of his mother's death then. I didn't. I didn't know that until I was 16 or so. I'd spent years angry at him for things I didn't even try to understand.

But, then, isn't this always why we hate anything? Paying attention is an act of love, and any time we try to pay attention to something we grow to love it in some way. It is our ignorance that keeps us angry and unable to love.

My parents never got a divorce.

A couple of summers ago, one early evening in summer, my family and I were hanging out in my parents' pool. We were making fun of each other and laughing as we usually do. We were listening to music, and my father would randomly ask us, “Who sings this?” whenever a song he believed to be obscure would come on. Sometimes he'd add, “Nan, you're not allowed to answer,” if he figured it would be a cinch for me. Sometimes he'd say it to my brother Robert. He never said it to my mother; she never knows who sings anything, although she's very familiar with the work of The Grass Roots. My father was sitting on the side of the pool, and my mother was sitting on the top step near him. At some point I looked down and noticed that they were holding hands.

A friend of mine recently chided her sister for missing their dead father. She wondered whether or not her sister really missed their father or just the idea of him. She wondered if maybe time had changed her sister's memories; their father had not really been much of a father at all. He'd made plenty of mistakes. Her sister must've rewritten history to make missing him possible. I said that it was possible that she still fully recognized their father for who he had been and still missed him. We can love and miss a person even when they are imperfect.

If we couldn't, we couldn't love or miss anyone at all.

Domination's the Name of the Game

2009-09-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

I'm crate-training my dog.

I've had my dog Baby for seven years. She's not young, but she's not old. Truth is, I have no idea how young or old she really is at all. When I adopted her, I was told she was one. A few days later the veterinarian told me she was probably closer to seven. Other than the gray that has crept into her black coat, I have nothing to suggests she's very old. Of course, the gray suggests she's certainly not young.

I remember the day I got her. My family and I had been at the State Fair of Texas all day. It was six in the evening, and we sat at a picnic table to rest for a moment. My sister and I wandered over to the SPCA booth. I'd been wanting a dog. The moment I saw her--the little poodle mutt falling asleep sitting up in the cage--I knew it would be her. I remember thinking, "She looks like she's nodding off on Valium! That's my dog!" I was drunk. So was my mother. Half-an-hour later, my mother and I had cleaned out the SPCA booth, adopting three of the four dogs they had left at the end of the day. We probably would've taken the fourth if he wasn't already in the process of being adopted.

I picked my dog because she appeared as if she were on drugs. That tells you a lot about me.

In preparation for crate-training an older dog, I did some research. You see, I'm not an all-around great dog mom. Oh, my dog thinks I'm a great dog mom, but that's because my dog gets to do pretty much whatever she wants. Everyone who knows my dog says she's spoiled. I've tried crating her before, but she's never taken to the crate. This is because I'm terrible at the training part. I mostly just put her in the crate a few times and, when she didn't like it, stopped putting her in the crate.

Thank goodness I'm not planning on ever having children.

The biggest problem with training my dog is that we don't have an alpha/beta relationship. We live side-by-side almost as equals. She recognizes in certain situations that she's better off if she defers to me. When I walk her without a leash, she stays close to me and comes when she's called. But she does this for her own safety, not because she sees me as being in charge. I know this because she enjoys alone time under the couch, and she will never come out when called unless she's good and ready.

And I allow this.

The problem with all of this is that, in order for her to be trained to do anything, she needs to see me as the boss. I have a very tenuous relationship with being the boss.

Last night my boyfriend and I had a conversation about who we consider the dominant one in our relationship. He said that he feels he's the dominant one. He supported this with the evidence that I often let him make a lot of our decisions. It's mundane stuff, really--what time we should get together to hang out, what we should eat for dinner, what movie we're going to watch. He always seems to make decisions that work for me, so why assert myself? I have nothing to assert. He asked me what I thought, and I said that I do prefer to defer to him on a lot of things.

He's never given me a reason not to.

The truth is that I see the two of us as wholly independent beings with complete freedom over our own actions. We choose to defer to each other to varying degrees at different times because that is how our partnership works. But I don't know that I'd call this dominance and submission. No one dominates me. I choose to defer. I tend to defer more often partially because I just really don't care that much about what I eat. I also tend to defer more often for the same reason that Baby stays close and comes when she's out in the wide open without the security of a leash.

He seems to choose to be conscientious when making decisions. I feel safe deferring to him. Neither of us are making a power play.

The question of who in the relationship is dominant and who is submissive is a question of power. In deferring, I don't give away my power. I still have it, and I have the right to exercise it at any point. But what I will not do is try to dominate when I exercise it. I will exercise it over myself. In reality, I'm always exercising it in recognizing that deferring is my choice. But suppose he were to do something that I found unacceptable? Suppose I wanted or needed something from him that he did not offer? I would exercise my power not by trying to dominate him into submission. I would make a request, offer a choice, and then make my own choices according to his response. I always recognize myself first and foremost as an independent, free being.

No one is the boss of me. (But that game can be fun sometimes.)

People make power plays when they are insecure. They seek to dominate out of a need for control over that which they fear losing, or they pretend to abdicate their freedom for the same reason. I don't like the idea of dominating someone I love. I may appear to get what I want, but I've destroyed something I wanted even more in the process.

I've destroyed the ability of the person I love to be the person I love.

I remember a time when I was very aggressive. Bossy. Pushy. Mean. It sprung from an anger that had grown out of a very strange idea. Somewhere along the way I'd come to believe that lots of other people were being given whatever they wanted by the people around them. The fact that I wasn't being given whatever I wanted (I cannot even fathom this thought process now, so it's hard for me to describe it in any intricate detail) proved that the people around me didn't love me. They didn't remember me. They didn't think about me. I saw myself at the mercy of other people's actions. So I was going to make them. Essentially I became a bully. I reaped a bully's rewards. People did what I wanted, but I felt even more disconnected from them than I had before.

When I recognize myself as having choice, I am free to allow others to be free. No power play is required--or even possible.

So then why am I crate training the dog?

Because that's right where the analogy falls apart. I can't give the dog a choice to stop having accidents in the house because she lacks critical thinking skills and doesn't understand English. As my boyfriend responded when I told him I wanted her to be free to experience the full expression of herself, he said, "She's expressed herself...all over your carpets!"

Besides, we're about to move in together...so I'm deferring to him on this one.

What Do You Call The Flap of Skin Around a Vagina?

2009-09-14T17:45:00.001-07:00

I like porn.

I still remember the afternoon I discovered YouPorn. All this porn (some of it, admittedly, terrible), free and at my fingertips. I somehow lost track of three hours that day, much the same way I lost track of two hours the day I bought my vibrator.

That's right. Hours.

I just finished reading a blog post at about threesomes. It wasn't anything particularly earth-shattering. What stood out to me was the same thing that always stands out to me in anything I read in Bitch: It's all cultures fault we're oppressed. This statement makes two assumptions. One, we're still "oppressed," and, two, it's all porn's fault.

The essential argument in the Bitch blog is that porn presents what are supposedly men's sexual ideals, and this does three. One, it causes men to see women as sex objects. Two, it makes it seem okay for men to ask for stuff that is not okay. And three, it makes women feel pressured to be a certain way in order to gain the acceptance they so desperately seek. I'm totally inferring all of that, but read the argument. That's the only way one could assume porn makes things go down in the blog author's opinion. Feminists have been arguing forever about how porn contributes to the sexual oppression of women, but I think the argument hinges on some ideas that are rather anti-feminist.

First of all, men see women as sex objects! I've done a lot of reading on the subject and polled my male friends, and it's true--every time a man looks at a woman, he thinks about sex. He may not think about it for more than a second or two, he may not act on it but .9% of the time, and he may quickly move on to other thoughts after realizing the woman they were just looking at is, um, not that cute, but he's wired this way. I don't bring this up to say that it's therefore okay for a man to dehumanize a woman, but the fact remains that no matter how much he enjoys the deep, intellectual conversations he has with a woman, he's probably sneaking peeks at her tits every chance he gets. I hate to creep anyone out, but if you're a woman, odds are good many men who only saw you for a few passing moments at the post office have probably later jacked off while thinking about you.

Secondly, men can ask for whatever they damn well please. Who cares? If my man asked me right now for a threesome, I'd say, "Um...nope. What else might you like to do tonight?" Don't get me wrong--I enjoy watching threesomes in porn. But I know myself enough to know I'm just not interested in getting involved in one myself. It once almost happened in college when my best friend and I found ourselves playing strip poker with a guy I had previously dated, and we all stopped when it just started feeling...weird. If a man asks a woman to do something he saw in a porn and she's not comfortable with doing whatever it is (dressing up like his mother, for instance), she is a grown-ass adult who can say no.

Which brings me to the thirdly--and the real seat of the problem. Several people commented on the blog in question saying that it wasn't alright that porn made men think they should be able to expect threesomes out of their partners. Threesomes in porn apparently make women "feel bad" about being straight, and they also make them feel like they won't be able to please their partners if they can't get kinky. WOW. Porn doesn't ever make me feel bad unless I stumble across one of those porns that seems to involve a less-than-willing woman with a vacant, drugged-out expression. If I think the actress is not okay with what is going on (which is different than a willing actress involved consensually in a BDSM scenario), I will feel icky. But I will not feel bad about my sexual practices because of anything some stupid porn presents or something some stupid guy said. If I don't want to do something, I'm not going to do it. If my man wants to call me a prude, whine or leave, let him. If we don't see relatively eye-to-eye on these kinds of things, I think we're just a bad match. Happens all the time. But I'm not going to feel like it's some kind of relationship handicap that I can't fulfill every man's fantasy.

As previously stated, I can have a pretty good relationship with myself if push comes to shove.

Since when is it porn's fault that women need men to approve of their choices? If you take that need out of the equation--if women actually say, "I don't care what you think, buddy--you're not sticking that thing in my ass!"--then porn can't affect a woman's self-esteem on any level. Hell, porn kind of helps my self-esteem. Have you seen all the different shapes/sizes men are into? Whatever it is I've got, odds are good there's someone out there who'd be more than willing to get into it. I find it liberating. And just because it's out there doesn't mean everybody's into it, either. If you just listen to the referenced blog's argument, you'd assume that all men are hot to have a threesome. But I'm fairly certain based on a number of conversations about sex practices that my boyfriend isn't just not into them; he's against them. At least in the context of our relationship. This argument that porn puts pressure on women to perform a certain way in order to get the love they seek assumes that men are all a bunch of idiots who are that easily influenced by media and women are a bunch of insecure, dependent, needy girls who are...well, that easily influenced by media.

I think media works the other way around. As stated before, there's a porn out there for everybody. I believe that there are many different people out there with many different tastes (giving facials to girls who wear glasses has a whole series) making those porns. The porn comes from the people. It wasn't created by some porn god and dropped onto earth as some sort of moral test or manna from heaven. We made it. Therefore, if it is bad, then we are bad. Stop blaming poor porn; it didn't do anything.

But beyond that, when are feminists going to stop sitting down and crying about what it is the big bad man is doing to us and realize just how much power we actually have? As my friend Kyle used to say, "Women rule the world! They have half the money and all the pussy!" Sure, we don't want to be seen as just pussies--but, then, why are we acting like a bunch of them? Porn--and men--can only oppress me as much as I let them. Some men I've met clearly have what I would call "anti-woman tendencies." Guess what? They've had essentially zero effect on the path my life has taken. So how oppressed am I, really?

I can tell you this: I'd be really oppressed if I gave a shit what they thought. But in that instance, I'd be my own oppressor.

So, in short, if you want to have a threesome, have one. Don't? Don't. Don't watch porn if it offends thee. The other day I ran across a porn that was upsetting. Soon after it began I realized I couldn't tell if the girl was acting as if she wasn't into it or really wasn't into it, but from the look on her face I'd say it was the latter. She looked miserable. And that kind of porn is horrible because it really does dehumanize somebody. But a porn portraying any number of consenting adults doing something they enjoy isn't dehumanizing anybody.

And it's not going to make me feel bad for not having threesomes, either.

Oh, and the punch-line to the title? A woman!

Every Rose Has It's Thorn

2009-09-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

A recession was bound to happen.

Pretty much everything I've ever really needed to know I learned in elementary school. Everything else has simply contributed to my thinking too hard about what turn out to be really simple problems. In elementary school we learned about ecosystems. An ecosystem is basically all the stuff in an environment that functions together as a unit. All the individual living and non-living things in a habitat (the environment in which these living and non-living things exist) have relationships with one another to varying degrees. Those are the basics.

I hope I didn't insult anyone's intelligence with the elementary school science recap.

As part of the lesson on ecosystems, we learned about the deer example. There is a population of deer. The deer eat plants. The deer are eaten by predators. All these things keep each other in check. Now, say something happens to the predators. The deer will continue to multiply unchecked. Eventually there will be more deer than available plant food supply. The deer will eat all the plants, and, barring any intervention on the part of the predator, the deer will begin to die from starvation. Once starved down to a dwindling number, the plants will begin to repopulate the area. Once the food supply is back, the deer will begin to multiply once again. But this is why the predator is an integral part of the ecosystem. No one likes the idea of deer being eaten, but that's because humans are insanely silly creatures with no sense.

Better a few be eaten than a whole mess of them slowly starve to death.

I should probably state up front that I got a D in economics. But logic would dictate that, just as is the case with the deer, the economy is bound to go into recession from time to time. A lot of people honestly seem to believe that the economy should always be growing or, at the very least, stabilized in such a way that they can buy stuff and be comfortable. The minute there's trouble they think, "Hey, this must be somebody's fault! We have to get to the bottom of this and make that bastard pay! Also, someone should fix this situation! Why isn't anyone fixing this situation? Someone should come up with a plan, put the plan in place, and we'll all be back to stocking up on iPhones and new cars in no time! 6 months, tops!" This is because humans are insanely silly creatures with no sense.

I may have gotten a D in economics, but it was mostly from skipping class--not a lack of critical thinking skills.

In an effort to draw the connection between the deer population situation and the economics thing, I copied this from Wikipedia's page on economics:

Thomas Robert Malthus used the idea of diminishing returns to explain low living standards. Population, he argued, tended to increase geometrically, outstripping the production of food, which increased arithmetically. The force of a rapidly growing population against a limited amount of land meant diminishing returns to labor. The result, he claimed, was chronically low wages, which prevented the standard of living for most of the population from rising above the subsistence level.

So, basically, a recession is inevitable when the human population grows beyond available resources. Since we're largely unchecked by predators (whether the predator be a wild animal or common sense), we were bound to start starving to death eventually.

Since this whole thing is an analogy, I'll stop fucking up the lessons and just get to the point.

The point here is that people have funny ideas about what should happen in life. Oh, sure, everyone will say that they understand that life can't always be perfect. But if there's anything I know to be true, it's that people's behavior always tells you more than what they say about what they really think. And all these people who say they understand that life cannot be perfect all the time promptly start looking for somebody to hang as soon as the shit hits the fan. Instead of trying to figure out what they can do as individuals to try to make the situation better and/or survive it intact, most people just start acting as if this horrible situation was somehow a surprise and a crime.

They act like victims.

Whenever I start in on this argument, I'm told that it sounds like I think people shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. Nothing could be further from the truth. But before I hold anyone else accountable for his or her actions, I have to hold myself accountable for my own. People love to live high on the hog and then act shocked when the well runs dry. I know I'm mixing my metaphors there, but the fact remains that we don't get to just take and take from the ecosystem or the economy without putting anything back in.

And this brings me to the real point of this whole thing.

A recession was bound to happen. And I'm not talking about ecosystems or economics at all.

Maybe the Sun Will Shine Today

2009-09-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

I have a 4% chance of getting divorced in the next 5 years.

I found out today that two friends recently broke up. The news hit me kind of hard, as these were two friends I really thought were going to be together forever. They made it through so much, and they just seemed made for each other. I know “together forever” sounds kind of naïve, and if anyone is the first to question the viability of a match, it's me. Still, I wanted to believe it for these two. I have no idea why they broke up; I found out through Facebook when one of said friends changed her status from “in a relationship” to “single.” But the whys and wherefore's are inconsequential for the purposes of this essay. When I saw the news, it hit me in my gut. If these two are breaking up, what the hell chance do the rest of us have?

So I calculated my chance for divorce at http://www.divorce360.com/content/divorcecalculator.aspx. Being unmarried, I entered information as if I were just married today. I sure hope the fact that I did this doesn't freak out my boyfriend. It's research. And it looks like the odds of my fictitious marriage making it for the long haul are pretty good. That's a relief, too, because I've always sworn I'd only do it the once.

And, no, my fictitious marriage was not coerced by a fake pregnancy. I'm not that kind of girl.

I will never forget my high school psychology teacher getting on his soap box and informing the class that the reason so many people get divorced is because they get married for all the wrong reasons. I believe the way he put it was that people date for 6 months, figure that they're in love, and get married. These people, he told us, are idiots. And I agreed. I thought people who dated in high school were idiots, and I went to high school in a small town where most of my classmates planned on marrying each other. According to the divorce calculator, if I had dated someone in high school and married the guy, my chances of divorce in the next five years would be 25%.

Thank God I waited. Um, er...am still waiting. Or am in a fictitious marriage—which, by the way, is not the same as a sham of a marriage.

This breakup got me thinking about the whole “together forever” proposition. I've always sworn marriage is something I will only do once. I believe that I should take my time in making this decision. I believe that marriage has to be about more than being “in love”--it has to be about wanting to create a family. Not necessarily a family in the sense of father, mother and kids, but a family in the sense that these people choose to live together and stand by each other no matter what. To that end, if I get married, that's what I'm looking for and working towards. Of course, I also once swore that I would never live with a lover until said lover and I were married, and it would appear I've changed my mind. At the tender age of 30, I'm planning on moving in with my boyfriend.

I was rather hurt when I told my friends a few months ago that my boyfriend had asked me if I wanted to live together. Me, the cynic, the girl who has been known to say things like, “This is why fuck buddies are better than boyfriends!”, is finally ready to take a chance on something as insane as living together. I thought for sure my friends would all be thrilled. No such luck. I was met with a chorus of, “Don't do it!” from the mouth of virtually everyone I knew. Of course, most of these people's experience with living together consists of moving in with their significant other a mere month after the beginning of the relationship because one or the other's lease was up. I don't want to sound like an asshole, but that's something I've never done and would never do.

You know, unless I was 83 and my possibility of death calculator said 98%. At that point, what the hell?

What changed my mind? I'm willing to move in with this man because we just seem to work. I'll spare you the sappy details. There's no internet calculator for the odds of our “making it.” For a girl like myself (always willing to enter into a completely doomed union because at least I know what's going to happen, never a bride), I suppose that should be unsettling. So imagine my dismay when another couple I consider to “just work” hit the skids. Am I on a fool's errand?

And what does all this living together talk have to do with marriage? I'm sure my boyfriend would really like it if I answered that question right about now. In all honesty, I think it's simply because my generation has so successfully blurred the line between the two. So many people opt out of marriage and simply live together as if married that it's hard to tell the difference. Also, many members of my generation and generations hence say stupid shit like, "You gotta live together first so you can find out if you and the other person are compatible. You don't wanna marry the guy and then find out he doesn't put the toilet seat down or something, do you?" The whole point of marriage is to make a promise to a person and then stick with it so you can grow spiritually and emotionally, making the effort to work through that kind of petty stuff. If you're living with someone to find out whether or not he or she is a perfect specimen for marriage, you're being silly. In my mind, living together and marriage are different, but they're both to be taken extremely seriously. If I'm willing to move in with somebody, I need to be willing to try to remember every day what loving somebody really means. It means I need to be willing to try to see beyond myself, petty annoyances and PMS to remember why I committed to this thing in the first place. Hopefully part of the reason was that I wanted to try to make that person's life better than it would've been in my absence. If I'm only in it for the sharing of bills and the regular sex or until the gas runs out on the butterflies in my stomach, perhaps it's time I rethink the proposition.

But even with all my calculating of odds and hedging bets, there's always an element of chance. The element of chance doesn't negate the need for me to consciously work toward being a responsible partner in my relationship. It's not an excuse to run willy-nilly into a situation before thinking about the possible outcomes and weighing the options. Still, the element of chance means that even with all my big thinking, I may end up where I've always sworn I'd never be: sleeping on the couch in the same apartment with the person who just dumped me/got dumped by me. I know that it would be a huge “growth opportunity,” but why even set myself up for the growing in the first place?

Because I may just end up with plenty of opportunities to grow closer to this person who I think is awesome and past myself, petty annoyances and PMS by staying in this relationship. Oh, yeah. And my vanity. We all have our things we need to work on.

Besides, I may know a couple who seemed to have it all and broke up anyway, but I also know couples who've been married for years and still post really nauseating crap about how much they love each other every day on Facebook.

There may be no odds calculator for which couple we'll turn out to be, but I love him so much I'll take that chance. Besides, if it all falls apart, I still have my imaginary husband.

Don't Hate the Player

2009-09-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, I declared to my mother that I would not be getting married or having children.

It's a rather bold (and typical) statement for a 16-year-old to make. Sixteen is an age at which we're each figuring out who we are (or, at least, beginning to assert our independence—it's a process that goes on every day of our lives afterward), and making such hyperbolic statements is normal. At 30 I can safely say I have no idea whether or not this statement still holds true, although I can tell you that I'm still the kind of girl who isn't necessarily chomping at the bit to get in the family way. But when I told my mother this, she had what I thought was a very strange reaction; she burst into tears and declared that I'd basically just told her that I thought her life was meaningless. Because I didn't want to get married and have children—the two things she considered the most important things she'd done with her life—I obviously thought anyone who made such a choice was an idiot. I was dumbfounded. It seemed like a rather ludicrous leap in logic to me. What I'd said had nothing to do with her in my mind. But it's a fairly common leap in logic to make. Most people do it.

Most people think that other people are judging them all of the time. And most people would be right. The question, though, is why do we care?

I was discussing this phenomenon with a friend the other night. It never ceases to amaze me just how much people feel the need to justify their choices when most choices don't need justification. The best illustration of this that I've ever encountered is the whole monogamy “debate.” I put “debate” in quotations there (although I'm not really sure why I did it the second time) because I think it's debatable as to whether or not there's really a debate over monogamy. People who don't want to be in monogamous relationships always seem to feel the need to have a highbrow intellectual argument to support their slutty horndog ways. “Mankind just isn't inherently monogamous,” they declare, as if this somehow proves that their choice is more right. But who are they proving it to? I've been in monogamous relationships; I've also fooled around with three different people in one week. I don't think I need to have an argument to justify either choice. Why? Because I choose which way I'm going to run my business, and my only responsibility is to make sure the people (or person) I'm sleeping with and I are on the same page. If I've promised monogamy, I need to be monogamous. If I haven't promised anything, then I get to get off however and with whomever I please. Neither requires that I go around telling everyone why I think it's somehow better that I've made whichever choice it is I'm making at that moment. I don't need to recruit people into being on “my side”--although, if I'm sleeping around, I guess I do need to recruit people into being on their backs. When people give me some reason for their whoring ways that incorporates man's essential nature, all I want to say is, “Who cares?” The existence of monogamous couples isn't an indictment of your lifestyle.

So why the argument? I think people feel uncomfortable with the existence of “the other side,” even if the other side is mostly an illusion. I'm currently happily monogamous, but I don't see all the sluts of this world as being on another team out to destroy the very fiber of my beliefs. I just see them as dogs out to get a bone, ya know? As long as they're not sleeping with my partner, I have no opinion on their existence whatever. They don't make me question my choice in exactly the same way that happily monogamous couples don't make me feel like a dirty whore when I'm free to sleep with whomever I choose (man, this is making me sound way sluttier than I've ever really been known to be). Basically, I don't care what anyone thinks of me when I'm getting laid on a regular basis. But, really, the monogamy argument is a symptom of a larger problem; insecurity. When it comes to religion and politics (politics especially), I believe that there's more than one way to skin a cat. I believe that more than one solution may be right depending on the specific details of the situation, and sometimes there is no real solution at all. Rarely is there one single solution—one right belief, one right action.
But (and here's the shit that's really gonna blow your mind), I think all these arguments are silly because not only is there more than one solution to this living problem we all seem to have, but there's no problem at all.

Now, I know what you're thinking. “No problem? Man, I've got problems.” I hear about people's problems all the time. “My boyfriend won't get a job.” “I'm in thousands of dollars of debt.” “I don't have six-pack abs.” “I have six-pack abs, and my diet is making me a raving lunatic bitch!” People have problems all over the place. But all of these problems are problems in perception. My mother burst into tears over her 16-year-old know-it-all daughter's declaration because she perceived it as an insult. Actually, she burst into tears because she's kind of mentally unbalanced, but she's mentally unbalanced because she perceives herself as the center of the universe. See? A problem in perception!

The bottom line is this: if you have a problem with the way someone is living his or her life and those choices don't impact you directly, you have a problem with yourself. Whenever I'm perceiving an “Us vs. Them” scenario, what I'm saying is that I feel that someone else's choices call my own into question. If I know where I stand on my personal life, what difference does it make where you stand on yours? We're all basically on the same team: a bunch of people trying not to starve to death and maybe have a good time every once in a while. All this defensiveness is either insecurity or a desperate need to kill time.

And I'm not above a desperate need to kill time. I routinely get annoyed by the tweets of people I don't even know. That's irritainment!

The Sad Reality

2009-09-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

I've been having a strange experience lately. As a waitress and a person who frequents coffee shops alone (in other words, as a person who has occasion to overhear conversations in which I am not involved at least 75% of the time I'm awake), I've begun to notice that at least 70% of all randomly overheard conversations sound like complete nonsense. I'm not talking about not being able to get a handle on what is being discussed because I'm only hearing snippets of conversations between people I know nothing about. I'm talking about hearing a full 20 minutes of a conversation and thinking to myself, “This sounds like gobbledy gook! Are these people talking in circles? Was that last statement even a sentence, or was it just a string of words spoken with inflection?” It's a lot like the scene in Some Kind of Monster when somebody says that the band should come up with a mission statement. “Mission statement?” someone asks as if he's never heard the term before. “Mission statement,” replies whomever made the suggestion. “Mission statement?” asks the other person again (it was hard to tell who in the room full of Metallica and hangers-on was asking), still stumped. “Mission statement,” comes the reply, amazingly unfased and unfrustrated. At some point this exchange just becomes like the drone of white noise.

And that's the thing: this strange experience I've been having reminds me a lot of what it's like when I watch reality TV.

Most people I know with similar intellectual interests to my own are generally in one of two camps when it comes to television: they refuse to get cable because watching TV is a waste of time, or they watch critically-acclaimed, artsy-fartsy smarty-pants TV shows on DVD even if they have cable. They wouldn't want to chance a run-in with some sundry common sit-com or reality rif-raf while clicking through the channels to watch The Wire. Me? I am a firm believer in television programming's right to be crap. I can watch an entire season of America's Next Top Model over the course of a lazy Sunday, and the smartest thing I watch with any regularity is Law & Order if left to my own devices. My current favorite television shows are The Real Housewives of (Insert Location Here), Millionaire Matchmaker, and whatever win-the-love-of-semi-famous-has-been show is currently running on VH1. I love reality TV. What I find so funny is that so many people make the argument that reality television is terrible because it's nothing like reality. Whenever I hear this argument, my initial reaction is that it is true—reality television is not reality. But I don't think this has any bearing on whether or not reality TV is good or bad. I love sitting on the couch watching a movie and snuggling with my boyfriend on a Tuesday night, but I doubt this very real scenario makes for riveting television. Even less riveting would be me doing my laundry or reading for an hour at the local coffeeshop (where I don't really read—I just pretend to read while listening to other people have conversations that make no sense to me). The argument that we shouldn't watch reality TV because people would never act like themselves in front of a television camera holds no weight because that is exactly why it's in any way interesting. The first 4 seasons of The Real World showed 7 20-something strangers getting real; in the fifth season we saw the 7 cast members forced to work together to create a business as well. Why? Because everyone knows that the episode in season 3 when Cory went job-hunting for a whole day—and we were forced to watch her fill out applications and talk to managers—was booooo-ring. It's something we all really do at different points in our very real lives, and we all really hate it. We don't want to be reminded of it while watching television.

My recent experiences have led me to believe, though, that there may be another reason for society's love/hate relationship with reality TV. Maybe it's not so much that reality TV is nothing like reality; maybe it's that reality TV is a little too much like reality.

I can completely understand why we don't want to admit that we spend 82% of our time over-analyzing every subtle nuance of our personal lives out loud to other people, all the while doing it in a language that loses it's meaning the longer we speak it. I mean, when did everyone start saying, “You know?” at the end of every other sentence? This has to be a sign that none of us are 100% sure we're making sense.

While watching the season finale of Tough Love, a reality show about 8 women who have serious problems with men who move into a house together and work out their issues with the help of a matchmaker (Sex and the City meets the therapist's couch), it dawned on me just how similar everyone's lives are. Two of the most disparate women in the house became best friends, crying and saying things like, “Oh, I've learned so much from you!” after initially hating each others guts (been there). One of the women had to choose between the affections of two different men (I don't want to brag, but...done that). Another woman quit the show when the matchmaker wouldn't stop getting in her face about being such a slut. I've never had that exact experience (mostly because I've never been on a reality television show centering on 8 women with serious relationship problems), but, trust me—I can relate. I think what makes us so uncomfortable with reality television is that we're really afraid that these are the days of our lives. Someone may not be able to relate to the situations on Tough Love in a direct sense, but when we listen to the conversations these women have about what's going on in their dramatized lives, we can't help but relate on some level. When our conversations are repeated by a bunch of people we don't know on television, they tend to seem much more ridiculous and meaningless than when we had them in a real life scenario with our friends or ourselves.

We're left asking ourselves, “Are we really this stupid?”

Sure, most of us would like to believe that our personal dramas are deeper than that. We'd like to believe that these intensely personal experiences aren't being replicated in anyone else's life, let alone played out on television. We'd like to believe that our lives are more ground-breaking than the basic 5 possible plots. When we're watching those plots play out on a scripted sit-com or drama, it's easy to believe that our lives are more complex and less ridiculous—that stuff is fiction! But reality TV hits a little too close to home. When I found myself relating to the ladies of Tough Love, it made me realize just how comforting it is to know that all the stuff about me that I think is so fucked up is fucked up in other people, too—which, in the end, makes it seem a lot less fucked up.

So, I guess, yes—we really are this stupid! The good news is that we're pretty much all this stupid! Trust me; I've been eavesdropping on everyone, and we all sound like nonsense.

Especially whoever it was in Some Kind of Monster who didn't understand the concept of a mission statement. That guy's an idiot.

And I can relate.