What was the question again?

We got a new TV this weekend! I'm not actually that excited about it. I still can't believe I spent THAT MUCH on a TELEVISION SET -- and we got one on sale for a really great price. But along with the new TV we picked up an antenna so we can at least watch PBS on occasion. I think cable is a total rip off, since I can buy episodes of my favorite shows through Amazon. BUT I'll totally spend $20 on a set of rabbit ears to watch a little public television...and maybe sneak some crappy network TV reality when the husband isn't around to judge me.

While watching KERA World, the secondary PBS channel, I saw a documentary made by a woman who was struggling with the hold that relationships had on her life. She was in her 40s, and she went to India, exploring with women there different views on sexuality and love. After the documentary was over, she and an interviewer began having a conversation about work and kids and blah blah blah. At this point, I'm sorry, I am tired of the way that most of these conversations go. Why? Because inevitably the question of, "Can women have it all?!" comes up, and I have to go stab my mattress 100 times.

CAN WOMEN HAVE IT ALL, Y'ALL?! I actually think this is an amazing stupid question, and if anyone takes it seriously, shame on them. Does anyone see this question as anything other than fodder for Yahoo content creators on a deadline who need something with click value? It's a media-generated conversation. For one thing, there's the obvious issue of the fact that no one ever asks men if they can "have it all." They can have kids and hand them off to someone else and go to work, the end. Also, in this day and age, I can't believe we're having this conversation because it's still framed as if anyone has a choice. I assure you, most women are working and having kids at the same time because LOL WUT? You can afford your kids any other way? And then, beneath these issues is this: WHO THE FUCK HAS ALL OF WHAT? I know no one, man or woman, who "has it all." I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS.

Seriously, it's insulting to all of our intelligence that we're having this conversation when we could be having real conversations about reshaping the world and making it work better for us ALL. We need to stop getting distracted with questions served to us repeatedly by lazy, hungover "content creators" at MSN, Yahoo, and HuffPo, and start asking actual, meaningful questions.

You first.

Writer's Block

I used to write all the time. Throughout college, I carried a notebook with me at all times, and I journaled incessantly. I wrote poems; obviously I wrote essays for classes and research papers. And when blogging became a thing people do (beyond the early days of LiveJournal, which always seemed to me to be artless barfing of personal information onto the internet...which is not really different from modern blogging at all), I jumped in. I had a lot of things to say, and for a time I was an insanely prolific blogger, albeit not very well known.

These days, I write very little. I write copy for work, but this isn't writing. It's more like word math, adding words together in strings that add up to something that pleases both client and search engine alike. But it is not writing writing.

I wonder why. I was sitting here at my desk moments ago, wondering why. I've been feeling the creeping sensation for years now that it is the internet itself that is squashing my desire to say anything. After spending several hours a day engaged in the constant online conversations over gender, sexuality, race, politics, class, et. al., I've come across virtually every viewpoint and found myself mentally exhausted. I swim through everyone's thoughts on Facebook and come up feeling drained. I want to stay informed, but I don't feel informed; I feel beaten up. And after reading what every single other person on the planet has to say about this, that, and the other, I feel like there's nothing left to say at all. There very well may be, but my mind is too full of them for there to be any room for me.

I need an effing break. I miss the energy of having an idea and feeling it flow from my fingers and onto the screen. I do not miss the me who was always so hopelessly a little behind the times, which was the impetus for the name of this blog to begin with.

A few years ago, I went through the Artist's Way. Part of the process involves going on a media diet. You cut out all media for a certain period of time. Because I work on the net, I had to make special perimeters for myself, restricting myself to work-related media and nothing more. And it was fantastic. Maybe I should do that again.

Maybe, maybe, maybe...

I wonder if the lack of writing has simply been a change. It's not as if I've forsaken all creative endeavor. I'm in a band. I help write songs, and I still paint fairly regularly. Maybe it's less that I'm failing at writing and more that writing is now failing me in this time of my life. We'll see. 

The other day I came across a thing on the web wherein a man said he met lots of writers, but none of them ever wrote anything. Whatever I want to be, I don't want to be that guy. 

Stalin probably had a huge penis.

Apparently Heineken is changing their bottle design. Instead of being short and squatty, the neck will be longer. This is, according to their marketing folk, supposed to convey “masculinity” and “pride.” Did no one ever tell Heineken it ain’t the size of the bottle but the motion of the ocean…or something?

When I heard this, I just rolled my eyes. This has been going on for a while now, this perplexed response I have to the use of the word “masculinity.” It is almost always used in terms of defense or encouragement, as in, “That thing ladies do threatens our masculinity,” or, “We’re doing this so those dudes can feel more masculine.” I don’t believe I’ve ever heard femininity discussed in these terms. No one can threaten my femininity. There’s a word – emasculate. It’s used to describe the seemingly forcible reduction of one’s masculinity by outside forces. I once had a short dude tell me it “emasculated” him when I wore really high heels while we were together. He said he liked that, but it’s no matter. My point here is that there is no feminine equivalent. No outside force is going to forcibly reduce my femininity by simply doing their thing in my presence.

I think this is so funny. Is who you are “as a man” so flimsy that it’s dependent on your relation to everything around you? Actually, that makes total sense when you consider that masculinity is equated with power, and power always kind of turns people into paranoid, overly sensitive messes. Look at Stalin. Dude killed EVERYONE EVER because he was afraid they threatened his power, whether they actually did or not. This paradox makes me laugh – your supposed power and powerful “masculinity” actually makes you weaker and nuts. It’s one of the things I like about being a lady. Oh, there are definitions of femininity most certainly. But if I choose to shirk them, I have never found that it completely threatens my entire existence.

Masculinity comes up all the time, and the male anxiety about masculinity is simply ridiculous. Who cares? And can a Heineken bottle really improve your feelings of masculinity? How so? Do you equate your dick with all that you survey? And what does dick size have to do with masculinity in the first place? Females express their gender in a wider range of ways, and this is something that I believe gives us strength. It leads to far less insecurity. We don’t need anyone constantly shoring up our sense of femininity, and we don’t have to waste time fighting to get our sense of femininity back if someone seems to threaten it. When my husband does the dishes, I don’t FREAK OUT about whether or not I’m still feminine enough. I feel happy because, shit, I don’t have to do the dishes! 

Perhaps that's not anyone else's experience of being a woman. I was never good at it, so I took myself out of the gender norms Olympics very early on. I've always been a big wearer of dresses, but I've never equated that with personal attempts at being a woman. They're just so much more comfortable, and a dress makes getting dressed so much easier. I'm lazy, not feminine. I've never felt as though I suffered any great loss by shirking my femininity, either. But my main point here isn't what people suffer for lack of conforming to gender norms. It's the fact that I chose that. Any lack of femininity on my part is purely self-inflicted. Meanwhile, men are consistently talking about their masculinity in terms of it's being threatened. A man cannot simply put on gender appropriate clothing and call it a day. His masculinity is largely dependent on his ability to gain and keep some semblance of power over something. From what I've seen, this has turned most men trying to hang on to masculinity in this current era into a bunch of whiners. "But maaaaaaaawm! Why won't that person/place/thing let me feel more maaaaaaanly?"

From a cultural and historical perspective, it all makes sense. It’s the power thing. It’s the idea that the most masculine gets the most power, and men are in this power struggle. The struggle to maintain power. The struggle to get more. But think about that.

Do you really want to be Joseph Stalin?

The Complicated Issue of Armpit Hair

I haven’t shaved my armpits in about three months. They’re not just shadowed with stubble. They’re not even just fuzzy. They’re…hairy. This wasn’t a conscious choice. It started out as sheer laziness. I take baths instead of showers most of the time, and the razor is always on the shower caddy hanging from the showerhead. Once I’m lying down in the bath and realize my razor is so far away, I just think, “Oh well. Maybe I’ll shave tomorrow.” I didn’t ever decide to grow out my armpit hair, but it’s interesting to me that it gets such as reaction. Apparently I’m supposed to shave every inch of my regularly visible body, or people will just tell me all about the fact that I’ve got body hair going on. I’ve been informed that family members are going to “stage an intervention,” and I was asked to explain why I had armpit hair. I guess I didn’t realize I owed people explanations for my choices as to what I do with my body as I go through my daily life.

I don’t ask other people to explain their body hair.

A lot of people have said that they shave not because they are responding to societal pressure but because they find body hair “gross.” Americans as a general rule will use this word to describe all things related to the body; people declare feet to be gross, their own genitalia to be gross, body hair to be gross, and everybody loves to say that penises are gross. I don’t understand any of these things to be gross unless they’re diseased and oozing pus. To believe that these things are inherently gross in and of themselves is to believe that even clean, fresh from the bath feet are “gross.” It’s to believe that my non-sticky, non-stinky armpit hair is “gross.” Some genitalia may be moist, but that doesn’t make it gross. I find it odd that so many people, and women in particular, describe a perfectly normal bodily function (the growing of hair) to be gross, but what really gets me down is that everyone feels the need to tell me this when they see my armpit hair.

As Madonna once famously put it, “I’m not your bitch. Don’t hang your shit on me.” I’m absolutely certain that I’ve quoted that before, but it’s one of my favorites.

I have been asked if this was “a feminist thing,” or perhaps the result of depression. It’s armpit hair! I just didn’t see it as that important. It’s just what’s happening right now, today, for me. Watching people have such strong reactions to such a silly thing is both funny and depressing. What I am doing harms exactly no one, but the group is passionately opposed to me stepping outside of the norm. My armpit hair makes me “the other,” that scary beast who needs taming. I suppose if I am willing to flout this convention, I might be willing to blow things up, steal, kill people, or be willing to step outside the other norms we so desperately need for civilized society. Except that is a crazy line of thinking.

Historically speaking, we’ve most likely used this instinct to spot “the other” to protect ourselves from the enemy. But we should be becoming more discerning at this point. Instead, we still crudely separate by “us” and “them” along even the most meaningless of lines. Of course, no one has abandoned me over it just yet, but they’re simply at stage one: shaming me into compliance. If I don’t respond to that, I wonder how long until I’m banished to the forest.

My armpit hair doesn’t feel so much like a feminist issue except insofar as it others me but does not other men. In reality, it didn’t really feel like an issue at all until other people started talking to me about it like it was a symbolic problem and a great offense. But if it is an issue, it feels like part of a larger issue for me – the issue of “the other” and how even the most banal of infringements on societal norms can immediately send you to “the other” side.

Public Displays of Affection

There have been three newsworthy shootings in the last few weeks. One was the Aurora shooting at a movie theater in the Colorado community. One was the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. And one, today, was in New York City, where a shooter shot four people in front of the Empire State Building. People make very public proclamations of sadness, but these proclamations seem a bit disingenuous to me. I wonder if the public sadness -- the near wailing and gnashing of teeth that can seem to take place by people who don't know a thing about the victims -- is more a sadness over having our general bubble of security burst in such an intrusive way.

You see, terrible things happen every day. Almost every day I will have at least one moment when a feeling will grip me and send my body into terror. I will be driving along on the highway, for instance, happily finished with the work day, and I'll think, "Something bad is happening to someone right now, and there's nothing I can do about it." I'll feel panicked, helpless, and overwhelming sadness all at once. I feel an intense feeling I cannot name; it's most likely just the unnameable meaninglessness that comes up for me in the face of life's seeming cruelty. I'm seeing a therapist for this tendency of mine. It's not so much that I'm a negative person. It's more that I feel that the only meaning I can find in life is the desire to make things better, and making things better depends first on recognizing that things need to be made better in the first place. I'm told that most people don't think this way. They allow themselves to be distracted by the comforts of their lives. At least, until a shooting happens in a very public way at the right time in the news cycle, garnering lots of coverage and sparking a public discussion of how unsafe we all are.

As if we were ever safe.

My therapeutic treatment actually involves distraction. I'm supposed to do something else when these thoughts come up. I understand there really isn't anything I can do about an unknown victim somewhere in the world. But distraction feels like part of the problem. If there is any evil in materialism, it is that it tricks us into believing that life is inherently comfortable. A recent study showed that people who make less money give more to charity than those with more. They know that life is bad. They don't forget. People are dying every day, but many of us only choose to mourn when it cannot be ignored.

But I wonder if we're really just mourning for ourselves.

Hurtling Toward the Grace of God

I'm currently reading Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner. It's a biography of Marilyn Monroe. I'd never considered reading a biography of Marilyn Monroe; you always think you know her story. She married Joe DiMaggio. She married Arthur Miller. She was America's sexpot. She was emotionally unstable, and her death is the most talked about part of her story, shrouded in mystery and conspiracy theory. Everyone knows her, but I suspect most people have never watched even a single Marilyn movie. I have; I was a classic movie junkie as a child, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a personal favorite.

However, this story is riveting, and as with most anyone you could ever sit down with and discuss their life, so much greater than the sum of its parts. And the book was written by a woman who teaches history and women's studies. It's interesting to get a feminist perspective on Marilyn's life story.

The other night I was lying in the bathtub, reading. I'm getting to the part of the story where things have really ramped up. It feels like I'm not hurtling toward her death instead of steadily climbing. As a biography, the book relates the facts in chronological order. I'm trudging through Marilyn's life, one event at a time. And following a life story in this way can make it feel as if you're accelerating life. I mean, you are. Instead of seeing her life in real time, I'm seeing it in a matter of weeks. In that bathtub, speeding toward her death, i began to squirm. It suddenly felt as if all of life was running toward the finish line, mine included. Most people argue this all the time -- life is short, the exclaim. But the moments when I feel that deep in my bones, actually physically feel it happening, are a completely different matter than the intellectual construction of what that means.

Exploring another person's life in this way throws the idea of choices in stark relief. At the end of a chapter, Ms. Banner comments that by deciding to take a certain film role, Marilyn unwittingly set in motion a series of events that would end her marriage to Arthur Miller. That was never her intent, of course, and it feels like an excellent counterpoint to those who talk about "good" choices and "poor" choices as if we all know which is which all of the time. It's easy to believe, for instance, that doing drugs is a "poor" choice, but I could find you 10 people in 10 minutes who feel that doing drugs turned into one of the best choices of their lives. And looking back, Marilyn could've exclaimed, "Why did I take that part?!" But the truth at the heart of this matter is that we really have no way of knowing the outcomes of our choices for certain.

I come back to this idea whenever I begin to feel myself wanting to punish someone for their supposedly poor choices. My response to those who say, "They did it to themselves," is, "There but for the grace of God go you, too." Some people pay far too much for the same choices that others make unnoticed.

Reflections on Poison and Perfectionism

I live in Dallas, Texas, where cases of West Nile have been unusually high and (last I could tell) ten people have died. That's ten people in the city of Dallas. Sometimes they tell you how many people in Dallas COUNTY have died; I think they do this to up the drama. So about two hours from now they will spray poisonous insecticide from the sky, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

I mean, I tried to do something about it. I wrote my councilman -- TWICE -- and when I found out he doesn't read his emails, I emailed his assistant. I emailed the mayor. I emailed the district judge. I also posted a comment on his Facebook page. Everywhere I looked people appeared upset about the spraying. And every story I saw made it obvious that they were being ignored. Threads of comments on articles 10 or 15 posts deep with variations on, "PLEASE DON'T SPRAY US WITH YOUR POISON!" and nary a dissenting opinion in the bunch. But it all started to feel like a bunch of tiny people screaming and shaking their fists as a giant put the lid on their box. The case, it would appear, was not up for debate. The scariest part is that there's pretty much nothing we can do about it. I considered driving the hour to my parents' house in Sherman for the night, but I have to go to work in the morning. It still feels like a tough call. 

It's petrifying, really.

I'm sitting on my couch at 8:30, one hour and 30 minutes from the commencement of the spraying. I look down, and I see a mosquito quietly sucking on my wrist. I chase it away to find that it has left two bites on my wrist, and I think, "Awesome. I might get West Nile AN HOUR AND A HALF before the spraying that supposed to kill the mosquitos and protect me from the West Nile while damaging my endocrine system!" It's moments like these when one really gets in touch with the feeling of powerlessness. At this point, all I can do is sit back and wait, watching to see which side is going to get me first. 

I'm already wondering if my slight sense of fatigue is the early onslaught of West Nile. It couldn't possibly be my poor sleep habits...

So here I am, sitting on my couch, pondering the complete futility of life because of two mosquito bites and a little insecticide. Earlier, Sean asked me if I ever feel like life is an endurance test. He asked if I ever felt like I was failing that test miserably. I said I don't usually feel like I'm failing it miserably, but that's because I did A LOT of work on my perfectionism in therapy years ago. I realized it's a complete waste of time to worry about perfecting things that will seem as if to have never existed (namely myself) within 10 years of my death. I do, however, often feel like I'm not sure why I do half the shit I do. I'm not trying to be perfect, but I do schedule myself to death trying to cram as much FUN and MEANINGFULNESS into my life as possible. Then I'm faced with a moment wherein I could possibly be about to simultaneously suffer from a serious disease and the side effects of a dangerous chemical and I think, "I NEVER SHOULD'VE QUIT SMOKING!"

Apparently when faced with my own mortality, I have exactly the opposite reaction from the one you're supposed to have. I'm supposed to be sitting here wondering if I smelled enough roses or some shit. Instead, I'm lamenting all the cigarettes I did not smoke. 

Although I suppose that one man's rose is another man's Camel Light.