Lovely Monsters

2011-12-06T04:19:00.001-08:00

I told myself, as you may recall, that I would wait to pseudo-dump the Creature (pseudo-dump insofar as we have a pseudo-relationship) until he got a new job and could move away from his horrible little town. He was dangerously depressed, I told myself.

Whether that was my motivation or I held off because it was so flattering and potentiating to be wanted (see above), I honestly can’t say.

***

Not knowing this does not please me, but having no way of knowing which of the two sides of something dread important seems to be quite the leitmotif, or even the backbone, of adulthood. For example, is there no God, or is all the blankness and occasional spurts of startling horror in the world just part of a larger scheme I can’t comprehend because I am not omniscient? Does God not answer my pleas to tell me what is the right thing, the truth, because there is no right thing, or because I was raised Protestant and thus he has already shown me? If I ask for a sign, and I perceive one, is that a combination of circumstance and confirmation bias, or is it genuinely a sign? If I achieve certainty, or believe something truly, is that because I am having a genuinely supernatural experience of what is true, or is it because the human brain is designed for belief and credulity and pattern-imposition because having those things makes it easier for a sapient creature to survive?

There is no way to tell. Absolutely none. That’s scary as hell.

***

I digress from my main point. Creature has been hired to a new job, which starts at the beginning of the year (less than a month away!) and is in a proper Big City and pays nearly $90,000 a year, an utterly ridiculous amount of money. I am still waiting with bated breath, watching, because I want him secure in his new disaster (a pretty turn of phrase, not an impugnance [is that a word? must look this up; surely it must be related to repugnance, in which case repugnance should have a verb form repugn] of his life) with his feet under him before I take myself away. It’s not time just yet, but the time is close enough that I need to start preparing.

And close enough to begin reviewing. There is a part of me—not overwhelmingly big, but certainly overwhelmingly loud, if you understand my meaning, not the majority opinion, perhaps, but one given volume by panic and guilt and all those things that lie under me, under the antidepressants, and are in some matters my first resort—that is thinking, strongly, “What have I done?” Because it is of course true that, by expressing interest in him for a few months and then not retracting that, but letting it lie, I have been stringing him along, deliberately and consciously, with no intention of ever giving him a damned thing of me.

Tonight he told me in our phone conversation, apropos of nothing, that although he very much wants to fly me out to Big City to see him (God, it was one of the first things he mentioned in rhapsodizing about having enough money to live on and some to spare), the offer of that plane ticket is not contingent upon my sleeping with him while I’m out there. “I’d very much like that to happen,” he said, “but I don’t want you to think that you have to. That’s not the only reason I want to see you.”

Knowing him as I do, I recognize this as a rather profound statement. I know him to be . . . a dude. He doesn’t like to think about emotions, doesn’t like to think (his acknowledgement, not my aspersion), doesn’t like verbally to show affection. He likes comedy, likes to laugh, likes crudeness and destroying and killing things. He’s thoughtless and careless and an utter barbarian, and wants to do absolutely nothing to improve or even maintain himself, though he does not like the self in question. He is incredibly, deeply sexist, and he spends a lot of time talking about my tits.

There are thus two aspects to his announcement, both alarming. The first is that he might be a better person than I give him credit for being. The second, less disputable, is that he likes me a great deal more, and more sincerely, than I thought he did.

Has this affection increased with time and my indulgence (or at least lack of discouragement)? Am I responsible for this, as well? I don’t know. I don’t know, either, whether I wouldn’t still think that the decision I made—not to reject him timely—was the best one in the circumstances even if that were the case.

So. The time for . . . putting him down draws near. God, how am I to do that? What is there to say? (I must admit that there is a part of me, an awful, craven, prideful part of me, that interprets that question more “What can I say so that I don’t look cruel and capricious?”—caring about my image in his eyes even knowing full well that cruel and capricious is exactly what I have been.)

Ugh. As I say, I’m not sure that the decision I made to string him along wasn’t the right one, but several of my motivations for it are utterly disgusting.

2011-12-06T04:17:00.001-08:00

I have never gotten around to setting this down formally, but it is undeniably true, and worth documenting: I spent a great deal of time in my late teens and early twenties trading sex for the illusion of affection. I knew it even then, consciously thought, “I’m trading sex for the feeling of being wanted,” but didn’t want to admit it for the longest time because that’s typical of women, and I didn’t want to believe, or feed into, the stereotype.

Now I feel as though it had very little to do with my being female and quite a lot to do with my being me.

[corollary to the previous post]

2011-12-06T04:16:00.001-08:00

On a side note, I once thought that being aware that you arelosing your mind, that part of yourself is slipping away from you, must be theone of the worst feelings in the world. I can say now for certain that it is—andyet it is not crushing, not like depression. It is sad, but I lived through itand am still here and still human. I think there is so much to experience as ahuman that even after infinite loss there will still be more. We need never runout of humanity—of wonder, really.

2011-12-06T04:10:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I had an orgasm and felt love, like I always do, because that it what orgasms do to you, and the love I felt was for God. I missed him. I was happy and humbled and awed to know him and to be in his presence, the way I am with a person I quite like.

There was a moment even then when I felt it fading, felt pride and doubt reassert themselves, very slowly, seeping back in, but in that moment I could feel love (I rarely do; usually I feel it as guilt or duty or concern), and I missed him. Now I can’t even access even the recall of that feeling, even its image. It is foreign to me—or, if not foreign, experienced the way one experiences a conversation held softly in another room across the house.

BUT FOR NOW WE ARE YOUNG, LET US LIE IN THE SUN AND DOUBT EVERY BEAUTIFUL THING

2011-11-07T02:19:00.000-08:00

I take part of a sleeping pill every night, and sometimes ibuprofen, too, and often I want to take the whole bottle, one or both, not because I want to commit suicide but because I want to be sure they do the job. The job of making me not hurt anymore. They never do. Marvellously inefficient things, OTC analgesics, I'm not sure why we have the things.

***

But there is this, as well: I make myself tired. I make myself guilty, too, starve myself of sleep and stuff myself with cheap and greasy food, and I think the reason I do it is so that I will feel like this, like I feel now, exhausted and on the verge of tears and so that I can finally think clearly, without all that bloody hope fogging up the system and confusing things.

Have you ever tried to live with hope in you, live like a healthy, normal person? It's like learning to breathe underwater, learning to breathe the water itself, or carbon dioxide; my mind can't process the world in this form, can't get anything useful from things when they're all bonded together into forms that have nothing to do with me.

***

And by the way, just so we're clear, I think hope is a bloody menace, and I do mean bloody, a clawed hand wrapped around and into your heart, and God help you if you try to dislodge it. It's got to be some kind of parasite; it feeds off you, that much is clear.

I wonder what hope's internal life is like, then, if it's an organism. Where does it go and what does it turn into when it's done with us?

[corollary to the post-script of the preceding post]

2011-10-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

A hypothesis on a definition of sacrifice (perfect, yes, but not complete):

"I hate this," he whispers.

Sherlock cocks his head inquisitively.

"I think it's just flu, but I. Well. You know what happened, probably. After I was shot. I nearly died."

Nodding, Sherlock holds out the teacup. With a rueful twist to his mouth, John takes it and sips.

"You aren't meant to break in when I'm throwing up everything I've ever ingested, you berk," John points out after he swallows the spiked tea.

"Why not?"

"Because I said so."

"Not good enough."

"It's the principle of the thing. You could give a man a little privacy if you liked."

"No," Sherlock says, deeply annoyed.

"I fucking deserve privacy, Sherlock."

"But I don't understand the point of it."

"Well, what if I don't want you to see me like this, perfect, elegant you, seeing me all twisted and weak and broken and fucked-up and helpless?" John snaps savagely.

On the word helpless, he sends the teacup flying cruelly into the bathtub. It hits the porcelain and shatters in a spectacular explosion of china. It's the most brilliant thing Sherlock has ever seen. Now the tub is spattered with brandy and hot chamomile, and there are little pieces of disfigured pink blossoms everywhere, sharp enough to draw blood. Shrapnel from a distant war zone brought vividly home and painted with cabbage roses, scattered all around their drain. John winces, hard, and then covers his face with one shaking hand.

Get your bloody hand out of my way, you're completely ruining my line of sight.

"I'm such a mess," John says hoarsely through his fingers. "I hate being this way. I hate me this way."

"I don't." And god, Sherlock doesn't. "But don't hurt anymore. I brought Boots night liquid and anti-nausea tablets from your kit."

The hand slides off his face again. John looks at Sherlock with a resigned and embarrassed and exasperated expression, as if he half wants to punch Sherlock and half wants to sink through the floor.

"You really can't be enjoying this," John observes. "I could spare you the discomfort."

"If you tell me to leave now, I will do," Sherlock offers. "I will. But I don't want to be spared. Do you think I like listening at doors, wondering how miserable you are? Does that seem like something I would enjoy, guessing at your condition? Where I'm concerned, do guesswork and John make a happy pair in your brain?"

John thinks it over.

"May I have a biscuit, please," he murmurs.

Tearing the packet open, Sherlock passes one along. John chews it experimentally, then winces again and drops the remainder in the bin.

Sherlock lifts the pair of flannel trousers and the soft cotton shirt experimentally.

"Right, hand them over."

"No. Come here."

John scowls.

"Problem?"

"Sherlock, I'll only get you sick."

All it takes is the raising of one very eloquent eyebrow to convey to John that the previous remark was either very stupid, or else failed to take into account anything he has ever learned about Sherlock Holmes.

Finally, at last, at last, at last, something in John softens visibly. He rolls his eyes heavenward and then crawls within easy reach. Being exquisitely careful, Sherlock reaches out and begins unbuttoning his shirt. When it's open, he slips it over John's arms, pulls his undershirt up and off, and continues, with John's occasional shaky assistance, until he has John nearly dressed for bed, tugging the flannels up his lean hips and pulling the drawstring to tie the knot. Dressing and undressing John is always a pleasure, but this time there is something to it beyond the revealing what's veiled, something deeper than the heady rush he always gets when a previously covered patch of John's skin is exposed. It feels almost worshipful doing this, like draping a Buddha or a saint. It's breathtaking.

If Sherlock could undress John to his bones, painlessly peel off the skin and then dress him back up in his own soft flesh again, that would be wonderful. More than wonderful. But it would hardly feel any more sacred than this does.

"You'd better go to bed," John says, watching Sherlock's fingers move. "I live here for the moment."

"Then I live here too."

"This is ridiculous, I'm perfectly capable of--"

"No."

Sliding the tea tray away a bit, Sherlock rises to a crouch and spreads the blanket over the floor. It's soft and thick and quilted, and he puts the pillow against the wall, lying back with his head sinking into goose feathers. John looks down at him as if Sherlock is a creature never before seen with human eyes, as if he'd encountered a unicorn sleeping in the middle of the forest.

"This is the part where you come here," Sherlock observes.

John's lids slide wearily over his eyes, and he grips the edge of the bathtub in frustration. "God in heaven, I--listen, Sherlock, you remember when I used to limp around like a mongrel run down by a truck? I was ashamed of it. Angry. I didn't...I didn't want to meet anyone who knew me, didn't want them to see how damaged I was. Running into Mike Stamford was horrifying. I'm a fucking doctor, I knew the leg pain was imaginary, I saw the tests and the scans myself."

"You're not limping an imaginary limp. You've a case of very real flu."

"Yes, and right now I feel as wrecked as I did when there was a hole in my shoulder and the nurses were being extra kind to me despite the fact I was screaming bloody murder at them, because the fever was rising and they all thought I was going to die. That was awful. Knowing. That they were coddling me, that they... And you're not just someone. And you don't just know me."

"Correct. And so?"

"I don't want an audience."

Sherlock, despite knowing that John is simply being honest, can't help feeling outraged.

"Wrong. Wrong. I am not an audience. Of all the mindless--you love me, and so I am going to sleep here with you on this floor, and bring you water and more tea in a new teacup and whatever else you like, for as long as this lasts. I cannot be coddling you, as I am emotionally and intellectually incapable of coddling anyone. I don't think you are twisted or weak or broken or fucked-up or helpless. But you are mine, in case you had momentarily forgotten."

He's listening intently, but nevertheless John doesn't say anything.

"Do you want it to be for me? Fine, that's fine. It would be better for me," Sherlock requests in desperation. "Please come here."

John absorbs this. His mouth twists, hesitant, and he swallows something bitter down. Sherlock would greatly prefer to have swallowed it himself and saved John the suffering, but some things aren't workable no matter how badly you want them, no matter how thoroughly your blood is mixed up in each other's veins.

When John does crawl onto Sherlock's lean chest, he's shivering badly again.

--wordstrings, "A Thousand Threads of What Might Have Been," part 1

Sacrifice, then, is much like thanks: accepting a a gift, which is the hardest thing. What I find most intriguing about this excerpt is what it suggests about the feelings and motivations of the sacrificed-unto.

All of this demands further consideration. I recognize that sacrifice is what's going on here, but I don't understand it--there is nothing in it that connects to my own life. I have never willingly appeared helpless to anyone--I don't even like appearing vulnerable--I have only very rarely wanted to show someone mercy when she or he appeared vulnerable or helpless before me.

There is one other part of this story that relates to sacrifice, helplessness, and mercy, and it is this:

Before this incident--and it's now much more than an incident in Sherlock's mind--John had always been endlessly affectionate and yet completely in control of himself. Deadly, in fact. A force to be reckoned with. John loses his mind during sex because he wants to, not because he can't help it. Now he's completely vulnerable, just a shivering little pile of bones. To Sherlock's shock, that makes the detective feel unspeakably kind. As if, now that John is actually at his mercy, mercy is the only thing he wants to provide.

No, not mercy. Mercy implies a crime. Just what John deserves.

--ibid.

Ha. "Deserves." The idea of anyone thinking that I deserve anything but evisceration is utterly bizarre and somewhat risible to me. The idea of my ever feeling about anyone else that she or he deserves anything better is likewise.

Mmm . . . maybe not my mother. My mother is very much like John, in that sense: good. But I am not much like my mother, and neither is anyone with whom I have ever fallen in love. Those like her are a different species; I don't know if miscegenation is possible--or advisable even if it is. I never know what to make of her, and I'm not sure what use her worldview could be to me if I were to take some of it. (I'm not even sure taking some of it is possible--it's that strange.)

[from an old book-of-shadows entry]

2011-10-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

Here is the truth: like we it or no, asking for forgiveness is important. There is no energy-channeling that can be done properly without purification first: if power rushes into a flawed crystal, the crystal breaks apart rather than becoming stronger.

I have never before understood why we ask forgiveness, why we must apologize, until this. We are not apologizing to God because we have failed her; we are apologizing to God the same way we apologize to Earth.

We work to improve Earth, yes, or to protect and foster her, but we also give her waste. And we waste what she gives us--on packaging, and greed, in torturing animals and treating ourselves and each other badly. And then we come to her with all our waste and all our wastefulness and ask her to take the poison upon herself, take it away from us, so that we can continue living. We give it to her and ask her to transform it, like Kali, from garbage into food, from something evil into life, from poison back into something of which we can make use.

And all this is natural. But firstly, natural doesn't mean not regrettable; and secondly, we ask too much in any case, more than we should. It hurts Earth, the things we do: it costs her something to take them and transform them. That is why we apologize to earth, and similarly we apologize to God (as above, so below)--not because we are "being bad," but because we are hurting her, that is, doing her harm. And it's nothing God can't handle (though as to Earth, I have my doubts), but it iswhy apology and forgiveness, in one form or another, are necessary in a religion.

And they are necessary for us, too. There is no focus to be had while guilts whisper to you that you cannot do exactly what you're trying to do: touch God, improve yourself.

Post-scriptum: What entirely sacrifice is, I can't say, but surely there must be an element of waste-disposal to it.

THE IMPASSIONED UNCOMFORTABLE

2011-10-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

That's what the Ride called himself once in a letter to me in which he described his desire to go on a date with me while he was cross-dressed. It (the letter, and the imagined date) was disastrous and erotic and delicious and perfect and awkward and lovely. "I am the impassioned uncomfortable."

What most Librans (philosophical, not necessarily astrological, Librans, I mean) won't tell you is that balance is just a nicer-sounding word for dynamic equilibrium, which is in turn a scientific term defined as "constantly teetering on the blissful edge that divides two species of disaster."

Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas is the matron saint of this idea, and it is my favorite thing about her (other than the fact that she's the only one in the story with enough sense and spine admit that she doesn't know how it's all going to go, how it should all go) is the way she walks, her body always pitched and akimbo and askew, as though at any moment she might trip or suddenly be disarranged so that she can no longer maintain her own structure. I love, too, that she is stitched together--by someone else, no less--out of things that used to belong to others, some of them pretty and some of them unspeakable, and she fights everyone she has to, even the person she loves, to be given the space to be herself.

I have thought for some time, but only just now realized consciously that I have been thinking it, that red hair, particularly if one adopts it rather than coming by it honestly, is a symbol of respect to her idea, the way some people carry a saint's medal with them. (I have come to believe very strongly in the power of talismans.)

Perhaps I have been asking too much of my own body, or asking the wrong thing, in demanding that it remain a constant, that it shrink down to an acceptable size and stay there, solid. That is not application of what I've learned about life; it doesn't work that way. Silly to expect otherwise.

I will always be fat, I think. Or, rather, I will always be hovering on that edge between acceptability and disgust, lust and revulsion (those two are often the same). I think I know, now, what I want from my body, and what I want is the same thing I want--must have, in order for it to be right--from everything else: doubt. I want to doubt whether my body can do something, I want to be . . . anxious. I want to be on the edge in fitness tests, in clothes sizes, in "normal" versus "fat." I want my body to spark discussion: I'll be repulsive to some and irresistible to others. I want always to be afraid of pitching over into gross on one side and boring on the other.

And I know I can achieve that.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure that "I am the impassioned uncomfortable" came from the Ride's letter. It might have been something J. Alfred wrote me (perhaps in the letter about satanic squirrels), or perhaps even Esme (although I don't think so). My claim, above, of the phrase's origins is just a story I tell myself to put some sense into the information I've been given.

PITCH GOLD

2011-10-16T16:49:00.000-07:00

Amazing how you can do without the essentials of life, so long as you have the luxuries.

--Paris P. Ogilvie, Pitch Black

In doing the monthly budget for October, my mother asked me to make her a template budget--a list of my monthly expenses as well as the outstanding balances and interest rates on all my debts.

It was an . . . enlightening exercise.

For one thing, I was unaware until just now that I have a credit card with a 26-per-cent interest rate. Holy. Cats.

I have been profligate for a while now--a few years. These days I spend between $100 and $200 a month on things that could rightly be called luxury items, or at least divertissements: dinners out with friends, expensive makeup, pretty baubles, new clothes. So far this month I have spent approximately $150 on a vintage glass lamp, a set of Corelle dishes from the 1970s, a small collection of semiprecious stones for my rock collection, and clothing. The fact that I am still in the black has more to do with my mother's overgenerous donation and the unexpectedly large amount of cash I've made housesitting this month than to any particular financial care taken on my part.

Laying all of it out like this--which my mother is also doing with my parents' budget (and with similarly sobering results)--has made it very clear in a way it has not been at all before exactly how far in debt I am; how very, very close I am (one missed paycheck, really) to financial disaster; and how enormous a total can be made by a plethora of small charges. I've been studiously ignoring this latter fact for some time now.

And, honestly, I'm still kind of pissed about it. I realize that this betrays an enormous sense of entitlement on my part, but there it is: I hate living here, out in the mountainous backcountry of the United States, an hour's drive from a town and two hours' from an actual city. I hate not having any close (geographically) friends, not having anywhere to go that's even remotely interesting--

Actually, it's not even that I hate living here. Living here would be perfectly bearable with friends; it always has been. It's that I'm lonely. I'm lonely, and bored, and nothing I do matters to anyone--not enough, anyway, to make it worth doing. I feel (even though this is not true unless I work to make it so) as though I'm going nowhere and never will go anywhere, as though if I stopped existing it wouldn't really matter much to anyone but my parents--and they have their own life with each other, and would be fine.

I shop because buying dishes for a kitchen that doesn't exist in an apartment I don't have makes me feel as though I'm getting somewhere, making some kind of concrete, visible progress toward a future in which I'm a part of society again. I buy clothes not so much because I need them (for the most part) but because I want to step out into the world well-dressed. Because I want to step out into the world, and buying clothes is a reassurance to myself that there's still a future in which I will.

2011-10-14T02:34:00.000-07:00

Tonight while driving home at half past midnight I peeled a banana (not green, but neither ripe), and for a full minute the newly opened space where the inside of the peel had rested against the fruit smelled like bluebonnets.

I didn't even know I remember what they smell like. My family moved from Texas to Colorado when I was six years old, and the only memory I have of bluebonnets is my parents (or at least my mother) taking me to a field that was carpeted with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, the whole thing a jewelled sea of red and violet-blue. I loved picking flowers, and this field was the most lush satisfaction of greed I have ever experienced. I never once needed to stand up and walk to another flower: they grew so densely on the ground that I only had to shuffle forward a little, bent, to gather another half dozen. I was probably about five.

Even now, after the experience of this evening, I have no accessible memory of what they smell like. But in the car, in the space between the unripe banana's peel and the column of fruit itself, it took me only one second, or maybe two, to think, with simple certainty, "Bluebonnets."

I inhaled it deeply and carefully until the scent dissipated, and I described it to myself so that I would be able to write, here, what bluebonnets smell like, since it is unlikely that I will ever get to smell them again. It is not a sweet smell, like jasmine, but it is a floral one, fresh as lilies and yet nothing at all like the smell of lilies. It has a little of the odour of its companion Indian paintbrush about it, something of the fresh juice of crushed field-mullein leaves, a field smell, a going-for-a-hike smell, that disappointing smell of wildflowers that do not really smell of anything; but there is something atop it that is much more than that and that lupines, the Rocky Mountains cousins of Texas' bluebonnets, do not have at all. A very little bit it smells like narcissus, but not the flower of narcissus, only the plant, or else the flower after it has just opened, before it has a chance to fully develop its sweet and sharp odour. Bluebonnet is not heady or fuzzy, but neither is it sharp.

THINGS THAT I HAVE LEARNED SO FAR FROM SHERLOCK FANFICTION THAT I SHOULD PROBABLY WRITE DOWN BEFORE I FORGET

2011-10-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

1. Communication problems do not stop when you fall in love. You will spend the rest of your life trying, and failing, to understand your other half.

2. You can be sexy and hideous at the same time.

3. In fact, you can't be anything else. You are sexy and hideous, beautiful and wretched, at the same time. You always will be. Acquiring the love of someone else will do absolutely nothing to change it.

4. A true lover will love you with your flaws. This is a great deal better than loving you in spite of your flaws. There is no in spite. Your lover either loves you or doesn't, you, all of you, and the wretched, ugly parts are just as much you as the lovely parts are.

5. Happiness isn't very important when you have a cause.

6. You are marvellous. There's no point in pretending otherwise. For every time you think, "How can s/he love me, given that I am so pathetic?" there should be a time you think, "Goddamn I'm fine." Humility is far overrated as a virtue; vanity is far overrated as a vice.

7. The only thing worth pursuing, really, the only thing that matters--if anything should matter to a species like ours (and of course there is no way to tell)--is the transcendent: giving to something bigger, better, than yourself. That's what drugs are for, that's what religion is for, that's what sex is for, that's what love is for. [It is my personal opinion that the greatest of these is love.]

8. Ironically, it's when you pursue being a part of something better than yourself that you become more yourself than you are under any other circumstances.

9. All kisses after the first kiss are the second kiss. Kisses never get old, never get boring, when they are with a beloved; they are always new, always miraculous.

10. Acquiring love will not fix all your problems. Your problems will go nowhere, and they will still, occasionally, eat you alive. But a) not as often, and b) you will have someone sitting with you while they do, and that's infinitely better than the alternative.

11. Be exquisitely careful. You are dangerous.

12. Human bodies are gross. You should not expect your lover's to be any different, and your lover has no right to look down on you because yours is. See Nos. 4 and 16.

13. Making yourself a better person has nothing whatsoever to do with making yourself a more normal or more socially acceptable person. In many instances making yourself a better person will result in your being more broken, more crazy, more desperate, and far, far less successful, happy, temperate, or likeable. Don't try to make yourself a better person if those things are the goals you're focussing on.

14. You will fail. Often, and badly. It's the human condition. It's not a problem. There's no point in being particularly upset about it.

15. Savor, hoard, and hold on to information. You never know what's going to come in handy and in what way. You need to know everything. There is nothing that is not worth knowing.

16. Stop judging. Start thinking of things as interesting. Things can be horrible and still be worth knowing. Hell, things can be horrible and still be fascinating.

17. There is nothing that is not worth knowing.

18. Knowledge can sometimes be extraordinarily expensive. The only thing that makes it worth it is to make it useful to you.

19. There only needs to be one. Absolutely everyone else in the world can make you feel like an alien or bore you to tears, and it will still be fine..

20. Don't try to hide the bad or weak parts of yourself from your partner. Trying to hide them probably won't work anyway, and it will make you look dishonest. Re-read No. 4, and show a little respect for your partner's ability to compass you.

21. There is no top or bottom; there is no dom/me or sub: you both demand and you both concede.

22. There will be times when you can't feel anything anymore, including love. When these times come, do the following: 1) continue behaving toward your partner as you think you would if you did still feel love; 2) whatever, anything, you have to do to get back to yourself. It is also probably be a good idea to tell your partner what's going on and why you now find it necessary to behave like a lunatic.

[appendix to the previous post]

2011-09-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

I owe the box two for sorrow as of last night: I listened to "Moon River."

I think, too, that I need a stone for longing, and one, also, for failure.

I briefly considered an exchange rate between desire and failure--being allowed one failure per so many desires unindulged-in--but I think that's not quite fair. It is not an honor to failure, and failure should be respected, as well, just as much as desire, or faith. (I need no stone for faith: I have none.) There is no exchange rate. They are different animals.

Sorrow will be cherry amber; longing will be milk amber. Failure and success will be garnets. Large ones.

I owe the box two of each, actually.

Success, if I ever have any, will be green garnets, I think. Green garnets are extremely expensive, but I don't have many successes, not big ones, not green-garnet successes, so I imagine it will work out fine.

(Faith would be moonstones. So that you have to look at it carefully to see how beautiful it is.)

(Perhaps I should count small successes, too, so I can feel as though I am getting somewhere. Assignments completed, walks taken, chores done. I suppose those, too, could be the sodalite, since doing what you don't want to do feels pretty much exactly the same as not doing what you do want.)

SHE'S A STONE BOX: or, NONE FOR SORROW

2011-09-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

So that left ritual. Ritual to achieve an altered state was the hardest to cultivate, but also the most rewarding in terms of payoff. [. . .] Religion was based upon ritual.
[. . .]
Part of creating a ritual was fetishizing the accoutrements involved, so he made sure that every aspect of the design of his ritual had layers of meaning.

--Eldritchhorrors, "I Hear Those Voices That Will Not Be Drowned," The Cold Song

***

I am having trouble refraining from acting on my every desire, since desire is so much stronger in me these days and the goals toward which I am directing my energies are so unimaginable and ridiculous and long-term, so I have bought myself a box. It is made of green onyx, an improbable yellow-green that glows with a luminousness that reminds me of human skin. It is not quite the size of an index card, and very heavy, heavier than it looks like it should be. And it has a lovely, delicate, heavy sound when the lid drops into the box' interior. If teacups mated with mausolea, their children would make this sound. I bought myself a string of beads at the same time. Stones, actually, chips of sodalite, cheap enough but a solid, sober blue that makes them seem more substantial than their size. I spent the very last bit of money I had for the month on them, and this felt right: they are important.

The ritual is this: every time I feel a desire, every time I want and must restrain myself in order not to indulge that desire, I take a stone from its string and drop it in the box.

I considered a soapstone box instead, but I'm very glad I purchased the green onyx. The soapstone boxes were considerably cheaper--$3 or $4 instead of $11--but they are brown and small, and I don't care much for soapstone, and when I picked up the green onyx box it made me think that to put my desires in it would honor them and treat them as beautiful, set them aside rather than shut them away.

Last night I fell asleep before I could take a sleeping pill, so I dreamt. I dreamt that the Ride decided that he really had no closeness with his wife (in waking life he left me for her because he felt that way about me) and that he and I clicked perfectly when we met again by chance and I, in a generous mood and deciding that I had enough energy to take the answer, asked him what was wrong.

And it was perfect, I understood everything he said perfectly, and he understood everything I said, and I felt no bitterness toward him, and he felt no contempt toward me. I asked after his children. (He had two, both very young, with his wife.) He was surprised I was interested. I was surprised to find that, though I had no desire to become a parent, the fact that they (and his dissolving marriage) were part of him did not faze me in the least, and I wanted to be part of their lives.

And then I said something. I said several things, actually, all in a paragraph about how I loved him and how I felt that he and I understood each other perfectly, and he left. Literally: he got up and walked away and vanished into a world behind mirrors and between trees--a magical world to which I had no access--and always a few dozen yards away from me. I used my contacts and friends to follow him, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon"-style, but he stayed stubbornly hidden so that for two years I only saw glimpses of him. And I knew, in the dream, that it was something I had said in that paragraph that turned him off, just like a light switch, to the idea of being anywhere near me.

Every time I would catch a glimpse of him, half a face or body hidden behind a tree trunk too slender for such a thing to be possible, I would plead, "Please, just tell me what I said, and I'll explain, or take it back." And then I would go through the paragraph of what I had said, and start going through everything I had ever said to him (this time around), looking for fallacies, inconsistencies, loathesome things, dangerous things. But I never got very far, because he, half-hidden, would smile a smile half impish and half mysterious, and dart off again, and then I would lose all my opportunity for thought because I had to run to chase him.

When I woke up it was as though something in me had gone, and I feel now as though I have forgiven the Ride entirely for what he did to me--the abandonment and cheating, I mean, and maybe also even the pettiness and leeching and cruelty--but I think perhaps I have not forgiven myself for what I did to him.

I went to put a stone in the box for this, for this dream, because there was desire in it, but it didn't feel right to do so, the blue of the sodalite fit the idea so poorly, and I realized that I have no stone for sorrow.

30

2011-09-28T03:40:00.000-07:00

I didn't get enough sleep last night and so wanted to go straight to bed after my last appointment today, which ended at 6.00, but I stayed awake through 6.42 (in fact it is seven minutes shy of four in the morning as I type this) just to be sure, chatting inanely on the phone with a friend. And I looked up and it was 6.44. I made it. I am now, I suppose, on my own recognizance. I have to say, however, that in spite of not dying before this birthday, my twenties were every bit as dire as I feared. I don't resent them, not at all, but I am very happy to see the back end of them, and from a safe distance.

Much on my mind at the moment (I'm kind of irritated that life and thinking do not pause for one's birthday) is Grandma and the fact that I will be helping her move next week. Underlying all structures labelled "Grandma" is the question of whether or not it is worth it to continue to have any kind of relationship with her at all; I feel as though I achieve the impossible through an act of sheer will every time I get through any kind of interaction with her, lunch or a phone call or not strangling her in her sleep on any given night. Helping her move is not a problem per se (I do just that for other friends on a semi-regular basis and in a more involved, furniture-hefting way); it's that helping her move makes me feel as though I have given absolutely everything I should and can and a bit more, even, in order to forge and maintain this fragile relationship . . . thing . . . only to be informed that the requirements have changed and I must now contribute even more. Trust me when I say that she is already unpleasant enough without the shitcrazy moving causes.

Purchases in mind for soon: hero coat (found it: dark dove grey in a Victorian tuxedo-jacket cut with a long, handkerchief-hem skirt), dancing-man tattoo, bras (extant examples crumbling), green glass goblets, foam rolls for lumbar and cervical curvature correction, coveted white square pillows (a pipe dream at the moment), spider ring to replace the one lost. Need an eye exam, but that's probably still a few months out. Maybe December.

Recent improvements: lovely keyboarded mobile phone, ability to text, discovery that exercise feels fucking amazing, fabulous chair, bowl and plate in houndstooth check, several Seventies saucers, five Corelle bowls and a few plates, blue toenails (9.25 of them), dark purple fingernails, decent haircut (for birthday), underpants (up to seven pair total, from previous quantity two; alas, no superhero print, but one can't have everything), seven completed audioerotica to listen to while exercising, the ability to have orgasms any time I want, the ability to want orgasms, presence in life of sleeping pills and Benadryl, finished reading A Study in Scarlet, have appointment for Yoshimi to be looked at Thursday, check for concealed-handgun permit cleared, new job starting 1 October, which means more money. Also I am 30, and I find that the fact makes me like my face a great deal better when I see it in the mirror than I did when looking at it at 29. The View is right: being 30 is being fully formed, which is much easier to deal with than not knowing and trying to make something out of personality pastry-dough. If I had a daemon, today would be the day it settled, I think. I wonder what it would be. (I note no one in Pullman's trilogy ever had pet allergies.)

Dissatisfactions: pants; jeans; weight (the former two not related to the latter, which I realize is against what statistics would suggest); horrid allergies due to housesitting with animals and eating terribly; depression and lethargy resulting from the preceding and in turn leading to avoidance of exercise and circadian arrhythmia; resultant loss of control over schedule and lack of efficiency/effectiveness in completing schoolwork. I want the first course done by next Wednesday, brain, do you hear? -$170 in checking account, of which $100 is overdraft fees, goddammit; Thank God for abovementioned paycheck.

Recently rediscovered how incredibly sexy the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is, and Frankenstein (the book, I mean). Reading The Sign of the Four for the first time,and it is awesome. "'Now, Watson,' said Holmes, rubbing his hands, 'we have half an hour to ourselves. Let us make good use of it.'" Indeed. Life is not bad. Not bad at all.

2011-09-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

At midnight tonight I began the last day of being in my twenties. Thank God.

I'm not ready or qualified for my thirties, but who really gives a shit about ready or qualified? I'll do just about anything I need to, anything I need to do to survive and not be in my twenties anymore. I imagine I'll pick up the hows to do it as I go along. It worked for Art History class, didn't it? so why not this?

(6.42 p.m. this evening; I'm trying not to think about it too hard because I don't want an accident to befall me so that I die before I get to 30; if I can get to 30 I'll be fine, and then from there I can safely reflect on the fact that I honestly never thought I would make it this far: I thought something would happen and I would die while in my twenties. Still, I suppose I should do something to say goodbye to them. A ceremony, perhaps? Is there a card for this kind of thing? "Congratulations, self, for not committing suicide or becoming involved in a radical political organization the FBI had to firebomb when you were 26"?)

2011-09-27T01:57:00.000-07:00

He goes on with the work he also loves, the saving grace he first married. John feels better, so he goes too. He sees all of it right beside Sherlock, the murders and the robberies and the loves and revenges and the thick smear of greed over the world. They try to stop people doing harm.

It's an endless task.

It's something to do.

So there are cases, and they are wonderful.

There is John, and he is wonderful.

There are the times between cases, and they are not wonderful.

But John is still there even when the cases aren't, so that's something.

--wordstrings, "The Death and Resurrection of the English Language, Part Two"

***

It is the sameness of the days sometimes that gets to me. Today, I thought, I might paint my nails, do homework, exercise, clean up the house a little, take care of the dog and the cat, run a few errands. Or I might do none of it. But these are exactly the same things I did--or did not do--yesterday, and they are exactly the same things I will do--or won't--tomorrow. The nails, pretty as they might be if I paint them, will chip off in a week, and anyway it doesn't matter because it's not as if anyone ever looks at them.

Actually that's not true. I enjoy them very much, myself, and, being a typist and craftswoman, I spend a great deal of time looking at my hands. Really what I am upset about when I say "it's not as if anyone ever looks at them" is that it's not as if anyone ever looks at me. I feel invisible. And in another four weeks, if I exercise and eat well and shower every day and keep my legs shaved and dress well and all of it--I'll still be invisible. And in another four months, the same.

At least when I get the fuck out of here and start an actual life with a healthier body and various other accoutrements--fabulous furniture, a career, a few completed pieces of writing, a stunning jewellery trousseau, a sense of self, a lovely little car--I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I put it all together myself, without help, without support, without guidance, and in fact with a fair quantity of resistance and an endless silica ocean of indifference, which is much, much more powerful than resistance anyway. How do you defeat nothingness?

I believe that the stress-eating comes, in part, from this, from this boredom. Eating is very pleasurable, and it also makes me feel safe and secure and full (metaphorically speaking) in a way nothing else does. I have other ways of experiencing pleasure, but they take a good deal more effort, planning, time, and fighting with other people to effect, and sometimes by the time the fighting is done it is too late to have the pleasure.

And I have nothing that makes me feel safe and secure and full. I know some people have religion, but I haven't finished making mine yet, and I'm not even sure what all it's going to be comprised of: at the moment it is a pile of scraps of other flags, loosely stitched together and not enough to hold up in the wind.

It's a goal, at least, I suppose, religion. Or some bits and pieces I can put together into something useful, at least. I am just so fucking lonely. Religious practice can give structure and peace, and I can now, I think, manipulate my brain into feeling the things I want it to feel without resenting the fact that it is a trick, a procedure, and not something real--or to say more accurately, not someone out there listening and talking back to me--and religious practice can keep one upright and functioning longer, but it does not fix the loneliness, and it will only stopper the bleed-out into it for so long.

Still. If I can buy enough time, I should. Best get started on that, then, I suppose. It's something to do, anyway.

2011-09-25T12:06:00.000-07:00

While I am thinking of it, and for the purposes of clearing my mind of it so I can concentrate, or perhaps for the purposes of stripping open what I have been resistant to acknowledging to myself (since as a general rule pain of this kind is always good), here is the list of the things I need to improve:

End any hint of romantic connexion, present or future, with the Creature
Stop the bad habit of stress-eating. What is it I need that makes me need this? I have no idea, which makes my prospects dim but the problem interesting.
Stop the bad habit of clawing at my own skin when I am unhappy with myself
Start spending money a little more responsibly; at its most effective this will likely involve setting aside, without guilt, a small sum every month to utterly waste on ephemera or use on things which serve no purpose in the present but will probably prove useful at some point in the middle future (e.g., the chair, the dishes)
Take more control of my time; I have actually gotten quite good at this, but every few months I will have a week where I do nothing but lounge about escaping, which is what I have been doing this week, and which I do out of resentment when I promise someone I don't like (this week it is Grandma) that I will do something I don't want to do (this week it is helping Grandma move). Fortunately in current circumstances I have already laid an infrastructure of being firm about what I need to do and limiting her access to my time; now I need to enforce it, in my own mind as well as in actuality.

Go to bed at a reasonable hour (i.e., before 4 a.m.), which in turn involves not reading delicious fanfiction on the computer while trying to fall asleep
Make structured, possibly written, plans for the week and daily so that what I should be doing at any given moment, and with how much inflexibility, is clear in my mind
Privilege schoolwork and exercise above chores and time spent with others
Stop answering people's fucking phone calls

Lose 60 pounds, which work I shall at the moment limit to exercising daily
Ah--

No, that's really about it. Hm. I had expected there to be more, and the items to be less easily accomplished. My sense of frustration with myself is out of proportion with the difficulty of the tasks. That's an enormous relief.

And exciting: I can really cause some trouble here . . .

2011-09-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

Fell asleep at four yesterday afternoon lying cross-ways on the bed with shoes still on; didn't even have time to shut the book ("The Sign of the Four"), which is even more surprising than the shoes. Rose briefly around six to feed and tend to the dog and the cat, then fell back asleep until eight this morning (unshod this time), still not having managed to shut the book before doing so. Luckily I slept like a corpse, and the book remained undisturbed.

So. Got up at eight, fed and let out the dog again, collected the mail, had some toast (need tea; make a mental note), and back to bed again from nine to just now, which is noon, although I'm not entirely sure I'm done yet. But as Ripley says, I've slept enough. Once more unto the breach. (I think it's time I read Henry V; it is a sin to quote things one has not read, a bad sin.)

None of this was with the aid of sleeping pills, as I left my bag downstairs so as not to be bothered by the cellular importunities of my various acquaintances (all of whom I am inclined to hate furiously when their communications wake me), meaning that my tubes of pills (need elegant pillboxes; make a mental note) remained downstairs also. Which in turn means that, as I slept, I dreamt.

I have stopped dreaming, in general, stopped in the way people mean when they say "I have stopped the delivery of the newspaper" because I simply have no patience left for my own ridiculous anxieties, which come out in dreams, nor sufficient mental stability for wishes, which also come out in dreams, usually in the form of having them fulfilled. I think I would be so angry if I were to dream something lovely, like falling in love or having an adventure or being pleased with myself, so frustrated, that I would not be able to function for the remainder of the day following the dream (see previous post for an example of what that's like), and the suffering involved in that is just not acceptable.

Weird to say "fortunately," but fortunately, this time was all anxiety dreams.

I dreamt I was going to school, i.e., U---, and that I had missed an entire day's worth of classes last Monday because I wasn't up to them emotionally and now faced returning to class on a day an assignment I knew existed but didn't know the nature of and so couldn't complete was due. Two weeks into the semester and already failing.

I dreamt my grandmother was over at our house being obnoxious, that I had accidentally left porn and other evidence of my masturbation habits out in a public area where my parents might see them, that I had tied myself up in patent leather bindings and now found no way to to get loose from them (this metaphorical; I've only ever handcuffed myself before, and those I escape from while asleep), that Creature called and I was in the midst of having phone sex with him when my father interrupted by knocking on my bedroom door to insinuate some passive aggression about how I had not sufficiently cleaned some part of the house or other, that I forgot I had put Creature on hold while dealing with cleaning the parts of the house in question, and that my beloved dog Luke (long deceased, in waking life: he died when I was 19 or 20) had returned to us in the form of a turtle.

Other than the bit about Luke, then, everything happened essentially as it does in waking life, although I believe in the dream I owned a miniskirt, which is preposterous.

In waking life, I did the other evening what I had previously instructed myself in strong terms not to do, videlicet, had an orgasm on the phone with Creature. (He has had a few now on the phone with me, which I think is already going too far.) The absolute truth of the matter is that I am hovering somewhere between putting off telling him that I am uninterested in a future with him and actively stringing him along. The reason for the former is that he is having a tough time of it lately in circumstances other than his love life, and I don't want to remove the sole source of happiness from an already dangerously depressed person's life; the reason for the latter is that, lack of interest in a future or romance with him notwithstanding, I find his voice and some of the things he says rather sexy.

This is, incidentally, precisely what the Ride did to me a few years ago, and what I deeply, deeply resented because people who love or respect each other do not do things like this. It is yet another instance of that remarkable phenomenon that has been in the habit of befalling me for the last several years in which I find myself doing to others exactly what I have earlier in life despised and blamed others for doing to me. From a cosmic perspective it's probably hilarious.

From a moral one it is certainly well-deserved, but the real point of this is that it is high time I do something about this nonsense and go back to just hurting myself rather than others as well.

For someone must be hurt in this business (life, I mean: living); that is the law.

Faugh. I have so enjoyed not hurting recently.

And it is high time I started in on my schoolwork. I have a great deal of work to do before I can qualify to live on my own and move out of this wretched country.

I have a great deal of work to do on myself, as well, but no anxiety dreams about it. Possibly because I don't believe that work even can be accomplished and so don't waste the energy of my subconscious on fretting about it.

What fun.

2011-09-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish I could just get rid of myself, get all that out of the way so I can think, so I can _get something done_ without, oh God, the weight of it, of all the stories my mind is in the middle of telling itself, none of them having yet reached a happy ending and several of them, I fear, written by Mr. Lovecraft. Maybe all of them.

But then I think of John Watson. John Watson Does What Needs to Be Done. John Watson does not allow himself to become so weighed down with the burden of Being Himself, of being, that he can't act. John Watson is overwhelmingly competent. And there are those stories, too, and I believe in them. I tell myself that: I believe in them like a religion, from L. relegere, "read again."

And I am John Watson. I have a bit of John Watson in me. And that means I will get out of bed and find some pants and have breakfast and do some homework, and tomorrow I will do the same, and soon I will be able to get out of here and be, perhaps, a little Sherlock. But here, it's pearls before swine, to be crushed. So John Watson, once more unto the breach, to lay his English body down to seal the gaps in me, not in walls the way we usually mean people have walls but walls the way we mean people have structure. Today I don't, and so John Watson will be my structure for me. No wonder Sherlock needs him.

2011-09-11T06:03:00.000-07:00

Michaels, a craft store, has sent me an email, the subject line of which is this:

A Special 60% Offer For Your Special Memories.

Gad.

2011-09-09T01:29:00.000-07:00

Positively (possibly literally) vibrating with energy (too many drugs in one day) I had to try to be still where before I have had to try tomove. I stood, but the wind blew through me, and it felt like delight (everything felt like delight) and I wavered, turning fromcharcoal to dark purple. Being still, then, is another type of resistance.

NOT SO GREAT, BUT WOULD SUFFICE

2011-09-09T01:15:00.000-07:00

Just taken a sleeping pill. Probably Thank Christ is a bad thing to think when taking sleeping pills.Probably also Finally.

***

I think I might have felt hate for the first time tonight.I’ve felt a hate once before, the romantickind—poets jerk themselves off pointing out that hate is a kind of love--thekind that’s gold as brass underneath a thick lovely greasy black layer ofhaving been betrayed, the kind that makes you vibrate with something you haveto call rage because you daren’t call it longing. That kind is not verypleasant: it’s like being perpetually in the moment just after your lover haspushed you off the edge of a cliff and you realize that you havemissed—touched, but missed—his wrists and the opportunity to grab on and takehim down with you. It really does feel like falling; the roar of the air’semptiness around you is enormous.

This tonight wasn’t that kind, but rather that other hateI’ve heard about but never before felt.

I was driving a friend on an errand, you see, a friend whois such by virtue of being the significant other of a real friend (that is, one I acquired under my own auspices) andwhom I do not really like very much.

In fact I had just realized earlier this evening that I donot really like this person. Prior to MedsChange 2011 I had not bothered tohave an opinion about him one way or the other: he was nice, I felt (mostimportantly, he was nice to my friend), a bit obnoxious in that nerdboy way(that is, slightly more prone to competititve bragging/false claims to esotericskills and knowledge than my own methods of obnoxing are, but similar in itstendency to interrupt and its desire to be the center of attention, held in aweand acknowledged clever). Perfectly tolerable, and I was happy to tolerate him,happy of the company.

Tonight he did not seem so tolerable.

I honestly don’t believe that he behaved any differentlytonight than he ever has before, but by the time I had spent 20 minutes withhim I was shouting at him inside my head, Idiot,do you really expect me to believethat a cartridge that will put a gallon-sized hole through a human torso from ablock away is essential when something as small and easy to carry as a .380 oras safe for bystanders as a .410 shotgun will do the job just as well, or is itthat the idea of owning a “badass” gun with “badass” ammunition makes you feellike a cooler person because you could make lasagna of your victim’s insidesinstead of just killing him and explosions are automatically cool? I’m using allmy brainpower trying to figure out what to do with my life here so that I don’tgo crazy and break every dish I own before I get out of this fucking town, I’mcrazy enough as it is looking around and seeing nothing but an endless sea offaceless noisemakers in casual clothing and even the people I know, love, lovebeing around, don’t really get me,wouldn’t go to Albuquerque with me at a moment’s notice just to see what it’slike off the edge of the map, wouldn’t not worry just because I need to cry andbe told I can keep them, forever, in a glass jar if necessary and of course it’s not weird to want to pretend to be acorpse while we’re fucking, that’s a lovely thing to try; God, what do I say to people, it’s hard enough dealing with aquestions like “Paper or plastic?” because who gives a shit in thegrander scheme, the scheme where all that matters is whether I will wake up oneday and be understood without havingto listen to a goddamned dissertation on the history of the 10 mm cartridge andwhy it’s so much better than the .40, like the .40 won’t kill a bad guy deadenough and like all that matters is power power power when I’ve just said twicethat I’d rather die than shoot someone innocent accidentally due to overpenetration.

I felt like I imagine supervillains feel: as the person nextto me was not worth my time or my attention, and profoundly impatient andannoyed that he insisted on talking anyway on a topic I had absolutely nointerest in and felt I knew better than he did besides. Bored. Angry that I wasbeing bored.

It was fascinating and horrible, and I left in a hurry and probably quite rudely. My God, how do people keep behaving like humans while feeling things at the same time? It's quite impossible. No wonder we're so irrational all the time, and inattentive drivers.

LOYAL SUBJECTS OF THE KING

2011-09-09T01:06:00.000-07:00

Pumpkins seem like something that should be manufactured, don't they, not grown. They're look so precisely sculpted and vividly colored, the kind of color that only comes from toxic paint or hundreds of years of fucking around with tulip breeding. Surely the round holes we put in the top of jack-o'-lanterns are not fresh incisions but re-openings of the moulding seams, which were closed at the factory only after the pumpkins had been sent down an assembly line with mechanical arms swooping down from above to deposit a clutch of pumpkin goop and seeds in the pumpkin's interior.

Or maybe the interiors of pumpkins are not native to the pumpkins themselves, but oviposited by something very worrisome indeed if "pumpkin seeds" are its eggs. Never, never plant pumpkin seeds. Ye gods, who knows what might come out.

Not being a celebrant of Halloween, I had to look up how to spell correctly jack-o'-lantern. I don't think I've ever written it before.

Amongst the definitions Merriam-Webster has for the term on its website is this:

3: a large orangish gill fungus (Omphalotus olearius syn. Clitocybe illudens) that is poisonous and luminescent.

Luminescent fungus? WHAT?

WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS EXISTS. Must . . . learn more . . .

2011-08-28T23:41:00.000-07:00

When in the house on Rolling Hills Drive, I discovered that the top panes of my bedroom windows, when viewed from the head of my bed (in a supine position) and through the slats of the horizontal blinds, streaked themselves every night with sequins of coloured lights--red like Depression glass, impossibly bright amber,* and emerald green.

If I squinted my eyes just so, I could make arrayed stars of the lights, which would turn back and forth, dancing, as I shook my head.

It took me weeks, maybe even months, to realize that they were from the traffic lights half a mile away, which were themselves hidden by the buildings of a strip mall but whose lights bounced off the invariable drops of water or imperfections in the window glass or slats of the hideous blinds, and even then it was a secret magic only I could do and a secret lovely thing only I could see, from my room, in my bed.

I don't think I ever mentioned it to anyone. This is the first time. It still strikes me as an immense and very unique gift.

***

*Because amber is never bright, is it. I don't know why everyone thinks amber is so sunny; it is a gorgeous stone, but it is always . . . minatory, almost, in appearance, though not toward us, I think. It is absorbing light and trapping it in its matrix somehow, enough so you can tell light is in there but not so that the light can never get out quite right again, or be itself. Amber is like a prison for light, or a carnivorous plant for light.

GIFTS NOT ACCORDING TO THE BOOK

2011-08-25T03:28:00.000-07:00

In the midst of all the Sherlock stuff (explained here), I started making an adventuring list. I plan to keep in the trunk of my car a couple of plastic storage bins containing supplies that will allow me to address emergencies, of course, but also take advantage of whatever adventures a day has to offer. You can view the lists here.

I started making the lists Sunday. I have not been at home for several weeks now, so please understand that the odds of what occurred were even lower than one might expect.

When I came home to pick up a few things before heading back to town to resume housesitting, I arrived at about the same time as my dad, who then proceeded to present me with one of the things I had added to the list perhaps 10 minutes before, one of the less usual things: a jeweller’s loupe.

He found them for sale while out running errands, he said, and thought I might like one. No other reason.

I started to cry.

***

The loupe lives in the car’s glovebox now. And today I filled out a passport application.

CumberSOMEthing, anyway.

2011-08-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

Alabama guy is thrilled to be living in a world in which a person--a person around our age, even--exists with the name Benedict Cumberbatch.

For a while I had trouble remembering the name, which resulted in my calling him whatever ridiculous thing came to mind (many of those things courtesy of Eddie Izzard), but my friend Amanda topped it: he is now (Lord) Gilbert Crumpetwinkle.

Yes: Lord has to be written in a smaller font. It is the rule.

[from an old note written while living in an apartment]

2011-08-25T03:22:00.001-07:00

Do you think it would take more electricity to run an air-conditioning unit, or just to leave the refrigerator door open? Because, seriously, I’m considering it.

7-23-11 BREAKFAST

2011-08-25T03:21:00.000-07:00

Three pieces gluten-free raisin toast, unsalted butter, coarse sea salt; 3 very stale RedVines. Read foodie magazine while eating. Everything tasted amazing.

(Even with the snottery.)

TODAY

2011-08-25T03:19:00.000-07:00

Stopped along the side of the road on the way home to watch a red-tailed hawk standing around in the grasses. I had no idea they were so beautiful, no idea, all gold flecks, like real gold, on a tawny back that turns to shimmering dark brass, or something with more depth, even, tiger's eye, wherever it catches the light. Their shape matches their coloring so well, somehow, sharp at the ends but also elegant, cloaked, maybe even a little stuffy. Against the pale sage green of the grasses her tail had the color and depth of carnelian stones when she skimmed away from me.

Binoculars will be the very next purchase for the adventuring kit.

ONE DAY, JUST SHOWING UP WON'T BE ENOUGH.

2011-08-23T01:48:00.000-07:00

I am now fairly confident that the problem now comes down to this:

I’ve recently, with my doctor’s oversight, decreased the amount of antidepressant (Zoloft) I’m taking because it’s been making me feel increasingly, ah, removed from the situation, whatever the situation happens to be. It is possible that we might add another medication later, but for now I’m taking Zoloft 100 mg per day instead of 150 mg as I was before.

Since the decrease, I’ve changed rapidly and, to my feeling, profoundly. I not only think about sex as something desirable now, I find myself distracted by it. Where I found the human body disappointing, now it’s exciting, elating, even, and I want one to explore and do with as I please. I feel emotions again, and they’re distracting, too. I get angry and frustrated and excited, I experience emotional pleasure so profoundly that it has turned my head dangerously in some instances, life is interesting again, I am interesting again, or, at least, I feel as though there are interesting things out there to find and that I have the desire to find them.

I’ve also become obsessively, unhealthily passionate about the BBC series Sherlock, which sets the game on (rather than afoot) in a surprisingly, delightfully phantasmagoric London of 2010. I’ll just assume that you’ve seen the series, reader, since in my opinion you should have done already and there is no excuse for not doing.

Now that I want things again, it seems wanting is all I can do, I’m a slave to it. And what I want is Sherlock.

I want to be John Watson: I want a fucked-up relationship in which I get off hard on being the only one trusted by an unhinged, brilliant, fragile princess whose puzzles are mostly beyond me but whose performances wouldn’t be as worth it to her (or him) if I weren’t there to watch them and to stimulate them, who would be adrift and—even with the puzzles—bored if I didn’t have her back, if I weren’t there to remind her to be human, or teach her how. (Could anything be more erotic than having something to teach a genius?) I want to be the best possible person an adventurer could have with her in a tight spot, more than able to take care of myself, rock-steady and a crack shot when it’s needed, overwhelmingly competent, patient and kind and civil by nature and also quietly spitting venom at those trying to assert power over me or the people I hold dear--quietly, in fact, totally, wonderfully, subtly badass, but capable of taking care of the ordinary things, as well, cleaning the bathroom and buying the milk. I want to be functional and, to a certain extent, wise, able to see what others feel and empathize with them, able to know what I am feeling and keep moving anyway. I want always to be ready to go see a movie or scale the wall of an abandoned building, always have a spare pocket in which to hide a gun or a note or a trembling left hand, and always have a little more in the quiet of my mind than anyone can perceive right away.

And I want an unhinged, brilliant, fragile princess, I want a Sherlock Holmes of my own. I want someone gorgeous and (really quite) strange-looking, unforgivingly lovely, someone I find so enthralling that I know I must gather my wits before I engage her in look or in conversation or in touch, someone I cannot look at without wanting to touch, everywhere, the side of the face and the neck and the mouth and the feet,* someone whose voice is so attractive that I can lose my place in a sentence, lose why the sentence was important in the first place, because every word pulls at my center of gravity. I want someone who will dissect me, over and over again, every time she suspects there is something new in me that she hasn’t learned yet, and who will be to me a subject of lifelong and absorbing fascination and study, who will be my adventure, my mystery.

But I want to be Sherlock Holmes, too. I want to be brilliant and mad and a dramatic dork, perhaps not broken but definitely cracked. I want to burn hard, able to see the world as it is but not care enough for it to bother me, to learn absolutely everything there is to be learned about everything that crosses my path—that I find interesting, at least—and to be utterly imperious, impatient and petulant, in dismissing the things I do not. I want to be adsorbed by the music I hear, the things I smell, but I want to be capable of so much focus and control that the things I see and hear and smell work for me rather than overwhelming me. I want my brain to do whatever I tell it to do whenever I tell it to do it, and I want my body to do the same until I collapse with exhaustion. I want my curiosity to be more powerful than fear or pain, to do everything I do with desperation and glee and focus, swinging always between being afraid of myself and afraid of getting bored, knowing that I have it in me really to hurt someone really very badly if I don’t pay attention and knowing that I will die, I will self-destruct, if I let myself run out of mysteries.

And I want to have a Watson, too, someone who can temper my Byronism and vicious self-destructiveness, bring it up short, even, someone solid and real and good enough that I need her always to have my back and know I must always return from wherever I go in my head because I must come back to her, that I cannot go mad because she is waiting for me in sanity. I want someone who is quietly extraordinary, whose extraordinariness is something I will never fully appreciate but which I will, eventually, be the only one to see in her face, right at the first glance at her in the morning, and it will always be something of a surprise to me, an unexplained phenomenon, that she is there when I wake up. I want someone worthy of my trust, whom I am constitutionally incapable of betraying but who will forgive me as often (and it will be often) as I disappoint her. I want someone whom I will, to my shock, find occupying my heart, that space I thought was empty, who has spun what little was there in happiness or any sense of meaning out into something real and whole, the person who is the cog at the center of me and without whose steady movement nothing else in me, of me, would work.

I’m serious, though, when I say that I want Sherlock, not just the characters. I want to know I am the heart and master of a city, in a country, I love (while being S. Holmes) and that there is always something new and risky to be found in that city, though I can probably—hopefully—handle it (while being J. Watson). I want a city that is modern and fast and has infinite resources to access at a moment’s notice, but that is also, as I said, phantasmagoric, battered and layered with hundreds of years of mysteries and home to rotting arches and empty, vaulted rooms. I want to live in a country I love, that I can get to know without disappointment, in which I am an alien but also completely at home. Holmes and Watson’s relationship with their London is almost as deep and sincere and romantic as their friendship with each other.

And of course at the end of the day I want to collapse onto a very comfortable sofa in a flat that is unspeakably gorgeous and welcoming, funny and mysterious by turns, where I can be even more myself (whichever that self might be) than I can in my exciting, lovely city, a flat that is filled with interesting things, all of which I have accumulated by doing interesting things. I might skip the cow-skull wall lamp, but how is it that a film set I've never been on, in a country I've never been to, with frankly hideous wallpaper (I adore the patterns, but I loathe the color brown), can look more like home to me than any of my first three apartments did?

I want a coat, not just a coat but a fucking fabulous coat, and a pair of stylish but deadly practical shoes (oh, Watson’s lovely, buttery shoes), and a blue silk dressing gown. I want to do wonderful things—not great, perhaps, but wonderful, at least to me—and I want to do them really fucking well. With someone wonderful. In some wonderful London. Every beautiful thing you see, and every ugly one, might be an adventure.

***

And even all of this is perhaps only a story that I tell myself—that Dr. Doyle and his acolytes tell me—to explain, to put faces on and order to, this great howling want I feel, this desire, which I can’t control and can’t get rid of and would rather throw myself off a cliff than do anyway.

***

(I want I want I want)

***

*I have had both a significant other and a friend possessed of this quality, at least, so I know for a fact that such a thing is possible in real life and with a real person, not just toward a character or actor constantly being lit to look like a skeletal angel. Benedict Cumberbatch is stunning, of course, I’d have to be dead to claim otherwise and maybe not even then, but I can be fairly confident that this, the desire to find someone as balance-upsettingly attractive and interesting as I find Cumberbatch’s Holmes, is not just celebrity worship.

BITCHFACE

2011-06-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

Makeup advice in beauty magazines really pisses me off sometimes, and by "sometimes" I mean "nearly all the time." It's retarded and unrealistic, but I would be able to deal with that, even, if it were at least fricking specific.

For example. April's issue of Women's Health genteelly bellows that "hair [is] a picture frame--its job is to beautifully display the face it surrounds." "Find the style here that most closely matches your own," instructs the article, "and then follow the expert application tips."

I have very deep-set eyes with purple eyelids and indented purple-brown circles beneath them, larger than the eyes themselves, that can appear charcoal grey or even blackish when I'm tired or have sinus problems, which is pretty much all the time.

All the models, of course, have soul-piercing orbs refreshed from 16 hours of sleep and completely satisfying sex in which they orgasmed every time. I therefore approach the article with anticipation of finding instructions for applying makeup that will subtly make my eyes and the skin around them appear brighter and fresher, as well as some product recommendations.

No. What I get is, "Dust a taupe eye shadow over your lids and a deeper chestnut hue into your creases," then, on the next page, "Dust a pearly taupe eye shadow over your lids."

Really? Pearly taupe? What IS pearly taupe? Is it taupe that has some pearl-colored highlights in it? Is it taupe that has a pearlescent finish, as opposed to matte or creamy or metallic or sparkly? Is it pearl-colored with a taupe base?

Does this mean that the plain "taupe eye shadow" on the previous page is not supposed to be pearly? And do you know how many different shades can reasonably be called taupe? Do I need light taupe or dark taupe? Brownish or more beige?

Also, the model wearing the (somehow un-pearly) taupe eye shadow and the "deeper chestnut hue" in her creases seems to be wearing, in addition, a highlighter at the inner corner of her eyes, a dark brown on the outer corner of her lids, and a faint dusting of that chestnut below her eye, not to mention all the undereye concealer and at least half the Photoshop in the world.

And in the second picture, the model's ear is sparkling. Why is her ear sparkling? Is that important? Should my ears sparkle, too? What product do you use for sparkly ears?

The rest of the article isn't much more helpful. Page 4 features a woman wearing a subtle, sparkly white eye shadow over a brownish-orange shadow in her creases. The captioning claims this effect is achieved by "[d]ab[bing] a peach highlighter across your lids and creases, then blend[ing] it slightly past the outer corners of your eyes." THERE IS NO PEACH ANYWHERE IN THIS PICTURE.

The product they recommend (they actually have one this time) brings up the other thing I hate. "Try Nars Super Orgasm Illuminator ($29[. . .])." Beauty magazines: Do you really, actually, think that I'm going to spend $30 on a cosmetic product?

Not unless it gives me an actual orgasm, I won't. Sheezes. Surely there is some creamy, light-reflecting product that costs less than literally its own weight in platinum.

It probably has the word pearly in the name, though.

A MOMENT WITH MISAPPREHENSION

2011-06-09T13:06:00.001-07:00

The sign says, “Share your belief with your kids,” not, “Share your belief and your kids.”

2011-06-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

A story about a demon pretending to be your father in order to destroy you—but! UST.

2011-06-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

I love the worthlessness for display of small art: there is no point in wearing a pendant with a tiny painting of a beetle in it under glass, or even the glass itself, with all its delicate, minute variations. It is art only masquerading as jewellery. You really have to be in love a bit already in order to bother to look. Maybe this is one good description of faith. I’d like a bit of such a thing in my life.

IN THE OCEAN WAVE OF WHAT I FEEL THAT WASHES OVER ME, THERE IS SOME ENVY

2011-06-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

At my grandmother’s retirement center, a woman steps gingerly from the elevator, bent, unable to use stairs, barely able to use her own feet, her own body. “It’s so nice out, I wonder—“ she says to the man who is with her, and I think, Someday I will be that old, someday helpless; someday a beautiful day will be enough to make me happy.

2011-06-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

So. Restarting blog. Need to write. Have nothing to write about: boring life.

More significantly, I'm secretly afraid that I have nothing important to think.

CREEPY CORPORATE SIGNALMENT

2011-04-21T01:42:00.000-07:00

BUILD YOUR OWN PERFECT GIRL

--Fleshlight

. . . which makes me so angry I've started to twitch.

However, in Fleshlight's defense, their site also features an ad for the Teagan Presley All Ways collection--apparently a trio of Fleshlights modelled after the orifices of this particular person Teagan Presley (also way creepy, guys!)--"now available in mouth and butt."

I think all product ads should feature that tagline.

P.S. Now available in mouth and butt!

2011-03-03T01:48:00.000-08:00

Instead of a wedding veil, why not a wedding mask? It would be gorgeous, and also a lot scarier.

Which, I assume, is the goal of all wedding-related decisions . . .

[from a letter to a friend]

2011-01-19T01:52:00.000-08:00

[T]his year I have celebrated the anniversary of B____ B______'s death by living the way I thought, when it happened, that I should be living, and wasn't. I am worried, and I am scared, and I have failed spectacularly in the areas where I've failed. But I am living. I am fighting back against my own fear and ennui, doing things that scare me and making a place for myself in the world, making little parts of the world love me, and loving them back with all my heart. I have a life that means something. I try to give it away carefully and generously.

My friends and family know that I love them, and that's a big thing to be able to say.

[excerpt from a letter to a friend and some notes that follow]

2011-01-12T02:07:00.000-08:00

As I've been reading your emails and writing to you, the date has changed from the 11th to the 12th of January. Funeral services were held for B---- B------ on 11 January 1999. He killed himself on the 7th of that year.

It's always a weird anniversary for me. This year I feel a little uncomfortable because I can't drum up the usual horror and pity, and anger, I usually find in myself during this Lenten period. I've been so busy surviving, trying to be fabulous and get the fuck out of here and talk to my friends more than once every six months, that I didn't click on the 7th as a significant date at all, and wouldn't have thought of the 11th, either, if I hadn't read a life tribute in the today's obituaries to a boy who died the same year Billy did. That boy was born on 11 January, which I guess is why his family chose the date to have the tribute published. I don't know what Billy B------'s birthday was. I think it's sick that I know the other end and not that.

What I'm doing now is what I wanted to be doing, back when the other end happened: I wanted to live, to say the scary things, to realize how grave and beautiful life is, how fragile, and how petty grades on math quizzes and whether or not one's hair looks okay are when right next to me there was a boy filled with so much despair at facing another day that he didn't, and now I will never have the chance to get to know him.

***

When he died, my best friend--with whom I had spent two years in a state of profound intimacy--and I realized that we had never before told each other that we loved each other. We both did, and we both knew it, but even so it was utterly, abasingly terrifying to say to her, and I was enormously relieved when the moment was over, for it was a moment of choking fear, like stage fright, rather than anything else it could have been. I loved her so desperately that I think I was afraid she would find out just how much if I told her at all.

She still doesn't know.

I have told this story several times in various ways. I will probably always be telling it. I will probably always be failing to learn from it everything that I should have done.

2011-01-12T02:04:00.000-08:00

I've just turned a guy down.

A nice guy. A guy whom I know very well, and whom I like. A guy I enjoy hanging out with, and once, for a while, enjoyed making out with.

A guy who has real Husband Potential.

I'm firmly convinced that I did the right thing. I'm also firmly convinced that there's no way to do something like this without feeling like an asshole.

***

I'm adding these entries to this blog today, 14 October 2011, but dating them according to their original dates so that they will appear on the blog in the correct order.

A while after I wrote the above post, I allowed my attraction to and affection for the abovementioned guy to convince me that I could be happy with him (and, because of meds, I was so numb that I had forgotten how different affection is from love, how love is fierce, how emotions felt when you were actually experiencing them), and got into a--not a relationship, exactly, but a definite understanding that I am interested in him.

I am not. Or, rather, I am, but not enough. And now I will have to tell him again.

I've known for a month--two? three?--but haven't yet found a time or way easy enough to satisfy me that telling him won't put him in a dangerous mental state--or just hurt him. Which of course it will.

I was, as I say, firmly convinced when I wrote the original post that there's no way to do something like this without feeling like an asshole. I was also wrong: there is always the option of actually being an asshole.

[excerpt from a letter to a friend]

2011-01-11T02:09:00.000-08:00

I promised myself that I would not let another day pass without writing replies to your emails. To this end, I have two Community discs I am using as a sort of carrot for myself. I AM PUTTING OFF WATCHING COMMUNITY FOR YOU. You should feel special.

And it's not even that I don't want to read your writing and respond to it. It's just that--and I suspect that you have some experience with this phenomenon--when you have put off, for whatever reason, doing something that's important, it weighs on the back of your mind, growing heavier and more intimidating out of all proportion to the actual difficulty of the task so that eventually, a month after you promised yourself and others that you would do the thing you said you would do, you find yourself seriously considering, say, fleeing your apartment in the night, leaving all your furniture and private documents and food, rather than just vacuuming the living room.

That's where we are now.

In a way that's kind of where I am with everything, actually. I could use a job. My family could really use my having a job. I need to get after Dad about removing the battery pack from my car so we can move forward with replacing or repairing the bloody thing. I need to learn to cook. I need to lose about 60 pounds. Those are all pretty effing important, but it's almost like they're too important, you know? They're all really big projects, and none of them need absolutely to be done today. And thus far every day has turned into another today in which they didn't need to be done, which is why my car has been sitting, undriven, for six months now and why I've applied for maybe half a dozen jobs since November.

I read this reply to my reply, your letter below, when you sent it, back in November, but I didn't respond to it because I was experiencing a feeling of sexual (and therefore all-encompassing) ennui so profound that I felt I had to do something to address it quickly, so quickly that I dared not stop to talk about it.

I don't know if that makes any sense. Put another way: when I realized what I was feeling, it scared me so badly that I didn't want to say it aloud until I had done something to reverse my course, in the same way that one should spin the wheel and then yell "Iceberg!"

I felt unsexy. And it wasn't just that: I couldn't feel in myself any memory of why I should feel sexy, neither why it was necessary to life or to my sanity to be aware of my body and my physical surroundings in any way nor what about me was intriguing and inviting and that differentiated me from Everyone Else.

The car and the job and the et cetera has been kind of the same way. I don't go very many places anymore (everything being an hour or more away from me), and my dad drives his work van for most things, so there hasn't been any substantial reason for me to pursue fixing my car. I'm not dating anyone and have no prospects for doing so (everyone being an hour or more away from me), so there hasn't been any substantial reason to work out and eat well, not when crappy food is cheap and enjoyable and nobody gives a shit whether I shave my legs or wear makeup--or even whether I wash my hair.

There's still a lot of that running through me, but I'm fighting it, and if it doesn't clear up in about two weeks, I'm going to request a change in meds from my doctor. It's made doing anything at all pretty hard, though, and it kind of snuck up on me. I was looking for depression to feel like sadness or anger or grief, and this is just a numb silver fog.

It's very comfortable, and I've had to work hard not just to bite and claw and chew to get out of it and get things done, but to remember at all that I should be biting and clawing and chewing, that I can win this and come out of it fucking fabulous and smelling of roses if I fight now.

So in a way I kind of envy you your sexual frustration. Your body has, to some extent, kept its sense of entitlement, and I wish mine held onto its own more securely than it has.

There's something else in Sex!land, too, though. After years of listening to other people describe how they want to have sex, how they want to fuck because it feels good, it's occurred to me that I've never viewed sex as something to be enjoyed.

Kissing, yes. God yes. There are days when I want to kiss someone so badly that I find myself perusing online personals just to find a makeout partner before I remember that such a scenario will not end well.

But sex is something I've always viewed as a performance, and one that requires constant vigilance if there is to be any hope of success. Other people seem to think that sex is something one does with a partner that both partners should enjoy, like badminton or snuggling. Recently it's occurred to me that I think of sex as a job. I've taken great satisfaction in doing good work, but it's never crossed my mind that sex was being done for me as well as to me.

That's pretty fucked up, isn't it.

But my from-the-hip reaction (so to speak) is that the idea of sex being done for me is utterly absurd. No one would want to have sex with me for my benefit. I know a reasonable number of people who might be persuaded to have sex with me for their benefit--because I am capable of doing a good job--but I don't find my body particularly . . . worshipful, I guess. In the archaic sense, I mean: worthy of being worshipped. My face, sure. I could see someone getting fond of my face. But not my body.

It's been on my mind recently.

It's strange, but I'm enormously relieved to admit that I'm really fucked up about fucking. For a long time I've felt disappointed and disgusted with the whole idea of sex, but now I wonder if I might have to completely rediscover the genre--how people do it, and why, and how I feel about it and what I like. And that's something I'm rather looking forward to.

[rbp]

A PIG, IN A CAGE, ON ANTIBIOTICS

2011-01-08T02:12:00.000-08:00

This week in therapy we (my therapist and I) started talking about my inveterate habit of being late everywhere I go and what we might do about it.

I'm not going to talk specifically about that here, but I must make note of two interesting things that occurred during the course of the therapy.

Firstly, Dr. Shrink mentioned that one of the reasons people are late getting somewhere is because of a subconscious reluctance to go to that place. "With that in mind," she said, "I always have to ask--do you want to come here?"

"Yes," I said, but even as I said it I noticed that my whole body had clenched, and my hands were gripping the fabric of my trousers, and I realized that I was lying to myself.

I think I've figured out why I don't want to go there, too, which I will demonstrate in the course of recounting the second observation, viz.:

I'm ready, I told Dr. Shrink, to work on this, to address it. And I'm elated, even now, that that's true. Maybe I really can get better is the thought that runs through my head at the prospect. It's part of the new belief--the belief that the end of this period of my life is near, that I'll be qualified and eligible to do a job I like that will make me enough money to live on, enough to pay off my student loans and credit cards and, most importantly, to move to and live in Oregon or Washington. To buy a gun. To take another gun class.

Heh. Right now I'm worried about doing enough housesitting to afford tuition this semester. I'd like to find a job, too, but that doesn't look likely--at least, a job around here doesn't--and I've been putting off looking for one.

That's another interesting note. I've been putting off looking for a job. Or, if not putting off exactly, then at least not pursuing one as assiduously as I am capable of doing.

ANYway. The second observation in therapy came when Dr. Shrink asked me to recount the history of my tardiness, when it started and how it developed. I started telling her about so on and so forth, starting with Walgreens and moving on from there--and I realized as I was doing so that talking about my past (God, it's even got capital letters in my head, "My Past") is really, really uncomfortable for me. So uncomfortable, in fact, that my brain was doing the shying-away thing it's developed.

And the biggest feeling I associate with talking about the past is shame.

I realized this even as I realized that the Asshole Phase I went through from the ages of 17 to 23 was . . . really not all that bad.

My parents seem to think it was terrible. My dad once told me that they were both "just hoping [I] came out of it without getting pregnant or catching a disease."

And okay, maybe I was acting like a total asshole. I honestly don't remember much of how I acted around my parents, except that being around them made me uncomfortable because I felt so elatedly awesome about myself and my sexual attractiveness when I wasn't around them, and I thought they could tell and were frowning on it.

But seriously? I was 19. So what if I dropped out of college? I was working full-time, or nearly, paying all my bills except gasoline and car insurance with my second job ever. I paid rent, on time, every month, I bought food and clothing. I was a clueless twit, but I wasn't drinking or doing drugs of any kind. I didn't smoke.

And yeah, I had sex. Probably not as much as my parents think I did--mostly it was fooling around--but some. I just realized last week that I don't really regret that. Or, if I do, the advice I would give Younger Me from the vantage point I've gained now is not "Don't have sex" so much as "Don't have sex because you're lonely or looking for approval." That would have eliminated one or two people, but not all of them by any means.

And there were a couple of times I dressed like a tart. Mostly this was because I wasn't very aware of how tarty I looked--I hadn't grasped that there's a disconnect between what women in magazines wear and what women in real life where even in their sexiest moments--which, in retrospect, I now think is kind of cute. I was so naive and so . . . harmless. So without bad intent in it. I just thought I was showing off a little for the first time; I thought I was doing what other young women had done years before.

But even if I had dressed like a prostitute--intentionally--so what? Dressing like a prostitute is not the worst sin I can think of. It doesn't mean you're a bad person (although it's a good sign that you're probably kind of messed up); it doesn't mean you're a whore. It doesn't even mean that you're interested in having sex with anyone.

That's the thing I think a lot of people--women as well as men--don't grasp about the way women dress, about that magazine/real-life disconnect: there isn't necessarily ANY correlation whatsoever between a woman's intentions and what she's wearing. Women are kind of socially required to look two to six degrees sexier--that is, more inviting or desiring of actual sex--than they actually are.

Red lipstick, cleavage, legs, and stiletto heels have everything to do with dressing up, with a sense of occasion, and almost nothing to do with deliberate sexual advertisement. Add to that my lack of education on the subject and lack of social and sartorial awareness, and you get a mini wrap skirt; a backless, patent-leather apron top, platform sandals, and no underwear. All on the same day.

I went to dinner with my parents wearing that. I remember being pleased at the time that everyone was giving me admiring glances, and utterly shocked and horrified when my mother told me later that she and Dad had been embarrassed to be seen with me and that "everyone was staring at [me], and not in a good way." The way she said it made it clear that she was talking about anger and disapproval, not about lust.

THE ABILITY TO LAUGH AT WEAKNESS

That's an incredibly painful memory for me, which I think is interesting, because from an outsider's standpoint I can see how it could in fact actually be pretty hilarious, in a cringe-y way. Something to laugh about over drinks with girlfriends, if I had girlfriends and was inclined to gather them all together and have drinks with them.

A CAT, TIED TO A STAKE THAT'S DRIVEN INTO / FROZEN WINTER SHIT

But that's my point: all my memories between high school and, say, yesterday afternoon, are painful. They're all entirely about shame. My view of the myself of my past, even if that past is an hour ago, is distinct and very clear: I was a pathetic, snivelling slimeball worthy of nothing but disgust.

And my view of the myself of now is that I am Getting Better. That I am shiny, happy, presentable, and that I do not in fact suffer from any of my (old) bad habits, as though each moment of my life is an instant discrete from all the previous moments, though each previous moment is contiguous to all other previous moments.

It's no wonder I love the new moon so much. It's no wonder I love to buy new notebooks, that I tire of them after I've written only one or two things inside, that I almost always distinctly feel failure when I look at one a week after I've started writing in it. My life is a Groundhog Day occurring on the first day of a makeover--or perhaps the day before.

And that, dear friends, is why I don't want to go to therapy.

I mean, I DO want to go to therapy. I honestly want to get better--to develop better habits, to get to the point where I feel confident that I am capable both of taking care of myself and of watching myself with enough accuracy that I can stop a downcycle before I become non-functional or suicidal. The part of my brain that doesn't want to go to therapy is the minority opinion, but we all know how a minority opinion can derail progress if it's loud and obnoxious enough. (I am looking at you, politicized evangelicals.) And that part doesn't want to go to therapy because it knows that there is a real danger, in therapy, of facing feelings--most especially that feeling of shame, that feeling that I might not be a viable human being (and all that that implies for my future--that even the majority of me desperately wants to avoid.

When I was dating the Ride, he was trying to get me to listen to new music, and I, not yet understanding that I was suffering from constant nervous-system overload, thought it all sounded like noise until he played the fifth, sixth, and seventh tracks of Radiohead's OK Computer for me--"Let Down," "Karma Police," and "Fitter Happier."

"Let Down" and "Karma Police" were both catchy songs, and they sunk into my head and stayed as if they had always been my own. "Fitter Happier," however, convicted me. It was so incisive, so correct, about how I was living my life that I burst into tears when I heard it, and had to kneel on the kitchen floor because I could no longer stand.

Now it still demands that I account for myself, but in a different, more general, way. I no longer make lists of the things I must have, the things I must buy, in order to feel like a legitimate human, but my desire to self-represent well makes me cast myself as a loathsome thing behind the white lace curtains you see in decorating magazines in ads for expensive flooring.

It's time for that to stop.

2010

2011-01-04T02:15:00.000-08:00

This post represents my taking a moment to appreciate the good things that happened and the good things I did this year. It's especially interesting to me that my mind shies away from thinking about memories of this year (or of any year). That should stop, because I have some wonderful memories and some wonderful stories, and I will lose them if I refuse to think about the past because I am afraid to face my failures.

Without further ado:

I got my bachelor's degree. I quit a job that I was tired of and at which I wasn't doing well. I started writing again.

I converted from Christianity to Something Else. I'm still not sure how I feel about that, and I still don't think I have it right, but I'm participating in spirituality again, and that's a good thing.

I watched my turtle eat little bison burgers my mom made especially for her. I decided what I'm doing with my life at the moment. I came out to my parents, and they still love me and like me and enjoy my company. And I still enjoy theirs. I got a handheld shower head. I learned how to shoot a gun in a safe manner, read my first book of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and generally acted like a decent human being toward the people around me.

I made some bitchin' jewellery. I took a summer off for the first time in about 10 years. I spent about half the year doing, for the most part, nothing, and it's been great.

I applied for a job that scares me. It's as a kindergarten-teacher's aide, and due to my mother's influence I have a good [entry ends]

AULD LANG SYNE [Part 2 of 2]

2010-12-31T01:49:00.000-08:00

Despite the multiplicity of my blood-chilling flaws, I really only have one resolution this year: Get the fuck out.

I'm going to finish school, I'm going to make some money, and I'm going to be either in Portland or packing and making the U-Haul arrangements by this time next year.

You heard it here. Hold me to it, friends and lovers.

I WANT THESE CHAIRS.

2010-12-31T01:46:00.000-08:00

With my cherry-wood dropleaf table? OH yes.

A cheaper way to go about doing this might be to get some aluminium chairs like these--

--spray them with clear lacquer, hand-blow a bit of black glitter on them, and spray them with a clear, high-gloss coat of that crap you put on lawn furniture. What is that stuff called, again?

I've repainted Grandma's plant stands with them pieces of furniture with it so far, and plan on doing her old lawn furniture and a log for Elvis with it, too. And Dad did the interior of the birdbath. I'll have to ask him how it went. It looks great, it dries to waterproof (important for Elvis, who poops indiscriminately with regard to the topography), it comes in all sorts of colors, and it takes like an hour to do.

Or you could just skip the glitter and go with the high-gloss coat.

***

In other news, I went to visit my table the other day and was astonished to find that I could live without it.

It was lovely, it was charming, it was a wonderful size and shape and color. But I could live without it.

It really threw me. So much so that it was something of a cause for concern: wanting that table had given me something to work toward, a reason d'etre, even, and now, lacking that, I am back to seething in my own malcontent and buying little baubles.

Well, enough of that. I have made my resolution for the year, and I will live in its shade. In the meantime, I had a dream the other night that I decided it was time to clean out all my jewellery-making supplies, make what jewellery I wanted, and organize the rest of the materials and put them away. (Right now they're all sitting in white plastic baskets atop the gentleman's chest in my room, which my mother and I call the bead chest, since the entire thing is packed with beading stuff.)

In addition, I have a dangerously bulging file in my filing cabinet labelled "Neat Stuff to Make into a Scrapbook Someday," and yesterday I bought (on the advice of God, through a best-of-three coin toss) a self-adhesive photo album. It will be the first of several, I suspect, but it saves me hours of gluing and explaining, and I will be able to store the book in the file drawer.
I won't (or can't) explain it, but it's one of the things I need to do to move on--to become that grave, silly, wise, funny, kind, beautiful woman I need to be to be ready to handle Oregon. There are things I can do to get ready that do not cost enormous quantities of money.

The self-adhesive album is the first unnecessary thing I've bought in a while that I feel has been money well spent.

That and that new Neutrogena foundation. That's good stuff.

AULD LANG SYNE [Part 1 of 2]

2010-12-31T01:40:00.000-08:00

I'm fat. I'm broke. I'm unemployed. I'm in debt up to my earlobes. I have unfortunate hair. I don't paint or draw. I'm a huge dork, and also kind of a bitch. I'm okay with it.

Huh. I'm okay with it. I didn't notice until just now.

LETTER TO POWELL [unsent]

2010-12-30T01:54:00.000-08:00

The question you asked me a while ago about whether I am in the habit of assuming that everyone is as miserable as I am returns to me these days, asking if it might be invited in if it promises to behave itself.

I've had two--three?--different friends over to the house where I was cat-sitting this holiday now, and they all agree with me that 1) S., one member of the couple who own the house, is an impressively talented decorator, and 2) that she has achieved It--she has Arrived at fabulous, and may now rest on her beautifully arranged laurels.

This is because of the kitchen drawers. The kitchen cabinetry is made of white-painted solid wood, with glass fronts, and that is impressive enough if you're into that sort of thing (I personally am annoyed by the lack of water pressure at the kitchen faucet), but the kitchen's point of ne plus ultra is the drawer runners. The drawers themselves are just as solid as their facades, not the usual warped particle board with shitty vinyl covering in a wood pattern, and the drawers pull out of their slots without any bumping, catching, or sliding--or noise. They're totally silent and totally smooth. The three friends and I agree that this, this, is the true sign of wealth. Fuck Christian Louboutin.

Honestly, the house is lovely. It's a tiny, single-story Tudor cottage, with a Spanish-style courtyard surrounding the back, on C______ Avenue. I'd love to have a house like it some day. I envy S.--tall, pale, beautiful, elegant, witty, red-headed S.--her home and her money, her beauty and her ability and means to surround herself with beautiful things.

S. wants to have coffee with me tomorrow to talk about her husband's alcoholism and the possibility that they might divorce.

I wasn't particularly surprised by the news (though I was by the invitation): cat no. 2 chewed one corner of, among other things, a prescription for Antabuse in C.'s name, and last time I housesat the bedside table in the room where I slept, S.'s room, was littered with books bearing titles like Ending a Co-Dependent Relationship and When Enough Is Enough and Nice Girls Finish Fat.

(The bedroom in the finished basement, where C. sleeps most of the time, is devoid of such paraphernalia, and larger, but I don't like sleeping down there anyway: C. tells S. that he leaves their bed in the night because S. tosses and turns, but in deleting my own cookies from the basement computer, I have seen the list of his. My guess is that C. is an asshole whose veneer of suave chivalry has cracked from long use in close quarters; he seems to favor exclusively porn featuring white men hurting or humiliating women of minority races. At least with regular porn you can pretend the women are enjoying themselves--as long as you don't look at their faces--but his choices all seem to point to a man who longs to abuse those classes he feels are beneath him. "Martha the maid has to take a facial for a paycheck," "Submissive black sluts in surprise anal fuckings," that kind of thing.)

S. is probably nearly 50, or just over, though expensive skin cream and regular hair appointments make her look 37, and her attitude of not giving a shit about age makes you wonder why youth is supposed to be important anyway. C. is a retired U.S. general who now works for Lockheed Martin and travels extensively. She met him in her home state of Kentucky, I think--or maybe they both lived there once--and the two of them moved away from their respective families (C.'s ex-wife and his two adult children, S.'s mother and sisters) to the pretty cottage.

I think that must be why she wants to have coffee with me. I think maybe she doesn't have anybody else--at least, not out here--except the half-crazed 29-year-old, broke and fat and tragically uncool and living with her parents in a trailer out west of BFE, who comes into town to housesit her cats for her.

You are the only person I've ever met who is, apparently, not as miserable as I am (hence my habit of assuming everyone is, which I view as being akin to assuming that everyone I know has a pulse), so perhaps it's time to ask you your secret. How do you remain happy, even with your troubles? You must have troubles, surely; everyone I've ever known has them, and some of the people I most admire have some of the troubles I think of as most basic. What is it that makes you think, "Life is good enough that I think I'll keep doing this living thing a little longer"? or "Yeah . . . this is good"?

2010-12-27T02:40:00.000-08:00

I got a C! I got a C! I don't have to re-take the BMS III class next semester! I'm still listed (inexplicably, to my view of my academic performance) as a student in good standing, so my plans can proceed as . . . well, as planned.

And they are, right now, to finish the medical transcription classes by the end of next summer, say fuck it to the billing and coding classes until a later time (a time when I am in Oregon and making a paycheck), and get a decent-paying part-time job this semester--hopefully with the school district for which my mother works. What I'll do over the summer, I have absolutely no idea. We'll see.

THE TRANSWITCH CONVERSATION

2010-12-27T01:59:00.000-08:00

She: hi may i ask a couple questions about being wiccan its interesting and all

I: You can, but I'm actually not Wiccan, per se. I ascribe to some Wiccan beliefs, but not all of them.

I: "Subscribe," sorry.

She: can u do spells and stuff like that?

I: Sure.

She: what all have u done?

She: ever have one manafast itself and work?

I: Most of the spells I do relate to the overall rituals I do--recognizing the new moon and the full moon, recognizing the two equinoxes and the two solstices, and the "general-purpose" spells--casting a circle, calling and dismissing the quarters.

She: so i was wondering is there any kind of spell that could make a guy well ... feminine?

I: Some of them have been for specific things. I am especially fond of attaching specific ideas or feelings to a physical object, such as a stone or a figurine.

I: Sure, I suppose so. Most Wiccans and witches in general make their own spells, and you can make a spell to do just about anything.

She: like basicly make a guy sppear more and act more feminine?

I: Sure.

She: would u do that to a guy?

I: Depending on the circumstances, possibly.

I: Let's say I cast a spell on someone to out him as a crossdresser, and let's say it works. Then whoever found out tells this guy's dad, and this guy's dad is so upset that he loses his religious faith over it and becomes very unhappy. And his dad losing his religious faith over it damages his dad's marriage, and his dad's wife has an affair. And maybe the guy she has an affair with is a suicidal alcoholic, and he decides that the affair is just one mistake too many, and he kills himself.

She: ah ok

I: That would be a consequence of the spell that the spellcaster had no way of predicting.

She: what if the crossdresser was willing to take that risk

I: Intent helps with that a lot, though: according to Wicca, if you send good things out into the universe, they tend to recurse--they tend to multiply.

I: If the crossdresser himself wanted the spell cast on him, and if he saw the casting of the spell as a _positive_ change in his life--he wanted it so that his life would be better, so that he could be a better or more complete person--then I don't see why it wouldn't be just fine to cast or undergo a spell like that.

I: Um . . . why do you ask?

She: im kinda that person were speaking of

I: And you're gay, and you want to be outed as a crossdresser and as being gay, in a sort of indirect way? So that you can live as an out person without having to _come_ out, or at least

She: i just think it would be easyer to face it if it just happened

I: God, I know that feeling.

I: When I came out to my parents, it was terrifying. It wasn't the hardest thing I had ever done, but it was far and away the scariest.

She: so i thought if it bacame ovious and i couldnt hide it why be neverous

I: You know what happened, though--it was a surprise to my mom, but my dad said he had known for a while and just hadn't said anything.

She: ah

I: Yeah. I mean, other than the risk of harrassment, discrimination, and physical violence, being out is a lot better than being in. And I mean that sincerely. Being out is more dangerous; being closeted is more poisonous.

She: so how would it out me?

She: any idea?

I: Nope. None.

She: do u think he would feel more feminine?

I: If you're determined to do so, yes, probably.

She: do u have yahoo messenger?

I: Do you want to be more feminine? I guess what I'm asking is this: there's a difference between what gender you are and what gender of person you're attracted to.

I: I don't, I'm sorry.

She: i feel like im a woman and im attracted to men but im forced to live as a male

I: I see. And . . . I'm sorry. That's got to suck bigtime.

She: :(

She: i need like a super feminine spell lol

I: I mean, I'm not sorry that you feel you're a woman; I'm sorry that the world makes being trans so much more difficult than it should be.

She: ya

I: Well, if you want one that's effective, the best one you can get is probably going to be one that you make and cast on yourself or cast on the world yourself.

She: dont think yours would be?

I: I don't think that mine would be as precise. Sometimes you need a pair of tweezers rather than a baseball bat, you know?

She: hell id be willin for the bet at least it has experence

I: They're both effective, but in veeeeery different ways. I'm not saying that I'm unwilling to cast this spell for you; I'm just saying that you might want to consider looking into Wicca or magick and making a few spells yourself.

She: how hard would it be for u to cast it?

I: Not very. It might take a two or three hours to write the spell and perform the ritual. I tend to ask the universe--the Goddess and the God, I call it, though I mostly speak to the Goddess--to work with me rather than relying entirely on my own power.

She: how would u word the auctual spell part that affected me?

I: I'll tell you this: I believe in a loving Goddess. I believe that nature is usually cruel and always impartial, and I believe that humans have a big dose of suck in them; but I believe in a Goddess that's loving.

I: I don't know. I'd have to think about it for a bit and write it out.

She: kool

I: Do you want me to do that?

She: yes id like to see like your ideas on what exactly u would ask for help with

I: Okay. Will you give me until the end of the day tomorrow?

She: sure

She: if u wanna toss some ideas out there what all r u gonna ask for?

I: Sweet. And I don't want to be a creepy evangelist--I left traditional Christianity largely because of them--but if you're interested, there's a book that might explain a little more about what Wicca-style magick is about. It's cheap, it's easy to read, and it's not preachy. You don't have to read it, but it could be useful.

She: kool im game

I: Cool. The book is called _True Magic: A Beginner's Guide_, and you can get it used on Amazon for about five bucks. Nine, if you count shipping.

She: kool ill look into it

She: so what are some ideas you might ask for help with

I think the first thing I would start with in a spell or a prayer for your circumstances is a request that things change so that you are comfortable with yourself--if not with your body, than with your identity, with your discomfort with your body. I don't know if that makes sense. Happiness with who you are even if you can't be happy with your circumstances.

She: kool

I: Then I would ask the circumstances themselves to change. I would ask for you to become aware of what power you have to change them--what your options are and the pros and cons of each--and for the world around you to . . . become a little friendlier, I guess is how I would put it. Become pliable for the changes you want to make, if you decide to make any.

She: :)

I: I always ask that changes that happen--through my will or yours--happen as much as possible in harmony with the Goddess' will, which means in a way that creates more love, more health, more interconnectedness, and more knowledge in the universe rather than less.

I: So I would ask that the changes that happen happen in a good way.

She: :)

I: And then I would probably end with a call for protection and blessing on you--one that wards off bad thoughts, bad actions, and bad feelings, whether they're yours or someone else's or just shit that happens.

She: :)

She: i wish there was something that would like make me unknowingly paint my nails and stuff lol

I: I would probably tie all of this into an object and either send the object to you or cast it out into the world.

I: /laughs

I: That I don't think I can help you with.

She: lol

She: like unknowingly dressing and acting feminine

I: Yep. That's doable.

She: really?

She: how so

I: Hm . . . it would be more a change so that you would become more comfortable in "feminine" clothes and attracted to "feminine" styles, and dressed and moved and presented yourself with a more "feminine" manner. How aware you are of it will kind of depend on how much you decide to think about it. But I can also ask that the people around you take more notice of your femininity at the same time that you become more feminine.

She: kool

I: I'm afraid that I have to go right now, but I'll message you either later today or tomorrow--most likely tomorrow evening--with a spell outline and anything else I think of.

She: so basicly it would become obvious

I: Yes. It would become obvious. To you and to other people. What they DO with that . . . I don't have any way of predicting that. I've never gone in much for divination or scrying. You might consider consulting a tarot reader for information on that. A reputable one, I mean, not "Mama Deity's House of Crystals" or something. Online is a good place to look for reviews of local magickal services. Seriously, dexknows.com is pretty handy.

She: how obvious do u think it would become?

I: I honestly don't know. I don't think there's any degree of obviousness that is as powerful as the ability of people to deny what's staring them in the face, but I also think that people often surprise you by how smart or wise or good they are when you least expect them to do so.

I: I know that's not a very satisfying answer. I'm sorry.

She: its fine im sure i defently wont be much of a guy after its cast

She: lol

I: I also suggest--and if you don't take anything else I say remotely seriously, TAKE THIS seriously, that you talk to a therapist. There are a lot of therapists these days who have decided that the DSM-IV's classification of gender dysphoria as a mental disorder is not accurate--that being transgendered is just as natural and acceptable as being any other kind of -gendered. Having someone to talk to who knows stuff about how minds work and who will be supportive of you is SUPER important and SUPER helpful.

She: ive been looking into that as well

I: Having a therapist has literally saved my life at least twice, and having someplace to go where you don't HAVE to pretend, even a little, can be a real help.
She: i just feel like i could start liveing if i had no choice like i unknowingly become really feminine actling girlys and had to face it

I: Yeah. And that will help. But having a therapist can do a LOT to put you in a position where you have no choice but to live and act honestly. At the very least it'll give you practice with it.

She: yup stuck as a girl so i face it

I: So. I'm going to go. I'll write you tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, I wish you luck and blessings.

I: Yep.

She: can i ask one thing before u go

She: please?

I: Sure.

She: can i email u a pic or 2 so u see like the real me and give me your opinion so u can kinda tailor the spell?

I: Sure.

I: You can either link to them from a message on [message service], or email me at [email address].

She: give me one sec ill email them k?

I: Okay.

2010-12-27T01:55:00.000-08:00

The guy I wrote the letter to a few posts down has now written me a touching email saying that he loves me.

I've been watching this oncoming train for a while now, but still: shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

I love him, too, of course, but I suspect that what he means is that he is in love with me.

I'm going to have to do something about this. And I don't want to.

***

Something else has changed along these lines, too. I don't want him to be in love with me; I don't want him to be attracted to me.

This has not previously been the case. Up until I noticed this development, I was excessively pleased by male attentions, and I do mean excessively: they could make my week, even if they were casual and from a total stranger. I felt that when I had male attention I had power, and I was perfect--desirable rather than an undesirable.

And there was no grey area. I was either a goddess that all men wished (or should have wished) they could have access to, or I was some non-human species, alien to the world.

So male attention, whether I reciprocated or even wanted it or not, was tremendously important. I honestly can't say whether I still feel that way, but I know I don't feel that way about this guy.

MARY JANE IS JUST A CUTE SHOE

2010-12-25T02:03:00.000-08:00

It has just occurred to me, for the first time in my (extensive, variegated) work history, that I might not be able to pass a drug test if I were given one now.

It's also the first time I've done something illegal without feeling any sort of guilt or remorse or regret about it. And I wouldn't, I think, even if I had been caught and convicted and forced to do jail time for it. The law against marijuana possession is so contemptible that I can't even be bothered to get upset over it.

[incomplete entry]

2010-12-25T02:01:00.000-08:00

My modus operandi is to parcel out information to individuals I think are best equipped to receive it: I tell Esme what I'm thinking about about being gay, for example, but not my parents; I tell my parents what I'm thinking about about moving to Portland, but not the View, who thinks I should have moved there four years ago.

It's unusual to have something I don't feel as though I can tell anyone. It's not a secret, or anything, but it's so socially unacceptable that even the people who are tolerant of differences amongst individuals would be offended and/or hurt by it.

I hate Christmas.

I don't mean just that I don't celebrate it, or that I find it inconvenient or obnoxious; I mean that it actively offends me and makes me angry.

Let's go through the reasons, shall we?

Firstly, Christmas is not the birthday of the son of God, so stop saying that it is. The holiday falling on 25 December came into the Roman religion as Saturnalia from several Near-East cults, most prominent of which was that celebrating the deity of Semiramis, a Babylonian queen believed to be the incarnation of Ishtar, a goddess of love, war, and fertility, and the Church co-opted the festival--sometime in the Dark Ages, I think, though I'm not sure--and turned it into a holy day celebrating the birth of Christ. Okay? It's not the actual date of the birth of Christ.

CRAP EMAIL FROM A CHICK

2010-12-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

Me

25 December 2010

You

Dear You:

I close my salutation with a colon because this letter is about the business between us.

The business is this: there is no business between us.

I will not ever marry you, and you should stop resting easy on that bed of thorns and trash you call laurels on the assumption that I will--that I will never find anyone better. I may not, but that does not mean that I'm going to settle for you.

I don't find you odious, don't get me wrong. I don't have nearly as much of a problem with you as I do with the idea of settling, period.

You, on the other hand, seem to be all about settling. That pisses me off. You expect nothing of yourself, and yet you you live in a state of constant self-disappointment. You thought that expecting nothing of yourself would make you happier, or make life easier, but in fact it hasn't increased your happiness or decreased your difficulties at all, and yet you're too lazy to give up the habit.

I'm lazy. Yeah, I get that. I'm lazy, and it fucking sucks sometimes because I ruin myself, and that's way worse than life ruining me. But I floss my teeth, and I clean my bathroom; and I do my ironing; and I buy underwear that fits if the old stuff doesn't; and I at least give a shit that I have acne, even if I can't get rid of it completely. I try. I'm trying. And even when I'm not, I'm at least trying to try. You . . . it's like you've give up completely. On everything.

And yeah, it does bother me that you like superheroes, and it does bother me that you like computer games. The stuff you like is the fantasies of white male nerds, in which women have adopted the male standard of living and have become bimbos or warriors (or bimbo warriors), in which hitting things with a stick until they break solves everything, and in which you're the jock who's good at hitting things with sticks--and allowed to do so. And you spend all your time there, and what time you don't spend there you spend on stupid Internet sites reading dick jokes and looking at airbrushed pictures of the results of breast implants.

And you know what, whatever. Live in a fantasy world. Fantasy worlds are often better than this one. I don't have a problem with you living in a fantasy world, but go out and fucking LIVE IT. You think the universe hates you. Fine. Maybe the universe hates you. But that should make you pissed off, because the universe doesn't have a good reason for hating you. I hate you because you've decided the universe is right.

You should be angry about that. Fuck the universe. You should be ready to go out and fuck the universe's shit up, and if you can't do it right away you should not let the issue go. You should hold a grudge against the universe. If the universe is going to take you away from happiness, you should make it take you kicking and screaming and punching it in the balls.

As it is, you've given up on being human. And this may come as a shock to you, but the fact that I like Alien and Army of Darkness and have a reasonably well-developed plan for addressing a zombie apocalypse doesn't mean that I don't want to marry a human.

See, contrary to what "The Beauty and the Beast" and The Breakfast Club may lead you to believe, when you treat yourself like shit, you treat other people like shit, too. When you utterly refuse to think about your desires and ambitions and emotions and pathologies, you refuse to think about other people's, too, and when you do try to think about other people's, you don't have the tools for it.

When you and I were dating, you did some fairly douchebaggy things to me. You almost gave up our relationship to indulge in a booty call because you considered the possibility that Sex Now > Long-Distance Relationship. This is something you should have considered before you entered into a long-distance relationship, and it's definitely something you should have worked out on your own rather than calling me and asking me what I thought about it.

You were the one who brought my history of being on the receiving end of sexual abuse into the conversation we were having, and when I started telling you about it--because you asked--you pretended you had to leave because your phone battery was dying. When I called you back a few minutes later to ask what gives--because in the past you had always just plugged your phone in and kept talking--you said you had realized that you couldn't handle hearing about it and had made up an excuse to exit the conversation.

You did kind of the same thing when I was going through a major depressive episode. You think that one of the great things about the idea of Us is that we both have mental illnesses, so we understand what it's like and can watch each other, Watch each other in that hairy-eyeball way we watch ourselves and our own symptomatology.

When my meds stopped working and I became suicidal, my therapist helped me set up a contingency plan, which included a numbered list of people to call if I was In a Place. I asked you if you were willing to be on that list. I explained, in detail, what the list was about, what it would mean if I were to call on you as a member of it. You said yes.

And when I did call you, when I did say that I was thinking about killing myself and I needed help, you said you couldn't handle the conversation and hung up. I could have died, you know.

And that's when you're in your not-depressive phases. When you're in your depressive phases, you totally shut down. It's like watching a sleeping computer. When I spent a few hundred dollars and a week of my time flying out to see you, which we only got to do a handful of times a year, you ignored me--literally ignored me--and went and played computer games in your living room, refusing to talk to or even look at me.

When I set up a particular fantasy you had mentioned wanting to experience with me, you walked in, sat silently while I gave you a blowjob, and then got up and walked out of the room without a word.

And, yeah, you were in a depressive cycle. I get that. But the depressive cycles wouldn't hit so hard if you took more care of yourself when you weren't having them. I get to say this because I know, the same way Jewish people get to make anti-Semitic jokes: we've earned our respective privileges.

Also, you don't go down, and you've let the term whiggers leave your mouth. Seriously.

So no, I will not marry you. I will not marry you soon, and I will not marry you ever. I will not sleep with you again, and I will not date you again. I am not in love with you, I am not attracted to you, and I don't like you like you. You are wasting your energy romancing me, and what you think of as your tricks--calling me and speaking Geek, trying to be witty, working our romantic and sexual history into every conversation--are unimpressive to me. You make me sad and irritated, not happy, and I have no interest in rubbing up against more sad and irritated than I've already got on my own.

Because I am fighting my own. Maybe not well, and maybe not gracefully, but I am fighting it, and I'm not going down the drain with you, so stop thinking you've got a partner in what you've decided is your own pathetic loathsomeness. My loathsomeness can eat me, and though it chews, yet I will bite back.

Yours sincerely,

Me

THE BIG DEAL

2010-12-25T00:30:00.000-08:00

This journal is, as you might have noticed, not private. It is, however, secret: no one who knows me knows that I have it, and no one who knows that I have it knows who I am, and it's probably going to stay that way.

I chose to make it thusly because I need a place to say things that I can't say to my friends, family, or lovers. But I also need to say it, out loud, to the world, rather than just muttering it to myself like it's a comment about a red stapler.

MEMO TO KAY

2010-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Do you remember when I decided I wanted to add some white-trash to my wardrobe, and you told me, in a way that made it clear that you didn't care for it and felt I was being ridiculous, that I had succeeded?

I've decided I like it anyway, so I'm going ahead with it. Remember that enormous, hideous pink bag I had? I've gotten another one. Next: cork wedges.

Also, you're a twit. Go trim your beard, nitwit.

THE FOUR PROBLEMS: REDUX

2010-12-24T04:30:00.000-08:00

When I briefed her on all this, my friend Rock Star responded instantly, "You need to change your meds."

It may be that I do. When I started taking Zoloft, I lost interest in sexuality, and found it difficult, pointless, and unsatisfying to have orgasms. This is terrible, yes, but it wasn't unexpected--and it's certainly not as terrible as being dead, which was my other option at the time.

Now, however, I am pretty consistently interested in having orgasms, in sexiness and sensuality, and I have almost as many as I please, and I am pleased with them.

This is wonderful, yes, but it also could be an indicator that Zoloft is no longer working for me as well as it should be. Perhaps I have built up a tolerance to it.

I think I'll talk to my doctor about this as soon as she comes back from South Africa.

THE FOUR PROBLEMS: THE PROBLEM OF THE NORTH

2010-12-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

Just as the north, as death and birth/rebirth, nothingness and everything, is all-encompassing, this final problem (not to be Holmesian about it) is a sort of umbrella over the others.

It is twofold: firstly, I have no real believe or hope that what I am putting myself through now (school, living with my parents, joblessness), which feels very much like tearing down every part of my life that I had built up so far, will result in any kind of net gain, or indeed any kind of gain at all.

I don't even have any belief that this period will ever end. It was supposed to be over a year ago or more, but I kept failing classes, both at the university and at the community college. (What was that about, anyway? I know what the university bit was about, but what was my deal with the community college?) Now my car no longer runs and Dad wants me to sell it, and my Flaming June poster is so worn and stained that it's not even worth framing.

The other half of the problem is this: I feel as though I am forgetting how to be human. I am forgetting not just how to interact with others, how to go out and have a good time, how to compass people and how people work, but why one does these things, why they're important. I feel that I am forgetting that there is any other way to live than the way I "live" now. And I'm not hopeless so much as I am just . . . numb.

I am. I'm numb.

I am hoping to emerge from this period a new organism, with new talents and more power than the old. But I feel as though my chances are just as good of shrivelling and dying in this chrysalis. A car is a cage if you can't get out of it.

THE FOUR PROBLEMS: THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUTH

2010-12-24T03:30:00.000-08:00

The thought of sexuality makes me tired. My own body is a disappointment, and better enjoyed alone--for I can't enjoy sex because I am constantly so worried about repulsing my partner--and the bodies of men are . . . gross.

It is not only that, though, that worries me about my problem with the south. It is that I don't quite grasp what the deal is about sex. Having sex doesn't seem that important to me, or that desirable. Having orgasms, yes. Hell, yes. But sex seems like an atavism, and one from an age full of ugly things--penetration and ownership and being owned, the alleged male instinct to be a douchebag (i.e., focus entirely on women's looks and fuck and leave as many women as possible) and the alleged female instinct to be a slave (i.e., carefully select a mate based on a complete personality inventory and then work to please him so he will stay).

Sex with a woman was humbling and amazing, and didn't feel, when I was doing unto her, like that at all. But when she was doing unto me, I was repulsed by the whole procedure, repulsed by myself and my body and what gives my body pleasure. (Even though my body was, in my mind, better than hers in some ways.)

And it is not just sex. I feel as though I am losing not just my touch at human relationships, but my grasp of why human relationships are important. Must they be, really, when I have the Internet, and chores to do and other works that need attention?

THE FOUR PROBLEMS: THE PROBLEM OF THE WEST

2010-12-24T03:00:00.000-08:00

Normally things proceed from east to south, but in this case, topically speaking, the segue seems most appropriate from east to west, the water.

Water is the element that has fascinated me most so far because it's something very alien to me.

The north, winter, is death and transformation, cold and waiting, destroyedness and creation. We have long winters on Colorado, and they seem all-powerful; this is something that I understand.

The east is air and spring. It is, astrologically speaking, the element into which I was born (though temporally speaking I was born in the autumn). There is nothing I like so much as a new beginning. I understand spring.

The south is fire and summer. I've never liked fire (as a spiritual element, I mean; I don't have any opinion one way or another on the actual stuff itself) because I've always thought of it as a frivolous, bitchy woman or as a douchebag-type guy. I was surprised when I approached it to find that it welcomed me, that it seems to like me.

Water, the west, is acceptance. It is also the autumn, traditionally the time of the greatest food harvest, and so a time dying and the generosity that comes with acceptance.

I don't understand that at all. I comprehend it intellectually, but I don't understand. The idea of acceptance is alien to me. I hate my body so much that I don't rouse myself to take very good care of it because I don't think of it as being worth saving.

I hate myself the same way: I don't think of myself as someone worth putting any effort into, so I don't do many of the things I should--ritual among them.

And I am none too fond of my life, either. I don't see it going anywhere, and I don't feel that I see results when I make any sort of effort in it, so making that effort is twice as . . . effortful, and not, I feel, very rewarding.

THE FOUR PROBLEMS: THE PROBLEM OF THE EAST

2010-12-24T02:30:00.000-08:00

I am faced with four problems, one for each cardinal direction. They have become clearer and louder under the amplification afforded by the fatigue I currently suffer due to lack of sleep, so I write about them tonight as an exercise in self-awareness as part of my ritual.

The first of the four problems, which I shall associate with air and the east, is that I do not, for the most part, do ritual.

Let me back up. I started doing ritual and becoming interested in witchcraft because I had no way of practicing (as one does a musical instrument) my spirituality or exercising (as one does an arm or a right) my faith, and as a result I was not making time for God or for myself in relation to God.

But now that I have the equipment and the procedures to do just that, I find that I don't anyway.

The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, I don't feel worthy of approaching God in a ritual fashion unless I am clean, well-rested, well-dressed, "together," and feeling rather sexy. No, seriously. And since I am almost never all of those things at once, I shy away from approaching an altar at which I present myself to God in a very "hey, notice me" fashion. And even then it's iffy, because I know that most of that's a lie--or at least a very temporary condition.

Secondly, witchcraft is as much about communicating with yourself--ordering yourself, commanding your body, your senses, and your mind to obey your will--as it is communicating with God. And I find that I don't want to pay much attention to myself; I'd much rather escape from awareness of myself by goofing off or playing games, because I find myself fairly unbearable.

[corollary to the preceding post]

2010-08-23T22:57:00.001-07:00

My mother says, "We become like the god that we worship." I don't think, though, that this is complete; or, at least, I don't think development along this line is so straightforward as the statement makes it seem.

Do not presume to tell me that sexist and gender-specific language is "understood" to be all-inclusive. It may be understood intellectually, but I have never felt it, for myself, to be true.

I have always been keenly aware of the differences between myself and the god of the religion (Protestantism) in which I was raised. That god was, I learned*, misogynist, murderous, ungenerous, bigoted, unmerciful, demanding, violent, warmongering, hateful, unforgiving, unfair, unjust, and possessed of grotesque appetites.

And a lot of these qualities seemed to proceed from the first. Monotheism is, in fact, the single most influential informant of the binary--and usually arbitrary--division between "masculine" things and "feminine" things and the pre-eminence of the former and contemptiblity of the latter, whereas polytheistic and goddess-inclusive religions often emphasize (at least doctrinally) the value of things considered suspect by the god of the Old Testament: menstruation, childbirth, women's capacity for authority (political, social, and spiritual), divination, intuition, human power and self-determination, magic, and instinct.

***

The formation of a human's psyche is circular--or spiral or fractal-shaped--rather than linear. To put things in a vastly simplified format, as I became more and more aware that I'm female, more and more aware of the disgraces and travesties practised upon women in the name of Protestantism, more aware of how little difference there is biologically between the sexes, and more and more aware of the value of so-called feminine qualities and ideas, I began to define myself in relation to my god--as being unlike him--rather than as a being that he made in his image.

I felt more like Lilith than like Eve: like a being whose gender zeitgeist, if you will, was present before God created man--man as we know him today--and who thus had to make room for and adjust to a more powerful (though less perfect) species, and, as that species gained dominion over women, to cheat and manipulate him, to hold the secret services, to retain her own thoughts. I am hostile to men because they were created by that God, a god I feel to be a latecomer, a usurper and a conquerer.

Of course, I ultimately became quite bigoted against Christians, and I still am quite sexist (misandrist, I suppose), intolerant, and hostile toward men. I did indeed become like the god I worshipped, even as I hated him.

2010-08-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

Part of the reason that I don't have a good relationship with a male god is that I don't know how to have a good relationship with a male person. Men are not equals to me, and I my feelings toward the sex are generally those of fright, anxiety, disaffection, and malevolence.

To me, men--and thus the male god--are like my father. My father is a wonderful man and an excellent father, but I am not intimate with him the way I am with a lover or a god (for gods must surely be as much like lovers as they are like parents), and I would not want to be.

My father is not a man who tolerates difference of opinion with any equanimity, and he is therefore both terrible and fragile in my mind--he is either a threat to me or my victim.

I feel much the same way about men, and much the same way about the male god. I do not know how to live with men; I only know how to trick them, and that doing so is necessary for my own survival.

I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF

2010-08-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

I became a witch because I wanted, among other things, to feel that I had a place in the universe, that the universe and god were trustworthy and competent, even loving-—that I was not some freak from another story who had been misplaced due to the metaphysical equivalent of a clerical error.

Now I do feel like I have a place, and it has thoroughly disorientated me. I don’t think I realized how valuable to me—how much a part of my identity, or how close to the core of it—was being disaffected, estranged, and bemused by humanity and its deities.

2010-08-18T01:17:00.000-07:00

You know what? I hate my job. There. I said it.

And as soon as I admitted it to myself this evening, it occurred to me that maybe that's why I'm late to work all the time--because I hate going.

It's not that it's a bad job: the people I work with are fabulous, and the work's pretty easy. Repetitive and pointless, but easy. Seriously: learning to shop for clothing and put together outfits that look good and express your personality reasonably well is important, but it's not that important, not as important as the people who shop at the store seem to think it is.

And that's my main problem with the job: $8.50 an hour to deal with customers--these customers--is just not enough.

But, then, $12 an hour wouldn't be, either. With half a dozen notable exceptions, almost every one of our customers is either highly unpleasant or totally insane. Or both. Often both.

So . . . there. I hate it. I hate my job, and I'm going to try to get another one. And that makes me feel better.

Not that job-hunting doesn't come with its own set of problems: it vividly recreates in your mind every professional failing you have ever perpetrated, and makes you blisteringly aware of just how much work you've done for how few references.

But the idea of looking for another job, even one that doesn't pay as well, still fills me with hope and relief, and if I can say that about a task that's almost as unpleasant as removing my own toenails with a pair of pliers, it's probably time to move on.

LIFE SO FAR

2010-08-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Ginger is dying.

I visited her in the hospital today--to say goodbye. Until today she had been refusing visitors, both at the hospital and at home, because she didn't want them to see her when she could not be the fierce, clever woman we were all used to, when she could not be one of the girls.

Her medical condition requires her to be on a ventilator run through a tracheotomy, so she couldn't speak when we came to visit her--which I imagine must have frustrated the hell out of her--I promised her that I thought of her--that I would remember her--always and only as she was when she was at her very best.

Ginger is my favorite customer. She is in her early or mid-seventies, and she is a badass with style. She's never tried anything on except the red leather jacket she bought.

I have never seen her without lipstick. I have never seen her without the pencil eyeliner, done slightly flat by an imprecise hand, that gives her face the dry, unimpressed expression that matches her voice, her personality. She's tiny, very petite, but her hair, in its messy French straight cut, frames a face that has always looked up at me with wicked sparks in its eyes.

When I was set to visit Lee, a long-distance boyfriend, over winter break, she had only two questions for me. "Is he employed?" was the first.

"Yes," I said.

"Is he good in bed?" she said.

"I don't know," I said. "I haven't slept with him yet."

"Well, you should," she said, "and soon. You don't want to waste your time with a guy who's a dud in the sack."

She's been a customer at the store, been a friend of Magdalene, the store's owner, for longer than I've worked there, and I've worked there for almost a decade. Ginger came in with Maureen and Dorothy, her two best friends, every Saturday morning, ten o'clock, the minute we opened (and sometimes before), and shop for clothes and jewellery. Most of the time she was looking for something to take with her on one of her trips to Europe.

Rome seems to be her favorite, although she wouldn't say no to Paris or London if either was on offer. She loved seeing the art and the architecture, and she loved that wine there was cheap.

She said that Italian women, to a one, wear fabulously designed, improbably high heels, and that she didn't know how they managed it on the cobblestone streets. "An American woman would break her neck in them in them on a sidewalk," she said. "Italian women can walk over anything."

Two years ago, when she asked me why I had been sick, I confessed that my antidepressants had stopped working for me and that I was not able to function without them.

"God I get sick of people saying things like 'It's a crutch' and 'You don't really need those,' don't you?" she said. "Don't listen to them. Saying you can be happy if you just work at it is like saying you can drop an addiction if you just try hard enough.

"They don't know, they've never been addicted to anything. Why do you think I still smoke after 40 years? If you can be happy just by trying harder, then you don't need the damned antidepressants, do you? They didn't make them for you."

Once we had in the jewellery case the ugliest, tackiest pair of clip earrings that I had ever seen, and she bought them and wore them to a tea party, agreeing the whole time that they were, indeed, breathtakingly hideous. She consistently threatened to give them to me as a Christmas present. "I remember how much you liked them," she said.

"Oh, absolutely," I said. "I'd love to have them; I think they'd be great on a first date, don't you?"

"Absolutely," she said. "If you want to get laid at the end of the evening, you're going to have to wear these."

She has two sons and a daughter, and one of the sons is gay. She told us about him sometimes: he's a fairly well-known artist who shows in a particular gallery in San Francisco. She's proud to have her son's partner as a son-in-law: he is the most wonderful guy, she said. "Now why aren't there men like that out there for women?" she asked us. "All the civilized men are gay."

When I started dating Jen, I came out to Ginger. I still haven't come out to my parents.

"Oh, J., I'm happy for you," she said, and she looked and sounded as though she meant it. "Men are wonderful, but there is a closeness two women--even friends--can have with each other than we can't always find with men. Look at me and Marge: I'm able to tell Marge things, not secrets necessarily, and she understands in a way Dick just can't because he's not a woman."

Despite such words, Ginger loves her husband Dick sincerely, as sincerely as a goddess loves her devotee, and she doesn't seem ever to have doubted that he loves her. When she spoke of him to us, the eye-rolling wifely longsuffering was little more than a wink showing off the fondness in her eyes. I suspect that there are things she's told Dick that he understands in a way her girlfriends cannot.

It is Dick, in fact, whom she has convinced to give the order to unplug the ventilator. She hates it: it is apparently extremely uncomfortable. Probably almost as uncomfortable as lying unable to talk or laugh with friends, drifting in and out of consciousness for a month and seeing only the ceiling.

I am not surprised that she is getting her way in this: by charm or by threat, her wiles almost always get her her what she wants in the end. Ginger's entire persona screams that she is a woman who knows what she's doing, and that everyone will be better off if they follow her lead into whatever mischief she has chosen.

And today was the day I had to say goodbye to her.

Alone for a moment in the room with her, I said only true things, and all the true things; it is the only time in my life so far that I have spoken so accurately--so exactly and completely--what I mean and how I feel.

So far in my life I have had an opportunity to know and have a friendship with Ginger as she is, or at least with a wonderful part of who she is. And I find now that I have an opportunity, somewhat more time-limited, to tell you, too, about her.

I don't know what she was worried about: the hospital bed today didn't matter because she's Ginger and it's not possible to be Ginger and not be a queen. Even though I said goodbye to her today, she still is. She is. She is, she is.

BECKY SHARP'S GOOD-TIME COCKTAIL

2010-07-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

In my dream last night, after the stuffy man with walrus moustaches had acknowledged me as his mistress, I flaunted my newfound power by forcing his wife to make me a drink--the one drink, in fact, that I had sworn to the man I would never, ever drink again, for it was this drink that had caused him to go mad and rape me when I was but 18 and a dance-hall girl.

The drink is always served in green cut-glass glasses designed especially for it, and contains the following:

ice cubes, slightly crushed, to fill 2/3 the glass
2 parts Champagne
juice from 3 or 4 squeezed lime wedges--enough to make 1 part
a small dash of lemonade
1 drop pomegranate juice OR your own blood, added with an eye-dropper or a pipette
2-4 spoonfuls of sugar, to taste
2 colors bright green eyeshadow, scraped over the glass to powder with a palette knife
1 large sprig mistletoe, added whole

Use the pipette to stir. Needless to say, it is delicious, but slightly poisonous, and must be drunk fresh.

Shortly after I drank my first glass I had another, and then I killed the family dog, one of those nasty little lap-style beasts with stained moustaches and a nervous bark. I was not sorry. It was this that earned me my execution--the man would have kept me and the wife would have had to suffer me, otherwise.

As a result of the rape, I had had an illegitimate son, whom the man had helped to gain a position as a police lieutenant. It was this man who publicly executed me--by pushing me off the top of a building--in order to protect his father's shameful secret (himself) and earn his captaincy.

My story was written by James Joyce and Arthur Sullivan. It was one of only a few collaborations between the two (written during one of Sullivan and Gilbert's several fallings-out), and is not often studied in English classes unless you luck into a professor who's really into novellas.

LIKE A VIRGIN

2010-07-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

Having graduated from my English program, I now find myself in the position--for the first time in six years--of being able to choose what I want to read.

You know how people who have been starving for a long time can forget how to eat? That doesn't happen only with eating.

I keep picking up books from my bookshelf and staring at them blankly, or reading ten pages and them leaving them to lie on the dresser or the snakes' cage or in the bathtub. Having for so long been motivated to read by necessity and deadline, and not being so anymore, books seem, for the first time in my life, like foreign objects whose significance I don't quite grasp.

It's like what I imagine sex must be for people who haven't read about it beforehand. "And this here, what is this? And it does what, exactly? Oh, I see."

This relearning curve also occurs with the following:

eating one's vegetables
exercising
sleeping
cleaning the bathroom
going out on weekends
managing finances
getting dressed in actual clothes
making new friends
engaging in hobbies
shaving one's legs

My first book-for-pleasure is to be Robin McKinley's Beauty, I have decided. It's interesting, though, how no one ever writes the story from the Beast's perspective. I think I might identify with him a little more.

NSFW

2010-07-19T01:50:00.000-07:00

I am in love with this comic, and I suggest you read the whole thing immediately.

It's gorgeous in every way possible, including all the ways that count. I wish more porn were like this. I wish more people were like this.

ANNOUNCEMENT

2010-07-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

In rereading some of the posts on Lovely Monsters, it occurs to me that I am in some respects not a very good writer.

This is surprising to me. I have always thought of myself as a good writer. I can, with effort, write reasonably good poetry, fiction, or letters, and I write very good academic essays.

Having had one blog or another for about eight years, though, and having read hundreds of them, I have come to realize that blog posts are not very much like any of the above. And they are not exactly like personal essays, either: in order to be readable, blog posts must have shorter paragraphs than personal essays, and they often benefit from a more immediate and conversational style.

Whether this marks me as gigantically nerdy or not, I'm pretty excited to be witnessing the development of a new genre of writing or a new movement in the genre of the personal essay. I'd like to take part in it, too: being part of something is a thing I rarely get to experience (and is therefore a thing I covet,) and it is of course vitally important to master writing in as many genres and styles as possible.

All this being the case, I've decided to do three things to make Lovely Monsters more to my satisfaction:

Firstly, I'm going to re-read all the posts currently on Lovely Monsters and edit them for style.

Secondly, in order to put all my bloggy writing in one place, I plan to post all previous blog posts from my various previous blogs here. (I sometimes post comments on other blogs and excerpts from letters to friends on Lovely Monsters for the same reason.) If it's a post of this kind, I'll note the name of the blog from which it came and the date I first wrote it. These, too, will be edited for style.

Lastly--and this one is difficult for me even to contemplate--I'm going to wait a day to publish most of the posts I write so that I can go over them with a more critical and foreign eye before letting them outside.

DO YOU SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, SO HELP YOU GOD?

2010-07-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

In an effort to expand my religious knowledge, I have started reading Richard Cavendish's A History of Magic and Paul Johnson's A History of Christianity.

Both are fantastically boring. More to the point, though, both also have made me question whether it is possible for a man to write a religious history that adequately takes into account the lives, beliefs, and practices of women--in short, what religion is like for women.

This, in turn, has led to another, more basic question, one that scholars of religion have asked of themselves and each other since religious scholarship began: is it possible to write of religion without the interference of one's own bias?

The conclusion I have come to is that it is not, both for reasons of breadth and those of angle.

Religion is a thing that encompasses or addresses every aspect of everything, and it's simply not possible for one person to compass it all in her lifetime, let alone in one treatise.

Writing a book, therefore, on a topic as enormous as the history of magic or the history of Christianity obligates the author to select only a few related topics on which to focus, leaving the vast majority of them unmentioned, let alone examined.

From my own experience in focusing research topics, I have learned that there are three main ways of choosing what to include in the scope of your scholarly gaze: you can choose to write about the things you think it is most important that your readers know, you can choose to write about the things that are most interesting to you, or you can invest in a set of gaming dice or a Magic 8-Ball or something and write about whatever comes up.

The first two methods are intimately, inextricably linked to authorial bias. Actually, they pretty much depend on authorial bias in order to work, don't they. It is not unfair to say, in fact, that all texts arise directly out of, rather than merely reveal, the beliefs and interests of their authors.

The third method, while certainly more egalitarian, will not yield results any more complete than the other two, although certainly it is helpful to the scholar when she is working under a deadline. Not that I've ever tried it. *cough*

ANYway. That's the problem of breadth. After that comes the problem of angle, videlicet, that even a single topic in which everyone has an equal interest looks different to each subsequent person than it does to the first. This is especially true in matters that affect people at a very intimate level, and there is little in the world more intimate than a person's relationship with her religion.

For example, a man describing the full moon might not describe it the same way I would, even if we were describing the same qualities. When I think of the full moon I think of those nights when it looks suddenly very close, even astronomically disastrous, hovering impossibly large near the horizon. I think of its weird orange-yellow light, and how the orange-yellow and the fullness and the closeness are uncomfortable and unignorable, and it reminds me of having swollen and painful breasts a week before having a period, or of carrying the period in you, unborn but portentous, making your body heavier than it should be.

The moon feels to me, then, as though something is coming, and as though there is power--power one can ride, but not grasp--in something-is-coming. Power in the incipience, not in the something.

And I have trouble not worshipping the moon. I'm not sure why, but it's reflexive. The moon has seemed like a goddess to me since I was a child, years before I was willing to admit it.

Weirdly specific, right? And not only would a man see the full moon differently than I do, but two different men would see the moon differently from each other.

Then what about how to describe a religion that has affected more people, over a greater time period, than any other that has ever existed in the world?

And this problem of angle tends to become especially acute (get it?) when it is religion in the telescope, not just because of the angle from which the writer writes, but also because of the angle from which the reader reads.

People are not tabulae rasae by the time they start to read. Just as writers tend to narrow their topics to what they think is important or what they find interesting, readers tend to narrow their selections in the same way. And "think is important" and "find interesting" are just more specific ways of writing "feel something about."

Most people who read about religion feel something about religion even before they start reading; with so many things that have happened because of religion, it's impossible not to feel something about it.

And feeling something colors your perception of what you are reading as you read it, too. Of course it does; reading would not be interesting if we had no emotional link to it.

The inescapable conclusion, then, is a double negative. No, it is not possible for a man to write a religious history that adequately takes into account what religion is like for women. And no, it is not possible to write about religion without the interference of one's own bias.

All religious scholarship, in fact, is doubly comparative (and so doubly biased): the author of the text compares whatever she is researching to what she has experienced in her own life, and the reader of the text in turn compares that comparison to her own experiences.

Studying religion, like studying mathematics or psychology or any other discipline, is telling stories about the world in order to make sense of it and control it.

There is a methodology, a chivalry, for the way in which these stories must be generated in order to be classified as legitimate scholarship rather than something else, but that does not mean that they are not stories.
And all stories are in some ways about their creators--and their listeners--as much as they are about their characters and plots.

And maybe that's okay.

Surely the bedrock of bias on which we build scholarship doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about such topics; in fact, these "problems" suggest to me that we should talk about them more, with more honesty and more metacriticism.

Because the fact that scholarship arises from bias as all other stories do also means that we need to redefine scholarship. Rather than the examination of a canon--of a universally applicable set of facts--scholarship needs to become an examination of why we narrowed our topics of study the way we did and why we see them the way we do--scholastically, socially, and personally.

Which parts of the history of Christianity are important enough to mention in a summary of the topic, and which aren't? What makes you think so?

What do we mean when we say magic? Does magic necessarily exist outside a dominant religion, or is it an aspect of religion? Or both? Why do you define it the way you do?

I know this must be true because if I were the one writing A History of Magic, I would use primary sources, and I would cite them thoroughly.

And if I were the one writing A History of Christianity, the book wouldn't be about the men who made the religion to the total exclusion of the women who had to live with it.

TAKE A LEFT AT CHINA

2010-07-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

Until the age of six, I lived with my parents in a trailer in the middle of a field in Waco, Texas. (Remind me to tell you the opossum story sometime.)

The land featured a long dirt drive and a chain-link fence with no gate, to the side of which was a 20-foot bush of poison ivy that turned shades of garnet and yellow in the fall that surely must have outshone East-Coast maples.

When I was about five, my dad and I went for a walk up the road that led to our house, and, as we always do when we go for walks together, we started speaking of the grand ideas of the world--religion, philosophy, humanity, that kind of thing.

Right around the time that we passed that poison-ivy bush--and thus walked through the opening in the fence--Dad was explaining the idea of hell to me. I have no memory whatsoever of what he said, except that a lot of people think of hell as a place in the ground that's very fiery.

I may have connected this with volcanoes, about which I was learning in school around that time. Whatever the reason, I asked a question that led to Dad answering me that, yes, if you were to dig down far enough into the earth, anywhere in the world, you would eventually get to fire and lava.

The next afternoon, I borrowed one of the family gardening trowels and went to squat in the driveway next to the poison-ivy tree and begin digging for hell.

THREE MEMORIES OF ONE THING

2010-07-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

When I was 15, I dated the Face. Everyone thought he was gay: he was bitchy and flamboyant in the way people think gay men are, and he was unafraid of appreciating the appearances of men, but, no, he was enthusiastically (even satyriastically) straight.

"You think about sex all the time," I said. This, by his own report, was literally true: it was, he said, a constant background vibration (I imagine that it must have been like a string quartet heard from a distance, or like the smell of lilacs coming from another room), which vibration frequently herniated into the sphere of his concentration. "Why?" I said. "When did it start?"

"There are so many people around who are beautiful," he said, "and so many different things that are attractive. I would feel guilty, like I was wasting something, if I didn't notice them all."

I liked his answer, and told him that I would try, for one week, doing the same thing--noticing everything that was attractive about everyone I saw.

It was like opening a door into a layer of reality--the reality--to which I had never had access before. It's only in the last three years that I've been able to shut it at will (or at all), and even that, I think, is only an effect of the antidepressants.

***

It was 2 July 1999 when I decided to end my virginity. Though I had done some fooling around, and though I have since ended different types of virginity in various ways, I felt then (as I feel now) that there is, even without considering the social aspects of a girl having sex with a guy for the first time, something notable--hugely notable--about letting another person invade your body with his own.

(Hands are different, somehow; hands are often not so much part of the body as they are tools of work. You usually forget them for themselves in focussing so much on what they're doing in the same way that when you write you are usually thinking about what you are writing and not about the pen you're using.)

This decision in mind, I called my significant other at work. "I want to have sex tonight," I told him.

"Okay," he said, "I'll pick up some condoms on the way home. Do you want to see a movie afterwards?"

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the house and the yard, looking at everything, because I knew that it was to be the last time I would see it as a virgin.

The world has not looked the same since. I don't regret ending that virginity--or perhaps it is better to say that I would not choose differently if given the opportunity again--but it is true that the world has not looked the same: it is has never been as beautiful.

***

The Ride was the only person who ever asked me if he might kiss me goodnight instead of just leaning in and watching to see if I backed away, and I still think that it's one of the classiest things a significant other has ever done for me. This is the story of the other one:

It was the Ride who introduced me to Radiohead. I had never heard Radiohead before, and their music was just irritating noise for a while (he started with Amnesiac, which I don't feel is the best album for beginners who are used to listening to folk rock), but then OK Computer sank into me.

After that it was still noise, but it didn't matter, because it was also home.

With this feeling in place, even Amnesiac pleased me, but it wasn't until "Like Spinning Plates" that I was enchanted with it. The song starts with the flutter of robotic pigeons' wings. Thom Yorke begins to sing then, sounding as though he is singing backwards around a mouthful of blood and broken teeth until suddenly his voice soars, sharp as a needle, as he wails, "And this just feels like / Spinning plates."

Sitting in the car, listening to it for the first time, I thought that Radiohead had simply reversed the first part of the song, and I wondered aloud what Yorke sings in the first verse and if there was any way we could play the song backwards to find out.

It wasn't that simple, the Ride said. Radiohead had reversed the instrumental tracks to one of their other songs to make the melody for "Like Spinning Plates," and they reversed Yorke's vocals, as well, but Yorke had sung the lyrics backwards to start with. What one hears on the album is actually backwards-sung words played backwards. They're garbled, but what we were hearing, he said, was ordinary, forward-facing words that retained that peculiar reversed quality without actually being backwards.

Mind-blowingly cool.

"So tell me what he's saying," I said; "I can't understand him."

"Are you sure?" said the Ride. "Once you know, you can't go back to not knowing."

I was sure.

Now when I listen to it, the song starts with the flutter of electronic pigeons' wings; then Thom Yorke, sounding as though he is singing backwards and around a mouthful of blood and broken teeth, sings, "While you make pretty speeches, / I'm being cut to shreds." It is even prettier than it was before.

I'D LOVE TO TURN YOU ON

2010-07-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

The rain pinged onto the surface of the standing water in the ruts in the road downtown. Normally you can't even see the dips in the asphalt, but with the rain it looked as though the world had worn away in places to show the clear, shimmering potential lying just outside it.

I imagine that if you could take a knife and cut through the air (which would surely have the satisfying feeling of ripping a hole in thick canvas, like the canvas of a circus tent), you would see that much the same thing is behind the sides and the top of the world, too.

2010-07-01T01:10:00.000-07:00

For twenty bucks, I spent two-and-a-half hours today cleaning my parents' bathroom. That's half of either another teeth-whitening kit or that pair of gargoyle bookends I've been coveting.

When did my taste in luxuries become so expensive? Twenty dollars used to make me feel a little guilty, like I was being a rich bitch. It was enough to buy myself any single item I wanted--and then get an Italian soda with a friend.

2010-07-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

Sure, Mr. Cynic, everything might be a joke. But maybe nothing is. Better use monotone just to be on the safe side.

THE ORIGIN OF ASSHOLERY: ZOMBIEGIRL EXPLAINS IT ALL

2010-06-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

I want to treat you rough. Throw you around, spank and slap you

Slap your face. Treat you like a dirty little whore. Put my cock in your  ass and then shove it down your throat

You are my fucking whore

Hold you down while i choke you and Fuck that ass that i own

Then im going to tell you to shut the Fuck up while i slap your face and  pull your hair for making noise

--Tiger Woods to mistress Joslyn James, via text message

I blame Ernest Hemingway for the existence of NASCAR.

[M]y reasoning is this:

One of the main leitmotifs (one might say preoccupations) that appears in Hemingway's work is the femiphobia of which [Michael Thomsen] write[s] in [his] article "Vaginophobia: Fear of Women in Gaming."

The Edwardian period and World War I saw a vast expansion of and shift in the perceived abilities, rights, and places of women. Hemingway saw a resultant shrinkage in the world of men.

He promulgated this anxiety (one I'm sure he was not alone in experiencing) in his literary oeuvre, and, since he was then (and is still) one of the most popular and widely read authors of all time, and a nascent example of rock-star celebrity, his ideas carried a LOT of clout.

Again, I don't think Hemingway was the only man who felt threatened, lessened, by the sociopolitical growth of women; he is, though, noted as being one of the first people to say it out loud, so to speak--to yell and scream and behave badly and brutally because of terror and uncertainty and self-loathing rather than disguising it beneath a saccharine veil of concern of a superior being--man--for the welfare of an inferior one.

Most people weren't--and aren't--able or willing to 'fess up as Hemingway does (which, by the way, is one of the reasons his stories are still such great literature), and seeing the expansion of women's dominion into the realm formerly belonging to men is still looked at as male habitat loss. Because apparently we can't share.

In reaction to this perceived threat, the men and women of the Western world have developed a variety of bizarre behaviors, most of which would be humorous if one were not directly affected by them. Women are now expected to present a hyperfeminized or infantilized appearance. The expectation that they will be the primary, or even sole, caregivers for children has not diminished in the least, and added to this is the now-overt message that women must also be caregivers for adult men.

This last is an extension of the changing definition of masculinity. As one feminist ex-boyfriend of mine mused, "There's not much left now that's exclusively male except serial killing and pro football." I see much of the current cultural definition of masculinity as following this idea. "This is all we've got left," masculinity has announced to men, "so we're going to RUN with it."

And behold: NASCAR, created as a guard at the gender borders. (It's now become popular with both men and women drivers and viewers but I maintain that whistling past the graveyard of masculinity was its original purpose and that Hemingway thus bears a significant part of the blame for it.)

And so we come to today: Western culture now proudly presents men as little better in terms of humanity than well trained water buffalo--brawny, ill-washed animals whose only thoughts are of conquest, whether financial, logistical, fantastical, mechanical, physical, or sexual. Impulses to care, to self-sacrifice and form intimate attachments, to work hard or play or cry or worry or create art or care about beauty, are viewed as rare and fleeting in the human male and cause for panic if they should persist (for surely they must be indicative of either faggery or being dominated by one's female counterpart).

And all THIS stems, in turn, from the idea that masculinity is an additive, not an inherent, attribute of maleness. Since it is impossible to prove oneself male by doing things or having interests that women do or have, the interests and behaviors that men, as a population, exhibit slightly more often than do women, as a population, have been tweaked, bloated, caricatured, and summarily imposed on everyone born in a male-looking body.

And since the purpose of this is gender boundary maintenance, which is best reinforced by extreme contrast, it is bad to be a woman wheresoever it is good to be a man. Thus even heterosexual impulses--those things that make men like women no matter how very hard they try not to do--must be safely contained in a context of conquest or, worse, contempt, as though the conquest is assumed to have already occurred. Because, shit, if you identify with women, you must be some kind of pussy or something. And that's bad.

Masculine and male are concepts that have been horribly conflated. The saddest thing about Tiger Woods' text messages to Joslyn James is that Woods may well have felt as he wrote that he was expressing affection, or at least attraction, and paying James a compliment--that he was, in short, behaving properly, the way a good man should. Certainly I, personally, know many men who have felt so [when saying or doing things equally appalling].

In light of all this nonsense, I think that we must discuss gender and how it simultaneously fits into and shapes our lives and our selves before we can discuss inter-gender relationships and marriage and how they do the same. We need to go further back and talk about what, exactly, is expected of person as a gendered individual, what those expectations cost that person, and what they will cost [the other people with whom he or she forms relationships]. [. . .]

NOTE TO SELF: BLOG MARKUP

2010-06-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

All right, just so I have the bloody thing lying about in a definite and convenient location whenever I need to refer to it (which is with every single post), here is, as a note to myself, the html markup for the

standard post font:
[ span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:Corbel;font-size:13pt;" ]
plus two hard returns before the [ /span ] at the post's end.

And previously written (i.e., by me) text that I am republishing:
[ span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" ]

And quotes, epigrams, and block quotes:
[ span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);font-family:Corbel;font-size:13pt;" ]
and a hard return before starting the text

And quote citations:
[ span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:Corbel;font-size:13pt;" ] then [ div style="text-align: right;"]
and
[ /div style="text-align: right;" ] at the end of the citation; you must also close the span for the color/font markup

THE FUGITIVE

2010-06-13T23:38:00.000-07:00

"I can't believe it's June already," says everyone at work.

I say it, too. I was prepared for it to be 2010, but only because I had never quite gotten over the shock of 2008 turning to 2009.

And today more than half of this year is gone, and I am not quite sure where it went, or when. Time does not fly; it sneaks out the back door or the window like a teenager when you its mistress have fallen asleep at the TV.

But it also seems as though full moon will never get here. I celebrated the new moon with an esbat on 12 June, and every evening I look at the moon to see that the perfect silver light has progressed a little farther across its face, but even so the full moon is not until the 26th, and that is yet ages away.

Witchcraft is the practice of magic (or magick, if you prefer to distinguish what's done under the auspices of religion from all other kinds of doing the impossible), and although I did so unintentionally, I have learned a spell to slow down time a little: remember with happiness the last time you were able to revel in something you love, and know when the next opportunity for celebration will occur.

Perhaps if I am careful enough about it I can stretch out this lifetime so that it is long enough after all.

2010-06-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

So! I've become a witch.

And oh my God, I am freaking out. The worst part is that I feel so terribly alonealone to face my fears and my life, my life which is so wonderful and overwhelming and scary.

It's almost worse that it's wonderful than it is that it's scary. Now that I am finished with my bachelor's degree, I can do anything, anything in the world, and I actually have the time and leisure to ponder what it is, exactly, that I want to do.

And the answer is that I [might be as surprised by what I want to do--my inclination--as I am by my ability to do it.] [. . .]

I don't know how it is that I decided to become a witch. I just decided, one evening, to start practicing witchcraft, to try to find out how I'm connected to the earth and to heaven, to find and claim my place in it.

I celebrated an esbat--day marking a phase of the moon--yesterday evening. I cast the circle, called the quarters, acknowledged the Goddess and the God, and dedicated my instruments. (I need a better chalice, and I can tell that my wand is not going to last long.) I performed smudging to cleanse myself and the world of some things. I declared my intent to practice and to grow in power, and my desire for clarity and depth of perception, and bound feelings to stones. I thanked the four quarters and the Goddess and the God for the new moon and for life and my part in life. I acknowledged the Goddess and the God once again, dismissed the quarters, grounded my excess magic, and retrieved the circle.

I was so tired, at the time, that I didn't feel anything but sincerity, but tonight I am going to do it again--not the esbat ceremony, I mean, but more witchcraft.

Witchcraft. I'm a witch, and I practice witchcraft.

In my family, there is nothing worse. Seriously. Nothing. Nothing in my whole life has been spoken about in such dire tones as witchcraft and the beliefs associated with it. Not even homosexuality. It's like I'm going through a checklist of everything I can possibly do to piss God off (my perception of God is one of the things I bound to a stone--and then I put the stone in a box and locked the box), and I'm going down the list.

And now, a message from the little screaming man in my head:

Christianity is the right way, the only way, to God. God is happy with Christians and is not happy with anyone who is not Christian--variously He is angry with them or pitying toward them, depending on how familiar they are with Christianity and what they have decided to do with that information. Everything else is wrong. The physical world, the body, pleasure, food, your job, your thoughts, your imagination--none of this matters. You are pitiful and pathetic and stupid, and no matter how hard you try, how smart you are, that will never change. You are a horrible person who is capable of nothing but evil, and the only thing you should think about, EVER, is Christ, because Christ is all that matters. Christ forgives you and sacrifices himself for you so that, one day, the alienation you feel from everything and everyone around you can end.

And while you think about Christ, you must obey God's commandments. The only way to be holy, the only way to be right, right in the world and right with God, is to take on faith that everything He says, whether you understand it or not, is true. Everything else you do is either done in vain or outright WRONG, and when you do wrong, knowing that Christ is the only thing that is right, you do nothing but serve the demons who are secretly running the world, and you open yourself to demonic influence, if not outright demonic possession. God will not speak to you, and He will not protect you from anything or show you what you're supposed to be doing. You will wander, lost and miserable and tormented by demons, for the rest of your life.

If you want to do right, you must not practice witchcraft of any kind, or even participate in denominations of Christianity that have inherited any practices from paganism, including celebrating Easter, Christmas, or Valentine's Day, or praying to Mary or to the saints or making offerings of any kind. As far as morality is concerned, God is firm and clear on all subjects. If it is against your nature, then you must defy your nature. If it is against what you think is right, then you must turn away from what you think is right. If it is miserable, then you must be miserable. You have no place, no standing, anywhere at all, and only God, through Christ, is willing to take you in. Ultimately he will blast away all the parts of you that are not like Him, and what remains of you will be part of Him, part of the joy that you can only dimly, occasionally sense, as though from a distance, now.

AND THIS IS ALL RIGHT, THIS IS ALL TRUE, AND GOD WILL HATE ME AND I WILL BE ALONE AND EVIL MY WHOLE LIFE. I WILL HAVE NO WAY OF TELLING WHAT IS RIGHT AND WHAT IS EVIL, GOD WILL NOT PROTECT ME FROM ANYTHING, AND ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING IN THE WORLD MIGHT HAPPEN TO ME, I MIGHT THINK ANYTHING, AND I WILL POISON THE WORLD AND CAUSE NOTHING BUT MISERY AND LOSS AND SUFFERING TO OTHER PEOPLE, WHO MAY WELL GO TO HELL BECAUSE OF ME.

This concludes the message from the little screaming man in my head. This is everything my subconscious is screaming at me. All the time. And there is a reason I have repeated the word screaming three times in one paragraph now.

Now, reading through it all, it's . . . not so bad. It's not such a bad deal, I think, and I think I'd like to take it. The only thought in that that really bothers me, that really worries me, is the thought that I might hurt other people's spiritual development, that I might keep them from peace and of feeling that they are loved, that I might take away their opportunities for hope.

Well, and the fact that my parents [might well] curse me to my face when they find out. Literally.

But hey, that was already coming with my annoucement of [the fact that I'm gay], so--

2010-06-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

"Do you know who the most troubled person is, the most pitiful? The person who gives 99 per cent."

DELICIOUS

2010-01-16T02:51:00.001-08:00

I had forgotten until just now, when I discovered that the people for whom I am house-sitting have a box of them, how I adore golden raisins.

They are nothing like regular raisins. Regular raisins are repulsive, and I hate them. They disgust me so that when I learned, as a teenager, that the brand of iced oatmeal cookie I had loved all my life contains raisin paste, I stopped eating them. I haven't started back up again yet.

The problem with regular raisins is that they are, in texture, appearance, and—worse—the occasional crunch of a seed or stem, like eating a large, unattractive bug.

I refuse to believe that golden raisins come from the same fruit as do regular raisins, even the same general category. They are elegant, pretty, tiny fruits, and—in taste as just as much as in appearance, as their sweetness is reserved and strange—eating them is like eating citrines.

THE HOLY LAND

2010-01-06T06:08:00.001-08:00

Look, I know no one who reads blogs that aren't about food wants to read about food, but I have just had such a singular experience (food-related) that I'm a bit stunned. This could be life-changing.

Everyone . . . I have just eaten a delicious nutrition bar.

Actually delicious, I mean. Not just edible, or even palatable, but a thing that my tongue was willing to believe tasted like actual food.

My father owned a bicycle shop throughout much of my childhood, and I have thus been eating "nutrition" bars since I was 10.

I remember when Clif bars came onto the market. I remember a time before Clif bars, when Power Bar was the only brand going, and when Power Bar came in two, maybe three flavors: I remember chocolate, and I remember the gross one in the gold and burgundy package.

The chocolate was gross, too, don't get me wrong. It was the texture and consistency of Play-Doh rolled in psyllium-husk fiber. Oh, it was chocolate, or at least flavored so as to possess a taste vaguely, distantly similar to the chemical composition of the taste of chocolate.

It was all right. Shrug. To a girl raised alternately on Taco Bell and homemade kelp soup, the original Power Bar was perfectly acceptable, or at least ignorable, which was the standard to which food must aspire in order for me to eat it.

My point is this: anyone who eats nutrition bars on even an occasional basis is an individual who has resigned herself so wholly to the idea that it is okay to eat things that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike food. These individuals have entered a sort of parallel reality, wherein eating things that are unlike food has come to seem so normal that they are not only unfamiliar with the idea of wanting food, of actually wanting to eat something, but are utterly taken aback when a taste like unto real food or actual deliciousness is presented to them.

You know those Girl Scouts chocolate-mint cookies? Thin Mints, I believe they are called? This nutrition bar I just ate tastes just like those, but with a layer of caramel inside.

It is a Clif Builder's Bar. The flavor is Chocolate Mint.

The world is hollow, and I have touched the sky.

MYTHOLOGY FOR ONE: AN ADAGE

2010-01-02T23:06:00.001-08:00

If justice is blindfolded, love should have its mouth stitched shut. It's only fair.

MYTHOLOGY FOR ONE: Adage

2009-12-25T02:09:00.001-08:00

Is one deer more beautiful than another? How can a blackbird tell?

(But there is one deer the blackbird loves.)

2009-12-22T06:40:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday Jen and I had lunch at a Thai cafe with Jen's sister and her sister's boyfriend.

The sister Knows about my status as Jen's girlfriend, but I wasn't sure about the boyfriend, so I asked.

"I'm not sure," said Jen. "I don't think so, as such."

This was vital information. If the boyfriend were to notice, or even suspect, that I was more intimate with Jen than a friend should be, and mention it in the presence of Jen's parents, Jen might lose everything: the love of her family, access to a car, her career prospects, her home.

So the sister and her boyfriend sat in the back seat of the car, poking at each other and holding hands, and, because the boyfriend didn't Know, this was something my sweetheart and I did not do that day.

We didn't give each other a hello kiss or a goodbye kiss or a hug that lingered any longer than the fatuous embraces of the type that girl-friends who are wont to perform air-kisses around each other give. I did not touch my girlfriend's hair or give her that stupid, besotted smile that people who adore each other are privileged to wear. I did not look at her too fondly or for too long.

Thai food is amazing, but the experience as a whole made me feel very sick.

[edited for style by the blogger 23 August 2010]

2009-12-13T09:20:00.001-08:00

I am seeing someone, and she is a woman.

She has a nickname for me, of which I am not fond, but I don't have one for her. The more I'm around her the more the idea of a nickname for her fades and the more I think of her by her name. I'll have to ask her if she is willing to let me use it here.

This is the first time I've ever dated another woman. I've kissed a few, and fooled around with one, and been friends with many, but, as far as actual relationship experience goes, I was until this functionally (though not theoretically) straight.

Dating a woman is a lot different than dating a man. I'm sure it's partly because she is a woman, not a man, but I think an even larger reason is that this relationship is new, and I am new, too, trying things I've never tried before and trying to be someone I've never tried to be before (viz., myself).

It is scary as hell. I'm finding that I have very little experience with being a healthy person, very little with being in a healthy relationship, and almost none with the way either of these things is supposed to feel. I'm used to feeling obsession and insecurity and desperation and escape; I'm not used to feeling peace and order and care and respect.

I'm finding that I'm much more shallow and a little more narrow-minded than I thought I was. But I'm also finding that I like to learn, and that I can get better.

Love is a lot quieter than I thought it was. Now I need to learn how to better be quiet, myself, so I can listen.

[edited by the blogger for style, grammar, and content 23 August 2010]

THE ROAD

2009-12-13T09:05:00.001-08:00

The road has a very particular symbolic meaning in American culture, and the term itself is often spoken in tones of reverent defiance. The drifter, the wanted man, the saddle tramp, the man hitchin' a ride, the wanderer, and the ramblin' man are all in love with the road in much the same way that the British are in love with the sea. It is safety from slavery, from consequences, and from commitment; that is to say, the road is, to Americans*, freedom and adventure.

Today I saw a squirrel that had been hit by a car lying dead on the road. Squirrels and other animals (of various sizes) cross roads in order to get to food or shelter or safety that is on the other side. In order to get to those things, though, they must spend a moment—no more than five seconds, but still a moment—utterly vulnerable to instantaneous death from any direction (including from above).

Even when humans do things in order to achieve results that are somewhat longer-term than the experience of doing the things themselves, they usually find the means rewarding as well as the ends. For example, people who go to gyms usually watch television or listen to music while they exercise. I go to college for a degree, but I've enjoyed many of the books I've read for my classes, and I've used college to make several valuable friends.

Crossing a road as a squirrel, though, is not, I imagine, an experience that is rewarding in and of itself. There is, I imagine, nothing at all pleasant about the action of the crossing itself.

Squirrels are intelligent animals, too, intelligent enough to know that the road is dangerous, that things that do not travel anywhere else travel on it, and that those things are too fast to avoid. To put a paw on the road, then, for a squirrel, is to step forward knowing that there is a significant chance that life will end, immediately, abruptly, and without time to organize one's affairs—see that the babies are fed and cared for, et cetera.

I wonder if squirrels think about the road as such, as a separate object or separate area from the rest of their landscapes. If they do, I wonder what the road has come to symbolize for them. I wonder how well we would deal if we had to play Russian roulette every day in order to (maybe, if we were lucky) keep living.

2009-12-08T19:30:00.001-08:00

You know what I miss? Chinese-takeout cartons with the little wire handles on them.

I still see the white cardboard cartons all the time, but I haven't seen any with the cunning little handles around in years, and I didn't even realize it until just now, reading a Questionable Content comic in which Angus, one of the main characters, eats from a carton with a handle on it.

The boxes themselves are pretty cute as it is, being containers made of pleasingly slick, white paper, (which substance my mind still refuses to accept as traditional container material despite the fact that the Japanese make houses out of the stuff) with tidy corners and intricate lids.

The handle adds exponentially to the box's appeal, though, and it's easy enough to understand why: it's a handle. You know, in case you need to take your Chinese food on a walk with you.

I'd like to be able to say that I was obsessed with them when I was a kid, but that's not entirely true: I was obsessed with them well into adulthood. I used one as a purse for a while.

Now I store my rings in little dishes on the top of my dresser, and I'm beginning to contemplate the idea that handled Chinese-takeout boxes might make good bracelet holders.

2009-12-06T23:20:00.001-08:00

Ooh, update, update! The dwarfs can't be eaten, but they can be disappeared like cookies.

And when they disappear they make this startled, dismayed little squeak, and IT IS GREAT.

2009-12-06T23:14:00.001-08:00

I am awed by the generosity and beauty of neutral, who makes what are easily the most elegant room-escape games in the world and then allows anyone in the world to play them for free.

I now find that her SakuSaku Sweets is just as simple and just as lovely and engrossing, and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a few minutes of prettiness and has no way of leaving her desk. (I am looking at you, dispirited cubicle dweller!)

For one thing, the game is scored with some of the saddest music I have ever heard.

For another, I never thought I could be this frustrated by my inability to eat dwarfs.

2009-12-06T22:50:00.001-08:00

For the most part, I don't like tomorrow. The small part of me that wants to die is responsible for this: tomorrow is another day full of suffering, and it will require energy that I don't have. But today I liked tomorrow quite a bit: tomorrow will not be today, and that's saying a LOT for it.