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	February 23rd, Two Thousand Five: I slept until 11 today, when I woke up, smelled someone else's scent in my hair and smiled. The scent was subtle, but evocative: it gossiped and whispered words of luxury, simplicity, substance, playfulness, warmth, generosity, kindness, comfort, friendship, passion. It sure makes getting work done and staying focused -- well, on what I should be focused on -- a bit of a challenge. And as I sit now, blissfully listening to Robyn Hitchcock's latest, one of my recent gifts from the object of my affliction last night, fingering the signature on it -- Robyn TOUCHED it, okay? -- it strikes me that I am a goofy grinning idiot. I slept until 11 today, when I woke up, smelled someone else's scent in my hair and smiled. That was not, at all, unpleasant.   February 21st, Two Thousand Five: Good times, bad times, you know I've had my share... So, Thursday night I went on a date after weeks of talking on the phone which started with 12 lovingly made CDs, original artwork scanned and intact, being placed in my hands. 12 CDs of my most favorite obscure band which no one else ever even knows, several which are not even HAVEABLE on CD, several of which are just not available, period. And over the next ten hours? It only got BETTER. It was a Good Date. The talking was great, the laughing was great, the mellow was great, the not-so-mellow... erm, yeah, the rest was great, too. Then everything went kablooie. In the midst of my afterglow Friday night, I had a small incident with a friend that was really distressing to me. This was lame foreplay for what went on with another longtime close friend, with aspects of my community Saturday night, whose highlight had me standing coatless in the snow, tears on my cheeks (which is the real stinger: I have huge problems crying in front of people, so when it happens, I feel insanely exposed and mortified, plus, I hate the sodding cold), in the middle of the night, after being told more than a little curtly that even after a couple years of closeness, I was thought to be utterly disposable, and that if I had a problem with maltreatment whenever she felt like maltreating me or anyone else, well then, too damn bad for me. What I really want to know is why it is exactly that --and I know I'm not the only one who can appreciate this, though appreciate certainly isn't the best word for it -- one has something really good happen, and all too often the universe feels it necessary to kill one's buzz as swiftly and harshly as humanly possible almost immediately afterwards. It's just not kind: I'd like to be able to enjoy a pure, good feeling for at least 24 hours before it gets crapped on. Doesn't seem like a whole lot to ask for. (As an aside, I would also like some explanation as to why the dynamics between myself and a few of the men who show up at the boxing studio have to be so damn weird. Typically, when men do come to train, I end up paired with them, merely because they're a better strength match for me than most of the women who train there. But I have noticed a disturbing trend when training with a couple of them which is that they both try to hit me harder than they do each other, and that despite this, there also tends to be some flirty touching around this, especially with two guys in particular of late. I keep having flashbacks to being ten again, it's that sort of pigtail-pulling dynamic, save that there are right hooks and roundhouse kicks involved. And I have a fucked-up back and a really gross knuckle scrape to show for it today.) It's looking like it's time for me to sever some ties. I am not good at this, and it makes me grossly unhappy and conflicted. Perhaps it's being a Year of the Dog person, perhaps it's how I grew up, perhaps it's just the seemingly random nature of personality, but as a rule, I'm exceptionally loyal and devoted, often to a fault. On the whole, I figure that when I take someone into my life or my heart, there will be a place for them always. I have exes, old friends who know full well they can always call me if the desire or need arises, even if years have lapsed since last we talked. I can count on one hand the people I have completely kicked out of my life, and let me tell you, those people had to REALLY fuck up, usually repeatedly, for that to happen. It breaks my heart to have to close and latch the door behind anyone, no matter the circumstances, even when I suspect or learn my loyalty has been misplaced. In this particular instance, I'm shoved into what appears to be a rather awful set of choices. As far as I can see from here, either I simply tolerate someone's awful and sometimes abusive behaviour, both towards me and others, in order to keep several of my close friends in my life, including one of my closest friends, or, in cutting them off, I likely isolate myself from a good half of my community, my family, from people I love intensely. All of what went down was just horrendous on several levels, not stuff I'm going to go into here, but I feel confident saying it was, in toto, one of the worst nights I've had in a very long time. By the time I got home, I couldn't even be angry anymore, I was just so emotionally shattered and absolutely devastated. Of course, I was a jumbled mess of sadness and anger on Sunday morning (even after shoveling huge piles of snow and hurling shovels-full of the stuff a bit aggressively: my sincerest apologies to tenants with ground level windows). So, in talking to the aforementioned date, I got to have that oh-so-lovely experience where you're just entering into something new with someone, before you even know what the thing is, where you leap from happyhappyjoyjoywowieyippeewhee! to...WHUMP! Welcome to my crap in your lap! (It was fine, really, especially since I wasn't the only one who got blindsided with badness over the weekend, but all the same, one tends to feel a little awkward sharing touchy stuff and weepy sniffles very early in the game.) I was, however, concerned that given Thursday, getting more work done on the me & you series was going to be something of a challenge, the bitter piss and vinegar I've been carrying round having gotten all sugared up and giddy. Post-weekend, having finished another piece last night and ready to work on more today, I'm not so concerned about that anymore. Merde. So, today is a studio day. Last night I was profoundly appreciative of this aspect of my life I've created for myself, my solitary creative space. There's just something incredibly special (and extra thanks to Becca for the new table hand-me-down) about working at night with your hands -- papers, exacto blade, rotary cutter -- my hair in messy braids, my jeans old and velvety, barefoot, singing out loud as I assemble, all process and little product, my dog at my feet, the radiator steaming up the windows, glass of red wine in hand. While in some ways that sort of space, and wanting it so often, may well contribute to some feelings of isolation on my part -- which isn't so nice when I'm feeling like I was yesterday -- in so many other regards, it's simply such a good house for my spirit that I can't imagine not having those times. So, more artwork today. Tonight we're doing another naked lady party at my place, so I get to be surrounded by some friends with whom there is zero strife and hurt. Must make piles of stuff for the wimminfolk and grab some munchies. Tomorrow, I should be seeing a potential intern for Scarleteen, and in the evening there's a second date in the works (which may simply involve collective sniffling and snuggling, but that's not exactly a bad forecast). Thursday, I need to show up for a new class the studio head is starting (a combo of boxing, self-defense and yoga) that he wants me to observe in case they need a sub sometimes. The rest of the week is going to be an avalanche of work, well through the weekend, as I also have portrait client bookings. Another little boon is wedged in there, as The Girl rang yesterday to tell me that a truly ridiculous hot pink child's armoire I've had my eye on as a sex toy cabinet for months on end landed in the as-is section at Ikea, as will be mine for absolute peanuts mid-week. Too, I also now get to listen to tunes I haven't heard in a good decade or more, tunes from one of my favorite periods of my life, as much as I want, some with nicely loose remembrances of hearing someone else quite lovely singing along to them -- knowing the words! -- beside me. And there's just no bad there.   February 14-15th, Two Thousand Five: There's just nothing like waking up, still in recovery from Influenza Type Evil, having to go shovel piles of heavy slush as it is, but getting the extra bonus of the roof of your building tossing down a ginormous pile of the stuff right unto your head. Good morning to me! Hello, my name is Heather Corinna, and I've been a terribly wayward journaler. (Of course, for girls like me, it is always nice to discover that you do have arenas left to go astray in: it's so easy to feel one has already used them all up.) It struck me that next month, I'll have been keeping this public journal for six years. Keeping it isn't so unusual: I've been keeping journals since I was wee. Having it be public is more unusual, though I'm not sure how much more. I do have some of my journals from other times in my life, and interestingly enough, though most of my life, in hindsight, it's pretty clear the Big Truths to be found are in my poetry, my art, and less so my journals. Perhaps that's because I always knew the liklihood of discovery, perhaps it's simply because I express myself better in less verbose media. That isn't to render any of my journals worthless, not at all, nor to say that I don't speak at length (and in my case, that's an understatement) about things truthfully and earnestly. But I do think there are times, like the last few months, when I'm benefitted by doing it a little less; when I'm processing tricky stuff myself and it simply feels better to do much of that processing privately, and share it after the fact (or not), rather than during the process. Keeping this journal, having a large, longtime readership of the journal does add an extra measure of vulnerability to my life. When I'm putting it all out there, even a lot of it (if not all), I feel, in every aspect of my life, more exposed and vulnerable than I already do. That's saying something, since even with my various types of protective interpersonal armor, I'm someone who has always felt particularly vulnerable with other people. Part of that is that I don't have a good poker face, and I'm not good at hiding things. When something crappy happens to me, my usual inclination is to stay inside and be alone, because I often find that even strangers on the street, in line at the market, what have you, will just look at me and ask what's wrong, or if I'm okay. "Are you okay?" are, of course, three of the worst words when someone is upset or struggling: I often find that even that small sympathy is a bit much for me when I'm not in a good space. Sometimes, having a public journal is like that: like a million silent "Are you okays?" floating in the aether. Sometimes it's a big cheering section, a hallelujah chorus, thousands of people saying "Amen, sister!" Sometimes, you can feel the quiet when you've spoken of something difficult, or even said something where very few people have any resonance or shared experience. Sometimes, you can feel everyone's hope for you when something good might be coming down the pipeline, or everyone has experienced your own lack thereof enough that everyone's WANT of something good for you is palpable. Sometimes, most of those things feels good: other times, not so much. Now and then, it's downright overwhelming, especially when things aren't going all that well, and when you know you are deserving of the good stuff and just want to shout "I KNOW!" to those silent and not-so-silent hopes and wishes for you. For me, this space is a lot of different things. It's letters to friends and family, to keep everyone abreast of what's going on with me. It's catharsis. It's political propaganda, calls to action, it's consciousness raising. It's a Sunday afternoon phone conversation with an old friend. It's community. It's a notebook, a workshop, a sketchbook, a rough draft. It's a long hot bath when my muscles are sore and aching, a cold shower when I need waking up. It's an early morning cup of coffee sometimes, a late-night cocktail at others. It's a treasure map or a scavenger hunt; it's a minefield. It's bearing witness. It is a looking glass and a window. Sometimes it's removing my clothing, other times it' insulating myself with a warm, thick coat. It's meditation on some days, while on others it is avoidance of same. It is not, ever, the keeper of my secrets: quite the opposite. That's really the difference between a private journal and a public one, though for me, it's not a difference I experience too profoundly because growing up, I always knew that it was a pretty slim possibility that my journal would be kept private and unread. Maybe that's why this has never seemed all that different to me, save the difference between knowing it will be read and suspecting it might be, and it being read not by one or two people, but by thousands. Yet, it still often feels like a place to put the things I might otherwise avoid or keep from looking at too closely. In any event, over the years, I've had various tactics for dealing with it during times when I feel overexposed: I've switched to doing a photolog for a week or a month, I've taken breaks for a few weeks, once even for six months. I've simply left out things which I want to keep private, spoken in tongues or in code, made entries private. But it's getting to a point where I need to find some middle ground, in a permanent way. In part, that's because I'm tired of feeling overexposed and vulnerable all of the time, like no matter how tightly I draw my shades and shutters, someone is always trying to peek in. But mostly, it's instead because....well, it's a little like monogamy. Except that we're talking about all the people in my life and all of my readers. (I got whacked on the head today during a snowball fight with Mother Nature, remember? I'm allowed less-than-perfect analogies.) In other words, as I brought up a bit last week, it is very much feeling to me like some aspects of keeping this journal limit or sap the intimacy from my in-person relationships: my friendships, my dates, my family, and all those relationships in between without easy names, which are most of the relationships I have. While I wouldn't call the journal my art -- it's more a notebook and sketchbook, a springboard, for what I create much of the time -- obviously, any artist, especially one whose art is very personal, is going to have some of that going on. Artists share things with the world most folks only share with others close to them: if we're doing what we're supposed to, we are laying ourselves bare to whoever views or reads our work in an intimate way. To some degree, we belong to the world in such a way that I think it's impossible for us to "belong to" other people the way non-artists can. We have incredibly intimate relationships with so many people, they just happen to be fairly one-sided, and because their relationship is really with our work, not ourselves, the intimacy we share is with that work, though in very different ways. This train of thought is a bit half-formed at this point, so forgive me for dangling you a bit intellectually. Another realization I've recently had which took me by surprise was the notion that it's entirely possible that in some ways, this journal actually insulates me FROM being more vulnerable, more intimate with people in my actual life. In other words, by virtue of feeling so exposed to any passerby, I might in some ways be anesthatizing myself from the intensity of those feelings in closer promximity. If this sounds in any way improbable, you likely don't know me very well: if I suggested this to close friends of mine, I'd expect some long, slow silent nodding. (Okay, so a couple of them probably would louse up the silent part.) I've been reminded over the last couple of weeks that there are things I'd really like to feel again which I've often managed to convince myself I just don't want, both because I'm nothing close to convinced I can have them, because I don't have them, and because I don't want some of the stuff typically assumed to come in tandem with them. I convince myself I don't want them because I've had so many experiences where the absolute worst thing happened, now and then worse than anyone could have imagined. I convince myself I don't want them because I'm scared of being too open, too vulnerable, too able to be hurt or disappointed. And honey, that's just no way to live. I read poetry of mine from certain relationships back in the mid and late nineties, and I can't help but wonder how it was then I clearly suspended the fear and the weariness I know I felt then as well, and obviously just really let myself take it all in, feel all of it, embrace it, even embracing my discomfort. A few months back, someone told me they couldn't imagine I was ever much of a romantic, and it was one of the strangest things I think I've ever had said to me, both because it was so untrue and because it was so easy to see how one might get that impression. In any event: I need to find a middle ground. I want to be able, no matter the relationship, to share things with people in my life I really don't share with anyone else, and I want a bigger basket of those to pull from. I want the people in my life -- friends, lovers, family -- to be able to have a much closer relationship with me than the rest of the world does. Over the last few months, that's been the case, and it's been very, very nice. It's also been nice over the last few months for people I don't know to really have little to no information about my intimate relationships: getting a break from having people think they know what's up, or making assumptions based on what I put here -- which is always partial, at best -- is a good thing. I remember years back when my marriage busted up, I had a really hard time because not having detailed the long and slow decline of the thing, I got so many people telling me how to fix it, or being shocked at what seemed like a fast end to them, when in reality, it was anything but. I found myself feeling a little like an immigrant in my own country. (An interesting metaphor that, really, it's a lot of how I've felt living with my own heart the last few years.) Eh, I'll figure it out. I am nothing if not resourceful. But not today. My next few weeks are insanely busy: I have piles of artwork to work on, Scarleteen stuff to do, a handful of portrait bookings, and in two weeks, I'll have my manuscript back to then revise fairly massively over a couple months. I have two proposals for new books I want to do to work up (one very very silly, one more serious), and I need to talk to my agent. I'll be out of town at least twice between now and May. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow, and to see Sy. I have a date Thursday night I've really been looking forward to. There's an awful lot of dishes piled up, and don't even get me started about rubbish that needs hauling out and laundry that needs doing. I got a bit gypped last summer in terms of really enjoying it because I was burning the midnight oil on the book through August, and I am bound and determined to put as much work in as is humanly possible between now and June so that this year, I can essentially be working part-time all summer and be able to really take advantage of my favorite time of year. I need to find some time to plan the community garden on the side plot of the building this year, because it never jelled last year, and though I suspect I'll do landscaping work with Brandon again this year, I still want my own dirtpile to play with. Plus, I need to get over this damnable virus, like, yesterday. A slightly off-topic swerve: can you imagine if it turned out that the HIV virus was a viable treatment for cancer? Let's just sit and think symbolically for a little bit on that one. Should it turn out to be effective treatment, let's visualize a scenario where say, an evangelist gets prostate cancer and is made better by the "gay plague." Very, very interesting stuff. One more topic veer: today is also the seventh anniversary of Scarlet Letters, which hasn't been updated in an AGE. Why? Because, flatly, our submissions have just really sucked, for the most part. It's a weird thing: the web is the one place where heritage really doesn't help a business. The web, in many ways, is all about the next shiny, new thing. Regardless, we really, really want to keep Scarlet going: that we haven't had enough good material to update even monthly is just pathetic (and we've always made it a policy to go without updating rather than simply posting crap so we could keep updates coming). So, check out the submissions guidelines if you're a writer or an artist. One of the great things about SL is that it's always been a good shopping place for publishers of anthologies, other magazines: it has provided a lot of folks really good opportunities over the years. And if you have other artisis and writers you love, love love in dire need of discovery, email myself or Roxane some links, eh? Bless! So, I lied about the veers. This week I just cannot stop playing Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue, Volumes One and Two. Part of it is the folkie in me, still ever chuffed to hear so much Guthrie reworked so brilliantly, but there must be something else going on for me to be so tight with it out of nowhere. California Stars comes on, and I get dizzy. Air kisses to the whole lot of them. Might be because I don't think a night has passed in the past month or two where I haven't spent at least an hour doing improvisation on the piano, covering everything from Cohen to Roxy Music to standards to what have you. I'm not sure I could ever leap full-time back into music, but now and then I do miss my troubadour days. Back in college, my improv skills with my voice and the dulcimer were keen enough that the big game we'd always play at little gigs of mine was for anyone to just call out a song, trying to think of the strangest song to convert to folk possible, and I'd very, very rarely get stumped. Every rare now and then I cross paths with someone from college, and more than once it's been mentioned that no one would have ever thought you could folk-ify Prince's "When You Were Mine," and yet. I'm not a fan of winter: it's my least favorite season. However, I do find there is no other time of year where I am able to be reminded both of the simple things in my life, my easy comforts, the little places I house my heart and my spirit, as well as the difficult things I grapple with over the years, and how much I still need to work on them, how vitally important it is to remain ever-mindful of every aspect of my life, even when it seems easier not to be. I could live without the avalanches on my head, though. In more ways than the one.   February 5th, Two Thousand Five: One thousand words of what I've been up to. Work. Back into the Scarleteen work groove. The last week or so, I’ve been writing new articles, cleaning up pages, trying to figure out how exactly I can present the idea that heterosexual intercourse shouldn’t be a default or rushed into, for no other reason than pleasure, without inciting a very quick knee-jerk defensive response. Not so easy. I continue to fight the good fight. The photo work continues to go very well, both with my art and with paying gigs. I do, however, need to improve at explaining more efficiently that while yes, it is a privilege of sorts to be allowed to take someone's photograph, when they want this done for a specific purpose, within a specific timeframe, with specific results in mind, the privilege really becomes theirs, and working at half my rates and rush times to do such is really not a good deal for me, and no, really wanting ME to be the photographer rushing and working for peanuts is not an honor. Conflicts. Some inexplicable struggles with a friend, within a fairly complex relationship triad I’ve had for some time now. These were a big part of the terrible, awful, very bad day on the 27th, a day where I stopped saying “This can't get any worse,” when a woman walked past Sofia and I, nodded and smiled, and then, when Sofi sniffed her leg, tried to KICK MY LITTLE DOG. Reports of a short woman in Uptown, clutching a pug and sniffling with her ass in a snowbank that day are to be believed. Remember children: the crazy ladies we see out and about once were not crazy ladies. Plenty of us are destined to become them at one time or another. Some other struggles with another relationship, which have since been somewhat resolved, but where time is still required to sort out the pieces of the puzzle. The sumup on that is that we have a long history of great literature and art which has attempted to make flaming-comet relationships eternal: that the art has accomplished this does not mean this can be, or even should be, accomplished in reality. Dating. There's been a decent deal of that over the past few weeks. I took a lover for a spell, that was fun, unsure at this point if it's still ongoing or not, also unsure if I am merely someone's inexpensive response to a mid-life crisis (I could perhaps make a vocation of this: “Too cheap to buy a flashy red sportscar? Skydiving not for you? For the low, low price of dinner, tequila and safer sex supplies, you can rent this flashy girl instead.”). I must, however, confess that the sex is/was smoking enough that I’m inclined not to care overmuch at this stage of the game. I’ve even spent some time writing trying to define what I mean when I say I want a lover, both for my own brain, for commiseration, and perhaps to be ale to produce a small laminated card with said definition for the sake of efficiency. I have had good Internet and phone woo of late: that’s been really quite nice. I have also been wishing of late that I was born at a different time, in an entirely different class, so that I could simply be presented with a queue of the interested while I sat in a cushy throne, little dog on my lap, and could simply look up from my book now and then to consider my prospects blithely. Am currently trying to devise the most delicate way to explain that if I do feel chemistry, no one will ever need to guess, because I will be in their lap, posthaste, upon experiencing this. If I am not, in fact, in said lap or attempting to cover the face in question with kisses? I’m not feeling it. Yes, I have considered the fact that it's possible that not everyone -- even those who do, also, feel sparks -- will WANT me in their lap by the end of a date, but I have come to the conclusion that I have no interest in dating those people. Three-date rules remain, as they always have been, an utter waste of my time. Friends. Lots of time with friends. Elise stopped by fortuitously on Monday afternoon, which is always, always a pleasure. Hooked up with Lise after not seeing her for over a year, spent my usual amount of time with Becca, without whom I earnestly cannot imagine my life at this point. My downstairs neighbor has practically moved in. Jhames and I have been chatting more again, which should scare everyone. Caught up with Hanne of late and some other folks I’ve meant to catch up with. I have fallen into the habit of using the local Italian restaurant as my salon: announcing I’ll be there for the evening and whomever wants to see me should come by. I’m considering instead, much in the way that now have one full studio day a week, having one such salon day at my apartment, especially since a lot of Americans tend not to just drop by, or feel funny about it. Too, come the middle of March, a public smoking ban is going into place in Minneapolis. It's cold in Minneapolis well through April, and I prefer sitting while I smoke, thanks. Plus, the tab is bound to be cheaper here, and I can always use more excuses to clean my house. Confusing stuff. Still a lot of it, still confusing, still feeling it's pretty much my own business, and still digging keeping it that way. Training. That’s where I’m off to now. Million Dollar Baby had Lucia Rijker in it (who, to my knowledge, is STILL undefeated, after years and years of boxing, and who also is really, really yummy). Just looking at her -- standing in place -- made me feel like a slacker. New work. On the right. More news at nine.   Photography: 02.04 members • sign up January 31st, Two Thousand Five: ... and the angry letters and memos just keep on a'comin. This time, it's back to the tenants, per usual. AW, SHIT. (a crappy quiz) My dog’s droppings are: a) my responsibility. b) my mommy’s...erm, caretaker’s responsibility. I know for a fact she likes taking care of other people’s shit, her ex-girlfriend told me so. c) my dog’s responsibility. After all, if Fido can fetch my slippers, surely he can pick up his own poop. Don’t look at me: talk to the paw, Miz Thang. Dog poop belongs: a) inside my dog’s colon or a trash receptacle. b) on the lawn, the ice, the walk, wherever! Dog poop is just the thing for every locale and occasion! It’s so pretty! c) In a prized exhibit at the Walker. This puritanical aversion we have to feces is inane. Chapter 64.50 is: a) the city ordinance which requires I pick up my dog’s waste, the dismissal of which not only can result in my landlord being fined, but in myself being fined by animal control when my very cranky Italian caretaker calls them on me. b) Bullshit. (Not dog shit.) I take a dump in the general direction of your city ordinances. Pfft. c) Who the heck cares? This is the frickin’ US of A, lady! Steaming turds all over communal living space are my Constitutional right! Get your laws off MY potty! Other tenants in the building are entitled to: a) a lack of concern about: fecal coliform bacteria, including E-coli, ground water contamination, shit in their shoes, the smell of steaming dog waste outside their windows, clean grounds, pissy memos from their caretaker about dog poop, and averting their eyes from the side walk to keep from losing their lunches. b) do whatever the hell they want with their dog’s poop, just like I’m entitled to leave mine wherever I bloody well feel like it. c) the beauty and glory that shit truly is. Seriously, Karen Finley got an NEA grant for hers, after all, and more than half the country (of those whose votes were counted, anyway) elected a little shit to RUN this country. TWICE. If your responses were a’s: while those in the other two categories will have only cold showers and find dog poop under their pillows in their next lifetimes, all your showers will be hot and you will never have to pick up poop again. I also will not be tempted to leave your dog’s feces in bags on your doorstep. If your responses were b’s: you need to stop being such a wanker and pick up your dog’s crap. If your responses were c’s: you not only need to stop being such a wanker, you also need serious professional help. For the daft, here’s the deal. The dog poop situation at this building is completely outer limits, and I know a good deal of it is from select tenants in this building. When tenants don’t pick up their own dog’s crap, *I* have to pick it up, and for nickels, quite literally. I should not have to pick up your dog’s waste, EVER, nor should you feel entitled to have me do so. I am bitter and righteously brassed off that, for instance, I will get to spend at least an hour of my day shoveling shit tomorrow. AGAIN. Being the technophile that I am, I am this close to installing a cam outside so that I can slap every tenant with the $25 buck fine EVERY time this happens, as well as creating mug shots of your face to plaster all over the building with the headline “Caca Criminal.” Pun and games aside, don’t be a jerk. Pick up your pup’s poop, or give your sodding dog to someone who can care for it properly. Man, I'm sick of this shit.   January 29th, Two Thousand Five: To: Brian Alexander, c/o Sexploration, MSNBC CC: Dean Wright, Lead Editor, MSNBC Dear Mr. Alexander, I was recently pointed to your article, "Sex Ed on the Web" at MSNBC. I'd like to first familiarize you with our history. The first version of Scarleteen was housed outside Scarlet Letters, and went live at the end of 1998, before any of the other sites you listed were around, and nearly all other young adult sex ed sites existed. I didn't buy a domain for Scarleteen immediately, because I had no idea that it would end up as huge as it turned out to be and turn out to be where most of my working hours were spent (working hours which during most of the last six years, often were completely unpaid, mind you). In other words, we had no precedent for Scarleteen. Rather, I simply saw a need because via my adult site, I was getting questions in email from young adults. I both wanted to provide them their own needed space so that they would not need to seek out adult sites, and answer those questions for them. The tone and approach of Scarleteen is as it is because it was built primarily in response to both what was being asked by the young adults -- who generally range in age from 14 - 24 -- and with what tone I found they responded best to, and were able to process the information best through, per those email exchanges. It's obvious that you have concerns about my character and perhaps don't think me the most appropriate person to do what I do. But I've discovered over the years that even when I have doubts about that myself -- heck, I didn't sign up to be anyone's role model, and it's tricky stuff to navigate sometimes -- that my character and approach, and the approach I ask my volunteers and contributors to take as well, is clearly a big part of why Scarleteen remains the most trafficked site of its kind by the population it seeks to serve, despite having no major organization to publicize, advertise or fund it. Scarleteen has the presence it does because, more than anything else, of word of mouth from the users themselves. Since our primary interest is in serving them as best we can, in whatever way they can best digest the information and feel most comfortable accessing it, we pay attention to these things, especially when it's clear some other related sites probably SHOULD be more used by the teens given their PR and far fatter resources. "While most of the information is accurate, and while Corinna does a good job of debunking sex myths and discussing sexual responsibility, the site is written according to her point of view, which may not be the point of view parents wish to give their teenagers. Scarleteen reads like it is really meant for those grown-ups who wish we had savvy back when we were geeky. " We also have always made a point at Scarleteen, with both parents and our young adult userbase, of encouraging both parties to both seek out and provide as diverse a range of perspectives when it comes to sexual politics, ethics, values and choices as possible. I say very clearly in our section at the site for parents that I think it expressly NOT ideal for Scarleteen to be the only source of sexuality information for teen and young adults. I do, however, think that our perspective IS valuable. I received a letter from a parent once I will never forget: he explained to me that he was a born-again Christian raising a teenage daughter, and that he sent her to Scarleteen. He saw absolutely no inconsistency in this because, as he put it quite jovially, "Between her square, suburban Jesus-freak father and this eccentric, Buddhist, queer hip lady online and her colleagues, " and every perspective in between, his daughter should feel very able to see a wide range of viewpoints and approaches and thus, best be able to suss out her own without feeling pressured to pick a "side." I'm in absolute agreement with him, and I sincerely hope that the vast majority of our users experience that much diversity in their sexual education and upbringing. Direct experiences aside, the studies and polls that have been done on young adults acquisition of sexuality information (SIECUS and the Alan Guttmacher Institute house a couple, should you be interested) show pretty clearly that most teens are NOT comfortable talking to a parent OR a doctor or clinician about sexuality. They're most comfortable talking to peers, but as we both know, that's generally a horrible source for accurate information. They will, however, often strike a compromise by talking to an adult who is more of a mentor, who doesn't talk down to them or use overly clinical language, who feels more like a big sister or a big brother than an authority figure. I've been a teacher in a classroom before: I know how to be an authority figure when that is called for, and sometimes at Scarleteen, it is. But more often than not, that just isn't effective in my experience, so the way I talk to them, and how I approach these issues with them, is neither accidental nor haphazard. It's quite deliberate. Should I ever discover something else works better, you can bet I'll change my approach. Moreover, while to plenty of adults, the teens and twenties may be remembered as a time of being "geeky," rather than cool or savvy, you might observe (or remember yourself) that many teens, while perhaps geeky indeed, think themselves quite savvy, especially when it comes to sex. So, approaching them as if they had no savvy or cool whatsoever usually tends to backfire when it comes to sex education, or any education for that matter. Again, this is something well-learned in doing what we do at Scarleteen for going on seven solid years of daily interaction, including the one-on-one conversations that I alone have personally had at the message boards with over 15,000 young adults, their mentors and parents. "The site was created by Heather Corinna, a sex blogger, and while the information is mostly accurate, the site is decidedly “sex-positive.” Twice in a few paragraphs, you mention that the site is "mostly accurate." Might you point me to areas in which it is NOT accurate? I ask this both out of curiousity and because, believe it or not, we are pretty heavily invested in all of the site being as accurate as possible, so should any reader find inaccuracies, I'd always very much like to know what they are so that we can double-check the content and make corrections or updates if need be. That said, I find it interesting that both so much of your talk about Scarleteen seems to be about me, personally. Like Teenwire, our site is maintained with a handful of different writers, contributors and volunteers, not merely myself (and a huge aspect of our draw is the moderated, interactive area of the site with over 20,000 registered participants), yet I don't see you talking about Gloria Feldt per Teenwire. CoolNurse.com has all of two other contributors listed: their programmer, and the site's "teen fashion reporter." I also find it interesting that what seems to be being implied in the discussion of myself and Scarleteen is that being "sex-positive" (or an adult who clearly enjoys sex and is sexually active?) must necessarily present a greater likelihood of bias than being of the opinion that sexuality is not something healthy, normative, and in plenty of circumstances, very enjoyable. Certainly, it is impossible for an educator of any type to present anything without some form of bias, but I am uncertain as to why you feel my personal biases -- being queer, feminist, progressive politically, and indeed, thinking human sexuality healthy, normal and rather pleasant -- incline me more greatly than someone with different biases to inaccuracy in this arena. I am also perplexed as to how you think these biases come into play in much of the site where the information given is incredibly straightforward and objective -- such as explanations of sexual response and reproduction, sexual anatomy, birth control, safer sex practices, and clinical STI information -- and not anything where my own personal opinions or values, or that of the other writers, comes into play. I am a fairly well-published writer (with a YA sex education book due for publication later this year) and artist in print and online, a longtime activist, as well as having been an active educator in various venues and populations since 1988. I'm not going to split hairs with you about the "sex blogger" tag, but I have to say that it does carry a flavor of being intentionally diminutive, or used for the intent of making myself and/or all my work sound more salacious for effect, and it strikes me as a bit strange since I was publishing online long before blogs existed. The only blog I have participated in, in fact, is the current events and activism blog we run at Scarleteen. Information regarding my background and the site itself, including a list of some contributors and mention of our 20 or so volunteers has always been present at our about page, which is easily found right on our front page and linked to on every single page of the site. "Scarleteen won't send any kids rushing to high-school swingers parties, but may seem just a bit too celebratory. The Scarleteen shop markets Astroglide lube and the site contains links to, for example, Toys in Babeland, which I’ve written about before as being fine and even healthy for grown-ups but might understandably concern parents. " The "high-school swingers party" quip is hyperbole, possibly intended to up the "Heather is a Bad Girl" motif, and is nearly as transparent as the fundamentalist approaches you talk about in the latter half of your article. I'm also not sure how suggesting lubricant, which is incredibly important in the efficiency of condoms AND makes a huge difference per women's pleasure and comfort during vaginal penetration is "celebratory." Certainly, a broken condom and vaginal microabrasions are NOT what I'd call cause for celebration, but trying to prevent those things is hardly blithe or superficial. Per the above comments and the mention that "sponsored links hawk products," I feel obliged to mention that save a single paid advertisement for Lunapads, a merchant of menstrual product alternatives, our site contains exactly NO links to products outside the small "shop" area, an area which exists not to fill our pockets (would that it did!) but to make things available to the teens they may need, like books about sexuality and sexual health, condoms, (celebratory) lubricant, latex gloves, pregnancy tests and menstrual products. Many young adults -- and plenty of grown adults -- are reluctant to purchase safer sex or sexual health products in person. As we very rarely see ANY return or commission on products, I assure you that my intent in putting them out there where they can purchase them online when possible is not about "hawking." It is, rather, about doing my level best to help them get their hands on the things they need to practice sex safely if they are sexually active. I don't very well see how not doing so is helpful, or how doing so in any way compromises the integrity of the site. A few links to Toys in Babeland are provided on a merchant thank you page and on a shop page, as they have both done a good deal to help us at Scarleteen and as a good chunk of our userbase IS over 18. As well, they carry dental dams, which most people of any age cannot purchase in their local pharmacies. Since TIB clearly has an age warning on their page, is not sexual entertainment, and the link, again, is only within the shop area, I do not feel this is problematic. Moreover, if it were up to me? I'd fully endorse 16-year-old girls being able to freely purchase vibrators. I'm all too aware, and reminded daily, of how incredibly often they seek out sexual partnership when what they really want, and are ready for, is masturbation (and their partners do same), something often far safer and sounder for them on all levels. The only reason they cannot make such purchases is not about safety, but about Puritanism and sexism. Obviously, this may be yet another example of my "raciness," but I remain unconvinced that it is more titillating, ethically questionable or impractical to give young people means to masturbate and learn about their own sexual response first than it is to either simply tell them "NO!" about sexual partnership or, intentionally or not, endorse the idea, especially to young women, that their sexuality or sexual pleasure is something only a male partner can give them. While I'm hardly elated about your approach to Scarleteen and some of the misrepresentations and hyperbole, I found myself most disappointed by the "clueless kids" section of your article. Before and throughout Scarleteen's tenure, I have also fielded advice queries for several other adult sexuality sites, and I've seen many a message board or group discussion from average adults about sexuality. Hard as it may be to imagine, with the advice letters, much of the time, if I was not told an age or given a clearly adult relationship scenario, I really would not know the difference between a young adult question and that of someone ten to twenty years their elder. Of course, that shouldn't be surprising: for all too many people, whatever information they manage to glean about sexuality in their developmental years, combined with what they pick up from partners and popular media, is the same information they keep with them into adulthood. The point is, calling young adults clueless is incredibly insulting to them, especially when for many of them, when they ARE actually given the information in a way that suits them, they DO digest it. If they're "clueless," the fault for that largely lies with us as their parents, teachers and mentors. Labeling them clueless or stupid is both disrespectful and noncompassionate, and truly unlikely to help them in any way at all. Moreover, it hardy helps adults garner more respect for them so that they might perhaps be more inclined to educate them more responsibly. Of course, to do that, far more adults would have to know more than the young adults do, which is all too often not the case. Speaking of accurate sex information online and cluelessness? "One girl on such a site wanted to know how long after unprotected sex she could use the morning-after pill. She was told by two other kids that five days was about the limit. That’s off by two days. " Those two "clueless" kids are less clueless than you were, Mr. Alexander. While within 72 hours is ideal, and sooner is better, some time ago, the window in which EC could be effective was raised to 120 hours or -- yep -- five days, just as those teens said. You can check up on that yourself in your most current edition of Contraceptive Technology, or, at http://ec.princeton.edu/ or Planned Parenthood's site. Scarleteen and Teenwire also verify that information. Seems a bit silly to be talking about accuracy of sexual information, or expecting credibility in your assessment of such, while doling out inaccurate information yourself on the same page. A few more statements I'm curious about: (Regarding Teenwire) "The site does contain some misplaced political content, but kids are not recruited into a sex cult." Might I ask what "misplaced political content" is? I'm sincerely hoping that by that, you don't mean ANY issues of sexual politics because you don't feel they are topical or appropriate for teenagers. None of us, of any age, especially in this culture and under this administration in the U.S., get to live our sex lives in a vacuum in which politics and cultural issues don't have a wide sphere of influence. Having observed teens over the years having quite a few conversations, of their own initiation, about myriad issues of sexual politics, I assure you that they can not only actually be quite invested in exploring and debating these issues, they ARE also both relevant and important to them. "Some racy Web sites redirect people under 18 to Scarleteen.com, and I can see why." Really? I'm betting you can't. Way back in the day, possibly before you were wired yourself, and often still, most adult sites put up an exit link for minors to cover their own bottoms, and all too often -- perhaps trying to be cute -- outlinked to sites like Disney.com. As is obvious, for teenagers going to adult sites because of curiousity about sex, a link to Disney both isn't helpful and is also quite patronizing. Jane Duvall, who runs Jane's Net Sex Guide (and who is also mother to three daughters), linked to Scarleteen way back when, and chose us because at the time, there really weren't other sites available, as Scarleteen was online before anything else like it was. In time, Jane took it upon herself to be incredibly proactive and encourage other adult sites to be responsible and helpful to teens and do same: even when other sites did come online, she still found Scarleteen to be the site she felt did best in this arena. Because Jane's Guide was then, and remains still, the premier site for adult sites to be reviewed at, this was quite a precedent to set, and resulted in very widespread adult-site linking to Scarleteen which has now become somewhat standard netiquette at this point. I can assure you that most of the sites linking to me have no idea who I am, nor how "racy" I might be. Finally, I was sorry not to see a usable link/resource list for those "clueless kids" actually wanting to repair their knowledge dearth. While Scarleteen, Teenwire and CoolNurse are a good start, there are at least a handful of other fantastic sites out there, some of which are far more used by teens than those latter two (and which are also more inclusive), like Go Ask Alice and Sex, Etc. for instance. Organizations like SIECUS and Advocates for Youth also are excellent resources for finding extensive lists of both websites and books which provide excellent sexuality information for teens and parents alike. I'm in agreement with you: young adults (and their parents, mentors and other adults who care about them), need far more accessible, valuable resources for accurate sex information. I also agree that it is best served up with as little bias as possible, particularly with information where personal ethics, value and politics have no place, and that when the information given DOES (often by necessity) address personal values, mores or choices, that when a writers own choices, values or biases come into play, they are made clear to BE the writers own views. Wait: you didn't say that last part, did you? In fact, in much of your article, you exhibited rather clearly that that is NOT something to which you subscribe, at least not in this particular piece. The great thing about the Net is that it is 100% optional: at a site like Scarleteen or others like it, users don't end up there by accident; it's not required reading, nor do we force it down their throats. Users have to very purposefully seek us out. For the teens to whom our particular approach has appeal, when others sites don't rub them the right way, they can get progressive accurate, inclusive sexuality information -- and we DO make a point of checking our accuracy, often with a handful of different consultants and highly credible references. For those for whom Scarleteen is NOT the right flavor, there are other online options like Teenwire, like CoolNurse, like Sex, Etc. The choice is 100% theirs. If parents have strong feelings about one site or another, they get to voice those, too, or suggest alternatives. But one of the biggest reasons why we have the huge readership we do at Scarleteen -- over 10,000 users every day --- is because we make very clear to our young adult readers that when it comes not just to how they educate themselves, but to ALL their sexual choices, the choices are absolutely theirs, not mine, not ours, and for most of the ages we serve, not their parent's choices either. I'd venture that at least once a day I make a point of saying "Don't just take my word on this: do more research, talk to plenty of people, mull all this over yourself, talk to your partners, parents and friends, and what I think is your very best choice to make is ultimately what you think is your very best choice to make." It is that, and the fact that we have done this for longer than anyone online, are very experienced doing this and very well-educated and informed per the information given (with ALL our perspectives, as a group, as I am no monolith) -- not scare tactics, not whitewashed language, not clinical approaches, not authoritarian posturing, not "sex-positivity," and certainly not patronizing our readers -- that, despite my lack of soccer-mom exterior, has made Scarleteen a grassroots favorite with not just teens, but also with their parents, educators, sexual health organizations and numerous sexuality experts, a widespread response with heritage that can be easily verified with a simple Google search. You perhaps now understand why I find much of what you said in this piece a greater affront to your own credibility, presented agenda or sincerity than an affront to myself or Scarleteen, and why I find your own biases far more pervasive and counterproductive with this topic than my own could ever deign to be. Sincerely, Heather Corinna, Scarleteen.com   January 27th, Two Thousand Five: The fruit of anticipation is, indeed, enjoyable. I felt the need to say that before I launched into things that aren't so enjoyable. I'm all about levity these days, so I hate to either give the impression to others or myself that when I've got rough stuff on my plate, that's all that's sitting there. I have no doubt that by the time I finish this entry the irony of my feeling the need to say that will be all too apparent, and perhaps even a little embarrassing. * * * My plan is to work on more pieces in the me & you series today. I was under the weather yesterday, and it's carried over slightly today, so anything super-active is out, though I could likely use a long, solitary walk a bit later on. I do seem to have the brain cells back I couldn't find to save my life yesterday, so I can probably get some good work done. I'm in the wrong headspace to work on Scarleteen -- or the letter that's been percolating in my brain for this reporter, but not today, on top of everything else, dealing with being crowned bad girl once more is just too fucking much to tackle -- so that's out, too. I know I've said it a thousand times already, but the last few months have been some of the strangest months of my life. Given my life and life history, we all know that's really saying something. * * * In the midst of several varieties of weirdness and angst, it struck me the other day that this month, Matthew would have passed 40. For newer readers, to sum up, Matthew was my first real, big love when I was 15. We met by literally walking right into each other in an incident that in one fell swoop left me unable to ever fully buy the notion that coincidence really is that. That blunder literally saved my life: I was pretty seriously suicidal for some of my teens, which isn't at all surprising, and after my last attempt hadn't worked as planned, I had a purse full of packs of sleeping pills and was en route to offing myself that day when we met, a plan I'd been singlemindedly making for weeks. The next months with him would very radically change my life and my approach to it, in a way that I'm not sure anything else ever has. I was able in that time to get out of my house and everything in it that was killing me, and it was in large part because of him that shortly thereafter I'd switch to the arts school that really put me on my path in life. Matthew was also, I'd say, the first person in my life who I didn't seem to have to earn love or time from: I could have those things effortlessly just by being who I was. In any event, those few months were all I got with him, because he ended up taking way too many ludes, finding his roommates rifle and blowing his head off. Even that had weirdness involved: I had woken up with a start and a horrible feeling of dread in the middle of the dawn before, and as it turned out, his time of death was clocked to within fifteen minutes of that time. There are lots of morose and awful details about all of this -- having to see the scene itself, what his family and the cops put me through, having to deal with a tragic death pretty publicly when I was so young, the fact that for a good half year afterwards, I went pretty damn crazy -- and a myriad of different related stories, issues and results, but it's not my intent to tell a sob story today. I don't know why, but death after 40 doesn't seem all that tragic to me. Certainly, we'd consider someone who died in their forties as having a short life but it seems to me that you can at least have lived a pretty rich life by the time you're that age. Not so at 22, especially when much of that life was full of abuse, endless foster care, and a cavalcade of nasty stuff. So, at some point this month, how old he would have been, just hit me like a ton of bricks: it's still hitting me. Some of it is about him, about the tragedy of the fact that a person who was just so damn wonderful and had been through so damn much and STILL come out kind and gentle and spirited and loving left so fucking soon; just couldn't make it himself, even though he could manage to help me make it. And some of it is about me: ever now and then I get so, so sad that I can't talk to him. Given what I do and the fact that I have a keen grasp on reality, I've never had the idea that had he lived we would have been together forever and ever, but I have no doubt we would have always been friends, and now and then, it just rips me apart that he isn't here to be my friend; that the very first person I really loved with all that I had didn't get to see me grow, grow with me. It's almost 20 years since all of this, and plenty of therapy, a lot of processing and all that time tends to dull the ache most of the time, but every now and then, it just floods over me in huge waves and then lingers, sending little ripples across nearly everything. Sometimes it's in the small quirks: for instance, if I'm just starting to get close to someone, if something feels like it could go deeper and I don't hear from that person for a few days, I have to battle feelings that something absolutely terrible has happened to them, even though I know they're unreasonable. If someone in any way reminds me of him, it's sometimes very hard for me to put myself back in normal time and space. Sometimes, it's bigger than that: for instance, when any relationship I'm in, of any type, reaches about the same tenure he and I had together, I often pull back because part of me is freaking out scared and I feel ludicrous sharing that with someone else. When I start to develop feelings for someone, I continually battle the profound feeling that not only do they have something very big they're just not telling me, but that whatever it is is going to come of of nowhere and rip me in half, or that if I get too close, I am going to be abandoned in the worst way possible. (And of course, the times when that actually has happened have only stood to prove me right and cement those fears further.) Any connection I discover that has that flavor of great possibility scares the holy fuck out of me: I don't trust it, or myself with it, in the slightest. Matthew-issues are pretty obviously a big part of why I actually really don't like falling in love and why those feelings make me really miserable and freakish sometimes. The thing is, B. once said to me that sometimes, being with me was like being with a widow. And he was right: I know that it is. I think one of the crappiest parts of what all happened is that with my very first huge love, there wasn't time for us to even have a single moment of anything even close to disappointing. He never didn't call me, he was never in a bad mood around me, he made grand gestures, and every single moment we had together was great and almost disturbingly perfect. Sometimes, I become convinced I'm projecting things on that now, but then I go read my journals and letters from that age and see that nope, it was all fairytale perfect just as remembered. Point is, in many ways, Matthew got a sort of sainted status: nearly anything else compared to that is going to pale horribly in comparison. That's often the case with first loves as it is, but in my case, it's massively amplified. Every now and then, if I listen to people talk crap about soulmates or anyone getting one love of their life, I have to confess that I turn away first not because intellectually and sociologically do I think that's crap (and I do), but because if I believed that for even a minute, I'd have to face the fact that I probably already had mine, and while were that the case, and was that belief system about love not crap, I could handle it, the idea of the whole thing is ungodly depressing. * * * The thing is, it's not unusual for people like Matthew or I, who just had shitloads of nastiness in their lives, especially during formative years, not to make it through. Most other people I've met in my life over time who have had similar lives or experiences to mine when it comes to the crap who thus far did live through it are just -- sometimes moderately, often markedly -- broken, or so deeply wounded that they never seem quite right or whole. Every now and then, I wonder if I'm kidding myself in thinking I'm any different, but those moments are rare. Often I know full well that I did somehow -- hell if I know how, for the most part -- manage to be one of the exceptions to the rule. I'm wracking my brain right now to think of any other people I've met like that, with anything even close to the same amount of icky, and Hanne is about the only other exception that comes to mind. (I remember, not gladly, that about six month or so s after Matthew died, I met someone who -- Matt and I were really visible in punk circles in Chicago, so strangers in those circles often knew who I was, this odd teenage widow of sorts, and anyone who knew him or of him or knew our story would often approach me in this very strange, vampiric way; it was a weird role to be in for a 16-year-old kid -- told me he'd known him back when. Well, it actually turned out he hadn't: it was a line to get into my pants, and I totally fell for it. At a party with this person a month or so later, back when Wicker Park was still a serious pit, not only did I find out that my best friend had also started dating him AND that he'd fed me a line, AND that EVERYONE else knew both of these things, I also had a particularly bad mix of substances unknowingly. All of the above resulted in my climbing into the garbage dumpster and wailing quite loudly, banging it in pain and anger, begging Matthew to come back from the dead and rescue me. For such a long time, meeting him when I did and how I did seemed like such a miracle that I wanted very badly to believe the miracles weren't over and I could have some more if I just wanted them badly enough. Turned out the entire party could hear me, and I got labeled a serious, crazy bitch for quite some time, and I believed it for a good, long time, too.) But that all too often puts me in a very strange position, especially with people I'm just getting to know or making moves to get close to, and absolutely in sexual or romantic relationships, far more so than friendships, though those platonic relationships get smacked with this stuff, too. I know that when people first meet me and get to know me that what gets shown are the parts of me that aren't heavy: I know I come off as dynamic, as provocative, as intellectual, as stubborn, as plucky, as sexy, as sunny, as engaging, as really together, albeit awfully eccentric and quirky. All of that is absolutely my nature, so that's not an act on my part. To some degree, all that being what is apparent is likely a front, but I don't think it's any more of one than anyone puts up when just getting to know people. Photography: 01.26 members • sign up Here's where it gets precarious: because my history is so vast, and so much of it so yucky, it generally doesn't take long before one of my tragedies gets brought up, usually way before the other person's do. Heck, much of the time, even the first couple of times I sleep with someone, sexual activities go in such a way that I have to bring up my sexual assaults in order to make clear what activities some caution is required with. Sure, I could lie and just say I don't like something and avoid it, but that's just not my way. And sure, I could wait months and months before sleeping with someone, but that's not my way, either, especially when what I really want is a lover, not a partner. But I dread those conversations. I know how they go all too well. More and more, it's just felt progressively awful-er, because I've started to realize that even I react to them badly, and that the way I approach them has a lot to do with how others do. As pretty much anyone knows, when someone shares a tragedy with another person, the most typical response is "I'm so sorry." The thing is, I just don't know how to react to that anymore. I fumble, I say "It's okay," or "It happens," which is incredibly lame, because of course it isn't at all okay (and someone called me on that this month, which left me even more mute). But I really don't know what else to say, and I also know I tend to bring these things up very plainly and dryly. Some of the why of that is that, of course, for me, since I've only lived my own life and I've carried this shit around for such a long time, it is plain and normal to me. Too, I do have to sort of pull back a little, turn my emotions down a notch when discussing things like this, because otherwise, if I'm at all emotionally open, it just makes me way too vulnerable in scenarios where it's only me who is close to that vulnerable (and if who I'm around has read or seen any of my work, especially the journal, those scales are FAR more unbalanced from the get-go). But I think all of that has an effect on how I'm perceived and how others learn to relate to me, or not to relate, whatever the case may be. The thing is, too, I just feel seriously sick at ever being perceived as one of those women who are some sort of sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, yet I know that it happens all too often: once I start to open up once more of the picture is shown, people start getting really funny about it most of the time. Either it bloody well never ends with half-assed odes to my Herculean strength, or folks just try and avoid bringing things up, finding out more, or I end up getting sainted in certain ways myself, despite the fact that I'm still here, alive and kicking. All too often, people just don't believe that someone could go through all I have and not secretly be a gargantuan nutcase, and you know, I feel that when it happens, which generally makes me take two giant steps back to keep my distance. It's safe to say that a good four out of five connections I have with people that are very intense, when it's all very electric and organic, end, often early, with the other person seriously chickening out, often in a really crappy, lame way, and usually when it becomes clear that no, it's not going to work out to just try and pretend or treat me like all the things under the surface just don't exist. Moreover, when I connect with people who have had either similar stuff happen, or have known some really deep pain, all too often with them -- in case that, dear reader, is where your logic was leading you -- I become a lifeboat, held unto to buoy them up because they can't or don't want to do it themselves. In many ways, I end up a Mom, which is one thing in friendships, but is just plain creepy in romantic or sexual relationships. These relationships usually end by my running out of patience with parenting when I wanted partnership, usually after my trying hard to usurp that dynamic for too long, and with the other person really, really angry with me for leaving them feeling like an orphaned child, even though I never signed up to parent them in the first place. I guess that lately, I'm just feeling like I really can't win in this regard, no matter what I do or who I'm dealing with. If I toss propriety and concern for how I come off at the moment aside, the most truthful thing I can think of to say at the moment is that I am really, really fucking sick of being so goddamn unusual. I'm sick of my own history and having to carry it around, especially the worst stuff, the stuff I didn't get any choice with in the first place. I'm sick of my history and my nature, who I am, seeming mismatched to people. I'm sick of either being defined by my history, or my survival of it, but I'm also sick of, in trying to avoid that response, having to feel like I have to diminish all of it, downplay it, or work so sodding hard to balance it out with all my fun, funny, bright stories and the parts of me that aren't painful or heavy. I'm angry at other people for being half of what they could be so much of the time, and angry at myself for being half of what I am too much of the time, especially when I do that to try to keep from scaring or intimidating people, or because I'm convinced -- even if I'm right about it -- that no one could handle me being the complicated, complex mix of everything I am and have been, just because so, so few people are able to. (Of course, conversely I'm also tired of trying to believe that it's possible people could deal and finding out again and again that they can't.) Only somewhat related, but equally important, I am REALLY sick and tired of having even people I've been involved with for a long time behave as if they're dogs out to mark me in competition with the other dogs with the same primitive, dehumanizing agenda. I'm sick of feeling fearful because of the fearfulness of others, and because of my own deep worry that at any time, one small straw will finally break this camel's back. I'm sick and damn well tired of other people just being bloody lame, and I'm sick of myself being lame, too. And I find that niggling feeling that I am, in fact, and without seeing it, one of those hopelessly broken people after all never goes away. * * * Some of the madness of all of this is that I rarely have discussions like this with people actually in my life, even longtime friends. There are a scant few I've talked about this stuff with, but I can count them on one hand. It's so much easier to write about it -- even somewhere like this where I know thousands of strangers I don't know will read it -- or to express it through creative work. Even then, I still keep most of it in my head or on pieces of paper destined for the rubbish bin. I fight feeling like I'm greedy, lately. I just know that in some respects, I've hit zero tolerance with quite a lot interpersonally, but that while what I want out of any sort of relationship seems like less than others do, it's actually quite a bit more, and I'm becoming convinced that no matter who we're talking about, or how I approach a wide variety of relationships, what I really want just doesn't exist and is never going to happen. I don't want commitment, I want communion. I don't want someone to complete me, I want someone to meet me, and vice-versa. I don't want a piece of paper, I want loyalty; I don't want a house, I want to feel at home; I don't want a promise, I want tenacity, and I want to give those things as well as receive them. I want roles that haven't been invented yet. I want to be proven really, really wrong once about the important stuff. I want anyone who thinks I'm strong because of where I've been and where I've gotten to to step up, not step back. I don't want to be treated like something delicate and breakable, not be a serious long shot, but I don't want to continually be treated like I'm made out of Kevlar, either. I want someone to be markedly braver than I am, rather than being the brave one all the fucking time: all the more so when I'm not even being all that brave in the first place. * * * It's a bad day. Yesterday was a bad day, too. I've had all too many of them of late. They happen. It's okay, really. See how ludicrous that sounds? I hurt, I'm tired of dealing with so much stupid bullshit from people, I'm pissed off and frustrated and scared, but hey: it's okay, shit happens. But I don't know what the alternative is to that approach, honestly. I know what to do with it: I can channel it into work, I'm good at that. In another moment of uneasy truth today, I'll say this: what I'd normally say is that I'd like other ways to deal with stuff like this besides work, I'd like people around me I felt had strong shoulders that I could feel fully comfortable leaning on, who could really get where I'm coming from, but I'm tired of saying even that, because the truth of the matter is that what I really want? I want far, far fewer bad times, period. It's not so much that I'm sick of being strong or resilient: I'm sick of having to be so damn much.   January 22nd - 25th, Two Thousand Five: It struck me the other day that in at least one way (and no doubt, quite a few more), I am not only a lousy Buddhist, but an intentionally, unapologetically lousy buddhist. There I was, washing the dishes, wiggling my arse and shuffling my feet to iTunes tossing me The Replacements' "Can't Hardly Wait," The Stool Pigeons' cover of "I'm Into Something Good," followed by Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said," (and then a bout of me loudly belting Aretha Franklin's "Evil Gal Blues" to a wooden spoon, just because I could) with this very silly little grin on my face. And since this is me here, kids, for whom it is several lifetimes too late to even pretend to be demure, I won't neglect to mention that it was also nothing close to chilly between my thighs. This was not helped by the ends of my ponytail opportunistically tickling a still-tender spot on my neck. I was completely grooving on feelings of sheer, easy anticipation. How could anyone not? I know, I know: I'm very well-versed in this stuff. Anticipation is essentially desire for that which we don't yet have, and part of my Buddhist practice should involve working on eschewing desires, but come ON! I LOVE this, man. Again, I ask you, how can anyone not? Sure, my brain knows that anticipation is essentially fantasy, but bloody hell, it's GOOD fantasy. It's fantasy about incredibly likely reality, or at least a mildly escalated projection of reality and the stuff is YUMMY. Heck, even if what was anticipated never became reality, I'm a sex writer and artist: it's always at least good fodder. Anticipation of something delightful, something (or someone for that matter) wicked, something slightly mysterious and murky but which is pretty much guaranteed not to disappoint? Honey, that shit is GOLD. (Mind you, some Buddhist thought leaves some wiggle room with this, namely, that so long as one recognizes that the future OF anticipation is actually in the present moment and not something one does not have right here and now, it's really not lousy Buddhism. But, if you must know, that sounds a whole lot like someone like me trying to rationalize their profound desire to hang the fuck unto anticipation.) * * * I've been doing a whole lot of thinking -- yeah, I know, me analyzing everything incessantly is so unexpected -- about gender and sexual orientation lately, about realizing that for myself, sexual orientation has perhaps a lot more to do with gender rather than biological sex, and not simply the gender of whomever the other person is, but my own gender identity. The following is pretty freeform, and I'm not drawing any conclusions; rather, it's just random snippets of my gender identity scrapbook. I think most of my regular readers already know that neither butch nor femme have ever spoken to me, personally: when pressed to ID in that regard, I usually ID as a broad. Most people understand broad to basically mean a woman who can throw a mean punch, and that certainly true in my case (my uppercuts are particularly formidable: I love uppercut punches, because you just fly when you really throw one, and the arcing movement of the whole arm and upper body has a special aesthetic appeal to me. Plus, you deliver one good uppercut in self-defense, and the job is pretty much finito). But what it really means with me, and has for pretty much all of my life is that boiled down to the most blithe divisions, I tend to look femme and behave butch. Interestingly, it often seems to go down much easier with people when that's the other way round: when a woman looks butch and behaves femme. For some odd reason, my inverse combo tends to be trickier when it comes to other people, especially other women. Of course, all of this is arbitrary, subjective, culturally relativistic, et cetera: whatever we attach to butch and femme, masculine and feminine. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm using those terms for simplicity because there do tend to be common attributes affixed to them by enough of a majority that most folks can glean some idea of what I'm talking about if I use those terms. I've been thinking a whole lot lately about gender and my personal history, getting a greater sense of how often in my life, especially in my childhood and teen years, I was really treated "like a girl," far more so than I would previously have recognized. I'm gaining a greater awareness, too, of how often gender issues were at least a part of family and social struggles for me. For instance, when at the end of junior high and the start of high school, in the early eighties, I buzzed off my hair, took up a pair of jackboots and found a lot of my happier moments in the mosh pit, I think that had a good deal to do with gender. To my mother and stepfather, punk and my community in it was all about anger or drugs or rebellion or sex when, while those things certainly had airplay, that stuff was not at all primary. The primary feeling I got in that scene was belonging, was sameness, and a freedom from gender roles. I don't remember anyone ever expressing concern for me jumping in the pit like everyone else because I was a girl. While I certainly had some sexual and romantic relationships in those circles with boys, I was never, ever treated like a plaything tagged along for that purpose, nothing close. I think some of the reason my younger sister and I never bonded was because she was, in many respects, the girly-girl I wasn't and didn't want to be, but who my mother felt much more comfortable with. When my mother remarried (she divorced again after I left home, thank gawd), the only bright spot in that for me at all was my two stepsiblings, especially the fact that I finally found myself with a BROTHER. A brother, and one almost my same age, even! One with whom I played tackle football in the park, who went on traintrack adventures with me, who got dirty with me, who didn't want to play with dolls, who wasn't worried about getting into trouble (and who didn't tattle on me like younger sisters tend to by design), and who never asked me to "act like a girl." A brother who, actually, treated me like a brother, too. I think I've mentioned this before, but one of the areas with BOTH my parents that was actually common was that I was never even slightly encouraged when it came to sports. In the early eighties, with a wave of diet mania in my house, I was encouraged to exercise, but we're talking leg lifts and jumping up and down here for the express purpose of toning those oh-so-flabby 11-year-old thighs (note: sarcasm), not anything particularly challenging for body or mind. There were a few small areas that I could make fit the bill so I could get in some physical activities I liked: swimming (despite being horribly allergic to chlorine), roller skating, ice skating, biking, the yoga practice I had with my social studies teacher in middle school. Do I need to say girly sports? I didn't think so. That's a bummer (and telling per how arbitrarily gender was assigned in my family, as my younger sister, for whatever reason WAS encouraged in this area -- she played rugby in high school), because I'm actually fairly jocky in some respects, I've always loved working my body until it just can't work no'mo', and it would have given me a lot, not just in terms of gender issues, but in terms of body image, health, and more outlets for my overabundant energy, to have any sort of allowance to explore those venues. It certainly might have saved many, many boys in my elementary school from a lot of bruises and more than one broken nose. I had a stint of pretty profound kleptomania during junior high. Some of that was to see what I could get away with, a lot of it was about severe resentment and gender, over what went down in my house, over not one but the two sexual attacks I couldn't give voice to or make sense of when I was 12, over being separated from my best girlfriend and first girl love, and in part, over being labeled the "bad kid," by that point, so I think I felt the need to live up to the reputation I was being saddled with. But looking back, I remember that everything I stole -- and it was really quite a haul over a year or so -- was the girliest stuff imaginable, most of which I never even touched: I'd give it to all the other girls who actually wanted all the makeup and the magazines and the frou-frou frillies. I'll need some more time analyzing that, but it struck me as interesting to recall. It wasn't until my mid to late twenties that I could establish really lasting, strong friendships with other women. And calling the sexual relationships I had with most woman close or romantic would really, really be pushing it. Now, that isn't actually so unusual, and I think a lot of women deal with that primarily because of how our culture pits women against one another, more than anything else. I hear some teenage girls at Scarleteen sometimes who are in the same boat, and that's usually followed by a list of negative attributes affixed to all women: they they're catty, competitive, shallow, superficial, all that typical crapola. I'm sure I said some of that myself at their age. I know I did. But I think what's really going on there, what one might not realize at that time, is that it's about a feeling of a lack of belonging; of a lack of sameness per gender, rather than sex. It's easy, I think, to get shitty and angry about that, because any of us, male or female, who didn't fit (and/or didn't want to) into easy gender piles generally took plenty of crap for it, and likely had some envy for those who DID fit, or seem to fit or want to, more effortlessly. Here's a brainteaser for you: I would normally have said that my sexual precociousness and on-the-early-side party girl nature when it came to sex wasn't really linked to gender issues. (Maybe this also has to do with the sports issue? I always have approached sex, in part, on a sheerly physical level as rather intense exercise. Hmm. ) It's certainly typical to attach all sorts of issues -- low self-esteem, survivor issues and the lot -- to very young women who are sexually active, or in my case, sexually hyperactive. One might even leap and say that a sexually prolific young woman is in fact very much playing to type. Yet, if asked on the fly, I'd actually probably say that some of that not only was (and maybe still is?) in part a rebellion of my sex and gender, given the fact that it was always very active on my part and never passive, it was bisexual, and moreover, it felt like an arena where how I looked and how I behaved was NOT expected to "match," where when I was in it, no one ever complained that I was "acting like a man." But. Looking at eons of folklore and myth, looking at plenty of arcane regional iconography, even looking at more current cultural archetypes like the femme fatale which clearly don't masculinize sexually dominant or active sexual behaviour of women, I'd ask not only where we'd try to class any sort of consensual sexual behaviour as male or female, masculine or feminine, but why anyone might bother trying? Isn't it one of the few arenas which is the great equalizer in most respects (I say most largely only because our culture works hard to keep it from being an arena where all genders have the same agency, and that given, all too many aspects of it which might more organically be egalitarian are not), where -- especially for those of us outside the tight box of heterosexism -- gender is actually irrelevant in terms of our basic motivations, wants and desires? I could talk a blue streak on this (as if there was anything I couldn't babble about for an age). But for today, I'll leave it there, sans conclusions, collect some more pieces for the scrapbook, then wash, rinse and repeat as needed. * * * Yes, my life is still, as of late, more than a touch surreal, insanely unpredictable, a tad convoluted and confused, and with potholes of some rather intense dark spots I wish my wheels would stop spinning in, though at the same time, even those bad spaces strike me as important and pivotal. A good deal of that stuff isn't actually so much what I've been doing, what I've been into, what's been going on with me so much as others reactions to all of that, and how much I really don't care for them and think they're a pile of crap, and how I'd really like to avoid taking any more bullshit at the moment. Yes, I'm still not getting into the several different reasons why my life has been kooky and whirlwindy publicly, for many reasons (though one reason is that intimacy is a theme over the last bunch of months, even with friends, and learning what happens when I share things only with them, not with the general public, has been compelling). But amidst the confusing, the frustrating and the difficult to untangle, I have to say that the last couple of months have also provided more than their share of strange, perfect-in-their-imperfect-way, profoundly unexpected and vastly different intense connections, questions, realizations. My shit has been shaken considerably in ways that I'd not say were nice or not nice: they simply were, are, what they are, often inexplicable, but also, from what I can tell, unavoidable; even when aspects of things feel as if they were intentional, I simply have had the weird, wacky feeling -- whether it is to or not -- that that my action or intentions have been largely irrelevant. Mind you, I say that while at the same time noticing that of late, I appear to be living some sort of warped fairytale existence where I only realize after the fact that things I have vocalized wanting, wishing for, thinking would be awfully nice, keep happening right now, to the point that I'm starting to wonder if someone is going to inform me of how many wishes I've really got left so I can use them wisely. I'm also starting to be a little more careful about those wishes. I mean, I haven't wished for a sugar mama, but maybe I should! The way things have been going, it's really starting to feel like if I just said, "I'd really dig having a sugar mama," that it could actually happen. Well, maybe. More accurately, I have this sense lately of being given what I need, even when it isn't pleasant, nice or particularly desired on my part. That isn't to say I haven't been getting some things I DO or have desired, because I have. Thus far, it's looking very much like 2005 is about learning a lot of lessons I haven't before (or have tried to avoid), seeing things in very different ways than I previously have, being given new windows, doors and mirrors to look through and into. I may well remember my 35th year as the Year of the Skeleton Key. * * * Post-Scarleteen-grant, and the substantial flip-flop of the way I do my work and schedule my time now, I've started a routine in which Mondays are left wide open as personal studio days and nothing else (well, save game night with Heather and Carissa when we have them, but that's way later). They aren't days off, instead, they're days expressly for artwork where I can work on whatever I want, with whatever fancies strike me. Today was a really good one: got a piece finished I'd been toying with for a month or so, and have a bunch of ideas for other pieces jotted down I'm going to dive into shortly, after I put some food in my gob. I may be the only person alive who actually looks very much forward to Mondays. I think that's swell. Poor, maligned Monday. She needs at least one person cheering in her corner. * * * In case it's not obvious, I also have less time for journaling, so I've tended to just take notes over days as I go, and then try and make what I have into something ever-so-slightly coherent when the pages get lengthy. (By the by? People REALLY do not need to worry that I have fallen off the face of the earth when I don't update or quickly answer email. If you want to make sure I'm still alive, and have serious doubts about this, all y'all really need to do is look around the other sites, especially at Scarleteen, the blog there, at my portfolio site, what have you, to see regular evidence of my continued existence.) Which is why I started writing some of this stuff Saturday, and it's now Tuesday. I started today quite accidentally at 5:30 in the morning, so Sofia and I took a walk while the sky was still black, the moon round and bright, making the top of snow drifts sparkle as if they were scattered with a million tiny stars. Not a bad way to start the day. After a bunch of scanning, I'm on to some training, forcing myself to read the damn Waxman report (even though I know full well what's in it, since I've been following the abstinence-only crap since it all started), some more site update work and a few errands, and a long, hot bath before that anticipation from the other night reaches what I suspect will be a quite satisfactory culmination.   January 19th, Two Thousand Five: Because sometimes, I can speak far more ably and truly with images than I can with words.
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