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February 20th, Two Thousand Six: The weekend, summed up with my last remaining brain cells, which
are woefully short of syntax and in need of a nap.
kisseskisseskisses
too cold to go outside: such tragedy
dancing in the living room
to future domicile daydreaming
I broke my boyfriend
(but he was not displeased by this)
kisseskisseskisses
(and extra kisses for the wounded)
lazy breakfast and drawn-out dinner
with a side order of pughugs
and your morning cocktail
more than the lion's share of various illicit substances
enough lube for three small countries
wine, women and song
drag mayhem and a line of lovely king kisses for Miz Heather
playing dressup with much over-dinner kablinky
at equal turns silly and debonair
all the world's your stage, but you share it sometimes
long, hot soaks and many bubbles
mangomangomango
giving biscuits to the dragons and making peace with the ghosts
falling asleep in that perfect spot you've got there
and hot coffee to wake you
lazing about with your scent in the air
only a week and a half this time to go without
kisseskisseskisses
(Having come not even close to recovering from the weekend, I
am being tossed on a plane to new York tomorrow for my deposition
with the ACLU for the feds. Wish me -- and your freedom of expression
-- good luck and a Get Out of Jail Free card if my foot decides
to move into its usual spot in my mouth. Back Friday.) |
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February 14th, Two Thousand Six: I am experiencing the greatest surge of mental retardation of
my whole life.
It was enough, already, that I remain googoogaga in love, with
a level of twitterpate that I expected to subside by now. Emotionally,
that's awesome. Fucking insane, but awesome. On a practical level?
It's a little problematic.
It's this move, though, that's seriously deep-frying my brain.
Ladies and germs, a word of advice: packrats should NEVER live
alone.
Packrats who live with others have the benefit of the ever-constant:
"What the hell is this?"
"No, I will NOT give up my office so you can have more storage
space for your growing collection of broken mirrors."
"What do you mean, why did I throw it away? Because it had MOLD
on it, and unless you're Marie Curie, moldy things are GARBAGE,
lady."
"But you didn't even like your grandma! How can it have sentimental
value?"
"You said you were going to make something out of that box of
stuff that's been sitting in the closet since 1988, too."
"Some people who survived Hurricane Katrina have nothing but the
clothes on their backs! (Note: this is the updated version of those starving children
in Africa.) You can't live without your third grade report cards, two racks
of cassette tapes you can't play, twenty 'important' empty wine
bottles and your old, dried-up paints?"
But those of us who live alone have NO ONE to force us to keep
our acquisitive habits in check. At this stage of the game, I've
been alone in this place for three years. Before that, I lived
with B. but the nature of our relationship and my personal stubbornness
made me 100% immune to all comments regarding all my stuff. When
I moved from there, I had hired movers, which made me feel all
I needed to do was shove everything in bags and boxes: no sorting
was required on my part, as far as I was concerned, because I
didn't have to carry the shit myself, so what the hell did I care?
Then before that, more years alone. Sure, there was an interstate
move in there, but I had a REALLY big truck, and it was only an eight-hour drive. Plus, I was moving
from the smallest apartment known to man, and a good half of my
shit had never been unpacked from a very hasty retreat from the
place before to avoid another pleasant bout of homelessness.
I've determined that growing up poor makes this worse. Not only
do many of us poverty-trained folk put even more value on things
than we might otherwise, ANYTHING can be valuable. For instance,
this morning I found two sets of nasty, dusty plastic 80's shelving
in my closet. These are shelves I had when I first got out of
the hell-house of my adolescence and into living with my Dad,
so they have value. Posters from college which are in no condition
whatsoever to be hung or seen have value (and for you Buffy-geeks
out there, per the first episode of season four, Klimt, not Monet).
Obviously, I could go on. And on.
I have, however, in the last week acquired and then removed at
least ten overfull bags of rubbish which was considered at some
time important, but which I cannot defend moving across the country.
As of yesterday, I have gotten past the habit of going back and
going through every bag in a panic before tossing it. On my planet,
we call this progress.
* * *
Probably I said this already recently -- and boy, my brain-overload
making me even MORE redundant than usual is not exactly making
me feel more wonderful about myself -- but somehow this winter,
time is doing the opposite of its usual routine. Generally, in
winter, the days feel like they stretch like the world's stretchiest
taffy. Time. Plods. On.
Not this year, not for this girl. Every week, the week starts,
I blink, and it's Friday already. In every day, I seem to get
half as much done as usual, and that's on a GOOD day. Someone
just plain ATE December and January for dinner, without leaving
me so much as a few scant crumbs on the plate. Usually, when time
does that funky jig, it's only select stuff that goes by fast
-- that great date, this day off or that one. But not so this
time: ALL the shit is going by faster. Hell, even my coffee seems to brew
more quickly in the morning, which is about the only thing I can't
complain about zipping by.
I hate feeling unreliable and unavailable. I really need to do some
photo work -- both to save my prolific reputation and my sanity
-- but there just isn't a single open space to do it in and, no,
I will not have the detritus of my cluttered life documented for
all to see. I really need to do some writing for a couple upcoming
anthologies. I am weeks behind on most of my email, and I cannot
get current with it to save my life.
But I need to remind myself that the ONLY thing I am actually obliged/contracted to do in terms of work
is Scarleteen work, for that is the only thing I am salaried/paid
TO do daily. I have been perfectly dutiful there, as always. Right
now, I have no outstanding paying photo clients to whom I owe
anything, and this site is as current as I am and chock full of
content for the paying folks. I have one or two older photo clients
who have finally made print orders, but I haven't taken any money
from them for those, and a simple email telling them both I'm
behind because of moving will take care of that easily. I have
a couple upcoming photo shoots with women who want photos done
for themselves, and are willing to exchange my labor for their
help packing and cleaning. But really, everything BUT Scarleteen
work and readying to move is 100% optional on my part at this
time, and it'd serve me well to remember that.
(On that note, if you have scheduled -- and I mean, day and time
-- something with me over the next two months, I'm still in it.
If you have NOT scheduled something with me that needs doing,
but we've discussed it, hunt me down NOW and schedule it. If you
want to schedule something with me, but we haven't previously
discussed it, seriously, don't bother. I just can't add anything
else to my already overgrown roster, and I seriously suck at saying
no, especially during times when I feel like I should be getting
more done than I am. So, even if you bring up something new and
I say maybe to it? It's just not gonna happen, I assure you. Better
not to ask at all.)
* * *
My cat, Zoe, went to her new home last night. It's all good news: a big,
three-woman household where they all love her, where no one is
allergic to her, and where she will be the only cat, spoiled senseless,
for the rest of her life. I tried to sleep with her the evening
before by way of saying goodbye, and an hour of having her in
my arms later, I had to kick her out and scrub the crap out of
my whole upper body to stop the itching. That sucked. I've had
her with me since she was born in my living room in 1991, so this
isn't an easy parting, and between her, having to finally put
old Rita down this year, and also parting with Elvis, it's been
a tough year to be a pet lover, let me tell you.
* * *
Then there was my recent experience with the DMV. The DMV, via
phone and web, for three different states, no less.
This is one of these bits where I have to show a bit more of my
not-so-great self publicly than I'd prefer to tell a decent story.
Hate that.
When I moved here from Chicago, within mere weeks, I lost my driver's
license. Since I sold my van before I moved and had no intention
of driving, I didn't bother getting one here, or even reporting
it lost. I figured it's show up. It never did.
I figured I'd get around to getting a license here. I never did,
which surprises absolutely no one who knows me. Me and anything
that's all-official-like and stuffy and form-laden just don't
mix. This was not aided by the fact that a few bars here were
of the opinion that a passport was not acceptable identification.
The first time it happened, I got in a pissing match with the
bouncer at Nye's, informing him that Minnesota was NOT a sovereign
nation, but a state, one of fifty for which a passport was ID
for ALL. I upped the ante by explaining I could drink in Pakistan
with this puppy, dammit. No one left happy.
A yearish ago, it was made even worse when Becca and I went to
the Red Dragon for a friend's birthday party. The Red Dragon is
the diviest chinese restaruant/bar you have ever seen. *I* was
actually scared to go in there, and this is a woman who full-contact
dumpster-dives for sport and sheer enjoyment. I have had many,
many a $5 fishbowl cocktail there over the years, however. We
were in the restaurant part, ordered drinks, and I was informed
by the maybe-20-year-old server I didn't have acceptable ID. So,
I say okay, no problem, I won't drink tonight. She then tells
me I cannot even be IN there. I incredulously point to several
young children in the restaurant, flummoxed, and she ignores this
and tells me I have to LEAVE. Becca and I -- looking incredibly threatening, no doubt, having
just come from an evening at the roller rink -- gather our things
and she sends a bouncer over to escort me out. I'm telling you
true: it was outer limits. This, of course, then cements my resolve
to neverevernevereverever get any sort of state ID in Minnesota,
out of spite. My stubbornness is a serious source of my energy:
this is not always a good thing.
(To my credit, truly longtime readers will perhaps recall what
I had to do to renew my passport here, especially since it needed
to be done one mere month after 9/11, AND at the tail end of a
truly unpleasant separation with my ex, who needed to be called
in to "verify" my existence, despite me having a million pieces
of paper, and who seemed to make a point of taking no small amount
of time -- read, a whole afternoon -- getting there while I sat
and stewed in my own juices.)
My own bullshit has now grossly inconvenienced me. Because, to
drive a truck from here to Washington, one needs a driver's license.
Mr. Price can drive, but:
a) I don't want him to have to do it by himself, because he doesn't
enjoy driving in any way, especially when there is snow, and
b) I feel 100% safe driving with him, mostly because he kind of
drives like an old lady. That's great for the nervousness I often
feel when driving with people -- having three members of your
family killed by a drunk trucker tends to make one a nervous passenger.
That's not so great for, you know, getting to Seattle in a timely
fashion, with a partner who is not a frazzled disaster.
Plus, I do enjoy driving, so it's better I take more of the load.
Certainly at least some of the load. But I was not pleased that
Minnesota seemed to have stuck it to me and had its revenge by
making me have to get a license here to leave.
So, nearly all last week I am trying to call three different locations
of the DMV in Minnesota, after trying every now and then over
a couple weeks before sporadically, and always getting a busy
signal. I decide to try a different route, calling the Illinois
DMV, in the vain hope my license didn't expire and they'll send
me a copy. Bzzzt. The automated system there either says they can't process my
request, or, when I get through a million menus and entries of
many digits, says they're having technical difficulties. Yeah,
tell me about it.
Eventually, I get a person, who says that I have to order a driver's
record in writing, which is this long-ass process involving post
going back and forth several times. They also cannot seem to find
any way to tell me the status of my license. But they do tell
me that the MN DMV will just call in my record via some system
or other and then all I'll need to do is take the written, since
I have driven before. I verify this online at their site. Okay.
Finally. Yesterday morning I get through at one location of the
MN DMV. After I am finished loudly singing four mezzo yawps of
the Hallelujah chorus (the Roches version), I make a point of
letting the woman on the line know that I am sorry, but I am about
to take up a lot of her time, because I am convinced I will never
get a real person on the line again.
She informs me they have now instituted a new, longer waiting
period between the written and the road test, which would be very
badly timed for me. So, I ask about my previous license, and she
tells me I just need to have Illinois send my records to them.
I inform her that I know for a fact -- and it's stated very clearly
on the IL DMV's website -- that they will NOT do that for states
anymore, and instead states are supposed to use some official-sounding
call-in system I can't recall the name of. She tells me that they
won't use that system. We repeat this same exchange two more times
with the same results.
I tell her that we then seem to be at a stalemate between states.
She suggests I call the State of Illinois and ask them to revise
their policy. She -- in earnest -- suggests I ask nicely.
Ah, those sweet, naive, nice Minnesotans. Oh, how I will miss
them.
Thankfully, the DMV in Washington seems to be far more sensible
and sane than either of the other two state agencies. So, when
I'm up there in a couple weeks, I'll go in there, and hopefully,
can walk out with a permit, which should not only solve the problem,
but keep me from both having to deal with the state of Minnesota
and have a license I will need to replace right away.
Especially since I think we all know how "right away" it'd be
replaced.
* * *
On a lighter note, it's like, Valentine's day.
Yeah, yeah, it's a Hallmark holiday -- wherein apparently 85%
of cards are purchased by women, for the curious -- full of schmaltz
which largely benefits those who heartlessly chop flowers from
their vines for a living and chocolatiers. Sure, it's at the wrong
time of year to commemorate romantic love and sexual energy; it's
an absolute affront to pagan tradition, especially if it was dreamt
up to usurp Lupercalia. Yep, St. Valentine appears to be a total
historical hoax or some guy who either saved poor Christians from
those scary Romans or some other guy who helped perform sneaky
marriages so women could continue to wear the beautiful, shiny
shackles of romance during an odd marriage ban so men could do
"better" in battle. Blah blah blah.
Truth be told, the very best Valentine's Day I had in my life
was when a friend and I in college had both had awful breakups
the week before, and so decided to spend the day going door-to-door
of every romantic wrongdoer we knew, either telling them off if
they were home, or pranking their dwellings if they were not.
The day culminated with the two of us, in some sort of stupor
(acid, grass, booze: I earnestly forget which -- gee, I wonder
why), proclaiming our mad love and affection for each other in
beautiful, slurred poetry, with a little bit of dried egg and
toilet paper decorating our hair in a very pastoral way. It was
a good day. I've had many a romance which has been current this
time of year, but that particular celebration always wins.
All that aside, it IS the first time my sweetie has been dating
someone during this holiday. We're having to reschedule it, mind,
as Mark won't be in town until Friday this visit, but it's the
last time we'll have to do that. Plus, you know, in my book any
holiday about romantic love is a holiday about sex, and honey,
I will never say no to anything I can use to require fine, orgasmic
celebration. Puh-lease!
Here's the biggest thing: on this date last year, know what I
wrote? I wrote this:
"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."
If wishes were horses, INDEED. Giddyup!
But seriously, folks. Mr. Price and I are approaching a year of
this crazy thing we've been doing now, which is just wicky-fucking-wacky.
Long distance has been shown to extend NRE some, sure, but some, man. This is NOT "some." I still get antsy and wiggly as hell
before we see each other, even before the phone rings when we
schedule talk times. When I get surprise calls during the day,
just for you-know-who to say some mushy something at me, it still
makes my whole freaking day. I've let this man see more of my
dirty laundry than anyone, and he loves me to bits. I am with
someone who, for the first time in my life, I have absolute confidence
would do everything in his power to avoid hurting me. I am with
someone with whom I can be utterly myself, and who I simply enjoy
immensely. I don't even kick his ass as bad in my sleep as I usually
do anyone else who has the terrible misfortune of trying to sleep
within a ten mile radius of me (nope, I really never stop moving,
not even in my sleep). I am with someone who has made my already-damn-good
vision of the rest of my life at least 50% better. THAT, m'dears,
is fuckin' COOL.
Last week, I awoke one morning to a giant mass of flowers at my
door, and my partner was just as excited to send them as I was
to get them, okay? We WILL want to throttle one another a'plenty
over time, we know this for a fact. We intend to keep cream pies
and squirt guns on the ready in the fridge for just these occasions.
That silly human nature issue notwithstanding, I hit the jackpot
here, kids.
I can't get too squishy today, because given the holiday, it just
seems too gauche. However, I also can't overlook an easy opportunity
to say thanks to the energy of the universe, my sweetheart, Sofia,
and all the pugs and the gatas in our hood, my third-grade-teacher,
all the little people.... sorry, I couldn't help it.
I'm very grateful, that's the thing. I feel like I fucking won
that partner lottery, when I was sure I didn't bother buying a
ticket. And I am kee-razy in love. Still. Weirdness.
* * *
Believe it or not, I still have lots more to say, but zero time
to say it in. I ended up getting a lot less done today than I'd
planned, largely because Briana called in the early afternoon
and asked if she could come hang out for a bit. A bit turned into
six hours. I still got some of my chores done while she was here,
but not as many as I'd have liked to. So it goes: it was nice
to spend the day with her, and I needed the downtime. As it turns
out, Becca is accompanying me to New York next week, so it's a
good week for me on the friend frontier as well.
(Plus there's that thing where Mr. Price will be here in less
than 72 hours, at which time I fully intend to drown him in many potentially
unromantic but quite delectable gifties. Last visit, we couldn't
do a countdown, because it made him an anxiety-addled wreck, as
it was also then a countdown to him shooting his film. I bet you
thought I was just being nice and sparing you, didn't you? Oh,
how hope springs eternal.) |
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February 10th, Two Thousand Six
- To: Martin Olav Sabo (Minnesota, 5th District)
Jim McDermott (Washington, 7th District)
Janice D. Schakowsky (Illinois, 9th District)
CC: comments@whitehouse.gov
In the last week, a slim majority of the state representatives
for this country voted against the poor, and against women and
children. I am writing to thank you, the representatives of my
home state, Illinois, the state I currently reside in, Minnesota
and the state where I am moving to this spring, Washington, for
voting against the 2006 budget reconciliation bill.
Our federal administration raises high the starry flag of "family
values." It identifies itself to be greatly concerned with the
health and well-being of children. Yet, it continues to send many
of those children off to a needless war when they become legal
adults, a war which has cost us hundreds of millions of dollars
and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives. This in the
guise of "liberating" those of another country, who we instead
continue to terrorize and strip vital resources from; this in
the guise of protecting our citizens who are in far greater danger
from our own government than from any overseas threat.
As you know, our administration continues to massively increase
the widest income gap we have had in twenty-five years with bills
like this, making the poorest families poorer to make the wealthy wealthier,
all the while demonizing and blaming the poor for the increasingly
desperate position they are placed in by those who have pledged
to protect them. While H.R. 4297 easily passed, providing the
most wealthy even greater tax reductions, the results of this
budget bill will now make it even more difficult for the children
of the poorest of our citizens to even go to college, have their
basic healthcare needs met, and have a quality of life which is
even a fraction of the quality which the most wealthy enjoy.
Both my parents are the children of European immigrants. One half
came here to escape fascism, the other to escape starvation. Both
had great faith in the principles this country stated to hold;
both thought they would find neither of those things in the United
States. All were salt-of-the-earth, hardworking people: on the
day of his death, my maternal great-grandfather literally waited
until the whole of his day's work was done to die. All of the
women in my family, including my own mother, bore children which
they did not have the information, means or the agency to choose
to become pregnant with; reared those children on incredibly limited
means despite working themselves to the bone. Very few members
of my family have ever been able to become even middle-class,
despite their hard and constant labor. All were or are taxpayers.
Some were or are veterans. All did or do continue to work as hard
as they can, and support their families as best they can, despite
this country often making it exceedingly difficult for them to
do so.
Many of the members of my family have had need of state and federal
aid for healthcare and childcare. Under the current budgetary
cuts, it's highly likely that I, for instance, would have been
able to have an emergency surgery that saved my life, the eyeglasses
I needed so I could have a basic public education, or the food
stamps we needed at several times during our lives -- despite
all of us working harder and for longer hours than many -- to
survive.
My father is disabled and homeless. While he may not be a textbook
example of a patriot, my father -- as well as my mother -- made
great sacrifices to try and make this country better through civil
rights and antiwar activism. Over the years, I have watched my
father's circumstances become increasingly more desperate, and
these budgetary changes mean they will only become more so, a
fact which is terribly painful for me to know.
I am a social activist as well, working primarily in sexuality
education and advocacy for young women. Many of those women utilize
state and federal healthcare services for their reproductive health
and to obtain contraception, especially in areas where private
care is either unaffordable or inaccessible. Our current administration
intentionally furthers that lack of access with passed and pending
bills to increasingly limit young women's privacy in healthcare,
their access to contraception and emergency contraception and
abortion, even to needed prenatal care. Our administration is
largely antiabortion, and purportedly pro-child, and yet it continues
to limit women's ability to prevent unwanted pregnancy; it continues
to make rearing healthy children more and more difficult.
All too many young women of this country have pregnancy and STI
risks from rapes or sexual coercion (one in two rape victims in
the U.S. are women under the age of 18; one in six are women under
the age of 12, according to the Department of Justice): while STI treatment,
contraception and emergency contraception do not repair their
trauma, they minimize it greatly, and allow them at least some
choice when it comes to the consequences they bear, often alone,
from being victimized. As well, abstinence-only sex education
handicaps even those who do become sexually active -- by choice
or by force -- by keeping information from them about how to protect
themselves: private organizations like mine, states which protest
federal abstinence-only sex education mandates, and most of all,
public health agencies which provide accurate information and
reproductive health and contraception services are incredibly
vital. They save lives, they protect a basic quality of life for
women and children. Abstinence-only aims -- for sex to only occur
within marriage -- do not protect women: they do not protect them
from legally binding themselves to partners who will not allow
them sexual choices, from unwanted and unplanned pregnancies,
from STIs their husbands will and do pass on to them.
Our administration continues to set millions of women up -- many
of whom have limited or no say as to when they have sex with their
partners -- to become pregnant against their will; to bear children
they may not want and/or cannot afford, children who will be without
some of their most basic needs. With $50 million more dollars
a year now allotted to fatherhood and "marriage promotion" programs,
not only are women in domestically abusive relationships -- which
kill at least 1,400 women every year in the U.S., which in total
have killed more women than the Vietnam war killed soldiers; relationships
in which an estimated two to four million women each year in the
U.S. are in -- put at greater risks, those in poverty, men and
women alike, who DO follow the directives of these programs and
marry will now be further penalized for doing so. Two parent families in need of aid are now required
to work even more hours than ever; to spend more time away from
their children, parenting them less, and at the same time, have
less funds available to them to help pay for their childcare.
How is our government pro-family again?
While tax dollars pay for Medicare to cover recreational Viagra
prescriptions for men, while millions of dollars each year are
allocated to these marriage promotion programs, states can now choose to deny women on Medicaid contraception and basic family planning services. This is especially upsetting given that those states which voted
in favor of this, who are most likely to choose to deny women contraception and family planning are those
states in which women are the most poor, and have the least agency
financially and in their sexual relationships. So, we continue
to pay for men to have erections whenever they'd like, while at
the same time cutting programs which hold men accountable for
what they do sexually, while women pay greater and greater costs
for the pregnancies which occur via those men, plenty against
their will, plenty which could be prevented easily and cheaply
with contraception.
Our nation has waged a war across the world, but it is grotesquely
minor compared to the war our country continues to wage against
the women and children right here at home. Many in our nation are terrified by a faraway, unseen threat,
due to an attack that harmed thousands, and yet, fewer and fewer
are concerned by the known threat, our own administration, which
continues to do tangible, very real harm to billions of its citizens; which puts the lives and well-being of the least
privileged at intentional risk to provide greater comforts for
those who are already more comfortable than most of us can ever
fathom being. Our own administration IS a known terrorist, terrorizing
its own citizens as well as others abroad. Poverty is a far greater,
more damaging and more insidious weapon than any bomb could ever
be.
You voted against this bill, so all of what I have said here is
likely not news to you. But I wanted to share it, in the hopes
it might posit a strong reminder of the great value your vote
and influence holds and will continue to hold when you vote for
and represent the best interests of all of our citizens, especially
our most vulnerable and most in-need. We're counting on you to
continue, and to become even more vocal an advocate than you are
now. Even with our limited means, agency and privilege, some of
us -- and hopefully, many more than that -- will continue to work
as hard as we can to protect our own rights and those of our fellow
citizens, stateside and internationally, of all genders, races
and classes. With representatives like yourself doing the same,
we just may be able to someday feel again the sort of faith in
this nation and the principles of it that brought my families
here, the principles which make us want to stay and continue to
fight for, even when, quixotically, it is the toxic tide of our
own nation we are fighting against.
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February 8th, Two Thousand Six: My apologies for both my sporadic posting, and the fact that
my life is so crazy right now that when I do get a chance to write,
I rarely have the time to code it the same day. So, until wordpress
is fully installed here (finally) and worked into the existing
site, you may be getting entries for a few days all at once, and
sometimes I'll be wedging older entries in after I have posted
newer ones.
At the moment, my dining room is a literal sea of boxes and papers,
while I'm blaring the Jayhawks' Rainy Day Music to chill myself out (the title track always makes me feel better
-- it's also an awesome tune for biking on a summer's evening,
for the record). The last two days, I felt unable to do nearly
anything but to start to go through the piles of papers and records
that fill the buffet here. Almost 20 years of living on your own,
about fifteen of which you've been running your own businesses?
Makes a LOT of papers. I reserved the truck on Monday, which is
likely why I suddenly felt extra pressure to get a leg up on packing.
In just fifty days, I'm outta here. Gulp!
(And in the better-sort-of-gulp department, a mere nine days until
my sweetheart comes back here to visit for the weekend. Yippee!
It's a very swell thing to have a person in your life who is BOTH
your great excitement and your favorite solace. Plus, it's a Dykes
Do Drag weekend, the last set of shows I'll be able to see, and
the only set Mark will have seen, and I've been promised some
very nice show goodies. Everyone should come: it's always a good
time, and rumour has it I usually make it more so. Not always
just in a bathroom stall "For a good time, call..." kind of way, either.)
I was hoping to be able to shoot today, but there wasn't a single
clear space in the place. On top of that, likely because being
back and forth between cities has limited the time I have to train,
I just feel blecky in my own skin lately. Often, when I feel all
gross or have weird body moments, I go ahead and shoot anyway,
figuring it's my job artistically to capture myself feeling tired,
uninspired or feeling ugly or less healthy than I'd like when
it happens, rather than only doing work when I feel good or look
my best. But doing that involves an extra level of vulnerability
I'm just not up to right now. The bouts of illness didn't help,
and today, a case of cramps was the proverbial nail in the coffin.
Chances are good, I'm afraid, that until I move, the photographic
work per portraiture, especially self-portraiture, is going to
be limited.
Everything seems to be taking me twice as long to do these days.
I sometimes have the unfortunate reaction of becoming frozen with
overwhelm, unable to do ANYTHING at all when I have too much to
get done sometimes. Realizing, for instance, that the ginormous
list I made here last week was missing big, vital things I also
needed to do in the next two months -- like my taxes -- made me
feel exhausted without having done a single thing.
I have a new portable 4x6 printer I have had for weeks now and
I haven't had even one minute to try it out. h hate getting new
toys and having no time to play with them. I still have synchronizing
to do between the my main computer, the old laptop and the new
one. I have photos that need editing that are piling up en masse,
and I earnestly want to edit them, even though that's not the
fun part, I just do not know where to find the time.
Brandon popped by unexpectedly yesterday, and besides being a
great friend, we usually have an awesome work dynamic together,
whether he's working for me or I for him. He's only working part-time
right now, so I just hired him for one or two days a week again
for the next six weeks or so. He's totally down with that work
being anything and everything -- from packing to benefit organizing
to filing. So while that tightens my tight budget even further,
I think it's going to help me out a lot and make me feel a lot
more capable.
Briana -- my friend and neighbor in the "fifth month" photographs
-- just moved out yesterday, which makes me incredibly sad. We've
gotten really close the last six months, and almost daily spend
one or two hours hanging out, share dinners, walk our dogs together
and so forth. The owner of our building who is developing our
units into condos is one seriously classy dude. He will NOT even
consider evicting the two asshat kids who live in another unit
who have cocaine-fueled, ceiling-shaking parties at all hours,
and even has told us not to call the police on them when they're
unresponsive anymore, because that "looks bad for the building."
However he WILL threaten eviction for the single, disabled women
on a fixed income who is now nearly seven months pregnant. Thankfully,
a wonderful friend of mine and her partner were able to offer
Briana temporary housing. But it still sucks that she and Elvis
aren't here. It feels strange in the building without them, and
Sofi keeps running down there barking at the door to see them
both. Poor, confused pup.
I suck at transitions, always have. I hate being in between in
anything, especially with where I live. Minneapolis feels weird
to still be in, especially with things phasing out as I'm still
here. I'm very ready to be in Seattle, for many reasons, but one
of them is that holding unto things here is hard. Becca and I
went to see Flogging Molly last Sunday evening. Bouncing around
with her in the mosh pit -- when not getting bruised, how did
I used to do that nightly sometimes in high school? -- I had this
giant lump in my throat at the thought of not being able to go
out and do things like that with one of the closest friends I
have ever had in my life, my closest friend for six years and
some now. And how much I have to do -- having to go to New York
now, too -- is doubly annoying because I have less than two months
to be with my friends here, and I hate feeling like I can hardly
find any time for them.
I have a list to finish really organizing to do my level best
to at least plan out what I need to do and when I can do it. Some
of managing this sanely and efficiently, I think, is going to
involve me accepting that I can't do everything. (Smell a familiar
theme in my life? Oh yeah.) I need to separate the wheat from
the chaff, as it were; figure out what NEEDS doing, and what can
sit on hold for a couple months, or be worked on less often without
catastrophic effects. I'm so bad at this sort of thing: looks
like I found Brandon's first assignment. |
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| February 6th, Two Thousand Six: Friends and patrons-only entry. (It contains abuse triggers for me, doubt it will for anyone
else, but heads-up just in case.) |
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February 5th, Two Thousand Six: I just went ahead and purchased the UBB license for the new project,
and have also finalized the two domain names associated, so I
want to chat about it a bit, because I have been dying to.
I really don't like some ways in which the web has changed over
the years. One thing that's been bugging the hell out of me is
that a handful of years back, there were a few good women's communities,
and most importantly, progressive younger women's communities
FOR them. Places they could talk as a group, places which served
content that earnestly addressed them, their whole lives, not
just them as consumers. And not just young women as sexual fodder
for someone, who, by virtue of being willing to be sexual fodder,
also get the benefit of being able to speak and be heard now and
then. What a fine trade! Oh boy!
That is what REALLY troubles me: to see that, really, most of
the visible, large-scale communities of women I see are essentially
online brothels, often packaged up all shiny and presented in
such a way as to make it seem like they are communities FOR women
when they're nothing of the sort. Sure, they might ALSO keep journals,
have discussions, have some sort of community, but the main pull
and draw of sites like Suicide Girls and the lot are naked, usually
young women for someone's profit. If they weren't getting naked,
very few people would be there reading or chatting.
(Might I be wrong about that? Who knows, maybe. But having been
online as long as I have, having watched the formation of most
of these sits while they happened, knowing quite a lot about these
sorts of demographics, I seriously doubt it, especially considering
that the journals/blogs of the women involved and the discussion
areas are not exactly...well, particularly deep. Most are written
with really substandard writing skills, most are for self-promotion.
Mind, I am not about to criticize women for self-promoting in
that context: it's about the only hope they have of making anything
close to equitable income at some point for the work they're doing
now. But vibrant, well-rounded, supportive women-for-women community
it isn't. Most readers active in those communities are in it primarily
for the text just as often as those who buy Playboy primarily
for the articles, okay?)
Scarleteen is majority female. It always has been. But even there,
I see a lot of decent discussions which are formed by the women,
about the women, but derailed by guys, even when that truly is
not intended. Case in point: there is a discussion which started
with young women talking about how they feel about their breasts.
It's very candid, it's mostly not about sex. It wasn't stated
to be women-only, but clearly the way the discussion was going,
most users felt that vibe and ran with it. And then some guy goes
in and tells them he loves ALL breasts, that in his mind, all
breasts are lovely and sexy and nice... and the discussion isn't
quite the same after.
These girls were not -- for a refreshing change -- looking to
be validated. Nor to be sexualized. I'm pretty sure this guy's
heart was in the right place, but it really degraded the tone
of the discussion: essentially, it reminded those girls very distinctly
that their breasts were also sexual objects, that they're being
watched and evaluated -- even if the evaluation is positive --
per their body parts. It detracted from their OWN feelings about
their bodies they were discussing.
I'm not about to suggest full-on separatism for young women, but
I do think (more and more the older I get, too) that SOME women-born-women
(and I'll talk more about that in a sec) community is really vital, especially for young women. Also
incredibly vital, especially at this juncture in national and
international politics, is young women not feeling the need to
qualify EVERY goddamn statement they make in advocacy of their
own rights with, "I'm not a feminist, but..." Even more importantly,
I really want to provide young women a means to learn, early on,
to network together, to work as a team, to understand each other
as allies, not as competitors.
The age group we're shooting for here is 10-22.
So, here's the plan:
• Awesome, free blogging software for a chosen group of women
in that age group. We'll likely start with 20 of them or so, and
base those choices on interest, on agreement to a very basic set
of rules and aims, on a couple essays from them. There will be
basic guidelines per them writing (or posting art, etc. whatever
their media) fairly professionally within their developmental
level, and there will be some basic etiquette required of commentors/outside
participants, so LiveJournal, et al, this is not.
• One main blog which a handful of them "edit," choosing entries
and posted articles from the individual blogs and journals, as
well as content from elsewhere.
• A discussion community which has both women-only sections AND
a couple mixed-gender sections. As well, feminist women over 22
will be present to help moderate, elicit and participate in discussions,
as well as providing mentorship. Like the boards at Scarleteen,
this will be a very actively moderated community.
The site/organization as a whole will be run by a community board
of mixed-age women, with a majority vote always going to the younger
women. The point is to make this space FOR them and ABOUT them,
and to help them do that, rather than to tell them how, because
we aren't them: they know what they need and want better than
we do. Another goal is to pair up women of all ages involved in
this per duties with the site so that the younger women can essentially
glean skills which they're interested in having, and glean them
from other women.
In time, we're hoping to expand this via donations, other orgs,
sound advertisers to pay the basic costs, especially if they increase
(I can cover them now, and just do a little swap where we run
an ad for ST once the site opens to recoup the money I'm investing),
but also to organize scholarship funds, annual gifts to a chosen
group of organizations which benefit and advocate for young women
and so forth.
I don't have daughters of my own. Chances are quite good I may
not biologically, either by choice, health or timing. But because
of so many years of teaching and advocacy for young women, I feel
something akin to mothering for the young women of the world.
I want to do what I can to give them something, because in my
mind, we're all collective parents of the world's collective children.
(Which is some of why I become exceptionally cranky when people
start talking shit about how crappy it is we all have to pay taxes
in for child welfare.) We owe the generations before us AND after
us a debt of our respect and our care, as far as I'm concerned,
especially if we're serious about wanting to make the world a
better place to live in.
Some of what's kept me from trying to reproduce in my life is
that the world now just isn't one I want to give to a child, and
I feel like my energy is best placed on doing what I can to make
that world for the kids that are already here, for everyone's
kids, and maybe for mine, should I choose to do that in the near
future (I'm no spring chicken), rather than rearing my own, which
would take a whole lot of time away from doing that.
I want to give a gift, in short, and I think this is a really
good gift I can give, and I'm excited TO give. I've been really
lucky in my life to have some seriously exceptional mentors, so
I always feel I owe that same energy back when I can, and I have
always had really good energy/relationships with young people,
so it's all good.
Already, I have an awesome group of women forming, and from the
looks of things, it really WILL work out as an active, collective
project, not just something of mine. In just a few small shout-outs
to young women over the last couple of days, I am getting back
a LOT of interest from some mighty cool young women who have been
looking for EXACTLY what we are doing with no success. I felt
pretty strongly that there was a need for this, but it's nice
to have it so enthusiastically verified. It's equally awesome
to have so many women in my close and more distant social and
networking circle so stoked about it. I think we can help make
a seriously amazing thing here, and it really has me seat-wiggling.
I think a project like this could also -- on a more selfish note
-- help open the door for me to do more of the sort of work I
want to be doing in the future in this vein. I also think it all
fits in very nicely with everything else I already do, with the
direction I've been going in. We're all really, really, really excited about this.
(Per the WBW thing, here's the deal. I am 100% transfriendly,
always have been. But, especially for very young women, who are
really just starting to suss out what it means for them to be
assigned female gender AND sex from birth, treated as women from
day one, without choice, I think it's important to limit this
to that per the blogs/journals and most of the forums. I really,
really hope that providing one or two all-gender, all-sex forums
works: sometimes it's better to go all or nothing, because what
can happen is that the inclusive sections end up more antagonistic
and less productive because people just want to show up to kvetch
about not being allowed to post wherever they want, to be entitled
to everything they want (which is more than a bit ironic and odd
to do in a feminist forum, to say the least). Here's hoping. The
point is to advocate for young women's voices being heard, for
them being visible, because they simply do not have the privileges
and visibility that those sexed male from birth have, even if
some of those sexed male are or choose to be gendered differently.
There are plenty of mixed-gender forums and blog communities online:
the intent is to provide more exclusive community for young women
because there isn't really any.) |
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January 31st, Two Thousand Six: We got it!
happyhappyhappyhappyhappydance
Last night, my sweetheart went ahead and signed his half of the
lease to secure the over-100-years-old rental house I was so hoping
we'd get. So, I feel fully allowed to prattle on about it now
obsessively.
(For those friends who have already had to hear me do so, my sincerest
apologies. And yes: I went ahead and linked to some photos, which
I will again qualify by saying: it was night, I had to use a flash.
I hate flashes, but we needed reference. Nothing looks quite as
shabby as it does in these photos, and even if it did, I could
still fix it, because I will give myself the credit of mentioning
that I am a wonder in the refinishing/rehabbing department. This
is one of the perks of growing up poor, dykey and ferociously
independent.)
Bear in mind, that for almost the whole of my life, I have lived
in apartments. When I was 11, we rented a very small house for
one year. From 12 -15, when I left home, my mother and stepfather
bought one, but flatly, that house never held any enjoyment for
me, save finally having a room of my own, because my stepfather
was in it and very not-good things happened to me in it. And even
that was 20 years ago. So, it's been a long wait.
Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the upstairs bathroom has the
required clawfoot tub in a little cozy alcove, including the feet (my apartment now has the tub, but the feet
are not present: it is instead on a strange sort of riser). Every
closet in the place goes waaaaay back and back in twisty-weird, hidey-hole ways: Narnia closets. A
wood stove in the living room, an odd little trash incinerator in the kitchen. Checkerboard flooring through the foyer and into the kitchen.
Note: the presence of checkerboard anywhere is always an omen
that I should live in a place. Every single one of the best places
I have ever lived have had at least some checkerboard somewhere,
so when I see it, I get excited and very interested. In this case,
when the front door was opened and yards of it appeared right
at my feet, I began to jump up and down in my stripey socks like
a lunatic. The jumping did not stop the whole time we were looking
at the place. Shockingly, this appears to be what made the owner
-- who has saved the place from the greedy developer's wrecking
ball more than once -- want us to have it. Let it never be said
my hyperkinetic jubilance accomplishes nothing.
Bit I digress. LOADS of wood: winding stairs, moldings, pillars, wood floors in the living room and dining room. Two of the upstairs bedrooms have vintage linoleum (one pattern of which is so-so, the other of which is totally
rockin'). Laundry will be in the HOUSE, not down the block, not
four flights down in some dingy room. We can paint it however
we like, and the owner is giving us a generous paint allowance.
The back bedroom on the first floor is currently crappy, but easily
fixable as studio space for me: two windows should provide plenty
of light, and because they face the backyard, that'll give photo
subjects, including myself, adequate privacy.
I did say backyard. A BIG backyard, and I'm allowed to garden however I choose. A whole, big backyard
full of grass and dirt just waiting for my happy fingers. A big
backyard I can let my dog play and laze about in. At the back
of that yard also lives a rather dilapidated -- but likely useable
for odd projects and photography -- carriage house with a loft at the top. The front of the house has a porch currently
shaded by a massive cedar tree, and then a little more yard.
And that's not all!
It's in Ballard, which means Mark is beside himself with glee. (Mr. Price is
not a handyperson or a fixer-upper, that's my gig. He can't exactly
visualize what I can with the house, but he's rolling with it,
trusting both my eye and my skills, which rocks. I very much appreciate
having a male partner who so eloquently expresses himself in this
matter with such poetry as, "It's so awesome you're a dyke, because
I can't fix shit." And that is a good thing, because I tend to
be a bit of a megalomaniac when it comes to this stuff, so I'd
much rather have someone around to either stay out of my way while
I repair and refinish, or be willing to take orders on what to
do without a lot of questioning as to why.)
It's in Ballard, a very short walk from the weekly farmer's market.
A Buddhist temple is a short walk up. Two blocks away there is
a print shop, a framing shop AND a camera shop. A short walk to
the cobblestone road of Ballard Ave. and the locks. A few blocks
to Market St. with everything I could possibly need right on it,
including the Sip N'Ship, which has coffee AND a means to ship
all my packages AND vegan goodies. A few blocks to Mark's favorite
bar (we have yet to determine if this is actually a pro or a con,
mind, but at least he'll always be easy to find). A few blocks
to the best bike trail in the city, and a short bike ride to the
beach at Golden Gardens.
And the price is totally right. Both of our expenses are going
to go u somewhat, especially during the winters, but not horribly
so. In effect, I'll be paying a couple hundred bucks more a month,
tops, for a massive increase in space: for BOTH a studio and a
separate office, for a yard, for a big kitchen, for living space
that isn't mushed into work space. For the ability to live with
my sweetie without either of us losing personal space. If I'd
been paying my full-rent here, not the reduced rent I pay for
caretaking, the increase would be a mere hundred bucks. And since
I will no longer have to accept or deny photo clients based on
if I'm comfy with them walking through my bedroom to get to my
studio, my income will likely increase to offset that pretty easily.
Oh, hey, wait! There's one other thing!
I get to live with THE LOVE OF MY LIFE.
Kind of an extra perk, that.
...and before you get to the super-stressed, full-on-frazzle of
the next entry, allow me a few moments to sum up my last Seattle
trip. They're mostly joyful, I promise. Well, except for the paralysis,
but isn't that always how it goes?
First of all, Mr. Price is crazy. As is everyone else in independent
film, I have decided. Seriously, I had no idea the amount of work,
stamina, networking, team-coordination, money and the lot an eleven-minute
film required. I wasn't short on respect for my paramour before
this, but it has amplified greatly since watching him work. I
tell you one thing, I won't ever be looking at filmmaking the
same way again. And I need to get a leg up on sorting and editing
all the stills and behind-the-scenes shots from it today and tomorrow.
Then there was The Funny Paralysis. I'm okay now, I swear, save some residual neck pains. But that
was distinctly Not Fun, and if it never happens again, it'll be
way too soon. Mark and I had some brief talking about what to
do to reduce the likelihood of my getting migraines at all, and
it's a toughie. I've had them on and off, sometimes chronically,
since I was in my early teens. Nearly all of the work I do is
incredibly stressful, but it needs doing. I use my eyes intensely
all day, every day. I work very hard not to be on medications,
but it may be time for me to see someone about beta-blockers.
I could also still stand to find more in-person outlets for talking
about the stresses of my work candidly. Really, I just think I
need more kisses. The doctor at the urgent care didn't say anything
about that, but then, I wasn't all that impressed with her, anyway
(for the record doctors? Don't send a patient home with the words,
"Get a full checkup soon, and be sure your doctor looks into MS."
Just don't).
There was househunting, most of which feels irrelevant as we have
a place. And it so clearly was The Place, especially considering
that the place we saw right after it cost even more, was in a
crappy location, and the seventies had thrown up over every square
inch of it. Sculpted carpet. Wood paneling EVERYWHERE. Sliding
room partitions. Avocado appliances. Mr. price and I agreed that
the only way to live there would have been if we pretended that
every day was a costume party, and I greeted him in the evenings
with feathered hair and satin jogging shorts and let him snort
cocaine off my hips. In a word, it was ishy. We also had another
place where we -- Mark, his/my brother Brian and myself -- waited
a good fifteen minutes in the dark for the agent to show up, and
then when he did (in a car with a vanity plate which read DAWG
and some series of digits), he then fumbled in his car for nearly
another ten minutes, giggling with his galpal without so much
as a shout-out to us to let us know it was him. I suggested we
all run and hide behind the large shrubbery since he was being
such an ass, but surprisingly, it was Mr. Price who vetoed this
action. Brian and myself were all over it. So cool when someone
else who isn't me is willing to be the grownup.
Which reminds me: in the airport flying out this time, I found
myself standing ten fee away from a woman who was seriously me
in 20 years. The stripey socks, the ass-kicking shoes, the crazy,
all-over-the-place hair streaked with grey, the big-ass smile,
the spunky disposition, the bag spilling over with books. So amazed
was I by this, and so small my filter, that I shouted out, "Holy
crap! You look like me all grown up!" To this she quickly replied,
with a mock frown, "Are you saying I look grown up?" I explained
I was saying exactly the opposite, and that was the total beauty
of the thing. She endlessly repeated how overjoyed my verbal vomit
made her, and we had a nice little chat and many appreciative
mirror-looks at one another then and after the flight. It was
just a really cool thing.
What else? Many, many kisses. Much with the fantastic sex. Adventures in Olympia. (I was hoping to do some nudes there, but alas, small children
at the cabin next door kept window peeping, so.) Time spent with
good friends, and awesome time spent with my new brother (we have
gladly claimed sibling status) who is just the fucking tops. Photo-taking. Soaking, planning, drinking, dreaming, and amazement with green
things in the middle of January. All in all, both of our stress
levels notwithstanding, an awesome visit, and all the better to
culminate with us finding out we now have a secured place in which
to do this thing we do full-time and on-site.
This girl's got more happydancing in her future.
(One more note: for a lot of reasons, most of which are obvious
to longtime readers of mine, I am terribly sorrowful that we've
lost Coretta Scott King. Martin Luther King was an amazing, incredible
man who did amazing, incredible things, but often the work Coretta
did was only annexed as a part of his; she as a part of him. To
call her "King's widow" is a pretty serious slight. In her own
right, she was an incredible woman, one who not only carried on
MLK's work and family after his death but also her OWN work, which
included working for the rights of women -- King helped with scores
of feminist organizations -- and children as well as gay and lesbian
rights and antiwar activism.
Suffice it to say, that loss hangs especially heavy with the confirmation
of Alito, and reading Bush talking about Coretta Scott King in
glowing terms -- though, of course, in the context of her "carrying
on for her husband" -- is about enough to make me violently ill.
I don't want the names of peacemakers touching his nasty little
lips. When he said, "Mrs. King's lasting contributions to freedom
and equality have made America a better and more compassionate
nation," he may as well have finished by saying, "Which totally
sucks, because it makes my work making that nation into paranoid,
power-hungry, xenophobic lunatics like myself and undoing all
those freedoms harder for me.")
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January 30th, Two Thousand Six: Back home. A little less tired and worn 'round the edges, though
still more so than I'd like.
I predict the next three months are going to be a time of some
pretty serious trial in my life. I just found out that I have
to go to New York to be deposed by the Department of Justice for
the ACLU/COPA case at the end of February, when I was planning to not leave
Minneapolis at all for that month.
Mind you, this is important. It's important because it's one of
those things where it's me putting my money where my mouth is
about being a full-time activist. It's important particularly
to me, because while I don't support the COPA period, and have opposed it from when it was the CDA (the DA,
would be, for the record, "Decency Act"), it really would screw
up Scarleteen. In essence, anything which requires an over-18
age screen for content construed by "community standards" as "adult"
-- read: sex, not, you know, that piddly little stuff that traumatizes
no one like violence and sexism and racism -- keeps the exact
users out we cater to, for whom these issues are NOT adult, they're
tailored right to their developmental level, and for whom they
are not entertainment, but education. We serve users over that
age, but the most critical ages we serve are legal minors, because
their access to the information is far more limited, and so little
of it which is available to them is tailored to their particular
needs.
It's also a feminist issue. Feminist on the part of all of what
I do -- I'm part of the case as Heather Corinna, and all I do,
not just as a rep for Scarleteen -- and protecting my right, as
a woman, to express myself, as a woman and for women, about "adult"
topics and my readers rights, as women, to be able to access same,
which is huge in a culture where women's sexuality is so invisible
and so often held hostage by male sexuality and male presentation
of female sexuality. Feminist because with the lack of access
to sites like Scarleteen, it is young women who will suffer most,
since it is young women who become pregnant, young women who contract
STIs the most and suffer long-term health problems from them,
young women who are in danger of rape and coercion and domestic
abuse most. (Of course, given the income inequity between men
and women, something like the COPA also means that women are essentially
given less free access to the web, as less of them have credit
cards. Same goes for people of color, low-incomes as a whole,
et cetera. In addition, doing these verifications would be costly,
which punished independent media, but even more so women's independent
media.) To add to that, understand that something like the COPA
in NO WAY inhibits mainstream pornographers: in fact, it benefits
them by giving the even more access to moneymaking schemes. They
would only become MORE visible, while independents and women in
these arenas would become less so. Children and young adults would
very likely be seeing more of exactly what the conservatives who
want to COPA claim to stand against, and far less to counter that
content and approach. If you doubt that, or think mainstream porn
is endangered by this, know that the last round of the COPA had
a porn giant testifying FOR the COPA and for the government. And
not because they're all concerned for the innocent little children.
Please. The spam I get in my mailbox every day, the text on many
mainstream porn sites tells me EXACTLY how much respect and care
they have for young people, especially young women.
It's a little more taxing on me because just about everyone else
on the case is a collective business, like Salon.com, who isn't
trying to drum up docs without loads of lackeys to do so; who
aren't really taking any personal risk at all. I'm guessing that
too, whoever of the other plaintiffs deposed aren't inclined to
vomit at the prospect of public speaking. Probably they also didn't
grow up around the sort of parent that told them about fascism
and government corruption at the age of four. Probably, unlike
someone else we know, those folks won't have to brainwash themselves
to avoid saying something like, "So you're the feds. Huh. You look shorter than I expected. Nice
tie, is that Gucci?"
So, there's that little thing. Oy.
What else do February, March and April hold?
Well, today, after just getting home late last night, my hired
tech for the sites jumped on adding all the things I ordered to
the sites, so there's a bunch of grunt work I have to do there,
likely taking up a good deal of time through the next month. Speaking
of grunt work, my place here is a post-packing disaster that needs
a serious scrubbing.
Speaking of serious scrubbing, I'll need to go to Seattle the
first weekend of March, most likely. I say "most likely," because
I don't want to jinx anything, but we applied to rent a house.
An AMAZING, 100-year-old four-bedroom house, right in the heart
of Ballard. Where the last tenants lived for sixteen years, tenants
who, from the looks and smells of things, stopped with a lot of
housecleaning fifteen years ago. Place will needs a hardcore,
two-day-on-hands-and-knees scrub-a-thon, maybe the start of some
painting. I could show you pictures, but given they were taken
at night, with a flash, pre-cleaning and such, you'd likely think
I was insane. On the other hand, when I finished up with the place,
you'd think I was a goddess.
Packing. I need to pack like a crazyperson this month. I need
to get organized for an indoor yard sale of a bunch of my stuff
by the second week of March.
Adoption. Of one of my two remaining cats, that is. It's weird
enough to only have two, now, but as I mentioned before, over
the last few years, my allergies to Zoe have gotten so bad, I
can no longer pet her, hod her, or even sit next to her without
breaking out in hives and having my nose start running down my
face. Moving her to Seattle was just a no-go: if I'm that allergic,
Mark will seriously die, and that notwithstanding, life as a cat
where no one can pet you is just plain cruel. Plus, she really
hates the dog, always has. I asked around for a long time, but
finally got lucky after placing an ad for her a month or so ago.
She now has a three-woman household to move to where they want
but one cat, have had an extended home-stay with her, and are
delighted to give her a home. That's completely awesome, but I
have two weeks now to part with her, which is a little loaded
since I've had her since the minute she was born until 14 years
now.
The Scarleteen benefit, to take place not even 48 hours before
I shove outta this town in a big truck (which I need to get a
license to drive in the next two weeks, too). I have a location
to secure, acts to book, the whole nine years. I have one or two
helpers for this, but was really, really hoping for more. That's
kind of the story of my life with any sort of collective project.
I have another I'm in the starting stages of work for right now,
and my leader-personality-vibe is so strong that I really need
to find new and exciting ways of saying THIS IS NOT MY PROJECT. This is a project I think X-group needs, which I want to help
get started and which I want to help manage, but this is NOT a
Heather Corinna Production, which means I need people who want
in it when it has started to be in GETTING it started. I don't
know how to make that clear, and it's kicking my ass. (I also
don't know if it's even a matter of me being unclear with collective
projects, or people just either being lazy or not knowing how
to work a collective.)
And while I'm at that: proactive young or adult women who very
much want to help provide space for young women (10 - 22) to network
per their own burgeoning lives and feminism; to represent and
be represented as young women without having to take off their
clothes to get noticed or heard online? Email me. On a note which will be understood as related in the near future,
I have decided to reclaim the word "army." In peeking into its
etymology, I discovered its roots come from "to tie together"
and "to arm," namely via tools, which strikes me, really, as a
word of far better use for women than for the military.
Okay, I'm not even finished and looking at this list is making
me tired. I need food -- good luck to me in finding any in a place
I haven't lived in in two weeks --and a quick shot of Buffy. I'd
ask you to hold, but this sentence will be the entirety of your
pause: you won't even feel it real-time, and how cool is that?
As it turned out, I had to go to the market. But I've food in
my belly now -- hand-cut chips with vinegar and a pile of fresh
peas, no less, don't ask me why I was craving that combo -- and
thus, can go back to making lists.
Having also just come back from the Scarleteen boards (and by
the by, interesting commentary on the last entry on ST stuff here), I am reminded that I still have to work there every day while
I do all of the above. I also have to start preemptively networking
in Seattle before I move to hook up with some other similar and
related organizations, as well as hooking myself up with the feminist
orgs there as well as any guerrilla abortion-rights orgs there.
I'm sick of lobbies and placid, nice meetings, and this administration
allows us no time for those luxuries anyway, as far as I'm concerned.
That I have to explain to young people every day why women's bodies
should be sovereign, that I have to explain what things like "partial-birth"
abortion bans truly accomplish, that I have to still explain the
reality of sexual "choice" for women at all for most is a sad
testament to how very much havoc the last five years have wrought.
And don't even get me started on discussions with young women
like this or this. Or, on a non-reproductive rights issue, this one.
What else? A handful of photo clients who want prints. Note to
self: find good print lab in Seattle nearby. I really hate printing.
I know it's the part a lot of photographers adore. I am not one
of these photographers: the part I like is the act of taking the
photos. Everything afterwards is like more sex when you've already
had the best orgasm of the night. Actually, a lot of it is even
less pleasant than that. Printing makes me crazy, because I'm
too much of a perfectionist to ever be satisfied with any given
print at all, it costs too much money to do right oneself, and
it involves fighting with machines.
I also need to start a waiting list for photo clients for Seattle,
and send a note to a handful of folks here who wanted shots done
to let them know they have less than two months to have them taken.
If it is in any way possible, I have one more place I could show
here before I go -- and somewhere where I could do a whole show
of the pairings of urban decay and natural decay I've been dreaming
about -- but I don't know if I can pull it all together in time.
I need to harass my agent again about the book. I need to reserve
a moving truck. I need to schedule an appointment with my acupuncturist.
I need to do laundry now that we have it (and water -- what a
luxury!) here again. I need to deal with my finances. I need to
bomb my kitchen, since cleaning it is generally ineffectual. I
need to call my mother. I need to see if when I move, hiring a
part-time assistant will be feasible. I need more coffee. I need
a nap that lasts ten years.
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January 16th, Two Thousand Six: Last Thursday afternoon, working the Scarleteen boards, I pull
up this post.
My heart fucking breaks. Seriously, when we get these Catholic
or fundie kids who ALWAYS have done something incredibly risky,
unsafe or just sodding stupid, it really, really gets to me. It's
a double whammy for them: they have to deal with both the stupid
thing and its repercussions and often, especially if hard consequences
come into play, some serious feelings of betrayal AND a supersized plate of guilt and shame. On top of all that, they
usually have no one in their immediate lives to turn to for support.
We get it often enough that anyone within a 20-mile radius of
me who suggests that abstinence-only sex education or just total
sexual silence is the best route? Had fucking well better be giving
each year to the american adolescent psychological health association
and a bunch of suicide and rape hotlines, had better well be pro-choice
and adopting metric arseloads of babies and also better NEVER
be heard talking shit about welfare mothers. Because: GRRR.
So, I do my best to try and make my response as Catholic-friendly
as possible and really address this in her context, but also give
her the actual fucking information. But already, I'm feeling twitchy.
Because, you know, the throwing oneself down the stairs thing
is the throwing oneself down the stairs thing.
Then she posts in another area reporting that she has taken a
sodding blade to her vagina to try and "cut the baby out," because
she is convinced a pregnancy risk = a pregnancy, and because,
likely my explaining EC was me all but saying, "You need an abortion"
to her ignorant ears.
So, I freak out. There may be some girl doing this -- believe
me, girls and women have absolutely tried to do this and worse
before -- about to fucking bleed to death, and she's online and
I'm helpless.
So, I shuck aside everything else I had on my plate for the evening
and start the excruciating process of tracing IPs back to the
source, doing email searches, the whole nine yards. (And Kythryne
helps me as she can: thanks, you.)
I have done this business of crazy, rushed tracing about five
times now in Scarleteen's whole history to this extent. The time
before this was when a 14-year-old girl was reporting multiple
rapes from her boyfriend, who got her pregnant, and whose plan
for taking care of that was purportedly to beat the pregnancy
right out of her (more). That one was using a school email, which
is the best scenario possible, and that allowed me to be able
to call her principal and the school DCFS/counselor contact and
purportedly, the situation did warrant some intervention. The
time before that was a Croatian girl who was suicidal with survivor-guilt
and clearly in the red zone. That ended up being a needed intervention,
too. Point is, my instincts with these situations have a history
of unfortunately being accurate.
The whole time I am doing this, of course, my heart is beating
a mile a minute, because I am terrified for this kid, because
I am deeply angry about every situation like this, because some
days, I have spent an entire day teetering on these kinds of edges.
Even knowing very much that a troll or some teenager just bloody
bored could be fabricating this did not help calm me much, because
the imagery was just too much to be calm about.
As it turned out, we got one last post apparently from the boyfriend
who she reported calling saying that yes, she was getting to the
hospital. From the tone of the thing, I'm thinking there's a good
50% chance I just got seriously played.
Mind you, I would far rather be played than have some girl mutilating
herself in an attempt to self-abort. I'll take played ANY DAY,
thanks. Plus, given that post, if it was for real, she's okay,
too. (And if it was a bored kid, given the notices I sent to the
appropriate party, it's entirely possible bored kid's parents
are going to have a very interesting discussion with them when
their ISP notifies them of a possible medical emergency due to
an attempt to self-abort. So, there's that.)
But the combination of very real panic and helplessness, the sheer
exhaustion of ending up working a 19-hour day almost nonstop,
save a half hour phone call from Mark at lunchtime, the idea --
which isn't new to me, but at times like these it stings -- that
all of this was for some chick in need of dramatic expression
just blew me. I ended up crying just feeling so lonely and overburdened
and bottled. The post-adrenaline drop, the relief that it was
resolved, whether bonafide or not, and the exorcism of the images
I had in my head just really dealt me the final punch.
(Not to mention that someone doing that to me or anyone else just
to GET that reaction is just so incredibly cruel to do to people
who clearly are invested; who aren't just answering a hotline
because they got assigned community service or what have you.
So many people, especially young people, can be so apathetic,
I have no idea that the notion of someone like myself or many
of my volunteers being earnestly 100% invested is simply alien.
)
Just before I was about to pass out from the soulsuckage of it
all, Mr. Price called to open his ears to what had gone on in
the day; to listen to my tale of woe so I could unburden myself
from it. Had he actually been in physical proximity, I would have
availed myself of many snuggles, and quite a lot of sex, were
he down with that at the time.
It may sound trite or even obscene in context, but days like these,
with stuff like this, celebratory, life-affirming sex is just
the ticket for me. Some potent and tangible reminder that sex
isn't shameful, even though a goodly portion of the world treats
it like it is; that my female body, and my female body when sexual,
are not meant to suffer and be sources of pain. The companionship,
the intimacy, the bonding, the joy. Just the change of hormones
and the endorphins and dopamine help a lot.
As it turned out, the phone allowed us close enough, even if it
is a bit on the techy side, and I had a really overwhelming orgasm
which I obviously needed, following by a thankfully sound night
of sleep.
* * *
The day was also made both better and worse in talking a lot to
my friend Sophia (who I know will not take that personally). There
was much, much goodness. But there was also a lot of talk about
the incredible work she does with fundamentalist women in abusive
marriages that made my heart hurt a lot, and a lot if issues in
that related to the sorts of things I'm talking about above in
dealing with Xian/fundie kids and sexuality. Again, it's more
double-whammy. In both our lines of work -- and completely in
hers -- it's generally about women and girls, already marginalized,
already screwed over, who then have yet one more system of oppression
delivering a strong sucker-punch.
And for the most part, it never gets better. There are always
more people in line with more situations and stories to break
your heart, raise your anger to a fever-pitch, and sadly little
to do about it, save to keep slogging through, one person at a
time, doing what little you can to help them do what little they
can.
Note to self: find more people who do the sort of work you do,
the really hard stuff. I realize I can get a bit short sometimes
with my friends who work in areas of sexuality that aren't like
this. When I hear colleagues complaining about what (to me is)
the minutiae of creating erotic art for instance, or selling sex
toys, what have you, I feel my eyes glaze over, because even for
me, challenging as my artwork can be, that's a vacation from the
sort of stuff above. It's my respite. Friends who make or sell any kind of pornography REALLY get
the short end of my stick. While absolutely, I've got sympathy
for the misogynist crap involved much of the time, sometimes I
just don't have the time or energy to pretend with them that there
isn't misogynist, oppressive crap required in the whole works
and it's all liberating and wonderful save when it's driving them
crazy, which is much of the time; or to pretend like I'm sympathetic
with those who choose to make or sell porn when other options
are available for them, easily, then they kvetch about money,
or asshole clients, or the giant limitations built into the work,
etc. That's not to say the friends of mine involved in various
aspects of that can't still be my friends, my friends don't all
have to be in the same space as me or vice-versa, after all. Rather,
talking to those folks tends to make me feel more lost in this
regard, sometimes a little angry, and mostly, when I open my mouth
with stuff like this, reading or hearing the total overwhelm is
just really isolating. (And I'm sorry if I sound like a crappy
friend: the older I get, the more I realize I just have limited
gas to run on, and as it is, I seem to run for longer on less
of it than most. I'm also cold and tired today and have no energy
to be tactful.)
Anyone have a friend who works full-time or close to it with a
rape hotline, in a sexual health or abortion clinic, with teens
in crisis, with the sort of sex ed and women's advocacy I do,
anything like that? Because I really could use some more community on that score,
and every now and then -- much as awfulness is not something I
want more of for any of us -- being emotionally overwhelmed and
righteously enraged by someone else's work is a nice break from
feeling that way with my own.
* * *
To top it all off, we have been unable to do laundry in our building
for three weeks. I have worn nearly everything I own inside-out
and upside-down, and given what a clotheshorse I am, that is truly
saying something. Then Saturday, the heat died. Umm, it's January.
In Minnesota. I'm on the top floor of a corner unit in a hundred-year-old
building. It is not warm. My neighbor and I just sat huddled in
front of my eight-inch space heater as if it were a roaring fire.
But it gets better!
Now there is no water. At all. So, I either get to go run errands
today like a madwoman, as I have to catch a plane tomorrow, with
unbrushed teeth, greasy hair and an unwashed everything, or, to
make it a little better, I can visit my oft-homeless youth and
go down the block to the gas station with a toothbrush and washrag
and wash up in the sink there. To be perfectly frank, I'd almost
rather stay smelly, because that's a flashback I just do not need.
I had a bunch of hair hacked off last week and my white streaks
put back in, which usually nets me a few extra days of no hairwashing.
Not this many days. Members of BonJovi look better groomed than
I do at the moment.
I also overextended or tore some muscle or ligament or some such
training Saturday. That useless one that goes from behind my right
knee to my groin, you know, the one you need to, like, walk without
looking like you've just come home from the wars.
It's been a fairly lousy, cold, lonely week. Friends have been
around some, but I am a little tired of unloading piles of giant,
scary crap on them per my daily life, and either having them not
get it, or depressing them with it. Those conversations that go
like this:
- "How are things with you?"
-
- "Eh, they're okay, we need a new water heater/ my boss at the
day job is a dope/ I'm working on this shiny, completely non-controversial
new project/ I got a new bike, how about you?"
-
- "Oh, fine. I'm living like a bum, not sleeping, there aren't enough
hours in the day, I think I'm usually a crap artist, I need a
damned hug. Then there was that self-abortion girl, the girls
with Chlamydia whose boyfriends give them shit for wanting to
use condoms and who cave, every time, despite knowing they're
riddling themselves with disease and the kid who called me an
ugly, lonely dyke who "judges men" last week because I suggested
that no, he and his friends ideas that their girlfriends vaginas
held the impressions of other men's penises in them, or "felt
different" because of the variant nature of the vulva from day-to-day
was NOT "proof" of the complete lack of loyalty of women who are
deceivers by nature who'll fuck anything that moves. Now there's
the survivor of multiple and military rape, again, the girl who
got fucked by who knows who in her unconsciousness at a party,
the young women who want to mutilate their labia, the daily handful
taking one day of BCPs then having unprotected sex, the user we
haven't heard a peep from since her new-husband -- the abuser
we told her to get the hell away from before she married him two
years ago -- hung the dogs from the garage ceiling to beat them
to make a point about how he felt about her calling the cops for
beating her repeatedly, who did nothing to protect her and everything
to excuse him. You know, the usual."
I'm tired of having those conversations. I know too well everyone
close to me in my life is tired of having them, too.
I am having an excellent discussion about feminist art at my radfem
community (really, that community saved my sanity over the last
two weeks), but it's a hard discussion, and in no way relaxing.
My sweetheart has been trying very hard to carve out an hour or
two for me in his day, but obviously, he's kind of marginally
attentive and necessarily distracted with everything he needs
to do for his film, especially given that this same week has him
in the highest stress bracket with his day job.
I need a vacation from my life. When I get to Seattle, from Thursday
through Sunday we'll be shooting Mark's new film all day, every
day, for which I am doing stills and videography, but tiring as
that'll be, I expect even that to be a refreshing change. And
after those days, I am AWOL, man. AWOL from Scarleteen and related
projects, AWOL from this building and Minneapolis, AWOL from pretty
much everything. AWOL from trying to keep everyone safe, especially
since I usually can't succeed. Thankfully, I got us a cabin on
the sound in Olympia for my second weekend there before I leave,
which I will be in dire need of by then. I also reordered a small
pile of books which I lent out ages ago, never got back, and have
since given up on: Audre Lorde's collected poems as well as Sister Outsider, and some missing Woolf novels. Those should be waiting for me
in Seattle by the time I get there, where I can hug them to my
chest like a threadbare, well-loved security blanket.
I will also be AWOL from journaling, but mostly because my new
powerbook doesn't have Classic on it and I need that to run the
web editing software I use which allows me to make quick updates,
and Wordpress isn't installed yet for me to use that, so. I also
looked at what an OSX version of GoLive costs because I will need
it on there eventually. I now know exactly what an aneurysm feels
like.
Any updates will be me photoblogging via Flickr (where there are a bunch of new things anyway, and to boot, two
new sets up in the members area as of yesterday, with one more
to go up tomorrow).
I need a hot bath (hell, I'll take a good handwashing), clean
socks, and a fuckload of hugs and kisses. Stat. I promise to be
much more sociable and less pathetic once I get them. I damn well
better be, anyway. |
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January 8th, Two Thousand Six: I need a break from being loaded and controversial. Ten bucks
tell me no one's a'gonna bitch about that. Well, not until they
realize it means me just prattling on even more randomly than
usual. You might just start BEGGING me to stir the pot again.
I am SO seriously ready to move. For so many reasons. For instance, I
have a rather typical work rhythm for a self-employed artist an
activist. It goes something like this, in about a monthly cycle,
at any given time:
Week One: Exhausted from the hyperactive week previous. Spend a few days
with friends in person and on the phone, lounging, getting rid
of the top layer of chaos and rubble in my domicile, playing with
dog. Cook much food. Masturbate often. Blow off training at least
once. Space out online window shopping. Watch a given season of
Buffy or Angel on DVD. Deal with whatever teeny rhinovirus I have
likely picked up in working myself too hard. Do Scarleteen boards
and maintenance at the bare minimum I require of myself.
Week Two: Now need to find motivation, begin to worry it is gone forever.
Do more cleaning, do more training. make many little digital memo
sheets of notes, ideas, reminders, due dates. Return phone calls
made during week four of last cycle that went unreturned. Take
some tear-sheet-y photos to try and get inspired. Read some books
and articles to try and get inspired. Imbibe in something-or-other
under the guise of trying to get inspired, knowing it won't help,
but happy for any rationalization to do so. Order some sort of
indulgence (this week, it was a tree-mountable mini-tripod, socks
and Keen shoes: I really hate to buy leather, but I have a lot
of rain and a lot of uphill walking in my future, and my pocketbook
is tired of replacing cracked pleather boots every sodding year.
Actually, it was two indulgences, but I am earnestly too ashamed
of the other to mention it here.) Play loads of piano. Pay bills;
say "Ugh" a lot. Have unproductive insomnia. Write some big journal
entry or another, maybe a few of them. Spend maximum time at Scarleteen
boards, some days answering questions all day into the evening:
try to wring own neck when some user or another decides to try
out all their shiny, new name-calling skills on me while mistaking
me for their parent, the girl that once jilted them, or the doctor
who didn't mention that giving an unprotected blow job to your
partner with an active case of Chlamydia wasn't the brightest
idea. Post actively at feminist community; try to raise energy,
end up whinging. Have little or no social time. Entertain ideas
of ditching it all and becoming organic gardener in Mexico: reread
Atwood's Lady Oracle for the 358th time to purge this desire.
Week Three & Week Four: BLAMMO! Get whacked upside the head, usually in the middle of
the night, by a tag team of jewish-mama muse and that nagging,
protestant workaholic faerie with who lives on my shoulder and
pokes me sharply in the noggin with her hairpin. Put in a series
of 12, 18, sometimes even 20 hour days, several days in a row
of photo work, writing, planning, Scarleteen boards, editing,
journaling, writing bits and bobs of half-finished poems and articles,
with a one or two day break in between. Train like nobody's business.
Often, get period on top of everything else. Forget to eat too
often. Expect the coffee to make itself. Have productive insomnia,
and shake fists at the sky that sleep does eventually have to
happen. Repeat this schizophrenic cycle several times over two-week
period. Cram social time into all of this, as it never fails that
social invites happen during this period. Enter into next cycle
exhausted and lazy.
But see, the way things are now, I keep getting cut off from my
process mid-cycle, by either it being my turn to go to Seattle
or some other locale, or Mark's turn to visit here.
I often justify my entire existence and all the air I breathe
by my rabid productivity.
Thus, me continuing to get stuck in the cycles of non-productivity
before I can reach hyper-productivity makes a Heather mighty crabby.
(Thankfully, I am entering into the Week Three phase today, so
I get a good week and half now if I can stay on the horse.)
So, that alone makes me want to move yesterday.
It's also been just as overcast and dark here as it is in Seattle
this time of year: I may as well be there.
I keep looking at all of these rental openings on Craigslist,
and I cannot actually go and see a single one of them. I walked
with my neighbor downstairs (Elvis' person) to keep her company
in seeing an apartment last week, and it was a brilliant place,
with literally the biggest yard in Uptown. Exposed brick! Red
walls! A real kitchen! I was all in the spirit of apartment hunting
-- all 2BD/LR/DRessed up and nowhere to go -- that I practically
shouted out, "I'll take it!" until I realized that I couldn't,
as it was in the wrong city. Irksome.
And gawd dammit to HELL. I go 35 years until I meet the love of
my life, I am READY to get started on living it in relative bliss
and the occasional "What the HELL was I thinking? You drive me crazy!" ... and I can't yet! I have to KEEP WAITING! When the other person
doesn't want to wait, either!
I am patient with children. I am patient with teenagers. I am
patient with puppies. I am even patient with really annoying adults,
flat tires, the obscene length of time it takes to bake a Tofurky
(it's just tofu: I mean, why does it take that damn long?), stoplights
that stay red foreffingever, and people who mistake me for Tori
Amos in passing. (Okay, so I lied; I lose patience with that last
one fast: I have too much Leo in my chart to tolerate being recognized
for someone else's fame rather than my own.)
But I am NOT feeling at all patient about this. I am the Veruca
Salt of love.
The hilarity of that, really, is this. Who, you might ask, was
THE head cheerleader for the long-distance bit with this in the
first place? Who stated she was quite pleased to have met far
from her home so she could keep her ever-important personal space?
Who just couldn't list enough all the great perks of this situation?
That, ladies and germs, would be your host right here.
("I'm the host. Have you met me? I never shut up." See, coming out of Week Two of the Heather work-process also means
drive-by Buffy and Angel quoting. Want me to be all rabblerousy
again yet?)
I'm not cheerleading for the distance anymore: I'm back to being
the pissy kid under the bleachers with the spiked hair and the
combat boots, spitting nicked tequila that I always was. I love
the hours on end Mr. Price and I spend talking, but dammit, I
need a hug. I need our ritual baths. I need to see that face all
squishy and mole-like in the morning. I need our dancing while
we cook dinner, our one-liners, our spontaneous, crazy-big outbursts
of affection, our debates, our adventures, our goofing-off and
our kisses. And yes, I know it's only been less than two weeks
since the last sex marathon, so no one here is going to come to
my pity party, but for the love of Pete, I need to get laid. Phone
sex is all fine and well and good, but you know, when I've had
an orgasm, if something's going to be sore after, I'd really prefer
it wasn't my ear.
I should shuffle off now. I have one last episode of Angel to
watch, one last indulgent meal to cook, one more long bath to
take, and one more extensive late-night phone call to stretch
into the wee hours to the great displeasure of my right ear before
high gear really -- hopefully -- kicks in, bringing strange, Calvinist
work faeries and fleshy muses bearing the occasional latke.
But sweet jesus, it really needs to be the end of March already.
If it doesn't come soon, I may just go 'splody. Probably all over
these pages in lurid detail, where you'll have to read about it,
wondering -- whilst rending your hair or waving a limp, tired
fist at the sky -- why, oh why, you couldn't just have been satisfied
with feminist processing, sticky gender issues, sexual culture
critique and menstrual cessation rants. You know you'll be handing
me that spoon for the stirring in no time. That is, if you aren't
too busy gagging on it already.
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January 2nd, Two Thousand Six: The New Year's Day Post, a day late, but in no way a dollar short.
I'm not so big with the January 1st resolutions. (Obviously.)
But I realized something the other day.
When I stopped teaching to do the sites full-time -- a job in
which I already did buttloads of advocating for girls -- that
was over eight years ago. And I did such primarily for Scarlet
Letters, a site started in the creaky dark ages of the web, by
women, for women, which was terrifyingly revolutionary at the
time. Nearly ALL the work I have done since, with Scarleteen and
all the sites, with my offline activism and community-building,
with my photography work, has been feminist work, women's work,
work done with women's empowerment, women's connectivity, women's
representation as the goal.
What I realized was that in many respects, I have often apologized
for that. Not in a "Oh gee, I'm so sorry boys, but ladies first," sort of way; rather, with some regularity, in interviews, in planning
things, I have gone on needlessly -- even when not asked to --
about WHY I do this work, about that I do it because there is
a need for it and a void of it. For example, in any branch of
sex education publishing, print or online, it is always serving
a female majority, not because that is who it is necessarily tailored
to, but because that is who seeks it out. It's always been that
way. For some strange reason, I find myself excusing even that,
again and again, as if I had any control over who sought me or
the work I do out in the first place.
Here's the thing: women don't need to have dire needs for us to work in their/our
own best interest and seek equality and fairness. We don't need to defend why we want these things, why we support
each other, even when women are our very first priority. Most
of us do apologize for this, all the time, out of habit. When
women's interests are always culturally expected or required to
be served secondarily, when we make them a first priority, many
of us get the message early that we'd better have a damn good
reason why, which is ludicrous, because one never has to have
that kind of evidentiary support for serving male interests. Hell,
even when male interest is served and either excludes women completely,
or oppresses or harms them further, we don't usually hear anyone
apologizing for it.
I love an awful lot of things about my partner. We all know this.
Perhaps too well. Scusi. But one thing I like is that even in
mixed company, he has got no trouble with my continuing to identify
as a dyke, nor is he threatened by this. And he seems to understand
why I do, and why it's so important.
Hint: it's not about wanting to fuck women. Yes, I'm still mainly sexually attracted to women: men on the
street very rarely turn my head, save the one I'm with. (I'm ashamed
to admit that when I stopped being attracted to most men and came
out with that, I let myself fall into apologizing to men for that who emailed me about it with surreal forms of guilt-tripping.
As if, again, that was about choice; and even if it had been nothing
BUT choice, as if it somehow wasn't a choice I was just as entitled
to make, without apology, as straight men are entitled to choose
not to date other men. Ay carumba.)
It's about the fact that I deeply love women, to such a degree
that it has giant real estate in every aspect of my life and has
become a vital part of my personal identity. If that sounds purple-socked,
potlucked and Birkenstocked, so be it.
I went through a pretty intense and emotionally difficult process
to get there, to even start to open the door to where I could
feel free and open enough -- and brave, given some of my history
-- to start to deeply love women; I had some really hardcore obstacles
in getting there. Getting past my fears to begin learning to open
my mind and my heart -- not just my legs -- in that respect has
been terrifying and huge and risky for me. It's been seriously
life-altering in the best way possible, even though I think I've
got a pretty long way to go still in that respect.
I feel confident saying that I want my first priority in my work
and much of my life to be women. All women. The beauty of that
is that I know full well that that loyalty will and does serve
everyone, of every gender. It's a risky thing to voice in the world we live in, an allegiance to women (or any oppressed
class for that matter, unless they are some form of starving child
of women: that always seems to be okay), but when it all comes
down to it, it strikes me as a far less risky way for any woman
to really live.
So, I went ahead and made one overarching New Year's Resolution
this year.
I'm not going to apologize for the work I do, the loyalty I feel,
for making women priority one when I do so, which is nearly all
the time anymore. Not just this year, not ever again. I'm not going to excuse it, defend it, rationalize why it's okay
for me or anyone else to do so. I don't need to: no one should
need to. If I'm really serious about helping to make the sort
of world I say I am -- where no one would ever be expected to
defend trying to empower more than half the population of the
world, for crying out loud -- the very least I can do is live
as if I am already living in that world in a simple respect like
this.
Know what else? I'm one of the women I've served.
My work, personal and professional, has benefited ME. And that
is more than okay. It has enabled ME to have relationships of
a greater quality, empowered ME to live by my own truths and ethics,
aided ME to feel better about myself, given ME more agency and
confidence to seek out, begin to create and cultivate the sort
of life I want to be living and help others live the sort of life
I think we all deserve.
Yet, related to what I said in another recent entry, I'm starting
to realize how little I allow myself to really enjoy the things
I have given myself, made for myself, helped everyone with, including
myself. And that is NOT the advice I'd give to any other woman:
I'd tell any other woman that working tirelessly for this stuff
without ever really allowing herself to enjoy the fruits of our
labors is not only utterly dumb, it is counter to what we say
we're trying to do in the first place. After all, you can't have
a life of real quality and equality on the shelf for a rainy day,
or for when everything else gets done
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