Monday, November 3, 2014

Fire-rimmed eyes

"11 If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? 13 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” 
Luke 11:11-13

I give good gifts to myself. I should - I know myself and my desires quite well. Unfortunately, I don't always trust myself. I begin to suspect that there is a serpent in the box and I run away, leaving the perfectly selected gift behind.

How do you recognize truth? Can you feel it snap into place like a crisply-formed puzzle piece? Does truth look truer, or less true, in hindsight? Can you trust yourself, and how much?

I write truth down. I highlight it in books, and record the words on scraps I tape to my walls and memorize and recite. Books I have been scribbling in for decades, holders of truth. Theories I'm working out, because it always seems like truth is evolving. Little bits added to a rubber band ball that never decreases in size, no matter how old and inelastic the rubber becomes. Newer, springier, fresher bits added to the outside, ready to withstand drops and scrapes, pressing the older pieces inward to a formidable core.

Sometimes those inside pieces show up in my dreams, or in the speech of others, or in the contrapositions of new rubber bands.

Sometimes I can recognize truth like I recognize a dog breed: I have no idea how I know that is a Maltese. It just floated up to me.

But most of the time I think truth recognition is more work, more conscious. It happens like understanding factoring: slowly, building up the necessary bits in class after class, lots of frustration that it isn't coming easily, lots of guessing and getting right answers even though I can't explain how the process works, until one day in college it clicks in.

Also, I feel truth. In my stomach. Lies feel like warm mayonnaise and albumen sandwiches after a heavy night of drinking Mai Tais and red wine. Truth feels like cool woodland breezes on your face when your toes are warm, like a singer hitting a note with perfect pitch, like the smell you forgot you liked so much until you open a door and meet it again.

Truth like my sister telling me most men are good. Most men want to protect women, to help them and take care of them. That the chances are, a random woman falls in a gutter and a random man will pick her up. Not to rob or rape. Just to help.

Every fiber inside of me resisting this logic, no no no. No. Men are mercenary. This is their nature. There is no altruism, there is only machinations and destruction you haven't yet decoded. Battening the hatches in my mind, even while some part of the rubber band ball recognizes itself, and is glad to wrap this truth around. 

How would you live if you weren't always on guard against hit men? What would trust free you to experience?

I dreamed last night of my lover. He was walking toward me down a long road, at night. A voice from my team of warriors told me he was joining us in our upcoming battle. I watched his slow approach. His eyes were outlined in glowing fire, thin bright tracings like kohl made from white-blue lasers. I did not believe the voice. I watched him, expecting him to reveal himself as an enemy. He didn't, but he also didn't speak or hurry, just continued to slowly walk toward me with his glowing eyes. I weighed the possibilities of his loyalty, trying to decide how close I could allow him to come before I decided whose side he was on. I woke before he reached me.

I want to weep and rail when things don't go my way. Swearing temper tantrums. I want to orbit & shoot sparks out of my fingers when things go the way I wish them to, embracing the world with endless arms. Hearing people, friends, pity me for my relationship is at once a source of consternation and amusement. Have you heard me? What do you hear? What do you make up in your head when you hear the story fragments I tell you?

The judgement of others, their emotional reactions to my life, used to be a scary movie, this forbidding thing I avoided but couldn't stop looking for, hating and hiding from and on some level craving. Tell me you think I'm wrong, you think I'm being wronged, let me prove you wrong, let me convince myself I am Amazon strong by the sound of my own defense.

I'm trying to practice just smiling.

The Zen monk story, "I put that woman down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?"

Let them be concerned, let them believe you wrong or weak. Let them. There is no screeching in minor key. Smile. How do you feel at this exact moment? Is it worth trying to explain? Let it go.

So many many grains of the texture that make up a relationship, a life, that will be largely invisible to anyone outside of your skin. And, it's ok. The lack of perfect understanding is not a threat. My companion's feelings, or misunderstandings, are not my responsibility. As long as I can say I am true, and reflective. As long as I am listening to my tuning fork, the off-key note of another is not a problem. They aren't screwing up my song, they are playing one of their own.

His blue inside flame, like the oven that bakes my bread, heats my living room when the radiator is cold, its pretty periwinkle flickers that comfort & nurture. My hesitations are okay. It means I am learning. I'm not used to seeing inside, despite how many times I've said I wanted it desperately. What do you do once you get what you want, that treasure you couldn't admit to yourself you wanted, because it wasn't what you felt you should want? What if you wake up one day and realize there is no struggle, because the battle you were fighting was to give yourself permission to enjoy what you already have? When you have defined yourself as a creature of desire, what happens when you realize you've been unhappy at not having things which would make you unhappy to posess? What is left to long for? Can hope abide without decay, without ageing to fear of loss, possessive hoarding, dragon-guarding a clutch of jewels you dare not use?

Make a different choice. Want not what you think you should want, but what you actually want, and choose to enjoy the gifts you have given yourself. 



Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Glissance


Be careful what you wish for...

"October 11, 2009
Wanderlust. Escapism. Noticing the bars on the cage. Hard to see the benefits of stability, every reminder of it becoming an unreasonable irritant. "I love yous" don't sound the same anymore that they have the ring of metal clanging shut. Irrational, foolish, spendthrift & wasteful. Baseless discontent...I don't want your care or concern, while you give your adventure away. I want space to breathe, and rage, and weep. I want my own adventures that have nothing to do with you."

"November 10, 2009
...once again disappointed at being acquiesced to, disappointed that my words are automatically assumed to be correct, when I am forming my ideas after the words have taken shape in my mouth. How can I be the smartest person in this situation, when I know so little?
I don't know what he knows, or feels, or falsifies; I am not permitted access. My effusiveness traps me, the only words and ideas I get are my own. Where is the other voice to challenge me, to help me define my thoughts? It gave up on me, it takes my words as ultimate truth - me, who was always the first to point out how ephemeral, how mercurial, how chameleon my words are. I don't know what I think if all I hear is me. I need counterpoint. I crave comparisons, connections, dispute. I do not want to be right, if it means I hear nothing new."

"December 21, 2009
...the siren call of my own solitude, the adventure I cannot quite peer from my place on your breast. What else am I missing, besides my time at sea? What does not wait for me out there, what wisdom, what truth, what new perspective, what experience I cannot fathom? I can only hear rustlings; your breath is too loud. Even a few steps away, I catch merely a faint hum, full of delicious promise."

"April 11, 2010
Recognizing my own need for solitude, to write, to think, to use words, reflecting and composing and synthesizing. And finding another who will interact with me in emotional language, hear me, and offer me new thoughts to consider."

When I am agreed with and believed, I want to be challenged. When I have a committed companion, I want to be free. Stability stifles me.

So, I think, I need more freedom. I will reconstruct my world to allow for discovery. And yet, when I have an adventure, I want to found a city on that adventure and put in plumbing. I love my vacation so much, I want to move there - not realizing the very quality of a vacation is that all of your pots and pans are someplace else.

"September 7, 2009
And I wonder, am I really strong enough to be vulnerable for both of us...?  Am I really so good at this and so powerful that I can throw myself under his feet again and again and be ignored, that which I hate more than anything?  It is intoxicating to think so, to think that I can make a difference.  And it is also true that I love without reason, because I can, because it is who I am, because once he was vulnerable and perhaps will be so again. He will come, or not come.  He will be leaving the whole time, if he comes.  And the child soul inside of me will cringe and cry to see him packing and leaving, and will think that there is a thing I can do to stop it, or delay him.  But he will pack and leave over and over everytime, using his power to hold off the world...[H]is power is to say no, and if his power is to say no, how will he ever say yes?"

"November 25, 2009
There is gratitude also for the outside force, the other entity, pausing me, providing me with the chance to gather my wits and consider my actions. As much as I want to control, and as little as I enjoy being denied, I can appreciate that without [his] flight I was ready to do mad things..."

"November 28, 2009
Do you think of them, those moments? When I have thought I knew your mind, I have always been wrong, reading emotion & analysis into you, because I want it to be there.
I think you do not consider those moments, of me. I have been packed away like a copper pan you never use, impractical, easy to jettison, a charming illustration when the bar chatter calls
for something shiny, if you recall it at all.

But perhaps the copper pan is more useful, perhaps it gets more time in your synapses. After all, the pan was a thing you selected, and have packed and unpacked, carried and stored. I am just a person, so much more disposable to you, and not someone you chose at all.
I wonder about objects I put into your world: the scotch, the case, the letter...But I don't want to hear the answer, that the scotch has been drunk by strangers & enemies, the letter discarded the moment it was opened, the case storing ten thousand other things that occupy your brain that never thinks of me, not even once for all the times I have longed for news of you."


I want growth, which always means wanting something I don't have. Is it better, then, to want something that is out of your control, than to want something you can have at the price of another's pain? Is it better to want in, than to want out? 

"Our doom, then: the inelegant dance of intimacy, closer, farther, turning around. Tightening our grasp till we meet resistance, flinging apart to recover."

Are there any other choices besides wanting in or wanting out? Choices that don't require violence to my own soul, remaking it into a grotesque caricature? I can accept that there is not growth without pain, no living apart from change. But what I do not know is how to enjoy the wanting in, or the wanting out. And if the only enjoyment comes from the slivers of time in between them, or from refusing for a time to think about the stage I am in...Horrible. I refuse to accept it. There must be a better way. 

I have always been a terrible Buddhist. I do not know how to want less. The wanting itself is beautiful to me - more of an Aphrodite-ist, I suppose. And maybe that is it, maybe I have to shift my gaze, just a bit, from what I want, to the desire itself. Maybe my most lasting joy and satisfaction is not from getting what I want -- a moving, impossible target -- but from the dance of wanting, itself. Feeling alive. Throwing my heart into the ring and seeing what happens. Isn't it wonderful to want, and to strive, and to enjoy the results of that desire? Sometimes it is caught, and it is joyful. Sometimes it falls, and it is awful. But it isn't awful in an ugly way, at least. Like Helga said, if you are going to be miserable, at least do it with style.

Maybe if I can take a step back, re-read my painful wanting-journal entries from the past and see how beautiful they are, maybe that is how I can find beauty in the moment of not getting what I want. 

Jason said something last year about the dance men do, to pursue women. He told me that my honest remarks to men I've just met about how I am never going to sleep with them are soul-crushing, like sweeping all the pieces off the chess board. The outcome of the game is not the point. The point is to play. 

"Let us pursue," he said. "Even if you know, we know, everyone in the room knows we aren't going to take you home. There is still a chance -- maybe the same chance we have of winning the lottery -- but we will still enjoy dancing and buying drinks and chatting and playing the game. We still watch recorded football games. Don't give us honesty, even if we asked for it; not that kind of honesty. Honor the spirit, not the letter. Let us be men."

Let us be men. Let Bartlet be Bartlet. Let growth happen. I don't read my journal enough. I always say this, and then I never read it when I need to. When I am happy, I want to stay that way, and don't want anything to snag at my silky happiness out of the murky depths of past insecurity. When I am sad, I think I might want to stay that way too - out of a fear of being inauthentic, or stuffing it down too soon, or being brushed off by my own past self who felt the same and yet did not waste away. 

But my journal is full of my own wisdom, and strength. It is my record of growth, the height marks on the wall. It is, more than anything, a tool to get out of my own head - and the most effective one, because it is still inside my own head. Nothing else available to me can give me the distance and perspective that my own journal can. 

The goal of a relationship is not to be stapled to someone. The goal of being happy is not to be frozen there. The goal of being sad is not to alchemize your pain into a time machine. The goal of everything, everything, is to grow. 

Happiness without growth becomes a bore. Sadness without growth becomes a tapeworm on your soul. When I am sad, I don't want to grow - I just want to go back to the way I was before I was sad. But my journal can prove to me, actually prove in a way even I can't argue - that I can make it through. That even when I don't get what I want, maybe because I'm not getting what I want, because I have to just step back from the want and look at it, take pleasure in the fact of being alive and having wants...I am rich. Desire is beautiful in itself, the way a summer storm is beautiful. All you need is a tiny bit of distance to shelter you, and you can enjoy its power.

"Sunday, March 7, 2010
You are my wealth. You, men whose bodies I watch, whose smells I encode in my brain, whose stories I record, who I will my body to charm, changing my DNA pattern if need be. You are my wealth, because you give stories, touch, sensory data, charm, patterns. You give texture. You make the day brighter for me than it is for others. My step sways for you.  
You are my wealth, my treasure, my secret. How do I smile so bright, how do I feel so much joy, how do I bounce? I bounce, for reasons that relate to you, and relate beyond you. I bounce, because I draw from this land, like an octopus, like a tree with tentacles into the ground, drawing from the water, drawing from the swamp land underneath our civilization sheen, the bog eternal, the unending richness of decaying vegetation, I draw from this depth, I find richness in the land, connected to this air, this temperature, these trees, this water, this location in the universe. I also draw from you, you men with stories of pleasure and adventure, high seas and victory, I draw from you. I can reflect this all back to you, with prisms and mirrors, I can amplify. I can give you Spring, I can give you your own joy tenfold. But you are my wealth, richer than children, richer than hearth, richer than family crests and lineage.  
Your wealth is glissance, glimmers of the unreachable. Charm is the word we use for the connection between people that touches on something vast and amazing. We are charmed not by the person, but by the connection, the possibility of something larger and unknowable becoming known. You men, whom I love, for yourselves and for that which is beyond yourself, to which you are only the gateway.  You are my wealth, for whom I will do anything, for you are precious and beautiful. Give me a story, give me a glimmer, I will give you the earth."

Friday, July 25, 2014

If I had Prince on speed dial

I hate being predictable. I don't like blending. I can't chase stars ("he's in town tonight!"), or even go to casting calls for extras that I might, on some level, enjoy. Too many other people with wistful faces, too much straining in one direction - it creates an irrepressible urge in me to do the opposite thing. Being swept along with the crowd pisses me off too much - I can't even tie my raft to the flotilla on Eric's river floats. Whatever act of spirit that has to happen to allow that merging makes me angry. I will deliberately stop clapping as soon as the performer asks the crowd to clap. Maybe I was a sheep that stampeded off a cliff with the herd in another life. Maybe I spent too much time in spiritual warfare sessions where everyone was yelling at Satan. I don't want to be one of D.H. Lawrence's nightmare strong-willed women, the ones his heroes feel justified shooting, but I have this feeling that I might be.

So if I did have Prince on speed dial, it would have to have been one of those totally normal things that happens when you are excruciatingly bored or trapped and have limited options. Otherwise while all the hundreds were swimming toward him I would have been swimming away. Say we both went to a terrible conference (I bet he goes to them all the time, for his 9 to 5) and ditched a bunch of sessions, and hid out in the bar with fruit smoothies and discovered we had some complimentary wavelengths in our mutual disenchantment toward lackluster presenters. And he was alone...because his entourage were all super interested in the conference. At least the ones that weren't trapped in the elevator. Totally normal. I bet he met half of his closest friends in similar experiences. Don't we all?

I've carried on lots of long distance, crazy close friendships with men, though I guess most of them were in high school, guys I met in summer camps or summer jobs, and we were all full of words, words, words in that way that teenagers are. I'm not sure if that happens in adult life. Or outside of fundamental religions. I miss it, and I like to imagine that if any adult man were capable of that kind of friendship with a woman, it'd be Prince. But you don't develop those kinds of relationships in the surface pile and smalltalk crush of crowded rooms - they are built lounging on opposite sides of the sofa, his feet by your shoulders and yours by his, past curfew at the fundie Jesus camp, with the boy who is struggling to balance his sexual orientation with his faith and sees a kindred misfit in the sexually precocious lipstick girl.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I would have called him today. Let's face it, I would have called him a lot in the last four years. If I hadn't allowed all of my crazy close men-dships from high school to die, out of a misguided sense of loyalty when I got married (or because they insisted my marriage was a terrible error I'd live to regret...true, as it turns out, but what IS that about men friends that they always want to torpedo your relationships?), I'd have been calling them over the past four years, too, all those guys to whom I wrote nonstop letters for years. There's something incomparably soothing in a man listening to your drama. Maybe because they never really get sucked in - either they are playing it cool, or playing a video game on the other end of the line, or whatever, but the calm, not-exactly involved tone of voice is very reassuring - lets you think out loud without having to worry about the reception. Maybe they just have the privilege of not living up to the girl-expectation of Showing Empathy, so they can just listen, and you can know that you have a friend because they took the call, wrote back, whatever, and not have to perform the little empathy seen-empathy accepted-empathy returned dance. Usually men can make you laugh, too, and say something mildly inappropriate, and suddenly the really horrible monster in the closet just looks like an annoying mess you can probably knock out with a day or so of work.

Prince would be good at making a girl laugh, of course, but he'd also be tender, and there's nothing you are craving more when your heart is breaking than a little tenderness. Wisdom, yes, and the scrubbed-sand clean peacefulness of emptying out your tears, but neither of them are much good without the tenderness.

It seems bizarre now to have those kind of friendships with men you aren't dating, though it seemed perfectly sensible in high school to talk for three hours or twelve pages with a single boy you weren't dating and had no intention of dating. I used to get home from school and immediately page the boy seven years older than me who worked in construction and put in my ceiling fan. I'd page him little messages for an hour or so, every day. I cannot imagine doing such a thing now, but maybe that is partly because I never forgave construction boy for marrying another woman. Not that I wanted to marry him, necessarily. But I certainly didn't want him to have anything better to do than to talk to me after I got home from school.

Those relationships don't fit into the whole married with kids scheme. I know that I didn't like being on the outside end of them, when it was my boyfriend taking the call. So then, it has to be an untouchable man. Someone so far outside of bourgeois expectations of morality, so far above me in station, that I could not possibly be a threat to his likewise rarefied wife/girlfriend, and the danger of annoying her is taken off the table. Prince seems like a good match.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I'd probably interrupt sometimes when he was working. Maybe he'd turn on the speakerphone so he could keep working a little at the piano while I blithered. There was a boy who did that once, let me sit next to him on the bench while he fussed over the song. I don't think I talked so much as held my breath - he was English, with the nice accent and the floppy hair. He sent me a demo tape with my song after he finished it, and he told me that I was unlike any girl he knew, which was also nice. Piano is good when you are sad, takes the sad and makes it seem noble. Sad with a purpose.

Sad with a purpose as in, I'll never see you again but I want to play piano for you. Like the man who picked me up in a bar once and took me to the Michigan Union to play for me. It was really just like how I became friends with Prince - this guy was bored, too, though not with a bad conference. I think boredom is how all friendships start - if you weren't bored you would be too in tune with your moment to notice anything else. Thomas? Theodore? was in from out of town visiting some local notables, Ann Arbor business nobility, I forget which family dynasty. He was from Berkley, of course, properly bearded and compact of body. I was reading Anais Nin's diary. He sent a drink to my table, we started talking. He wanted to play for me, and even though it was broad daylight the idea of leaving with a man I'd met ten minutes ago for a piano excursion frightened me. The female chorus shouted, "ARE YOU INSANE??" So I declined politely, and he nodded and walked over to the bar, and let me know he'd still be interested if I changed my mind.

About ten minutes more of Anais. Fuck the chorus. I want adventure. What happened to the teenager on the piano bench? And I liked that he had given me space to think. I walked over and told him I had changed my mind. He smiled. Took me to one of the large ballrooms, and played for the whole room. When I asked him later if we could talk, if I could have contact info, he smiled and said he wouldn't give it to me unless I promised to write, because no one really follows up. I promised. He gave me a tattered card. I never wrote to him but occasionally stab myself by looking at the card. What would I say? Maybe it's not the boys who have changed since high school, or the expectations of phantom girlfriend/wives. Maybe it's me - maybe I'm just not the same storyteller, the same original girl who'd break the rules for a good conversation, who'd assume friendship unless explicitly propositioned, and even then, would just say no thanks and keep on chatting. I was less considerate twenty years ago, I suppose, but also a lot less self-conscious, and less tortured.

Prince's card wouldn't be moldering in a basket, though, because he would have just entered his number in my phone and put it on speed dial at the juice bar. I think there was another boy who did that a long time ago, which doesn't make sense, unless it was the programmable corded phone in my mom's kitchen. Maybe I'm thinking of someone from grad school. Hazy, hazy grad school. A boy actually chased me down the hall one of those hazy days to pet my hair when it was newly pink, and when I tracked him down later and asked him out he was scandalized. I never learn, I guess - I'm still emasculating boys a decade later, not taking them at face value, still assuming that something like spontaneous pink hair-petting means something else. High school me would not have assumed anything - hair-petting is just that. He doesn't likeyou-likeyou unless he asks you to Homecoming.

The face of someone entering a number and putting it on speed dial is blank, but I remember the emotion - amused faux-outrage at his cheek. No obsessing for hours about what it meant that he put himself on speed dial, I would just have laughed and decided it was pleasurable and left it at that.  Until he announced he was getting married, anyway. I am really unhappy about construction boy getting married, it seems. I'm remembering how he helped me move into college my freshman year, and consoled me when my mother screamed at me that day. He was a good guy who really should have remained not married so I could be calling him right now.

It'd be terrible in some ways having Prince on speed dial, though, since it'd be torture not to call him constantly like that, torture to pluck up the courage to call now that I'm adult and know that men won't tell you they don't want you calling everyday after school, they will just marry someone else. Can't risk pissing him off, or he'd change his number, or his name, and you'd never find him. I'd have to have some kind of schedule or alarm clock or something, that would let me know when it was ok to call him again, when the window of "back off" time had passed. What would I say? You can't call someone up to reminisce about bad conference experiences. "So...whatcha doin?" Horrible. Prince's number would be moldering, on speed dial instead of the basket, because I wouldn't have anything to say, because I'm too adult to send upside-down pager messages about being sans boobs.

It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Even having Prince on speed dial isn't enough to make me happy.

How would you build up enough intimacy so that you could call Prince when you really needed him? So that over enough years of friendship he'd draw me a bath? And brush my hair? It's very important to figure out how to build the intimacy enough to get to this stage, because it's nice to be soothed, especially by a man's hands. Adult conversations in juice bars are just not the same as the after-curfew church camp talks, they just don't automatically lend themselves to spontaneous offbeat physicality. You can get really creative when most everything is off-limits.

He'd have to employ me. He must need a librarian. (Everyone does). Or maybe he'd provide me with a breadcrumb path...like the offer to "come over anytime you want to use my new washer and dryer" on which I followed up recently. I'm a sucker for front-loaders, and a numbingly-normal chore makes the initial, awkward bit of the intimacy quest a little less screamingly awful.

Maybe no special transition is needed between the meeting and the spontaneous "I need a friend, my sails are in shreds" call. Perfectly wretched at basketball and table tennis, I am quite adept at negotiating how to sail my storm-tossed ship into safe harbor when needed. Probably anyone who's known me for more than a year has gotten one of those calls, whether or not the receiver realized that I was calling from my ship. You can't use the shredded-sails call too often on any one person - got to spread that shit out. It's exhausting, picking up that call. Not terrible, though - it's strengthening, in some ways, to know that someone trusts you like that, and to be able to see yourself as a nurturer, as a calm port, a sanctuary and shepherd and sage. But I know I've avoided the shredded-sails calls sometimes, so I know I've got to have a broad base of calm ports from which to choose, enough so that I'm not wearing out my emergency welcomes. Prince is almost old enough to be my father, but not exactly, so he knows a lot more about heartbreak. He'd understand.

If it was the shredded-sails call that poured concrete onto our bad-conference foundation, I'd still have to come up with other things to call Prince about, so he didn't always see my number flash up and roll his eyes knowing I was in a pity puddle again. I'm not sure we really have that much in common, though, so that might be tough. I'd have to keep notes on what he was up to, what projects he was tinkering with, so I could ask pertinent questions after his work and his pursuits. Again, I really don't think I did this twenty years ago. I said whatever I was thinking, and expected it to turn out great. Improvement? Deterioration? Surely being considerate is better, or why would I have changed?

Maybe we could swap stories about fundie religion and door-to-door witnessing experiences. I am kinda missing out on someone to debate Bible trivia with. I actually had to look up Absalom's story yesterday because I had forgotten who his mother was and why his Dad was so pissed off with him. That hilarious day when I thought I'd found a Bible debater, the Calvinist technology professor all the fashionable pessimists loved to love, despite their disaffection for religion and earnestness. I showed up after a day reviewing my aged Greek sentence arcs and diagrams, ready to take him to the mat...and saw him blanch. Another man I emasculated. He just wanted to have a beer with his adorers. Not deal with the ball of intensity carrying the briefcase.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I might even find I spend less time struggling with shredded sails, because I would be way more in touch with my intuition. Or more able to direct the misery in some channel that did not lead to sailing into friends' ports on the Yacht of Pain. He seems to be pretty decent at pouring his pain into securely buried vaults, or transmogrifying it. I need a bit more of that. In fact, that's how I got to this particular voyage, chasing after another master pain-wizard, who had this uncanny talent of seeming to always have shit together, no matter what, deflecting the storms that I'd absorb and suffer through. I thought he could teach me. Maybe he tried. Maybe I needed more distance from my teacher to be able to process his lessons. Maybe just more repetition and practice.

Pretty sure that having Prince on speed dial would be good for my psyche. I might be able to re-invest the money I currently funnel to mental health and chiropractic. And maybe I wouldn't even miss the booze. Able to transition off the doom track with my Prince-tutored spiritual acuity, I'd be better at letting go and embracing forgiveness and hope. No one cries at Paisley Park.

Maybe. Or maybe I'd just have a really cool deep-voiced friend, who'd make things seem better simply by not being a part of them.










Wednesday, July 9, 2014

The dance

Chances of staring at the walls are great. But the fear of being a wallflower is enough to stiffen my spine. I'll go out. I'm not backing down, sensibly cowering in my apartment though I'm longing to dance. Fuck them. I've done it before. The worst that can happen is I feel stupid, with a drink. Courage needs to be practiced - the fact that I'm afraid makes me more likely to do it. 
"I like your energy," they say in the beginning. Ah, yes. My energy. My fearlessness. The part they will mistake later for anger, for snobbery, for disdain -- a judgement of them and an affront to their dominance -- but which in the newness of time reels them in, seems exciting & fun. At once the creator and the destroyer of my happiness...my energy, which propels me forth into situations I fear, feminine charms blazing, lashes lowered, shoulders thrown back, hips swinging. Why I will always laugh at the things they say in the beginning, because I know, I know this very thing that captures your imagination and pulls you across the room is that which you will learn to hate in me.
My energy. A smokescreen to fool them into thinking I'm not afraid. Not beating, counting the minutes until I can run, under the forced prescriptions of a ruler of my ego which demands I not shrink, not hide, not cower. I will let the screams of the drunken man on the street wash over, a wind blowing reeds, safe in my music cocoon. No angry rejoinder from me. I am water. Hard as you hit, I simply absorb, disperse. My energy is the oil in my amphora, carefully carried into the loud and crowded bar, where I know no one, where everyone is younger than me, where my heart will not reach out to me, but another impossible charm boy will dance with me. Dance with me. Dance and tell me the parts of my face in Spanish. Dance and charm. Tell me you like my energy. My energy, the smokescreen.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Masculinity, the emotional man, the man who needs me. My ability to take care of myself.

I have a visceral reaction to men needing care. Men needing me, or being soft. I hate it being there, but it is there. It is there, so I always will choose the calmest, most emotionally detached man in the room, and find him wildly attractive. 

wanting to be able to be a woman. to be with a man who is strong. but even then, i can barely relax, always looking for signs of weakness. and then, i want him to romance me, soften toward me, respond in softness. can only accept softness from a man i know will not fall apart on me. but those men are not soft, they will not fall apart because they do not experience the emotion that leads to both softness and sometimes falling apart. wanting both. wanting stability, wanting romance and emotional chaos. 


i am afraid of the emotional man. because i need to be strong. because she is standing in that room watching. because i can't be left by her, she holds my world together. loyalty. 

i am afraid of the emotional man, because i want him, but i feel like i have to choose between him and survival, and i know i don't need him. 

i am afraid of the emotional man because he is a luxury. he is in a tuxedo. he is a liability. he will drag me down, and then i will not be cared for, either. we will both be alone. Afraid if i start nurturing a man, it will not stop. it will bleed me dry, like a child.

I recoil from the emotional man because I do not trust him. Because it seems fake. But that is not my view - I am emotional, and I want emotion, want to trust it like I trust my own. I am smarter about emotions than about anything else, and it cripples me that I cannot talk emotions with men I am involved with, this thing that I am so good at.

Hating men needing me, hating them wanting care, like I hated my father for wanting me, mother - women who didn't want him. i wanted him to be strong, like mom - wanted him to move on, to show some spine. wanted him to play a masculine role, like she was. 

I need to be able to make choices with men that will actually get me closer to what I want, to what is good for me. That means I have to stop being afraid of emotional men, stop hating them, being ashamed of them, being angry and full of rage toward them. Because what I am feeling toward them is not about them. It is about being 13 and watching him act shamefully and then demand love for his actions, manipulating me by seeming pitiful.







Monday, June 30, 2014

Odo's pool

I'm reading Jung, and interpretations of Jung. I'm picturing this collective unconscious we all sleep in as Odo's pool planet, all liquid gooey changelings swishing around that he melted into like a reverse Anakin.
Each morning, then, we re-enter our own limited perspective, alone, isolated, secure inside our protective skulls. Each day we get to decide how much connection, how much intimacy. Which people will you look in the eye, which conversations will you initiate, how will you spend your moments & minutes. Will you build, will you coast?
Yesterday was a pool-of-one day, a day to hide. I used to be so frustrated with myself in school that I'd read for twenty minutes and fall asleep for twenty, but without a taskmaster schedule, it's kind of a nice way to process complicated ideas. 
But today I'm ready to reinitiate contact. Olivia & I made a date to spend the entire day together, & I've been looking forward to it all weekend. Relationships sometimes happen accidentally, I guess - like people you work with in high school, or the folks who are always at the park when you take your kids. But probably not. Anyone you have reliable, call-in-the-middle-of-the-night connections with, it's probably a result of intentional work. A desire, and a follow-through. 
My sister asked me once if I had any friends. Of course I have friends! (Even though I'm super lonely constantly). She asked, "How many people do you know you could call to go have coffee?" Um. Well, that's different. That's not how many names do you know, or how many people would say something kind about you. That's about how many relationships you have built. The answer at that point of my life was none, or maybe one but it would be super awkward. And that was when I was thoroughly churched, serving in one & attending another. Lonely? You bet. But also not investing in the people around me, who I had already decided were inferior to the people I'd left behind. 
That realization freaked me out a little. Some time later I was on the phone with my brother crying about how I had no friends. He didn't seem terribly concerned, just told me that there'd be a day when people would be calling me wanting to hang out & I'd have to choose from the invitations. I was not pleased with his pat answer, didn't believe it, but felt a little better anyway. He was so sure, maybe hope was ok. Maybe my tragedy wasn't really, just a blip in a story. Growth.
There was a time I blamed California for that loneliness. Then poverty - hard to have friends when you have zero disposable income. Marriage. Jesus. Lots of reasons. But maybe the most important was me. Your relationships can't produce love and connection and intimacy like a magic tablecloth in a fairy tale produces food. They are organic. They bear fruit when you tend them. 
And I think learning to like myself has been huge, too. That makes it believable that friends are everywhere, that moving to a new place doesn't mean a slow death as old faraway friendships go dormant. When I thought I was hard to like, meeting new people and handling change was painful. I had these really hilarious crying jags about how I'd never have friends as close as Tara and Shane. All the while refusing to open up to anyone in front of me.
Intimacy as a daily choice. Will I build intimacy today? Or is today a day to nurture myself, so I have freeflowing changeling goo to share later? Today I have the opportunity to connect. To create a new story. To touch part of the Great Link while awake. To laugh at my younger, ridiculous self. And to be grateful for people who love me, challenge me, throw me hope-lines, and have coffee with me.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

I dig

I dig in.
Deeper.
Crouched embankments,
A man and a half deep.

I dig out.
no taking on water.
no burial

I rest.
I find absurdity
I laugh, I try to make you laugh.

But I don't stop seeing.

play, work
both toward one goal
I dig.

When I can't bear it anymore,
When I'm exhausted,
I float.


But you are wading.
Far ashore.



Friday, June 20, 2014

Ah, love

Who knows what you will bring?
The drama. The surprises. The confrontations.
Like soap operas, but no one ever imagined himself so deceitful or sinister in real life. No one plots to have sex with her best friend's long lost husband after he returns from the dead with amnesia. No one does that.
But as it turns out, real life is just as outlandish in its details - the difference is, no one is plotting. They are just people. Living and making decisions the best they can, moment by moment. And the same messes ensue.
Do I want to hurt anyone? Nope. Do I hurt people? All the time. What is the way to not hurt people? As far as I can tell, there is no way to win this Kobayashi Maru. Someone will be unhappy about your choice on Monday, or next spring. And not just "someone" as in "someone in Kansas you don't know." Someone close. Someone you are trying to please. Please this one, displease that one by the same action. Not choosing anything will make someone unhappy. And everything you do contrary to your own nature is guaranteed to make you unhappy.
What to do, what to do? I care about people. I care about my mother. My family. My lover. My friends. My colleagues. How do I please them? They want different things. Can I be all things? Maybe some of the time? Maybe I can switch up really quickly between acts, separate them all so I can play all roles simultaneously? Maybe I can meet my own needs through this round of role-pleasings? After all, is there anything more fulfilling than making other people happy and never hurting anyone you love?
Turns out, my needs are not just another role I can play - they contradict with the essence of the whole plan. I need to have integrity, to match inside to outside, to be whole. Not a collection of horacruxes. This is hard to admit. It feels like a failure -- because, after all, I can do it. I'm good at pleasing and being pleasant and pulling on roles. Part of being myself is being a storyteller, a roleplayer. I am Every Woman. Polite. Ferocious. Vulgar. Sedate. I can do any role you give me. I am smart enough. Agile enough. Adept. I get it.
Except, I can only be Every Woman for about a year, and then I want to kill you all with lasers. Because FUCK THAT. Why do I have to be Every Woman? Why does Whitney have to be Every Woman? Why isn't being just one good enough?
Your words "We should both be able to be who we are. And that should be ok."
For particular black-ops missions, sure, subterfuge is fine. If it is beneficial to some plan that you make me a part of. Let me in to the strategy, and I'll do whatever is necessary. Charm in the service of the greater good, charm with my team behind me.
But I'm not so interested in charm as a tactic to keep everything surface-level between us.
If you want a liar, I'm not your girl. I want to tell you everything, all the time.
If you want a faker, I'm not your girl. My heart is on my sleeve. I can cry in secret, I can spin my rage into a clean house, and I'm trying to learn to not blast lovers with my Care Bear Stare because it usually knocks them unconscious. But I'm not going to smile when I'm angry. Inside matching outside. Inside-outside.
If you want a spy, someone who is comfortable in the shadows of vagueness and unknowns, I'm not your girl. The secrets I keep, I keep out of love, under very particular, clearly-defined circumstances. Negotiated agreements, not a default setting. If you are uncomfortable with questions, uncomfortable with spotlights, you are going to be uncomfortable with me, the storyteller, the sensemaker.
If you want a smiley face, someone who's never a hassle, I'm not your girl. I have a great smile. And I'm a hell of a good time. But I'm a person. And no one is happy all the time. No one is easy all the time. And when I'm in trouble I'm going to ask for help. I'd like to ask you. I'd like to be a priority.
I'm about intimacy. Intimacy is messy, and often a hassle. I accept the hassle, and the mess. I don't relish either. Soap operas are not fun to live inside. I'm not looking to hurt anyone. But since I inevitably will, I'd like to be close to the person I hurt inadvertently as I stumble through my life choices. Because I love that person. And I want to comfort my friend.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Cream in my coffee

You need to move your car because it's in a one-hour spot. But you are coming back. Borrow my keys, I say. It means I don't have to stir from my pillow and lock the door behind you. Look how handsome you are pulling on your shirt. teehee.
Minutes tick by. I can feel the little gremlins start climbing about my brain. I get up, do a sink of dishes. Mop up a spill. Sort a load of laundry, and set it by the door for when my keys return. Look at the clock. Look at the clock. Don't be ridiculous. Gremlins gaping, throwing rusty metal chunks around.
Pull out the ironing board. Iron a basket of clothes. An hour. Calculate what I can do, have done in an hour. Decide to call. "Getting coffee," you say. Ok, get me some, I laugh, relieved.
For about ten minutes. After which the entire process repeats, louder, and faster.
Moving the car took about two hours. When you return, I force myself to look at your face, knowing that it will help calm me down because I'm well into anxiety-induced-rage mode. It helps, particularly because of the coffee cup, but I'm still angry, grouchy, wtf-is-wrong with you spin cycle.
Why did I give you my keys? Why didn't I ask to begin with how long you'd be gone, or verify my understanding of what moving-the-car meant? Why does any of it matter? Why am I so pissed off just because you wanted to roam around for a while? aaaaaaaaaaaaa
The emotional quality of the room is sharp and toxic, like a cloud of ammonia. You are standing, probably trying to calm yourself down too, probably trying not to "See you later" out of it. You say, "Would you like to work on --" the project we were going to do together, a piece of help you agreed to give me. Somehow just the reminder of this help makes the gremlins scrape their tools and grouse backchatter nastiness. I don't want your helpdon'tneedyourhelpgaragaragara.
"Is this my coffee?" I know perfectly well it is, from the way you set it down, but I want to hear you say it. I open it up, just to waste time while you respond. Probably will drink it black, that's how irritated I am. I will show you how mad I am by drinking my coffee ferociously.
I look down at the cup. It takes me a few beats to process what I am looking at. The soft caramel color of you, stirring cream into my coffee cup before leaving the shop.
I wouldn't have stirred cream into your cup. Not in the middle of the ammonia fog.
The gremlins set their tools down, and cock their heads, listening. Silent.
My first thought is that he couldn't have done this for me. The coffee must be sweet, must be mixed for him, he's just giving me his castoffs. There cannot be a cup of coffee mixed for me on the counter in front of me because enemies do not mix you a cup of coffee. There is a cup of coffee mixed for me, though, because a sip confirms it is not sweetened. Not his. It's for me.
Enemies do not mix you a cup of coffee. You are my enemy. But you mixed me a cup of coffee. But you are my enemy. But there is cream stirred into my coffee.
I don't know what to do with any of this. I decide to make bacon while I think about it.
You help me with my project. You are clicking through the task as though from the end of a long shiny executive table, and I am irritated that you are working so deftly and that your insight is so well-tuned. I'm not supposed to be impressed, and you are not supposed to be helpful. Enemies are not helpful. No one is proud of their enemy. I cut up a mango while I think about why you are helping me.
The shiny table gets a little shorter, even as you get a little more direct. You're not going to rustle papers at me when I prevaricate any more, you are just going to tell me how it is and move on to the next agenda item. I should not like this. I should be angry that you are being bossy. But I'm glad. I like it when you take charge when I am a mess, and aren't overbearing about it, just uncompromising. I am still twisting my fingers, but you aren't getting exasperated about it. "How many eggs would you like?"
Everything has to be talked about. Everything. Whenever the gremlins come out, they have to be acknowledged, they have to be pointed out to the other person "There are the gremlins, we have to talk about why they are here and what this means and what you feel about it and what I feel about it and what we are going to do about it and what this says about the future and how we both feel about all of that."
You don't want to talk about anything. Ever. "Those are not my gremlins. Not my deal."
"Gremlins do not just show up without cause! This is important!"
"I have to go. I can't talk about this now."
*BOOM* Mushroom cloud.
Maybe not everything has to be unpacked, every time. Maybe I can spend some time figuring out my part before I try to unpack it all in front of you. Maybe we can move around each other, catlike, and let the bacon and mangos and shiny executive tables blunt and cushion the gremlin edges. Maybe I can reflect on the shades neither black nor white of men who disappear for two hours and return with cream-filled coffee and businesslike helpfulness. Enemy? Vassal? How can there be anything but enemy/vassal?
Your thoughts and desires I do not understand or even guess at and yet which are so often not the threat to me which I anticipate, which may even be an "I love you." Vassals are not independent or mysterious or unknown or unexpected and they do not make me angry because they do not have their own emotions apart from mine. Enemies do not show love or consideration and they do not have emotional struggles or self-doubt because their every move is calculated to destroy me, take advantage of me, extract resources from me. You have emotions, demand to be allowed to have them, have ones that are different from mine and refuse to clear them with me first.
I know how to behave toward a vassal. I am a benevolent lord. I reign in peace and plenty. I grant boons and throw jousting events and everyone claps with bored hands. I go on long trips and trust you with the estate. I stare out the window a lot, and sigh. And everything is always as it should be.
I know how to date an enemy. Explosive and short-lived and fiery fun and lots and lots of trap doors and high walls and snares. Watch me laugh and tease and know that behind my languorous amusement I am sneering at you for thinking you can get the best of me. I'm competitive, and fun. Because I don't play games I can't win.

What to do with a man who won't stay in either role? You know the games better than I do, and call out my moves as I make them. You blow off the jousting events and dare me to my face, out of earshot of the guests but still in full sight of them, refusing to show allegiance. You are more considerate than a vassal, more apt to predict my needs and desires, more likely to fill them in unexpected ways, though still disconcertingly likely to drop me on my ass on the ice. You are complicated and contradictory. You are more annoying than anyone on earth.
"My life is falling apart this week and you aren't even here." "Oh really? Tell me how your life is falling apart." I will slice you and your sarcasm with claws of lava. How dare you refuse your lines. It says right here what you are supposed to say. What everyone else said. No one else talks to me like this. Enemyenemyenemy. All missiles launch but wait launch but wait. Wait. "What do you want?" he asks. I list perfectly reasonable everyone knows these are obvious demands. He says flatly, "Two out of three isn't bad." It would be hilarious if it weren't happening to me.
I'm telling a colleague how uncertain I am about my own professional skills, and how infuriating it was to ask you how you handled similar insecurities. Uproarious laughter, my male colleague chortles, "Nope. Does not compute." His laughter at women and men trying to talk to each other across the void defuses the rage that dragon-reared from your clipped response that you didn't experience that problem.
I walk into the restaurant. We've played this scene before. It didn't work out so well that time. (Mushroom cloud). Have we learned a little? Your body language is different, less pointy. I'm more conscious of mine. My tone of voice. Indirect, I learned. Catlike. Don't make a full frontal assault. Don't unpack the gremlins. Put the weapon down. Have a seat. Wait. Feel the moment. Feel it a little more. Move your chair a little closer now.
"I try as hard as I can to make sure that you don't feel backed into a corner, because I know what happens when you do," he told me angrily in the first year. And I sat, dumbfounded. Men who hate you don't say things like that. That sounds like something out of the mouth of someone who loves you and is frustrated, trying to understand you. But it doesn't fit with the narrative I've crafted in my head, the role I've written for him. Damn it. That means I have to take that shitty little overgrown path over there, the one that I haven't been on in decades, the one that needs to be hacked down with a machete and is crawling with things that bite. I want to take this nice wide comfy bridge that I can logroll down wearing a blindfold, the one all worn smooth from all the other times I've marched back and forth across it. But he keeps not reading his lines, and refuses to get on the bridge. Making everything all difficult.
His presence fills the room even when he isn't in the room. A pitcher of sangria shows up at the table, the owner drops by to run her hands over my shoulders. "She's seeing a fella who is well known around town." The deference shown me in other situations when his name is mentioned. The spill of pleasure on people's faces when they talk about him. My own pleasure listening to his stories, stories I understand, stories that make me feel connected, kindred. Sitting next to him, standing at his shoulder, walking into a crowd with him - heady, powerdrunk. I feel mythic with the weight of our combined eyes and ears and energy. The electricity bouncing back and forth between us is enough to light up the block. "Stop it," he laughs and forgets what he was saying.
I have my own charms and powers. My life has magic in it that does not arise from him. But he is the enhancement of the spell already cast, the beam of sunlight poured on top of a beautiful day, the fully saturated colors, the extended version of the song. The cream in my coffee, already stirred in and perfectly combined. Which part is me, which is him, why am I not in control? Can I trust a man I don't control? Our power together is unstoppable, our power directed at each other is a screeching feedback loop. The night is a pile of gardenias you didn't reach without a morning of coiled jagged wire launching you there, farther and higher and faster than you can reach alone.




Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Ms. Valentine, do you have a book on the Greek alphabet?

Why, yes. Yes I do.

It's Camp Read a lot time, and I can hear children at the picnic table, their voices raised to that particular shrillness that usually means an argument is about to boil over. There's activity over at the fishing pond, too - but I don't have a line of direct sight to see if anyone is swinging their magnetic "hooks"...ah, no swinging yet. But I have, I estimate, about forty seconds to help you find a book on the Greek alphabet. After that, who knows what will happen with the fishing lines and the picnic argument.

You walk over to the foreign language collection in the 400s, perhaps the shelf I am prouder of than any other in this collection of 14,000 items. I built it from nothing, almost. We needed materials for our ESL students. I was tired of having nothing to offer frantic teachers who found out a new student was also a new immigrant, and frightened of his teacher who spoke a language he didn't know. I still never have the right language at the right time, but I'm getting there. Urdu. Hindi. Bengali. Gujarati. Farsi. Somali. Ukrainian. Tamil. Arabic. Korean. This year I added several books on spoken Mandarin and Chinese calligraphy, and several on Portuguese. Bilingual picture dictionaries. Software. Music.

You look up at me finishing with assigning other students their stations, and you say, "Ms. Valentine, I don't see it." I walk over, and we look together. You are right. The new book I thought was here, on the history of the alphabet from Proto-Sinaitic signs to Phoenician script to Greek and Roman letters, must be loaned out. (I find it later, inside a tent.) I pick up a book on the Rosetta stone, and flip through it half-hoping to find a relevant illustration. "I see lots of hieroglyphs," you say a bit sadly. "No Greek." 

I'm running out of time. I see other students approaching me, with drama on their faces. Someone is not sharing a beach towel, and someone is hoarding fish. There is no time for searching the catalog - pulling out an iPad, loading the app, praying the wifi works. Fortunately, I know that if all you really need is the alphabet itself, there is an older book with several world alphabets in giant illustrations that I was just re-classifying. It was originally an art book, but I had a suspicion it would get more use if I took it out of the art section and shelved it with languages, so that friends like you could trace letters from Russian, Gaelic, and Hebrew in perfect form.

I want to know why you are interested in Greek, but there isn't time to ask. Your classmates need attention, too. Maybe you heard about Greek from a fantasy movie. A video game character making a joke. Maybe you are developing a secret code. Maybe you saw fraternity sweatshirts at the mall. I wish I had time to find out. I hand you the book, open to the Greek pages, and I don't hear a sound from you for the rest of class.

But for that forty seconds, everything I do behind the scenes clicked into place. This is what I do. This is why I do it. I am a librarian.

The library collection is my creation, built especially for you, from the requests of every person who has ever walked inside my doors, and the repeated choices of children wearing out some titles and passing over others. Every day over the last ten years I have added, subtracted, re-covered, re-located, and re-imagined this creation to make it more useful and appealing to you, more reflective of who we are as a school community. This is your library, that I have sorted and kept ready for you, for the day you would come in and ask for a book on the Greek alphabet.

The magic here isn't that I could put a book on Greek in your hands without a finding aid. The magic isn't how fast your information need was met. The magic is that an eight year old child could take a break from learning about partial products and Detroit landmarks and sentence fluency and opacity to pursue a topic of his own interest, which just so happens to be ancient language, thank you very much. The magic is that there is a space for him to pursue this interest, to take his ancient language book into his tent and discuss cryptography with his best friend. The magic is that there is an information-nugget perfectly-suited to his age-level and ability and interest. The magic is what happens when raw materials like tax dollars are converted into the look on the face of this particular child staring at the Greek alphabet. You don't get from one to the other without people all along the way, putting their heart into their work because they believe in it.

This part of that chain, this collection of 14,000 interesting nuggets, is my work. I'm a librarian. For now, at least. For today. Welcome to your library, the creation I built for you.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

The woman sitting in her car

I read something once, one of those scare-tastic articles about protecting yourself against assault, that tells women all the things they do wrong. You've read them. You've probably read too many. They piss me off at this point, and are one of the reasons my window coverings are semi-transparent and I always have headphones in while I walk, unescorted, at night, wearing skirts. I hate anti-rape advice. MEN ARE ANIMALS ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.
Anyway.
One article talked about women sitting in their cars.
"Take a look around a parking lot," it declared. "Men park, get out of their cars, and walk away. They walk purposefully and directly to their cars, then immediately drive away. Women sit in their cars, balancing checkbooks, putting on lipstick. This makes them targets."
When I read this, at 23 or whatever, I thought, "Shit. I don't do that. How stupid. Women are dumb."
I'm 38 now. I park 1/3 of a mile from my apartment, in a structure. I commute 30 minutes each way on the freeway. I get home, many nights, after work bs and commute bs and downtown traffic and navigating the crazies flying full throttle around the sharp corners of the structure, to park in a different spot every night. I turn off the car, and I'm tired. Cars are a crappy video game I hate playing. And then there is the video game of lugging all my stuff home through the undergrads. I need a few minutes to check my armor. It's heavy, and dented. I sit in my car and look at Facebook.
And I think about being a target. GO GO GO. Always keep moving. Don't sit still. Don't relax.
And my 30something mantra rears its head. Fuck you.
My sister told me about the Fuck You stage. I thought I was there already, years ago. But it keeps getting stronger every year. My Fuck Youishness. 
Fuck being a target. Fuck making other people comfortable. Fuck being on guard all the time. Fuck you.
I had this couples therapy session once and the therapist asked me what I most wanted to say to my partner and my answer was "I want to tell him, 'Fuck you.'" I think the therapist was shocked. Maybe my partner too. I know I was. It's not nice to tell someone you love to fuck off. I'm not the "fuck you" kind of person. That's my sister. My brother. Not me. I'm nice. I make people happy. I smile & try to make people laugh & like me.
When I heard my sister talk about the 35-ish disease of the fuck-yous, I translated it to mean I would be more confident, less concerned about the opinions of others, more able to chart my own course. I thought I was already there in my early 30s. I was confident. I knew who I was, I knew or was learning what I wanted. I wasn't afraid to ask for what I needed.
But the fuck-yous turned out to be different. They are, at least for me, about distancing myself from the emotional needs of others. They are my own teenage phase, which I missed somewhere along the line. 
I don't care what you think.
I dare you.
Whatever.
So I sit in my car, and try to pull the emotional strength together to go back out in the world. To still be not-home, not-safe, not-vulnerable. I don't have the energy to spend so much of my day, 10-14 hours, in armor. Armor is uncomfortable. 
And I think about women, my sisters. How much time we spend pleasing or being pleasant. How much time we spend being bled. How tired we are. Is it any wonder we want to be in the bathroom, in the parked car? I don't want to have anyone call my name, or touch me wanting something, or ask me anything. 
I think about the scene from Jesus Christ Superstar, where he pleads with the crowd to leave him alone. My nightmare about teaching. I can feel the panic rise sometimes. Stop. Stop.
But it's more than just the kids. It's the commute, and the neighbors, and the drivers running me over. The politics. It's that sometimes I need a safe space where I am right now, because I just can't go any farther without a timeout. If you try to give me a hard time about it, I've got two words for you.
I'm going to watch the sunset from my parked car. I'm going to actively unclench my jaw. I'm not going to read your bullshit article that wants me to be afraid. I'm the woman you see sitting in her car. Not ignorant. But learning to measure herself.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Super Mario?

Isn't there some cartoon character, comic hero, video game avatar that pulls power from the ground? I have a memory, foggy and indistinct, like an image I glanced at without much thought, but recurring and recurring like something deeply familiar. The image swims up to the front of my consciousness about once a month, bringing with it a sense of invincible power, a burst of tireless energy and optimism. My soldier soul, one of the many casualties of artificially regulated hormones. 
Touch the ground. Crouch down. Scrunch like Mario charging up, kneel like a sprinter finding your mark, one palm against the earth. Draw your power. Consider your trajectory. Prepare. To launch.
Go.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

The persistence of romance

I was in a philosophy class once, Philosophy of Sex. We were talking about the feeling of being in love, the way it consumes you, the way it doesn't last. I said something about how it is good that it doesn't last, because it wasn't real life. I was married at the time, had been married for years, was at the point where I'd given up waiting for my husband to lead, given up being a good wife who nurtures his ego and had instead marched back to school and found the quickest path to a degree and a middle-class job so I could stop crying over my taxes. I loved him, but he was a child for whom I had decided to care, no longer did he impress or thrill me. There were lots of romance-killing emotions in our relationship by that time - my pity for him, a bit of shame, a sense that I was more powerful than him.  I still saw the marriage lasting at that point, I still shared everything with him, came home from school and teased out all the intellectual discussions with him, talking for hours, analyzing everything, sharing my reading assignments and pulling his viewpoints into my own, carrying them back as pollen on my legs to my classes, where my instructors wondered in comments scrawled across my papers about whether they should be giving him a grade.
My philosophy professor smiled, asked me to explain. I thought back to when I was in love, really consumed by my husband. I thought about how nothing else mattered, how school and making money and talking to other people were exhausting chores. You can't live like that, I said. We'd starve to death.
Even as I said it, some little voice inside my heart, young and idealistic, was gagging at myself. Are you 85 years old?? What is more important than pleasure, intimacy, joy? Who gives a crap about getting anything done? Think of pre-contact Polynesians, eating fruit and having sex and laughing and totally unprepared for getting-shit-done Europeans to show up - do you really want to argue that that's NOT your ideal?
But there was another part of me that did feel very righteous for my "getting shit done" attitude - plowing through my degree requirements, summa cum laude, thank you very much, working full time, check check check. No time for being in love. That leads to weeping over the taxes.
After the divorce, there was a while when I thought that I'd just have to keep rotating partners so that I'd always have some new prospect of "in-love"ness on the horizon. The romance only lasts a few years, so keep 'em coming.
I started to notice that after a while, almost without thinking about it, I would take a new romance and start trying to mold it into Something Traditional. Something Responsible. Without really considering whether I wanted Responsible. And then I'd get bored, and miss my romance, and start looking for excitement. And the personal growth that comes from me reconnecting with my messy emotional self.
I don't know if I want Responsible. I don't know what I have, if it has Responsible potential. I still have lots of freakouts, about Expectations and The Future and Worst Case Scenarios and Someday I Will Be Old and lots of other fun channels with similar names.
I'm beginning to think that part of what kills romance for me is a sense of having conquered. Being more powerful. And yet somehow at the same time also, surrendering. Not the scary deep bits, but the parts I like, the messy emotions. Halting my growth. Setting up, settling down, leaving the road. Ceasing exploration. Getting shit done instead of figuring shit out.
I've told him before that one of the parts I most love about him is his strength, the way he pulls against me. He says he knows what I mean, though I do fear that he interprets it as "Don't make a commitment" or "Don't ever give in to me or show weakness." He smiled and said, "I got it." I hope so.
Because it is different. It is how he is always himself, how well he knows himself, how he is always internally consistent, how I can pull against him to find my way and trust that the line is always going to be taut. He changes, he adapts, he listens. But he doesn't give up, let go of the line. He doesn't accept everything I say - he makes me prove it. It enrages me, because it makes me vulnerable. I can't just blow smoke at him. He demands my best work. It forces me to know myself better, to go back to my core, to stop taking the easy way through.
Learning, learning. The growth is a good place for me. Ask me about the status of my relationship and what can I say? It doesn't fit into the categories I thought I knew. Laura said that relationships made of two whole individuals will always look strange from the outside, because we aren't trained to see the union of whole people as romantic, because individual growth can seem "bad" for a relationship, because we value self-sacrifice, togetherness, advancing lockstep at the same pace. Because if you are individuals, you'll be independent, apart, and yet if your relationship is healthy you will also have a persistent intimacy - which must surely confound observers trying to determine if you are either estranged or a storybook.  It confounds me. This isn't how it is supposed to be, I thought. Am I being lazy, or fearful, that I don't feel like doing anything to fix it? That I'm not taking charge and commanding my battlefield?
I know I really like myself a lot more than I ever have, and I know I'm having a hard time getting shit done, though its not always because I'm with him but also because I'm exploring alone. Sometimes the fruit knocks me on the head, and sometimes it falls right into my hand. But if I can make peace with my fear of invading conquistadors, I am standing where I wanted to be. Or rather, lounging.