Month: August 2012

  • “‎I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.” – Sister Joan Chittister, Catholic Nun

    In pop culture, girls who crush hopelessly on guys they can’t have are painted as just that – hopeless. Over and over again, we’re taught that girls who openly express sexual or romantic interest in guys who don’t want them are pitiable, stalkerish, desperate, crazy bitches. More often than not, they’re also portrayed as ugly –  whether physically, emotionally or both –  in order to further establish their undesirability as an objective fact. Both narratively and, as a consequence, in real life, men are given free reign to snub, abuse, mislead and talk down to such women: we’re raised to believe that female desire is unseemly, so that any consequent shaming is therefore deserved. There is no female-equivalent Friend Zone terminology because, in the language of our culture, a man’s romantic choices are considered sacrosanct and inviolable. If a girl has been told no, then she has only herself to blame for anything that happens next – but if a woman says no, then she must not really mean it. Or, if she does, she shouldn’t: the rejected man is a universally sympathetic figure, and everyone from moviegoers to platonic onlookers will scream at her to just give him a chance, as though her rejection must always be unfounded rather than based on the fact that he had a chance, and blew it. And even then, give him another one! The pathos of Single Nice Guys can only be eased by pity-sex with unwilling women that blossoms into romance!

  • Exodus Update: Destination Complete

    My laptop sat under the front seat for the entirety of the trip, so I wound up satisfying my urge to write on slips of paper. I jotted down job leads to places such as a haunted house that promises minimum wage in return for dressing up as a monster for five hours a night on the weekends during September and October. On the second leg of the journey, at Micah’s dad’s house near the Arkansas/Tennessee border, I chronicled just how awkward it was to be treated like a rebellious teenager when you’re doing the one thing with your life that is brave and positive and responsible, which is leaving a place that offers you absolutely no growth. Then, in the next breath, I marked how thankful I was that Micah’s stepmom offered us a tent, just in case. I wrote these sentences in the almost dark, while my feet were so covered in poison ivy that I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t write much while in Kentucky, I just did a lot of moon-gazing and reading and attic-dwelling and thinking. And about every two hours or so, I was coerced into playing dolls by two little girls.
    Now. I have a lot of free time and a lot of new experiences. Right now my responsibilities are making sure we have enough money, and getting a job. I applied to tons of coffee shops and bookstores, and was offered an interview, that I wasn’t able to take, for the store is too far away from my current dwellings. I went to a meeting for the Indiana Department Of Workforce Development, at a library, and wound up applying for a job at that same library. There are theatres pretty much everywhere here, but I understand that I’ve got to get settled and networked before I dive into that world. But, I am here, I am safe, and I feel strangely liberated.

  • Dangerous Fun

    We are on the second leg of the exodus. Micah and I have been in Jonesboro since Saturday, visiting his dad. Today was kind of rough, as we got lost on the way back from a gaming session Micah’s stepsisterinvited us to. The gaming session itself was fun. Micah and I played a Native American healer and warewolf in a prohibition era fantasy game, set in Chicago. Our part of the game was that we were searching for our sister, who had just become a vampire. Micah’s character almost beat the shit out of the other characters, until one of them got the idea to repeatedly hit his character with a car. As fun as that was, it didn’t cover for how scary getting lost was later. We kept almost hitting redneck country, in our jeep that held all of our worldly possessions. Needless to say, we got in really really really late.

    Micah’s father kept looming over us while we were jobhunting online. It was frustrating, and Micah had to try with all his willpower not to get into a fight with us. The man was making useless suggestions, as if neither one of us had ever been to a job interview. It felt like he saw us like rebellious teenagers going on our first roadtrip. Ugh.

    Micah’s stepmom was a lot more helpful, though. She suggested that if we needed a cheap place to stay, we could always camp out. Then she gave us a tent out of the shed. Just like that. It was small enough that it actually fit into the jeep, even though we thought the entire vehicle had been stuffed full. That part felt like the moment when you’re in a video game, and a random villager you talk to hands you this old trashcan lid they found, and suddenly “Player 1 Recieved a Shield!”

    Last night I discovered I had a break-out of poison ivy from our outing at the park. It just keeps getting worse. I think what happened was the oil got on my socks and the bottom of my pants, and then I took a nap on the bed in the same pants and socks and my skin kept reabsorbing the oils. So, now that we’re in Kentucky, it should be better. Have I mentioned yet that Kentucky is absolutely fucking beautiful? I definitely feel that the exodus is going well so far.

    Also, now I’m a redhead. The color seems to suit me so well, with my pale pink skin and fiery attitude, that it makes me wonder why I wasn’t born this way.

  • Obligatory Rain Dance

    Two days. Two more days until the grand exodus. The visit to my family has still not veered from surreal, even though a few of the relatives that were on hard times have found employment since I arrived, and feel like they are getting their lives back. It’s just the others that are trying to convince me to stay on fallow ground, when I can see the emptiness in their eyes that kind of puts me at unease. And the fact that they act offended when I say I’ve got to move on, as if this bit of backwoods is the only place to live, and that I’ll be perfectly happy if I just come back, settle down on some farm and start popping out children, and go back to singing in church as my only artistic outlet. I feel like that wasn’t my life back then, that was just a way to survive with my sanity somewhat intact. I was doing a dance to keep my secrets tucked under the veil, which is why within weeks of leaving for college, I felt like I could finally breathe. I guess that’s one good skill I’ve honed, that people tend to think that I’m just like them, that they see themselves in me a bit, and that I can chameleon pretty easily. Someday I’m pretty sure I’ll use that as a weapon, but hopefully only a weapon for good instead of betrayal.
    I keep collecting small things, like hawthornes and bull quartz and yarrow, as if I were about to cast a spell. If I were into that, I’m sure that would be one helluva spell. But, in my walks lately, those are just the things I’ve been drawn to, for some unconscious reason. Maybe I’m just building a small memory, and those trinkets are there to remind me where I came from, without any feeling of “I need to stay here”. Because that’s the strange thing. Despite everyone’s pleading, I have no interest in staying here. Never have. It’s something I’ve had tucked in the back of my mind for over a decade now. It’s the one thing that so many people, including my father, have tried, but never gathered the courage to do. Which is why it bewilders me that so many people seem shocked that I have no reason to stay.

  • Are you the person you’d thought you’d be at this age? Why or why not?

    The difference in the person I am, and the person I had thought I would be when I was younger would probably be a big surprise, but a good surprise. I was a shy kid, who had this idea in her head that the future would make everything easier. I’d be this carefree, yet strong woman who practically lived in coffeehouses, loved and was loved fiercely, did whatever her passions drove her towards, and went on adventures. I’ve done all those things. But, it took a lot of changing and growing in ways that many people are too afraid to think about. I’ve had to go through a lot of pain and pick up a lot of scars, and constantly be reborn. To the point that, when people see me that haven’t seen me in a long time, they are surprised themselves. For a while I thought I was fake, that I was invisible and an emotional wreck, that everyone looked at me and saw a prude. I became who I am because I was frustrated with these things, and sought to change myself from the inside out. I kept doing this, and doing this, until I was satisfied. I am the goddess of evolution. As a result, I keep growing, and I’ll keep re-defining who I am, and it will all be beautiful.

  • What I have learned so far at Daycamp…

    My relatives were strangely well-behaved yesterday. I had maybe one aunt get really antagonistic, but no one else was wishing for a fight. At least there’s still lots of watermelon in the fridge.
    I realized something about economics yesterday, while watching Antiques Roadshow with my dad. He kept complaining about how some of the coins in his old coin collection could only be sold for their metal, and not for their collector value. I said something about how this is a buyer’s market, and nothing like it would have been ten years ago. People are too worried about selling, and know that it’s to the point of just pawning things to pay the bills. So, it’s the buyer that sets the price, and then worries about if they can sell what they just bought. Everything is going up in price, but losing value. It’s the strangest phenomenon.
    I’ve also realized, that though my past job was pretty shitty, and one of those “minimum wage-slave” kinds of gigs that I hope never to have to do again, it’s kind of made me a crusader for the lower class. People keep talking about political things, and economic things, and I keep spouting out almost anarchistic dogmas, without really meaning to. I mean, it’s like I was doing field research and one day I figured out what makes and keeps poor people poor and now I’m putting words to their/our circumstances, and it’s all coming out angry and subversive. I’ve never really felt “poor”, even though by poverty line standards I have been, but then again, I’ve never felt the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” that most people seem to be afflicted with, where I empathize with rich people, and hope that some of that trickles down to me. Despite my fancy college education and all my strange eccentric sophistication, (that once actually had a cop fooled that I was much more wealthy than I was and had him almost chasing down my stolen wares until I told him that it was just a fifteen dollar backpack and a book of poetry), I’ve come out with some pretty hard life lessons, that maybe hopefully made me a better person. Or maybe I’m just romanticizing this shit too much.
    Also: there’s a huge, viscous dog that got loose outside, and I’ve been instructed to poke it with a stick if it comes at me while I’m outside while my parents are at church. I keep hearing a small dog yelp in the next yard over, and it makes my heart sad.

  • Ten Points for Something That Looks Like Moonshine

    I have been partaking in the recession-era family past time: collecting scrap metal from old dumps. If we find stainless steel, aluminum, or something heavy, it’s a “bonus”. I guess that’s about the only upside to pollution: the ungodly amount of time it takes for trash to break down means that glass and metal are up for grabs sixty years later to whomever has the stomach to dig around in rusty cans for fun and profit (mostly for profit). It’s an investment in the future, for all the wrong reasons.
    I had a strange thought about cognitive growth when I was hanging out with my nephew. People keep asking him where his nose is, and where his eye is, and what color this is, and where is the stuffed cow. These are things that we can ask a fifteen-month-old, because he’s new, and he never gets tired of it. But, when someone says that they don’t like something, be it some type of music, or literature, or an activity, because they find it boring, we call them a snob, and get offended that they don’t share our interests. But, to that person, listening to nothing but bad country music, or watching some newest campy dumb comedy, it’s like asking that person to point to their eye or their nose over and over. They’ve grown beyond it, and should be left alone. Sophistication is not a negative trait, although that thought seems to be gaining in popularity. Kind of like syphilis.
    Tomorrow begins the part of my visit to my family that I’ve been dreading: the potluck with extended family. I had two short phone conversations with the only cool aunts I have (I come from a big family, and only about half of them are the bad kind of crazy, the other half are the good kind), telling me that they weren’t going to be there, to save me from the bad kind of crazy. As much as I love my immediate family, I cannot stand most of the rest of my family, and would probably avoid it, if my mother hadn’t come up with some hairbrained scheme to get my boyfriend to meet the people he’s been avoiding (which didn’t work, it’s just a hairbrained gathering that has no scheme), so now it’s some impromptu going away party for me, so that means that I have to be there with people I don’t care for. By myself. Micah’s not going, my sister’s not going, and Eunice and Mellisa are not going to be there. So it’s down to me, my dad, my nephew, my crazy mother, my crazy aunt, the random distant cousin who now lives with her, my alcoholic uncle, maybe a cousin or two, and my racist grandmother who likes to loom creepily behind people. Maybe I can just take my dad and puddinhead and just go look at some trees for a while. Ugh. On the bright side, maybe I’ll have contracted poison ivy by tomorrow and no one will want to touch me.

  • Unmeltable Welfare Cheese

    I hadn’t realized how depressed economically my hometown was until I came down here. This visit so far has been a secretly heartbreaking, and gives me just one more incentive to get the hell out of dodge. People are trying to sell crystals (the kind that grow in the ground, not the illegal zombie-making kind, although I suspect a bit of that is going on too) just to make ends meet, and living in houses five or six people at a time. My own parents, who have always been kind of bad with money but have always been able to survive by the skin of their teeth, almost cried when I gave them my stockpile of rice and greenbeans. Any time someone now bitches about welfare queens, I shall soundly punch them in the nose. Everyone’s just trying to survive the best way they can, and people who abuse the system just make the people who are scraping by look like a mockery to the people who are holding the pursestrings. The weird thing is, as bad as I thought my own situation is and was, I’ve never had to do without. I’ve always had means of supporting myself, and ways of saving money, and ways to be resourceful, even if it meant that I was walking everywhere. Then again, I’ve been looking at the past four years as just a waiting place, and I made the sacrifices I made so that I could achieve my dreams. My dreams kept my head above water, and it kept food in my pantry and kept me working and creating and never giving up hope. I’ve never given up hope, even when it seemed hopeless. It just puts a lot of things in perspective for me. But, Jesus H, I still keep looking around and thinking, it’s 1934 all over again… and it’s kind of shattered my entire worldview, of how I thought humans thought. It’s all turned upside down. But, it still doesn’t make the fact that my aunt Lora is pretty much constantly drunk any less disturbing to take. Or the fact that I handed my nephew to her back when he was a week old, not knowing that she was three sheets to the wind, and she made some slurred speech about the fact that he was going to be the only bright spot in everyone’s lives for a while. And, it seems, she was right. All of my unemployed and hopeless neighbors and relatives come over just to play with the little puddinhead (I will introduce the child to Twain once he finally is old enough to look at me incredulously when I call him that) and this little kid, this goofy-faced whispy-haired destructo machine that likes to eat crayons, does seem to inspire hope. He just hasn’t grasped the concept of kicking a ball. Or the fact that stuffed bulls only fly when I throw them to him. But, he’s still new, he has a lot of dirt-throwing years ahead of him.

  • Ангела крыло пят

    I fit most of my worldly posessions into the backseat. This makes me happy. But, it’s mostly books and art supplies. My priorities are almost too damnably bohemian. I could live off rice and soup forever, just as long as I am not separated from my paints for too long. People keep asking me what I’m going to do with the rest of the stuff, as if I’m going to miss not being tied down my the trappings of domesticity. I’ve lived before without lots of useless crap, I can do it again. I can wash two weeks worth of clothes and then wear them again. I can live with no TV. I don’t require a well-stocked minibar in my basement. I’m just excited to get my nomad on again.

  • Skull Crotch, For the Look That Screams “I’m Dangerous”

    All this time, and I’m unbelievably relieved to be getting rid of the bed from hell. Damn thing’s ripped up all my cute panties. And all I have are cute panties, each with a big hole over my hip. It’s like they’ve been violated, but all it was was an over-enthusiastic broken spring. Blah.
    Well meaning people are just a hinderance when they try to help but don’t really know what they’re talking about. As a result, I almost spent an unnecessary amount of money because some redneck pointed out that the passenger side light was out on the jeep. And then he proceeded to list, for about ten minutes, what the problem could possibly be. After all that hassle, the light wasn’t out. I’d even pulled out the owner’s manual to look up how to replace the bulb. All Micah could do was thank him for pointing it out. And, if it hadn’t been this week, of all weeks, just before we move, with money as tight as it is, I don’t think I’d be so angry at the man’s blind stupidity.
    I’m trying to adjust to a daywalker’s schedule. It’s so hard when I’ve been working nightshift for three years. Right now I just want to sleep, but this is my usual bedtime, when most people are getting up. It’s like I’ve been living in Oz all this time, and I’m adjusting to earth habits. Where the hell are the flying monkeys?
    Final thought, before I give in to sleep: You cannot squeeze blood from a stone, and expect the stone not to crumble.