Wives & Lovers & RAGE

Color me surprised. Apparently a couple people who are not me have seen this blog. I've always thought I was sending thoughts out to a void. HI VOID PEOPLE! ARE YOU LIKE THE ABYSS? ARE YOU STARING INTO ME?

If you're there, I'd love a comment. Just say hi. It would be fun to think you're real people. Of course, you might be bots. Aw, man. Now I'm going to be paranoid about HAL 9000 knowing too much about me.

Anyroad, I just logged in to vent my spleen over Burt Bacharach.

Burt, honey. Why you gotta be so awesome and so sexist? I had a hankering for "This Guy's In Love With You," so I turned on a BB YouTube playlist, and this song pops up:

"Wives and Lovers"
Hey, little girl,
Comb your hair, fix your make-up.
Soon he will open the door.
Don't think because
There's a ring on your finger,
You needn't try any more

For wives should always be lovers, too.
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.
I'm warning you.

Day after day,
There are girls at the office,
And men will always be men.
Don't send him off
With your hair still in curlers.
You may not see him again.

For wives should always be lovers, too.
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.
He's almost here.

Hey, little girl
Better wear something pretty,
something you'd wear to go to the city.
And dim all the lights,
Pour the wine, start the music.
Time to get ready for love.

Dim all the lights,
Pour the wine, start the music.
Time to get ready for love.
Time to get ready, time to get ready for love.
Time to get ready, time to get ready for love.

SERIOUSLY, BURT?!

"MEN WILL ALWAYS BE MEN/ YOU MAY NOT SEE HIM AGAIN"?!
When I hear that, my brain translates:
"MEN CANNOT HELP BEING LED BY THEIR REPRODUCTIVE URGES, AND IT'S YOUR FAULT IF YOU CANNOT ACCOMMODATE THEM"

I know relationships take work. I know it's often harder to be aroused by someone when you've seen them poop or seen them hurl. I know it's human nature to be attracted to pretty people, even when you're in a committed relationship. I saw a study once that children equate beauty with goodness and homeliness with evil. That's hard to argue against. Yet, similar studies also show that even darker skinned children will equate whiteness with goodness and being a person of color with badness. We shouldn't accept this reduction of values based upon unrelated genetics. If that's what society tells us, we should change society.

When I get into a relationship, I'll be relieved to be out of the dating game, and of course I'll let my hair down a bit. But I hope I'll be in touch with my partner and be able to communicate with them about their needs. And I hope my partner will not threaten to commit adultery if I do not meet his or her superficial standards of beauty. If they do, well, I'll make sure it's not cheating, through the expedience of excising them from my life completely.

UGH! Just the tone of this song- so paternalistic! "Little girl", "I'm warning you," if you don't smarten up, you're gonna lose that fine, wonderful specimen. Even his solemn vow of everlasting devotion won't make any difference if you turn off the sexy, even for a moment! GRRR! It's twisted justification for the whole toxic beauty industry.

I'm going to look for friends and lovers who can love me in curlers, and love me in silks, who'll appreciate that I don't want to be sexy all the time- that, in fact, the current notion of "sexy" is difficult for me to portray. I'll try, for the right person, but I want someone who'll be attracted to my reality, too.

Burt Bacharach, I guess I just have more faith in men than you do.

Youthful Poetry

Take my wrist in your hand
Turn off this eerie charade
Let me at last rest safely
In the warmth of your gaze

I may be beaten now
My eyes wrung of their cold tears
But I'll cry no more, I swear
With your arms surrounding me

I desire nothing so much as you
Your words foretell the future
And your hands trace my past
Without you with me, I cannot exist

You touch me; my world reforms
You speak; my thoughts divert
How you've changed me you'll never know
And when you leave how I shall hurt.

I found this scrap of poetry in my desk at my parents' apartment over the holiday. It makes me like my younger self more than I think I tend to do, nowadays. It was written as you see it, except in a cursive hand, with only a couple of crossed out words.

Girl on Fire

I entered the shower feeling adrift. I normally try to use warm water, but oftentimes when I'm entering the shower, I'm so cold. Normally, I'm cold because I neglect my body's needs like food and warm clothing when I'm "not in the mood" to be self-charitable. Tonight I kept inching the heat up, turning down the cold, until I got to the point where I could feel my skin's discomfort, like the warmth was a symbiotic alien, entering my epidermis and raising my internal temperature until I felt hyper-alive. It's like I get into a hot shower awaiting a phoenix transformation: if I can just raise the temperature high enough, I will transcend my problems and faults and ascend to a higher state of being. 

Tonight, the revelation is that, as much as I want to create internet content, I don't really have anything in particular I want to say. There are things I believe in, quite strongly too, but I don't have the words to share them. I feel like I have nothing to add to the conversation. This made me realize that I've felt this way before. I didn't let that stop me from making new friends and trying new experiences. Thus I am attempting to say more, in the hopes that eventually, the things I say will improve in quality with practice. Then, maybe, I can craft a message and a means of delivery.

Talk more, write more, text more, do more. Because phoenixes don't combust for no reason. They flame for justice, for innocence, for truth, and for Albus Dumbledore.

Don't let the sun go down on your anger.

Today I learned that it's okay to hang up on loved ones, as long as, once you've regained your composure, you call them back to smooth things over.

I'm quite impressed with myself for handling this so well. I had a strong emotional response, I removed myself from the situation, wept noisily, then called my parents back to tell them I love them, and that the topic previously under discussion was no longer viable. I know this sounds a bit ridiculous; me being so proud of losing my shit, right?

But it's more than that. I didn't allow myself to have strong emotional reactions against authority figures as a teen without a heaping dose of guilt and shame. Now I give myself the space to feel things, I respect my body's telling me it's overwhelmed, and I enforce my boundaries. I used to fear the emotional turmoil, and I'd be completely derailed by it, often for days or even weeks. What I did tonight was look beyond my current challenges, anticipating the future fallout from my hasty but necessary decision to hang up on my parents. I was able to feel compassion for the ones who had precipitated my emotional compromise and resultant discomfort, and I took steps to prevent further harm to them and myself.

That's huge. I know I'll never stop learning how to be a good daughter, and conversely, I know that my parents aren't the paragons of perfection I thought them to be when I was younger. We're all trying, and we all could do better. I'm just thrilled that after all they've done for me, I've learned enough to disagree with them without distancing them.

I'm proud of myself, and I feel quite grown-up. Quite an accomplishment for someone who was crying like mad earlier, eh?

Loneliness is such a sad affair

Reason 5,042 why I want to be in a relationship: someone needs to be here to appreciate when I'm dancing to horrible '90s British pop music while doing household chores. The exhibitionist in me has HAD IT with performing for myself and my posters of Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, John Cleese and Andy Warhol. Maybe I should pull my Princess Leia cut-out out of storage. She at least holds me at gunpoint. Dammit. I need ice cream.

Where are the simple joys of maidenhood, anyway? One date with a staunch & dogmatic Libertarian and another with a depressed barista at a Whataburger. This is my (edit: formal) dating history. I think I could be awesome in a relationship, I really do. I've had proof I like the intimacy part of it. Where am I supposed to look for a (comparatively) well-adjusted nerd boy to love? I even want to learn better domestic skills- and I have the potential to be good at it! Somebody hold me too close! Somebody hurt me too deep! Somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep and MAKE ME AWARE OF BEING ALIVE!

I'm cute, I'm smart, I'm wise and wicked and innocent and good. I've even got some curves. Granted I'm currently unemployed, but I'm also a marketable commodity, and I'm sure that'll get me a job very soon. I'm getting closer to being ready. I wish there was some Universal Sign pointing me in the right direction. I'm so tired of being mature and patient.

He doesn't HAVE to be a nerd boy. I just can't imagine attracting a Channing Tatum or something. Not that I'd want to- he's too symmetrical... too sculpted. I prefer a be-suited Doctor, a spastic vlogger, or a bighearted passionisto. I just invented that word. I'm a passionista, I need someone who can be unashamedly enthusiastic to his devotions. You know, I don't know if I'd care if he was a she. I'd probably need a fair bit of therapy to wade through my programming, but I think if the right person had the same plumbing, somehow we'd find a way.

Bring it on, Cupid.

Benedict Complexibatch

Ohh, Tumblr. You almost won me with your charming and admittedly sexy photos of Benedict Cumberbatch. But I SEE THROUGH YOU. I will NOT spend the rest of my young adulthood (when does that end, btw?) looking at photographs of beautiful, charming, and often British people who I will never meet and whose image can only inspire in me a torturous, unquenchable longing doomed to hopelessness.

But I so love to be subsumed by fandom! It's so much fun! The in-jokes, the cleverness, the exposure to interviews and photos of people I admire! The contextually appropriate overuse of punctuation and bad spelling! But NO. As much as I'd like to take a larger part in that, my addiction is to absorption, and I think I'd do better to be absorbed by something... less pixelated, less airy. Something that can actually give back to me.

Growing up can be a real pill. Getting in the habit of imagining people like Benedict Cumberbatch complexly brings my life into harsh relief. He's a real person of varied internal dimensions and bad hair, face, and body days and finds himself turned into this ideal star/sexgod/future boyfriend/boy next door. But that's not him! And we don't like him for those reasons... at least I don't. I like him because he's interesting to watch, a compelling actor, a charming interviewee, and, yes, appealing to the eye. It's also nice that he's within 10 years of me, so I don't feel like a paedophile or a precocious child in admiring him.

(When I was a huge Star Wars fan in middle school, I think I had a massive crush on Han Solo, but I wouldn't admit it because he was too old. Even when I did, grudgingly, admit it, I was very clear that it was the fictional character Han Solo I liked, and I never wanted to usurp his attention from Princess Leia--I wanted to BE Princess Leia. That made it "ok" in my mind.)

I suppose in my head, it's only "ok" to have these feelings about fictional characters. It seems dangerous to confuse the actor with the part or the situation. I certainly wouldn't want people to go home and write steamy love scenes between me and my colleagues, but I am of course, in little danger of this happening. Though it might be a bit amusing. Heady, really. But it would make it harder to keep my center and not become a crazy gasbag of ego. And I wouldn't enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch half as much if I didn't actually *like* his personal character. Admittedly, that is caretaking on my part (sign of codependency!)... or is it just being considerate?

SO. Send me no DNA samples, tell me the occasional story, and please God Of All That Is Good, don't let this be me creating a new psychosis. Fangirl Libido Repression?

John Green

"You choose what to think about. And you may not feel that way every day, but the truth is, that you choose what you think about. It’s one of the few things that you can choose and it is—it’s kind of the definition, I think, of being a person. It’s that you have this weird gift of consciousness and you get to choose how you direct that gift. Like, how you direct your ability to think about things. So, if you choose to think about the relative health of the romantic relationships of The Situation, you’re making that choice. MTV is not making that choice for you, The Situation is not making that choice for you, you are making that choice. If you choose to think about astrophysics, you are making that choice. Every second of your definitionally temporary consciousness, you are choosing how you spend something that will not last forever. You are choosing how you spend your life, and it will be spent. And that’s a very serious thing that you have to try to take pretty seriously, even though, of course, much of our lives—because consciousness is kind of a burden—needs to be spent turning that off, which is, you know, why God made television. But we have this responsibility to ourselves, to each other, but also to the people who came before us and the people who will come after us, to think consciously about what we’re thinking about.

And that was, in some ways the beginning of The Fault in Our Stars for me, was trying to think about, what I should be thinking about. Trying to think how I should be orienting my life, what should I value, what should I prioritize. And I grew up—and so did most of you—I think, in a world that values a very specific kind of heroism. The kind where you jump on a grenade to save your buddy, or you die heroically because your family says that you can’t marry the girl you want to marry, and you’re fourteen and somehow you think that’s a deal breaker?—which is the plot of Romeo and Juliet, I ruined it for some of you, sorry; I should have prefaced that with a spoiler alert, but if you haven’t read Romeo and Juliet, that’s your fault—or in another of our great epics of heroism, The Odyssey—which I’m also about to spoil for you, but it’s a good reading experience, regardless. There’s this dude, his name’s Odysseus, he does some good warring, top-notch warring, and it takes him a long time to get home, because a bunch of stuff happens, and then he finally gets home and his wife has a bunch of suitors, and the correct response to that situation is to be like, ‘Hey! I was gone for a long time, and there’s no text messaging, you didn’t know I was okay, like of course there’s a bunch of suitors living here, that’s cool, but suitors it’s time to head on out and, you know, find someone else’s house to occupy.’ And instead, what happens is that the palace floors course with blood, and that is your happily-ever-after ending.

And Augustus Waters in this novel really buys into that idea of heroism, that idea that the best lives are lived on the biggest possible stage, and that the best lives are lived with an eye toward the grand heroic gesture, whether it be sacrificial or otherwise. That, like, the good life, by definition, is the big life. Well, I’m here to tell you that even the biggest lives are temporary, including the life of Odysseus, including the life of Romeo and Juliet, because, you know, we’re temporary. And if that’s the only way that we orient our lives, if that’s the only thing that we value, we’re doing ourselves, I think, a great disservice. So, I wanted to write The Fault in Our Stars because I wanted to write a story that was about the kind of small heroism that almost all of us are going to have to choose; very few of us will have the opportunity to jump on a grenade and save many, many people. The vast majority of us will have to find tiny ways to take care of ourselves and each other in the best ways that we can figure out how to do. And that’s really what The Fault in Our Stars is about, ultimately. It’s about these two kids and their parents trying to figure out how to take good care of each other and trying to figure out how to leave the best possible world for those who will come after, and also live a life that honors those who have come before."

John Green, on The Fault in Our Stars at the Tour de Nerdfighting Event in Austin, Texas (21 January 2012)

He's so amazing. Hank, his brother, is also awesome. He's an environmental activist and a writer of nerdy songs. He wrote one about TFIOS (TIFF-e-oahs) called "Video Game Books" which you can find on youtube.

I don't know how to explain how this community has changed my life. They're such great role models; John teaches me about politics and world history, Hank teaches me about science and the environment, and they both show me how to live an authentic and meaningful life. I love the hell out of them, and I'm not alone. But when I'm watching the videos, it feels like they're my friends alone. We have all these inside jokes and shared experiences. Then meeting them in public, and it's not so much about my relationship with them anymore. It's about the awesome things they're saying/singing but more about the 1,300 other Nerdfighters in the audience who feel the same way about this new-fangled friendship. And when I arrived at the front of the line, it didn't really matter that Hank and John had no idea who I was. All that mattered was that they were staying there for hours, signing books and smiling and being present for us. Hank made a point of making eye contact with me when he signed my book. They love me as part of a conglomerate, and while I'll always have a special place in my heart for them as individuals, seeing them on tour gave me perspective of them as perhaps just part of a group, too. We're contemporaries, and that's what they want. They want to be surrounded by clever, silly, curious people who prize compassion and fair play. And, completely apart from my own inner need to be the center of attention in order to feel valued, I was content with that one moment of eye contact.

-this was from a note I wrote to my best friend. it was so true, i wanted to share it.