ila: my across-state move sucked balls, so i can't even imagine how much mo
Kimberly: Woo, almost a month late! My first car was a '98 Dodge Neon. I got
Lauren: I don't know why but I'm always good at shutting this kind of thing do
Lauren: Yay house! twitter tells me you're still working on it, but even so! (
I went into the office today. My boss was having one of those days and jokingly suggested going out for a drink after work. I took the idea and ran with it, all but pushing her out the door at 5:30.
We ended up at a tasting room downtown. We'd moved through the white wines and on to the reds. We were talking about hiking when a sudden commotion from down the bar made me pause midsentence. A bottle-blond woman was hooting and smacking a bald-shaven man on the arm. "Women are competitive, honey!" she half-shouted, then repeated it louder: "Women are competitive!"
She caught us looking at her and leaned over conspiratorially. "Isn't that right?" she asked us. "Women are bitches. Women are just bitches."
The man laughed; braying like a horse. My boss and the girl behind the counter smiled reflexively. I didn't.
I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell her all the ways she was wrong. I wanted to tell the man not to believe her. I wanted to tell her not to believe herself.
I didn't.
What good would it have done? I would have made it too easy to scoff. I would have looked too earnest. Can't you take a joke? God.
What a bitch.
So I shut my mouth and complied.
Hands tied. Voice silenced.
Defeated at both ends.
Sigh.
Every day is an exercise in futility.
Oh, what? I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you over my raging self-pity. Also, you are likely located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from me, so you might want to consider speaking up.
What's got me so glum, chum? I don't know. That ol' clock just keeps on beating me down. Father Time: what a dick, right? Talk about the long arm of the patriarchy — they can even screw me over metaphysically.
I had a function to attend this past weekend and no suitable clothing for it. So on Friday I was forced to leave the house in search of something to wear.
I was cutting through the open-air mall when I saw a new ATM installed near the Panda Express. I needed cash, so I queued up behind a man with a double stroller parked in front of the machine. Trying to be unobtrusive, I stood a few feet back and patiently waited for my turn. I hadn't stood there long before the man spoke up. "Excuse me, can you help?" he called to me. "I lost my contact somewhere, and now I can't really see to find it. It's blue-tinted," he said sheepishly. We then commenced that awkward dance between two strangers who have been thrown together in the name of a common purpose and are trying to be impeccably polite about it. Bent at the waist like cranes, we gazed at the empty space atop the brick walkway like it held the secrets of the universe.
"I can't seem to see it yet," I said after perhaps 45 seconds of this, a little embarrassed about my inability to perform.
"It might be on her," he said, pointing to his daughter in the stroller. I dutifully began scanning her clothes as she stared at me in utter bewilderment. His son, peering out from behind his father's leg, also stared me down. It seemed each of us was grappling with a conundrum we could not quite solve.
Hi. You look nice today. Is that a new shirt? It's really working for you. Is, is uh... are you doing something different with your hair? Parting it on the other side, maybe? Yeah? I like your face. Good job with that. Good job having that face.
[Clears throat, drags toe across floor]
Some rain we're having, huh?
[Avoids eye contact]
Uh.
So, I've been gone a little while? Partially because I unofficially participated in the Bloggers' Day of Silence last Friday in support of For Japan with Love (and by "unofficially" I mean I didn't tell anyone I was), and partially because I've been working on the same damn post for over a week now. I just keep pouring words into the post draft window, and whenever I try to stop and edit them down, I end up adding more. I've read it over so many times that it doesn't even make sense to me anymore. I try to scan through and all I see is DERP DERP DERP DERPA DERPA DERP. They say the hardest part is admitting you have a problem and, well: I think I might need help, you guys. Someone please come over here and hit "publish" for me.
Confession: I don't watch movies. In fact, I hate movies. Whenever anyone asks me if I want to watch a movie, my immediate response is to punch that person in the face. Maybe you think I'm exaggerating. The beau has had his nose broken five times.
All this is to say I don't know much about movies, or the celebrities who are cast in them. Or celebrities in general, really. Which naturally leads us, as it does, to the one celebrity I seem to be marginally conscious of: Brooklyn Decker. It's appalling to think that there was once a time in the not-so-distant past when I did not know a person named Brooklyn Decker even existed! Fortunately, the intense kinship I felt with her during the brief half hour I thought her name was Lyn Decker has forever seared her name indelibly into my squishy grey matter. This has helped, too:
I know what you're thinking: that cover? Again? Seriously? This is the third time you've slapped that thing up on your blog. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were fishing for new male readers. What gives, man?
What gives? I finally read that article, man. In Esquire. The one about Brooklyn Decker.
And guys, it's bad.
The beau had been traveling for work last week, so after he got home on Thursday night I told him about what Angie and Clare and Aisling had put together for International Women's Day. I told him about the post I wrote for In Her Own Words and the tweet chat I participated in.
And then it all just came spilling out. I shared with him some of the horrible stuff that's been floating around the intertubes this week, and we talked about it. It slowly dawned on me that we'd never really done this before. We talk about politics frequently, sure, but the conversation usually stops there. My blog reader is stocked with feeds on women's issues, history, and pop culture analysis. The beau tends to be drawn to articles about science, research, and technology. Reading material is simply an area where our interests wildly diverge, and that's okay — if we always did, read, and watched the same things we'd have nothing interesting to share with each other.
But that's just the thing: I wasn't sharing. I saw my online life as a completely separate thing from my offline life, and so I never really felt the need to fill my husband in on the details of which links I'd clicked in my browser that day. I wasn't holding anything back on purpose — it's just one of those patterns people fall into with each other. But then something kind of broke inside me this week. It was the news that did it, I think. That relentless wave of negativity about women, about race, about culture and politics and religion and, hell, even nature. It finally surged so greatly that it burst through my monitor screen, gushed over the keyboard, and knocked me flat on the ground. It was too big to keep inside anymore, so I found myself talking to the beau, word after word tumbling out so fast that I almost couldn't keep up. I turned myself upside down and shook myself out, and all the words that had piled up inside me over this past week, this past month, this past year came tumbling out.
This is a day late, but I had to post. Sorry thank you goodbye.
A year ago this weekend, I found myself with a group of friends in Newport Beach, CA.
It was a perfect storm of happy coincidence: our friend Randall was in the southland visiting our friend Fabio, and the beau was already going to be in the same area for a rugby game. My best friend and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, hopped in her car, and drove down on Friday night to help get the party started.
I have to admit I was reluctant to spend the weekend crashing in Fabio’s living room. At the time he was living separately from his fiancée – family pressure made cohabitating before marriage impossible — in an apartment just two blocks from the beach. It was a proper bachelor pad that came furnished with half-broken wicker chairs and nautical-themed wall hangings, such as miniature wooden oars. The fluorescent light flickered in the kitchen and the sink was rusty.
Gross.
Fabio has a music habit, and he indulges in it loudly. So that weekend, whenever he wasn’t drunkenly playing the keyboard and singing at the top of his voice, he was playing music videos on YouTube for us at top volume. That was the first time I ever listened to Lady Gaga. In fact, it was the first time I ever listened to a number of things.
It’s safe to say that after that weekend I was never the same.
In recognition of International Women's Day today, Angie of One Cat Per Person and Clare and Aisling of Any Other Wedding put out a call for posts by women, about women. In Her Own Words is intended to raise awareness of women's rights and to celebrate women at a time when it's increasingly scary to be one. Please read on for a much better description of their efforts and links to this important series.
I've been thinking about birthdays a lot lately, and not just because Sarah posted last month about her excellently awful unsweet 16th. A lot of people I know have birthdays around this time of year; one of them being my coworker, who recently turned 30. And she had a really, really hard time with it. I'm talking bad mood for days. She was sulky, inconsolable, crushed. I've heard of birthday blues, particularly in milestone years, but I've never witnessed anything quite like this.
Even though I turned 30 last November, I couldn't relate to her. In fact, the older I get, the more I revert to acting like a kid around my birthday. Buried deep in some album at my parents' house, there's a picture of me at the head of a table full of little girls who'd gathered for my 8th birthday party. I'm wearing the frilliest dress I could find in my closet, I have a paper cone party hat on my head, I have a giant cake sitting before me, and I am sitting on a dirty clothes hamper. Why? Because I wanted to sit up higher than my friends, who were in real chairs. Higher = awesomer, in my young mind. And it's still sort of the same way. I'm a quiet person who wants an excuse to feel special. When my birthday comes around, I want pomp and circumstance. I want to revel in the attention paid to me. I want a special dress and a cone on my head and a giant cake and I want to be high in the air, dammit.
I remain unapologetic about this.
