"We Didn't Know How Bad It Was."

There are days when I’m embarrassed to be an American. Days when Americans with all of the best intentions don’t do their homework, and end up looking like idiots. Why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep going into places to “fix” things without doing our homework?

I was asked in a previous comment about whether or not “democratic” elections would improve the situation of women in Iraq. Women can vote in Zimbabwe: I don’t know that things are exactly fun and games over there. Women can vote in this country: have been able to do so for just over 80 years, but “getting the vote” didn’t immediately translate into more women’s rights. It’s taken 80 years just to get to where we are now, and we've gotten this far because we fought our fucking asses off tooth and nail every inch of the way, and continue to do so. Sure, things are better for women than in the 50s, but we’ve got a long bit of trucking to do, because we’re still trying to work in a system that says “men” and “male” are the norm, are equality, are what we’re striving for, and "men" and "masculinity" are just as fucked up and socially constructed as "woman" and "femininity."

So "equality" is a lackluster goal, when what you're comparing yourself to is just as socially constructed as you are. Not that I’ve got any sort of Grand Feminist Overthrow of the System Plan or anything. That’s why I write fiction.

In any case, “voting” doesn’t equal equality. Look at the civil rights campaign in this country. It took African Americans a hundred years to get anything like the right to vote - a hundred years after it was legally guaranteed. The people you want to control are the people you don’t let vote.

You can say a lot of bullshit in sound bites, on paper, but at the end of the day, it’s Iraqi women, not clueless Americans, who are going to have to stand up, run, fight, and come to grips with what they want. Yes, we should provide them support, open up dialogue, but you can’t tell women how to do it. You can’t tell them what they want. You go there to listen to them, not to preach. They’re likely going to be a fuck of a lot stronger than you know.

The huge Iraq problem is that it's an occupied country. You can't force democracy on an occupied country. This entire campaign has been so fucked from the beginning that I honestly find the idea of equality in Iraq as imposed by the US laughable.

It's the Iraqi women who are going to do it. But don't think for a minute that this administration gives a fuck about Iraqi women. The cluelessness of these legislators speaks volumes about what a Grand Fucking Priority the state of women in Iraq is to the United States.

The United States could give a fuck.

"WASHINGTON — It was billed as a trip to teach Iraqi women who are running for office the rudiments of campaigning. But for the members of Congress who traveled to the Middle East over the weekend, it turned out to be a harrowing lesson on the sometimes painfully high price of democracy.

The U.S. lawmakers brought with them banners, bumper stickers and T-shirts to share with their Iraqi counterparts at a two-day retreat with 20 aspiring female legislators. They quickly set aside the campaign paraphernalia when the Iraqis disclosed the grim facts of their political lives.

The biggest challenge Iraqi candidates face: how to avoid getting killed."

No shit. Who briefed these Congress members on the situation in Iraq? “Embedded” reporters working for CNN?

"In eight years as a member of Congress, I've never had an experience like this," said Rep. Kay Granger, a Texas Republican who led the congressional delegation. "These are some of the bravest women I have ever met."

Never been to an occupied country? Do you read the newspaper? Do you keep informed of how the hell the policies you’re voting on effect real people? Do you have any idea how women live in this country, let alone the one you’re cavorting around in? No? Then you should be fired. This is your fucking job.

The four House members who made the trip — three Republicans and one Democrat — came prepared to discuss the practicalities of political life: campaign tactics, and techniques for getting publicity and for getting out the vote.

They quickly realized that much of what they planned to tell the Iraqi women "didn't pertain to them," Granger said. Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., who brought along her favorite campaign giveaway — a sponge bearing her name — added that after hearing the women's stories, "it seemed kind of frivolous."

Yea. Frivolous. Who briefed you on this trip? Sweet fuck, and she’s from a goddamn blue state.

Under the law setting up the Jan. 30 elections for a national assembly, which was written under American supervision, at least one-third of the candidates on the ballot must be women. That provision has provoked bloody opposition. One female candidate, Wijdan al-Khuzai, was found murdered near her Baghdad home in December.

The one-third provision is a cool one, actually. They did this in South Africa. With a national assembly, you’re voting on a party, not a candidate, so the actual party has to then fill the seats with 1/3 women. South African women fought like hell for this provision – they originally wanted ½ of all seats reserved for women (makes sense to me…), and shut down talks by stubbornly singing freedom songs and refusing to move onto another item until they got what they wanted. In the end, they got 1/3 of the seats reserved for female candidates.

They’re tough fuckin’ cookies, those South African women.

Not unlike these tough fucking Iraqi women.

As Election Day approaches, many female candidates are sending their families out of the country, said Manal Omar, who directs a program in Iraq on behalf of Women for Women International, a non-profit organization established to provide financial and other support for women in war zones. Omar said she spoke to some of the Iraqi women who attended the meetings with House members and that they were "frustrated" by the American politicians' apparent naiveté. "They were amazed (the Americans) didn't know how bad Iraq was," Omar said.

Americans are uninformed. We listen to CNN, that feeds us bullshit in short sound bites, and are far more interested in our waistlines than foreign policy (I’m not any better, you understand – how many posts do I write about weight, and how many about bombing foreign countries? Yea). But you know what, these are members of the United States fucking Congress. It’s their goddamn job to know what the hell they’re walking into. I’m pissed off at their cluelessness. The media fucking sucks.

The only soundbite from this encounter I won’t snark about:

For the Americans, it was an emotional encounter… Said Granger: "We went over there to encourage them. I think they ended up encouraging us."

As well they should.

Waking Up to CNN

Turned on CNN, and found one of the Iraqi presidential candidates using all the catch phrases, "pockets of resistance," "free and fair elections," "cival war," "if Osama Bin Laden, Zalawi and Saddam don't want us to have elections, then we have to have them," etc. My favorite, "All we have to do is make sure that 50% of Iraqis can vote. That's the number of people who vote in most western countries."

Well, no, actually, that's the number of people who choose to vote. Choosing to vote and being able to vote are different matters entirely. And the scary thing is that the US and "insurgents" get to decide *who* gets to vote.

Bah.

I think they're working on the old premise of: if you lie long enough and often enough, people think it's true. Oddly enough, this does sometimes work. But there's a fine line between hope and delusion.

Next up after the break: the scandel that's rocking the world - Prince Harry dresses up as a Nazi for a party, and the government has new weight-loss tips to share with the American people.

Gag me with a spoon.

Is it any wonder I changed the channel to the cartoon network?

Interesting Stuff From China

Thoughts on fantasy fiction, from China Mieville.

Also, Vandermeer is back from hiatus, and blogging again. Yay.

And It's Just More of the Same

All day meeting (as a nice addendum to yesterday's desire post, I spent most of one presenter's speech deciding whether or not I'd go to bed with him. This made it really difficult to take notes), Blaine took off early, Yellow's not there, and the expected and much-hyped big drunken dinner is apparently big-wig invite only, so of the twenty of us in the room, only about 6 are heading out for client debauchery. The rest of us are on our own. Denver fucking sucks. I want to go back to hanging out with the Indy team. They were way more fun.

What the hell's up with a stingy dinner?

Well, a lot, actually, but I won't go throwing rumors in, cause you know how that work-blogging stuff goes. Suffice to say, dinner tonight has gone from high-class back-smacking to a couple of beers with me, Sarah the construction manager, and a couple of the architects from the Chicago office. Not as snazzy. Though Sarah's cool, once again, I wish I could have picked my own friends' list for dinner.

Oh well. Better luck at my 30th, when everybody's invited.

Shit You Don't Want To Hear From Your Pilot When You've Been Circling Denver For 20 Minutes After Being Delayed an Hour And a Half Because --

"Well, we still have zero visibility in Denver, but we think we might have figured out what's wrong with the equipment here in the cockpit, so we're just going to go ahead and attempt a landing."

At this point, you've just got to sit back, relax, and turn up your CD player.

In fact, the visibility is so bad here in Denver tonight that my cab driver got lost in the business complex where my hotel is.

Denver just isn't my city.

Off to To Denver

I'm off to Denver. I'm bringing my own personal laptop, which doesn't have so many problems with wireless internet, so I'll be in touch...

Bah

I just can't believe people spend money on crap like this.

Oh, well, to each their own. Good luck getting your kids to college.

In any case, here's a couple wins for those who think fascism sunks.

Some Thoughts on Attraction

Amanda's taken on the "do women actually have sex drives"? crap, and since it's something I've been meaning to say a lot about, I'll dive off her post and take the opportunity.

I'm tired of arguing biological crap about differences between men and women. The big difference is, was, and for a while more at least, will be only this: most women can bear children. Men can't.

Because of that, we're going to view some things differently, particularly the sex thing, cause if women get pregnant, guess who's got to spend nine months giving blood and breath to creating a kid, and who's gonna be stuck raising that child? And women, built as we are, are also more suseptible to STDS. You've just got more surface area. It sucks, but it's true. For these two reasons alone, I'm incredibly picky about my sexual partners.

But let's not forget our social pressures, shall we?

And how fear of the female body and its desires can really fuck you up into thinking that women aren't people.

I was always pretty nuts about boys. In kindergarten, I had two "boyfriends," which I remember thinking was pretty risque at the time (looking back on it, it's funny, because the boys, Nick and Brian - damn, I remember their names 20 years later - were great indicators of what my grown-up taste would be. Troubled home lives, one of them skinny, smart and dorky, the other one more punkish, stout, with the spiked hair and leather jacket - seriously, his parents suited him up very well in kindergarten) and I spent most of gradeschool forming gangs of girls who would chase boys around the playground and tie them up to playground equipment with our scarves.

Later, as I got plumper and dorkier, I attached myself to good guy buddies. Dorky Matthew and Aryan Adam were the two biggest ones from this period. I had very few female friends because it's tougher to find girls who won't play the girly game when you're in gradeschool, since that's the time when you're all rushing around trying to fit in.

After kindergarten, I always formed crushes on one boy in particular, and stuck with that crush for years, sometimes. Not only because it was expected of me to give an answer when asked what boy I had a crush on, but because it helped me narrow down the playing field. It just didn't seem appropriate to go wacky over that many boys, and I do think that I'm sort of hard-wired into serial monogamy. The idea of polyamoury just never worked for me on an emotional level, though there was a point in highschool when I did consider "sharing" a boyfriend with a girl I was hot on. This never happened for a number of reasons, but the big one was just because I couldn't do it, emotionally. I'm not built that way.

Highschool, I was pretty much just batshit insane. I hit highschool theater and there were all these available guys, and suddenly they were actually interested in me *back.* I'd never gone so wacky over so many guys in one year. This was also the first time where I could honestly say that, looking back on it, I had a crush on a girl - let's call her Mistress, who had this amazing, girl-next-door sexual appeal to both men and women, and who made the most of it (she was the one who wanted to share a boyfriend with me [which I couldn't deal with], and then she later got married, and invited me into a threesome with her husband. I was so drunk at the time that I told her, "You know, I'm totally cool with you, but your husband freaks me out. Maybe if you'd married somebody else...?"). Ah, batshit insane.

Undergrad was my second real girl crush, the one that was so incredibly wacky that every morning I woke up wishing I'd become a boy so I could date her (this is where my "and that girl in Speech class wasn't bad either" line comes from). After that, my last two years of college were a frickin' boyfest, which I won't go into detail about because my parents read this blog.

We had a lot of fun in Alaska.

The funny thing is, I always thought I was really weird for liking boys as much as I did and for thinking about sex all the time, and the masturbation thing for women is really tough to figure out because our culture's focused so much on penetrative sex. So you're kinda like, "OK, I'm doing that, that's not doing it for me. And it's kinda messy. Is there an easier way to do this? What's the trick, here?"

The trick, of course, is to gear yourself out of the "penetration" mode, and go for the "What would lesbians do?" mode.

There's a lot to be learned from watching lesbian porn.

You also get a lot of "fear and disgust" of the female body thrown your way pretty early on (there's that crazy moment at puberty when you suddenly realize you're not a real person after all, you're the "other" you're one of those *women*), so you're also battling a lot of "don't touch yourself, ewww gross" stuff. To be a woman in a society that says women are weak and icky can be... tough. To say the least.

So you don't learn how to masturbate in sex ed, and it's not as incredibly obvious as men's masturbation, which always seemed to me like it would be easy to figure out. If you know the mechanics of penetrative sex, you're going to try and simulate it. Trouble is, stimulation for women is mostly about the clitoris, with the penetration part a sort of added bonus for most people.

Luckily, once you figure that out, honey, it's all over.

Funny thing is, though I was always sure I had a serious sex drive, I was always worried about it. Most of the women I talked to in high school didn't actually like sex. Or, they said they didn't. It was something they sort of "gifted" to their boyfriends to keep them happy, they said.

This never made sense to me, as I was always happy to jump on my boyfriend (`till things soured, of course)... and would have been really happy to jump on other people in highschool, too, but women have that "slut" label hanging over their heads. Once you sleep with a guy, you've gotta keep on for a "decent" period in order to be... decent. As previously discussed, this one got me into a lot of trouble, and I stayed with somebody far, far longer than I should have.

It's only been recently that I've fessed up to my attraction for real and allowed myself to stare at boys on the train - never face-on of course, as that "invitation to harrassment/rape" thing is always over my head, too (look at all these social inhibitors to the visibility of female desire) - but you better bet that when the tall, pretty guy in well-fitting suit turns around, I'm totally checking out his ass.

And for those women who keep track of such things: during the four days a month or so when I'm ovulating, I know it - sexual drive spikes on par with any guy's at any time of the day, because suddenly all boys everywhere are beautiful "and that sweetheart female cello player on the train with the short hair isn't bad either." I want to bundle up all the boys and take them home and shower them in kisses. When I'm ovulating, even Blaine the football player looks damn good for a night.

It's really awful.

And it took me forever to come to grips with it, because "girls aren't supposed to feel that way." Girls aren't supposed to think so much about sex, and though I'm still emotionally a serial monogamist, I recognize that the myth of the libido-less female just doesn't apply to me in the least.

I think we're raised to be afraid of our bodies and what they desire: sex, food, strength, and so we don't listen to our bodies and acknowledge what we want.

If you want to know what a lot of female hysteria/wackiness is about, I'd say it's this: being taught to be a non-person, somebody who's not supposed to feel any sort of desire for anything at all, and trying to operate on that level.

That'll drive anybody batfuck insane.

Rupert Thomson

Iain Rowan is doing some guestblogging over at Vandermeer's joint, and he's posted an overview of the work of brilliant English writer Rupert Thomson.

My buddy Julian turned me on to Rupert Thomson with one book:

The Book of Revelation.

Read it. The rest will follow.

A true Brutal Woman book - don't say I didn't warn you. Here's an amazon.com overview:

Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29-year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven-year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist's destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and torment: The realization that no one will believe his strange story. Coolly revelatory, meticulously crafted, The Book of Revelation is Rupert Thomson at his imaginative best.

An incredible look at sex and power, sure, but that's only half the book - the other half of this novel is about dealing with what's been done to you, about breakdown, collapse, and finding the strength to live on.

Really well done.

Pirates!

I find this far, far, too amusing.

That's My Nephew

My sister's son Christopher won a year's supply of pickles for being terribly cute, and was written up in the local small-town paper:

PICKLE LOVERS WIN PRIZES

Two photogenic children from Battle Ground are among the winners of the annual Steinfeld's Pickle Pucker Photo Contest.

Christopher XXXX, 15 months, son of Jacqueline Hurley of Battle Ground, won second place in the contest and will receive a one year supply of Steinfeld's pickles....

The interesting part about this article? The interviewer apparently paused upon hearing that my sister's last name was different from her son's, and carefully asked, "Is there a Mr. XXXX?"

I told my mom that my sister should have said something to the effect of, "No, there isn't. He's a 20 year old kid who put in his five minutes, has no job, and doesn't pay child support. This is my fucking kid."

Unfortunately, she didn't. So the guy's name is still associated with this great kid's, and my sister is busting her single-mom ass off to get all her ducks in a row.

After seeing my sister raising her kid, I've got a greater respect for single mothers. These women get nothing but shit from the media - the same media that tells them they're going to hell for getting abortions, but refuse to provide her with free medical care and state-sponsored daycare.

Fuck those fuckers. They don't live in the same world I do.

Oh, How I Loathe Thee

The good news is: People who sleep more are thin! Gear up for the new weight-loss perscription: Sleeping pills! If you're unconcious 3/4 of the day, you won't have time to eat! At this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything the dieting industry was trying to sell me.

But you know what? They might be sleeping a lot because they're functioning on so much exercise and so little food that their body is physically incapable of doing much more than sleeping.

As someone from a family of binge and purge dieters, I can tell you that a big part of the "dieting strategies" used by the women in my family were this:

Eat once a day, go to bed by seven.

You'll "lose weight" in no time.

But if somebody jumps you on the train, you're pretty much fucked. You'll be so tired, dizzy, and washed out that you'll hit the ground in about 2 seconds. My sister once passed out at a friend's house merely walking across the kitchen.

Which sort of person would you like to be?

If Nick Were Younger, He'd Be My Secret Boyfriend

But, alas, he's old and bitter.

But damn fucking funny. Germaine Greer is now apparantely signing up for Celebrity Big Brother in England. Germaine Greer and Brigitte Nielson (of Red Sonja fame) in the same house?

Oh, shoot me.

Nick's thoughts on programming, which are so purely Nick that I'm reproducing them in their entirety, and sending you his way:

"Unfortunately, America is so anti-intellectual that we don't even have any famous enough to make it onto Celebrity Big Brother. I know I'd watch Fear Factor if there was a chance to see Noam Chomsky eat a rat on the show. Irving Kristol and Murray Bookchin can switch households and speaking duties for two weeks on Ideology Swap. I can just imagine a shot of Kristol peering into a crude hole cut into a wooden plank and saying "You poop...WHERE?" Judith Butler is...The Bachelorette! Or maybe we can have a show where people call in to vote on whether or not Susan Sontag was a lesbian; we'll call it Who's Your Life Partner? Let's just throw the whole lot of them on a show where they have to make their way from the Sahara to Johannesburg: The Subaltern Race.

The possibilities are endless. As an official Nielsen Family worth 40,000 normal people, I demand that production on some of these shows begin immediately! "

Judith Butler as The Bachelorette. Can't you just see it?

I Love Living in a Blue State

Though I find it incredibly sad that people in this country have to fight this goddamn hard in order to get the legal right not to be discriminated against based on who they want to take to bed. There's something really fucked up about that.

No doubt weirdos like me were saying the same thing about color-segregated benches and barstools 50 years ago in this country... 10 years ago in South Africa.

Funny, how long it takes to change this shit, eh?

SPRINGFIELD -- For the first time ever, the Illinois Senate approved a controversial measure Monday that would ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in matters of housing and employment, clearing a long-standing hurdle to passage and inspiring one key sponsor to proclaim a victory for "fundamental freedom."

Why on earth is this a "controversial" measure?

This is why:

Critics of the proposal claim the activists' ultimate goal is not just to end discrimination but to shift social norms about acceptable behavior. Some conservative religious leaders say if the gay rights bill passes, a push for gay marriage will be next.

Holy crap! Society might change! Kids might not grow up hating themselves for being attracted to... people! We might have less teen suicide! We might have to actually treat everybody just like they're real people!

Gosh, that would SUCK.

Who would be society's next sacrificial goat?

Maybe fat people.

C'mon, you knew I was going there.

Good Night, Good Night

Sleep well. Dream good dreams. Wake up and live them.

Packing for Denver

I'll be leaving for Denver straight from work tomorrow.

Now, the big question: how the hell to fit everything I need in carry-on luggage.

The drawback to working out in hotels: you need yet another extra pair of shoes and clothes.

Suck it up.

The Fighting Life: Ah

Sweet fuck, I've missed going to my MA school.

Accountants, attorneys, paralegals, project managers, architects by day -



Kick-ass Amazons by night.

Oh, how I have missed them.

For those in the Chicago area, my martial arts school is offering me the month of February free if somebody signs up and says I referred them. And, seeing's as how my MA school charges me a sweet pretty penny, I could totally use the windfall.

So, if you've been wanting to kick some ass, take a chance and come in for a trial class. Don't worry, it's January, so there's *tons* of newbies. Keep in mind that everybody there was a newbie once, and a lot of them were also 50lbs heavier.

Everybody's a frickin' sweetheart, and Sifu Katalin rocks the house.

Can't Get Enough of These Things

You can just never have too many of these things. I break into uncontrollable glee every damn time.

I Just Can't Pass This One Up

It's MSN, after all:

Ten Things Your Teenage Girl Won't Tell You.

Notice this wasn't number one, but should have been:

1) "Hot damn, dad, sex is great! I want to have it all the time! There are so many hot guys in the world!(And that chick is French class isn't bad either!)"

Ah, to be a teenager again.

Not that I'm much better at 25.

Because Everybody Always Gets Very Passionate About My Depression Posts

When I was in Denver last week (flying out there again tomorrow night), I tore an article out of my complimentary hotel USA Today - you know you're a freakshow blogger when you do something like this.

Apparently:

Lives were threatened and Americans treated like "guinea pigs" because Eli Lilly & Co. officials lied 15 years ago in denying there was any evidence the anti-depressant Prozac could cause suicidal behavior, a Harvard psychiatrist has charged...

Teicher, who considers Prozac valuable, said many of the problems with suicidal behavior were in patients given high doses, and that's how the drug was used for the first few years in the USA. "American people were guinea pigs for a few years. If we had known the truth, we would have used it more wisely from the start," Teicher said.

Isn't that just the shit?

What I worry about with the huge rush for more and better happy drugs is shit like this happening: the same sort of "oops, actually, it's worse for you to be on the drug than off it" thing that happens with a lot of weight loss drugs.

I've got buddies on Zoloft and family members on Prozac, and you know, though I'm all for drugs as a last resort (and for diagnosed conditions, though the "diagnoses" list is starting to look about as long as the "hysterical symptoms" list at the beginning of the last century), I freak at the idea that popping a pill is the first thing we're being taught to reach for. Somebody's getting really fucking rich while we search for "normalcy."

So. Pause a minute and decompress before going for the bottle, OK?

Same goes for pretty much all solutions found in a bottle.

If She Didn't Turn Into a Vegetable, It Wouldn't Be Winning Shit

Million Dollar Baby's taking home a bunch of awards.

Makes me wonder, if Swank didn't turn into a dependent vegetable at the end, would the movie have made such a splash?

You know, I'm thinking... not.

What's Happening

Amanda's got some really thought-provoking stuff up about how the uproar about public schools and what's being taught in them (history, sex ed, creationism) could act as a long-term dismantling of the public school system: making mucho bucks for the privateers. Check it out.

And yea, I'm still irritated with the hullabaloo about the Tsunami. Sure, it's great, the whole world throwing money and people out there; the media frenzy is amazing (everyone's so glad to stop talking about Iraq and whether or not Ashlee Simpson really knows how to sing).

And here's why I'm still really irritated:

Guess what happened today?

About 600 people in South Africa died of AIDS.

That's about 219,000 dead people in South Africa every year. Dead for a stupid, preventable reason. Not a natural disaster. One we can do something about through AIDS research, education, prevention, and giving money to local sustainable community project in SA.

Where's the money? Where's the public outcry? Where are the hordes of relief workers? Nelson Mandela's son just died of AIDS. Wake up, people.

In this country, the highest rate of HIV infection is among black women. Where's that on the news? How come Cheney and Edwards had absolutely no idea this was so during their debates?

Yea. It bugs me. We play "who's giving the most money" on Christmas, and tell people to blow off the other 364 days a year.

Nightlife

Beer is good. There should be more of it in the world.

Fuck It.

I'm sending the Beast back to Asimov's. There's been an editor change since then.

Screw it. It's a good fucking story.

Campbell Hopefuls

A couple of my fellow Clarion compatriots (class of 00, shit, has it been five years?) are up for nomination this year for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in spec. fic. (this is a bit of a big deal in science fiction circles), Amy Sisson and my buddy Greg Beatty (who's got enough weird-ass publications to kill a horse. Check out his Aliens Enter the Conversation)

Buddy Movies

I was watching the extended edition of Return of the King last night, and Jenn popped in and we got into a discussion about what a great job Jackson & co. did sticking to the original heart of the story while boosting the believability and interest of the female characters, and ditching some of the classist bullshit Tolkien was so obsessed with.

And we started talking about these sorts of war movies, how the heart of them is about friendships forged by men, about characters who have been given this huge responsibility, and the arcs those characters take (one of my favorite character arcs is Frodo's, because he's given this one task on which the world depends - all he has to do is throw the ring away. He goes on the tremendous journey, and gets there primarily because he's got Sam, and all he has to do is this one thing: and when the shit hits the fan, when it comes down to the wire, he can't do it. And I always wonder, how would that person live, afterward? Knowing that when you were tested, when it came down to it, you ultimately failed? Great stuff).

Inevitably, we started to try and think of buddy movies about women bonding in this way, women who would carry each other up the mountain, and about all we had was Thelma & Louise, in which the protagonists, of course, die, so that one doesn't really count. Female buddy movies tend to be about women who come together over smaller, more domestic issues, and are friends because they have similiar past experiences or live in the same place. They don't bond over a great world-changing experience. Joy Luck Club, Steel Magnolias, Secrets of Ya-ya Sisterhood.

When you do get those rockin' types of women, they're either saving their children, or their love interest (which is never, of course, a woman). So you've got Linda Hamilton saving her son John Conner (though in the first Terminator movie, she does save *herself* at the end, which, believe it or not, isn't seen that often either), Drew Barrymore throwing the prince over her shoulders in Ever After, and Kate Winslet running through the corridors of the Titanic with an ax in a desperate effort to save Leo.

The reason Thelma & Louise was such a big deal is because Louise pulls out the gun and shoots the fucker trying to rape Thelma. She protects her friend. It's this huge gaping cinematic hole that people have gotten so used to that they won't even mention it when they say, "Why is it women are their own worst problem? Why do they hate each other and compete over male approval?"

Well, you know what, we don't exactly get a lot of great images about female loyalty and friendship.

The best women-bonding-in-war movie I've seen recently was Cold Mountain (Scarlett doesn't exactly bond with any women in Gone With the Wind). They totally nailed that one. Kidman has a great rant about how she's been taught to be an ornament, how she doesn't know how to *do* anything, and her frustration comes through, that idea that now that the shit's hit the fan, she doesn't have any skills whatsoever to deal with her predicament. She and Zellweger get to have a buddy-sort of friendship where a man doesn't come between them; they don't fight over him, and their situation is often a life-or-death one.

In fact, I just went and looked through my DVD collection to make sure I wasn't missing anything mainstream (indy movies tend to get more leeway with this, but I want to stick with what's up for "popular" consumption), and I couldn't find anything else. Keira Knightly goes out to save Orlando in Pirates (there's mutal saving in this movie, which I love), but her and the female pirate don't even exchange any words, let alone form a friendship.

So where are all the *women* watching each others' backs? Apparently, these sorts of movies are reserved for "chick flicks" like Under the Tuscan Sun (I like they way they left this one open-ended, which is why I can stomach it: it's not *really* a romance movie, it's about finding yourself and creating friendships and families - and doing that your own way).

I suppose war, and performing acts that are seen to impact the very Nature of the Universe or Fate of Humanity have always been seen as male preserves. And if women are involved, it must be because they're hot on the guys.

I was clicking through movie trailers at apple.com and was startled by the trailer for Miss Congeniality 2: try to ignore for a minute the fact that they feel they have to figure out a plot device for Bullock to go from snorty to hot again and look at this - the trailer makes it look like a buddy movie.

A buddy movie where the two main characters are female cops, and not only that, one of them is black.

Unfortunately, it's not Lethal Weapon with women, which would be cool; they had to play it with Bullock being prettied up, so there's lots of "female"/"feminine" jokes they can make. But shiiiiit. A female cop buddy movie? When the hell was the last time I saw that?

OK, yea, there's Charlie's Angels. But the recent Charlie's Angels movies are played so over the top as to be terribly funny. The women aren't supposed to really be able to do those things. How the hell they're doing those kinds of kicks in 3-inch heels without busting an ankle, I'd love to know (in fact, I just busted out my pair of 2 1/2 inch sensible, square heels and tried to do a roundhouse kick - it's almost possible, but if you turn that square heel into a spike, I think it's all over, and unless you were a dancer, you'd be on your ass). Women are only allowed to kick ass and be friends if they're little, pretty, and fem enough not to cause anyone to feel insecure. And the angels, though friends, don't spend much time saving each other. They tend to save their male bosses and love interests.

I know that I find myself writing these gaping-hole types of stories all the time. I'm in the business of fantasy sagas, and the first thing I did was create a buddy-buddy central relationship between a man and woman who, I decided wouldn't be sexually interested in each other. I was looking for some sort of "pure" unsulllied friendship that had the same feel of the Frodo/Sam or Fellowship buddy relationships. It wasn't until I got through all of book one (the third version of it), that I started to see that there were pretty much no female friendships in the book, or at least strong ones. The women were still all rotating around relationships with men, even in my egalitarian society. In my female dominated society, where everybody was expected to form close friendships with other women and the default was being attracted to women (the whole Plato idea on its head - women can only truly "love" other women, because only women and women will ever be equal: men will always be inferior), I chose to have the viewpoint character for that society be a terribly staight female fighter with what she considered a rather shameful attraction to men that she'd never really been able to push toward women, and very few friendships with anyone.

There I go, stabbing myself in the foot.

If you see these sorts of images and stories often enough, you internalize them. You make them up that that's what it's supposed to be.

Why are women clawing at each other all the time? Why, as my dad said, do so many people think "you women are your own worst problem"?

Because we aren't taught to like each other. Boys get told to go out and save each other, and women, and kids, and we get told that women are our rivals, our enemies, and that what we're really looking for is to be that lone female fighter, the "token man" who can then look down on all the women around us. That, or you're just supposed to be the usual: a love interest, a damsel in distress, etc. etc.

I want more female buddy movies.

I want women carrying each other up the goddamn mountain.

What Hurts This Morning

Had my Saturday pilates class followed by my boxing class, neither of which I've been to in almost a month, due to holiday closures, and my own holiday and work travel.

This morning's aches are in (surprise) the delts, dorsal muscles, and triceps. Because I'm jogging with something like regularity now, the jump roping was easy. I'll be in Denver most of this week, so I'm packing up my jump rope, CD player, and jogging clothes.

I have two big concerns about living out of hotels, because you generally see two types of female travelers: the ones who deal with it by living on lemon water and exercising 3 hours at the hotel gym every night, and the ones who deal with it living out of stuff they can get out of the minibar, which is convienent after long hours sitting in front of a computer and meeting with hysterical guys all day.

I don't really want to be either of these "types."

I'm packing mixed nuts and protein bars, they have omelettes for breakfast at the hotel instead of those hunger-inducing bread-filled continental type breakfasts, I can order salads from the cafeteria in the central corp. building for lunch, and they've got Lean Cuisine meals in the hotel "pantry" that you can take up to your room and microwave. They've also got a fridge in the room, so I can pack out some string cheese, too.

I'm trying to make them get my traveling schedule down so I can still get to my MA classes on Monday and Saturday. Throw in two jogging days the rest of the week, either one on Sunday and another on Weds or Thursday, or one on Tues. and one on Thurs. I'm also looking into buying water-inflatable free weights that I can pack with me so I can keep my morning free weights routine up.

Mainly, this is my way of battling depression, believe it or not. I'm well aware that living out of hotel rooms is going to be stressful on me, and my best bet for warding off freak-outs is to have very set routines: eating right and exercising has always been the first thing I change/interrogate when my moods start to spike. I've also invested way too much time in these great arm muscles and kicking leg strength to see them atrophy in Denver, or Dallas, or New York.

This is gonna be a bitch, yea, but nothing worth doing is easy, and I think it'll keep me sane throughout what's ramping up to be a really frickin wacky year.

Night Thoughts

Totally Worth it.

If I ever go to jail, I hope it's for something like this.

Dreaming By the Book

Had a dream last night that I went to New York and tracked down the lit. agent who's got my 50 pages. I was given a letter saying how great she thought it was, and oh-so-sorry to take so long, and a request for the entire manuscript.

I then shared a taxi back to my hotel with Ellen Datlow and Sheila Williams.

Yea. There's a lot on my mind. The day all my dominos line up is gonna be amazing.

Honeymoon's Over

Bear with me, everybody.

It's gonna be a long 6 months.

The thing I always forget about this job is that the reason we can all sit around and screw off for 6 months is because for the other 6 months, we're working 24/7.

Blaine's a frickin' sweetheart, and he must have talked me up like I was fuckin' Jesus Christ, because I realize I've just been handed a career along with my corporate card. I'll be supervising document controls for all the new projects coming down the pipeline, which means training and overseeing the support staff in each location and making sure they're delivering and tracking the right information.

I didn't take in the full scope of what this really meant until we had our meeting in the warroom, and I realized I was the youngest person at a table full of men, and my name was up there on the "top" part of the top-down org chart, along with theirs.

What the fuck just happened?

Oh, shit, I got handed a career. Which I could still very well fuck up.

And, worse: which I don't really want.

It's funny, you get your shiny shoes and your suit jacket, and you get told to make plane reservations to camp out in Denver, and it's like, isn't this it? This s the top? This is corporate America. This is why you go to college, to get a good job like this with great health care and a 401(K).

And if I stay here too long, I'm gonna get my soul sucked out.

Don't think I don't know that.

I just want to write books. Fuck. Just pay me for *that*, OK?

So updates and rants here are going to be a lot more sporadic.

The Big Boys are going out to negotiate the NYC project next week, which everyone agrees is going to be long and messy. Prepare for rants from the warroom in NYC.

I've also come to the conclusion that I won't move to Denver. I talked with Yellow about it (they asked him to move out there), and I basically have the same reservations he does: I'm not in love with Denver, the corp. office is waaaaay too corporate (seeing Yellow spiff up for a real corp office was amusing), and honestly, Chicago is just way better than Denver. There's just no contest.

I either love a place, or I'm indifferent about it, and I don't know that I'd have any interest in living somewhere that's halfway between the West and the Midwest.

It feels like going backwards.

The News From Denver

Quotes of the day:

Reddy, the construction lead, on our participation in the NYC project:

“When I got hired here, I told them there were two places I never wanted to be assigned to: Iraq, and New York City.”

From Yellow, when he heard that I’d be heading up document controls for his new project in addition to the three or four others we discussed that day:

“Kameron, how many of you are there?”

My response: “I’m starting to wonder that, too.”

Denver is cold (about 2 degrees. A lot like Fairbanks in March, actually), with what I consider to be less than a mile of visibility, though the pilot insisted there’s 3. The roads are shit. I passed three car accidents, two ambulances, and a fire truck on the way out here. It’s a mixture of snow and crappy visibility – and the rich kids on vacation who have stopped their cars on the side of the roads and are whining to their parents on their cell phones.

I’m from a really, really small branch office of this company. We run a tight ship. We reuse paper and have to make lengthy petitions for office supplies. Our HR manager and the lead architect make sure of that. At most, we have 18 people working there, but nobody’s in all at once, and haven’t been for about six months. It’s relaxed, laid back, and they’ve been known to put the speakerphone on mute when corp. starts bitching during conference calls, so they can bitch back.

It’s a bit like working for a mom n’ pop operation. Only, more conference calls.

I expected that in Denver I’d walk up to the corporate office and find that it maybe took up a couple floors of a high rise. Maybe a whole building.

When I arrived, I found I’d been dropped off at the wrong building.

Oh, yes, this was XX Company, but the wrong building belonging to XX company.

Corporate Denver consists of three buildings.

They’ve got every single division of the company headed out of here, not just wireless.

They’ve got charts up on the wall for Iraq projects.

It’s like I sold my soul and woke up working for Halliburton.

Locked Up

It should be illegal to get up before 5am.

Not sure how long they'll keep me locked up today, but my hotel has wireless.

See you all tonight.

Go drink some coffee for me.

I transferred all my writing files to my company laptop.

Ha ha

Stepping Out

My whole body hurts.

I tried on my suit jacket in preparation for the Denver trip. I haven't touched it in months. When I pulled it on, I was surprised to find that it seemed to have a tighter fit than I remembered, which was physically impossible, I thought, because I've dropped two sizes in the last year.

It zipped up fine.

The problem was the shoulders.

Of course. Spend two or three days a week beating the shit out of something, and work with 30lb free weights five mornings a week, and you get broad in the shoulders. I was already broad in the shoulders.

Such irony. I've spent my whole life wishing I was smaller, and here I am, getting bigger, taking up more space.

I've been issued a company laptop, a corporate card. Rumor has it I'll be traveling to Dallas, New York, maybe Fresno this year. I'll be talking with my new boss about what they can offer me in Denver.

I'll be 25 next week.

I went jogging tonight. I'm not sure why, because I was prepared to pack all my jogging clothes for Denver (my hotel has a gym), but I was full of this nervous energy that I couldn't get rid of, so I pulled on my Hurley hoodie (I was so gleeful to find that "Hurley" was an actual clothing brand) and hit the pavement.

By the time I got to the park, the wind was up, coming in from over the lake, and it was snowing.

I picked a sport I like - boxing - that requires the one exercise I have hated the whole of my entire life with a blazing passion - jogging - in order to be in any way effective.

I hate jogging. I have always hated it. I can't say why. Maybe memories of those truly awful fitness days in PE when you all got clocked on doing your mile, and I always seemed to be lagging behind back there with the other fat kids. Mostly, I think, I didn't like the idea of running much because, well, I gained about 30lbs during puberty, and all of the sudden there was a lot more extra flesh to jiggle around and attract attention, and I hated drawing attention, because I never looked on any of it as good.

So for whatever reason, I hate jogging, but here I am, knowing I have to be up by 3:30am to catch my flight, knowing I should be sleeping, but too edgy to sit still.

I've learned to pace myself, which took awhile to figure out. Now, whenever I start moving too fast, I remind myself that it's better to feel like I'm trotting out the duration than to have to stop because I'm gasping. The breathing thing took forever to figure out, too. All from the diaphram. If you lose the breathing part, you're finished, and that's what I'm paying attention to the whole time, that and my music.

I'm just about to reach the place where I usually stop for my hundred-yard walk (usually my halfway and turn-around point), but there's a good song on (Snow Patrol: Run), and I keep going, and you know, just past where I usually stop, the path is way better lighted, and you know, there's some bike riders out here tonight, hey is that another female jogger? Hell, I'll keep going.

Past the skating park, cool, why aren't I tired? Another good song (Velvet Underground: These Days), put it on repeat, keep going.

I'm not sure why I'm not tired. It's like I've given my brain leave to gnaw on all the bullshit I've been tossing and turning about in bed, and it's taking the opportunity to hash it out while I run.

I'm worried about this job, worried about sticking with it, because I'm so damn terrified of sticking with anything for more than two years (yea, about the time it took for my last actual relastionship to go from blandly sour to freakshow. I'll be the first to bang that one on the head).

But what did I always want? A job where I got opportunities to travel, that gave me time to write (if I only work 6-9 months a year when projects are going, guess what I'm doing the rest of the time?), a job that paid off my student loans, because until I get out from under the burden of all this debt, I'm going to feel leashed.

I can see the tennis courts now, and I've mapped this route before. To the tennis courts and back is over 4 miles.

The snow's coming down thick now. My fingers are numb.

Train: Ordinary (repeat)

I jog past the tennis courts, take my 100 yard half-way point walk, turn around, and head back.

I'm facing more into the wind now, and the snow's like sleet against my face.

This is stupid. Why am I doing this?

I'm tired, but I can't stop now because to stop and walk means to frickin' freeze my ass off.

I just don't want to do this. I hate this. Skip, go back to Snow Patrol (repeat). Keep going.

The last mile and a half is a blistering bitch.

I tell myself I'll let myself walk at least under the tunnel. Just a breather, just a...

And I headed into the tunnel, and I realized there was no one waiting on the other side of it.

I told a buddy of mine once that I always felt like I was running away from something, and he said, "Are you sure you weren't running *toward* something?"

Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, but tonight, the only person behind me was me, the only person ahead of me was me.

I was running away from somebody I was, and running toward somebody I wanted to be.

I had this litany running through my head, "You've got three degrees. You've trekked 160 km into rural Africa. You've written eight books (no, they aren't very good, but I fucking finished them). You can run four miles. This is the last of your shit that you need to get together. Fit and strong. That's it. You'll be there."

I've been looking for somebody to fight my whole life, when the only person I've got to fight is myself.

But it's like once you start running, you can't stop.

For better or worse, I'm stuck with myself.

May as well be a better self.

But goddamn, it's a bitch to get there.

What I Got For Christmas

...from my buddy Stephanie was a notebook with this on the cover:



The best part about knowing somebody for over a decade is that they totally have you pegged. She apparently picked it up months ago, it seemed so appropriate.

I'm so easy.

Why Are You Here Reading This Instead of Trolling CNN?

Steve Gillard's got some cool thoughts up about the history of media, the reasons behind the collapse of the dot.coms, and the growing attraction of blogs.

My short answer: I like having a bigger sandbox, where the sand stretches into the sea.

The Blue Place

If, like me, you have a lot of trouble finding books with kick-ass female protagonists, I'm currently re-reading Nicola Griffith's crime thriller The Blue Place, and damn, I'd almost forgotten how good it is. If you don't mind that about two thirds of the way through, there's a short Norway travelogue, you'll love it.

How's this for an opening:

"An April night in Atlanta between thunderstoms: dark and warm and wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azalea blossoms. Nearly midnight. I had been walking for over an hour, covering four or five miles. I wasn't tired. I wasn't sleepy.

You would think that my bad dreams would be of the first man I had killed, thirteen years ago. Or if not him, then maybe the teenager who had burned to death in front of me because I was to slow to get the man with the match. But no, when I turn out the lights at ten o'clock and can't keep still, can't even bear to sit down in my Lake Claire house, it's because I see again the first body I hadn't killed."

And you might learn a few things, too:

"It's the simplest thing. If you walk tight around a corner, you can be surprised by anyone who is waiting on the other side. It's like sitting with your back to the door, like chambering a round and leaving the safety off, wearing a dress that will restrict your legs, or walking with your hands in your pockets: stupid. But so many people do it. Every now and again I go into a school to teach self-defence classes to young women. I ask: How many of you know which way to look before crossing a busy street? and every single hand will go up. So then I ask: Who knows the fire drill? And most of the hands stay up. Even if I ask who knows CPR, or what to do if you smell gas, there are a lot of hands. But if I ask how many know how to walk around a corner properly - or escape a stranglehold, or find out if the man behind you really is following you - they lower their hands in confusion. Yet these are all sensible precautions. It's just that women are taught not to think about the danger they are often in, or how to prevent it. We're taught to feel fear, but not what to do about it."

Great stuff, there. Particularly that last line.

Busy Morning

Lots going on this morning, I'll have more later. Looks like we're going to sign for something in New York. I've never been to New York. Might be cool.

Off to Denver tomorrow, etc.

I'll have lots to say about this later. My first thought was to wonder if this was the same guy who was terrorizing my neighborhood a few months ago. He may have just switched beats. That's what ya get, fucker.

Just One of Those Days

Yea, it's just one of those days.

I'm going to go home, go to bed, and start all over again tomorrow.

Fuck the Fucking Fuckers

Blogger ate my goddamn post.

Die Blogger! Die!

I think this was blogger's way of saying, "Kameron, you're done for the day. Really. Relax. Take a chill pill. You don't have to be pissed at everyone today."

To which I reply: ARGGGGGGHH, you Fucker!

Episode 15: In Which I Try to Figure Out What the Hell it is I Do Here

The problem with having a new boss who's out of Denver and has about a zillion things he's responsible for is that I get no feedback whatsoever.

Now, really, this is nothing new for me. For the first three weeks I worked here, I didn't even know what the hell it was we did.

In fact, I have a feeling Blaine didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do either, and he was my boss. So, we were even.

As I've said before, Blaine is like a big puppydog. He's a big former football player, with a football player's distrust of his own intellect, a sweetheart, but sort of all over the place. He says thank you all the time, watches where he puts his hands, and has gone out of his way on numerous occasions to praise what I do. Even when he's busy, I'll at least get a, "Yes. This is good" or "This is good, but can you change this?"

In fact, he just called me into his office to read a line from an e-mail he couldn't understand to see if it was, and I quote, "Smart person lingo that you'd know" or "industry lingo."

I told him I didn't know it, so it must be industry lingo.

I feel so appreciated for being a geek.

And from Piper I'm getting zero reaction. I sent him oodles of crap I'd been compiling that I'll be using to, you know, do document controls work. The only reponse, "Can you make one of these up for X project too?"

Uh. Sure.

Today it's: "Make this look more professional, send it back to me."

Sure. I do so, he says, "Actually, that was the wrong thing I sent you, here's the right one."

OK. I do that one.

Radio silence.

Now it's "Convert this other document, we'll do this thing later. I'll call you tomorrow."

Right-o.

No "Thanks," no "This is great," or even "This frickin' sucks, you should go back to cleaning dog kennels."

In the grand scheme of things, of course, the formatting of documents for kick-off meetings shouldn't matter, but I've worked a year now with Ned the regional VP occasionally leaning over my shoulder, and that guy's a frickin' perfectionist. I reprinted Thank-You cards four times because he found crap he didn't like in them (thank god he wasn't around when I was doing audit packages).

I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that 1) Blaine is younger than Piper by well over a decade 2) Blaine actually shares the same office with me, whereas Piper's only met me once.

I think there's a generational difference in management styles going on.

That, or I've just gotten very, very cozy with all this overpraise, and I'm about to take a nosedive into Corporate Hell.

Getting a raise really sucks.

I just want to write books.

Damn, I'm Sore

Did 3.5 miles yesterday, which I didn't think would be a lot until I actually did it. When you're used to jogging 2.6 or 2.7 miles, jumping to 3.5 is a fucking bitch.

I just didn't realize how much until I stood up just now.

Damn. I've got kickboxing tonight, too.

It's Because Only Stupid Women Get Married, Obviously.

LONDON (AFP) - A high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married while it is an asset for men, according to a study by four British universities published in The Sunday Times newspaper.

...for girls, there is a 40-percent drop [in marriage] for each 16-point rise [in IQ], according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Smart women are just too smart to get married. They cohabitate and fuck around like any good, normal, sane person. Obviously.

"A chap with a high IQ is going to get a demanding job that is going to take up a lot of his energy and time. In many ways he wants a woman who is an old-fashioned wife and looks after the home, a copy of his mum in a way."

Then let him go fuck his mother.

Midnight Cowboy

I watched Midnight Cowboy last night, and for some reason, I've had this insatiable desire for Dentyne gum all day...

Sisterly Love

Somebody else has purportedly got Lynne Cheney's lesbian romance up.

I sure wish my last name was Cheney. The opening paragraph to a book I wrote when I was fourteen sounded just like this:

"On every side, there was emptiness. On every side, the prairie stretched on and on, unbroken to the horizon. Even the dome of sky was a naked stretch, swept bare of clouds by the unceasing wind. In all its vast blueness, the only interruption was the inescapable sun. She felt its heat. She saw the shadow it made, her shadow, a startling darkness in the bright and infinite loneliness."

Looks like it's a real deep, penetrating read.

Yum.

Welcome to Chicago

It's quarter to seven. I'm heading to the train station, splashing through dark puddles on the pavement. The sky's that purple-black color that city skies get just before dawn. At this time of the morning, the smell of fried Thai food from the restaurants lining the street is more stink than smell, and my stomach heaves at the idea of consuming anything non-liquid at this time of the morning.

I'm listening to a Live cd, and thinking that you know, Live sounds pretty good until you actually listen to the lyrics, and then you start listening and you realize the lyrics are shit. Luckily, I'm in no state to actually listen to what the hell anybody's saying this morning.

I arrive at the top of the train platform just in time to see the ass-end of a train heading toward the loop.

Wait around for the next one, dreary day, rain, Chicago, the sound of garbage trucks. A northbound train clatters by. Somebody's smoking and eating a McDonald's breakfast sandwich. Heave.

Maybe I'm getting sick with something.

On the train, the only empty seat is full of gnawed chicken bones. I wait until a woman moves herself, her stroller, and her 3-year-old to a vacated seat, and then I take theirs, hoping they aren't moving because the kid pissed on the seat.

I doze and watch the rain on the windowpanes. Past Wrigley Field (Addison - amazing when the Cubs were in the playoffs, it was like Disneyland), past Boys' Town (Belmont - there's an army surplus store there I keep meaning to get to), past De Paul University (Fullerton - maybe I should go to law school?).

We pass underground, and at Washington I prepare to alight from the wrong side of the train - that's how out of it I am. When the doors open on the other side, I do an about-face and stumble onto the platform, heading toward the blue line tunnel. I follow after the same little old woman almost every morning. She usually wears a lime green coat, but today it's gray featherdown.

At the blue line platform, familiar faces, but no violin player, no man crooning alongside bad tape recordings of cheesy songs. The street performers appear to have taken the day off.

Step onto the blue line, sharing the train with people and luggage, bound for O'Hare. I get off before O'Hare, trundle up the escalators with a bazillion other commuters, click, click of high heels and good men's shoes.

Twelve minute walk, past the mini-skyscrapers of this cozy little office complex (look, mom, I have a real job!), under the parking garage, follow the sidewalk, cross at the blinking light, there across the street I can see Cyllia the secretary's van already parked out front. Another day, another dollar.

Push inside, turn off the Live album, Blaine's office light is on, Blaine's in early... Cyllia's greeting, "Happy new year," dump my crap in my cubicle behind Cyllia, fish out my chicken and broccoli, stow it in the breakroom. Nobody else is in this early, we're all a bunch of slackers...

Blaine is on a conference call or something, Cyllia's listening to some funny ditty somebody forwarded to her.

I take my seat, CD collection at my left elbow, open up the computer, change the password (my old one: "Tragic!"), check my g-mail, nothing, check my work e-mail, nothing but "read by" receipts (if I "work" the work comes in by e-mail, unless Blaine tells me to print something, which has been my default position for the last six months - printer of Blaine's RFPs), blow me, blogging time, get some coffee, sitemeter, hotmail, random bullshit.

Another day, another dollar.

The printer next to me jams. Cyllia comes over, and one of the lead architects appears to retrieve his jammed document, tells me I should have told him I needed a car - he just sold "a real chick magnet" (there's a running bet in the office on the nature of my sexuality, as I never talk about a boyfriend. I've preferred to remain ambiguous. Who I take to bed or don't isn't their business. Their bafflement amuses me).

The accountant who took off so suddenly and was summarily fired is back, and chatting with the lead architect. She's apparently so good with Oracle that she can flake out, fly out, and abandon her key card and her job for three months and then burst back in without a salary penalty.

Must be great to be her.

Blaine bumbles in for said dictionary, discusses how he and his fiance suffered from stomach flu over New Year's.

Way to ring it in.

Cyllia comes by, whispers the usual lament against the injustices of the HR manager.

There are no messages on my phone. I could be in bed right now.

I can't believe I get paid for this shit.

Whose Book Would You Rather Read?

Sad, sad.

On the upside, I find something gleeful in the juxtaposition. I don't know what, but it's there. A symptom of sleep deprevation, no doubt.

Cooffffffffeeeeee

Is good.

Quote of the Day

Blaine, my former boss and head of regional business development for North America, comes in and goes, "I need a dictionary. What the hell does burgeoning mean? I've been reading it everywhere."

I love these guys.

Blogging For Feminism, and Other Flights of Fancy

Media girl has up a poll about what feminist priorities should be for 2005.

My favorite was using blogs to reach people. But as much as I love the idea of blogging as being a bit like consciousness-raising groups ("You mean it's not just me?"), there's a big problem with it:

The internet isn't free. It's not in everybody's home, and unless you have broadband or wireless internet, reading or creating blogs is pretty much a hopeless cause. You'll never be able to keep up. If you're savvy, you might create your own newsfeed of favs so you don't have to visit each every morning, but that means a couple of Saturdays spent with a sloooooooowwww dial-up connection trying to find blogs (probably initially starting with google and moving on to blogrolls from there). You've gotta have the leisure time, which means people who work 12 hours a day (not at a cooshy office job like mine where I can screw off) and then put in a second shift with kids and housework aren't going to have the time to do it.

I'm a big proponent of free wifi, though as someone who works in telecommunications, I can tell you that all the telephone and wireless companies are fighting like SOBs to keep wifi private - and as long as you can surf around for porn, you're going to see this administration protecting private businesses by preaching that tax payer dollars shouldn't go toward paying for teenagers to surf for porn.

And it means most of the red states go radio silent.

Yea! The Obligatory Holiday Weight Woes Article!

Look at CNN covering that hard news on your after-holiday Monday morning!

Blow it out your ass, CNN.

I *lost* weight over the holiday. Fuck off.

Insomnia

Currently functioning on 0 hours of sleep. That's right, 0, for no good reason. This is highly erratic. I don't have trouble sleeping. I love sleeping.

I was in bed by 9pm so I could make my 5:15am alarm, and tossed and turned, got a massive headache, checked e-mail and blogs, went back to bed, tossed and turned for hours and hours, got up again, couldn't find any painkiller in the house except Midol, went back to bed, wishing my brain would just stop thinking...

Yes, brain, it's going to be a busy week. Yes, Denver trip, going back to MA classes, diet and exercise, yes, you're way behind on your books, no you haven't written anything substantial in months, yes, all of your latest stories have bounced, Jenn will be back, you need to go to those Saturday writing meetings, and you have 0, count them, 0 stories currently in the mail, and no, you currently *can't* afford to go to Glasgow in August, and you need to write a letter to that agent who's got the 50 pages, cause it looks like you're SOL on that threadbare hope, too, and oh, my damn head hurts...

I'm still feeling strangely wired, though I expect this to turn into total collapse by 3pm. I look like hell.

Oh, goodness, it's gonna be one of those days.

Bleeding Onto Pages

I'm supposed to have another draft novel by March. Sheeeeiiiiitttt.

Back to work.



"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman cables exploding like spiders across the stars."
- Jack Kerouac

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
- Nietzsche

"Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself."
- unknown

Madness Du Jour

I have a confession: I'm pretty nonplussed about the tsunami. 150,000 people dead, yea, so, 2 million died in Rwanda and nobody gave a fucking shit. 1 in 3 people in Southern Africa has HIV or AIDS, and the US is pushing abstinence-only programs there instead of condoms.

Whoop-dee-doo 150K dead.

Oh. Yea. That’s right. White tourists were there! Poor white tourists, their cozy vacations were ruined!

Let me tell you a story, because I had to pull out this story to put it all back into perspective for me. Before I was writing here at Brutal Women, I was sending "updates" to my writing buddies a couple times a month. I dug this one out this morning, about one of the times me and some of the other U of Natal academics went to a neat little bar in Durban called Bean Bag for B’s going-away-to-an-American-university party. So, let me channel my 22-year-old self and share:

Madness Du Jour 12 Sept, 2002

What I like about Bean Bag, among other things, is that there are actually women mooning over other women here. That may sound sorta stupid, but mainly, among J & co., I'll meet lots of girls, their boyfriends, and men who flirt with men - couples and singles. Sometimes I despair that there's no one in the world who finds women attractive enough to flirt with.

It's safe to bet that all of the male waiters at Bean Bag are more interested in your date than you are, and the guy-couples are usually sexual pairings, and the handful of guys interested in women are there with girlfriends. As a girl, you don't go to Bean Bag to pick up on guys, you go there to look fabulous and hang out with fabulous people and have fabulous people see how fabulous and bohemian you look. It feels like everybody's in drag: everybody's trying to look good and impress people. There are some non-beautiful people here, sure, but they're actively trying to be "cool" if not beautiful. They're trying to Look Like Somebody.

I meet a Zulu couple who are sitting next to one of my fellow grad students, Stephen. The man is a friend of B's, and his wife or girlfriend sits at his side. She's quite beautiful, has an aura of quiet intelligence about her, and I like her immediately. She's a physically big woman. Not tall, but big - not fat - big. I once lamented to J about being from a country of obese people and feeling so totally out of place in South Africa. He pointed out that it's not that there aren't fat people in Durban. Almost all of the older Zulu women you see are heavy, or at the very least, have exaggerated curves. I sometimes wonder where the hell they buy jeans that have enough room in the butt and hips. So it's not that there aren't big people here: they just don't carry it like it's shameful, or something to hide. And it's not like they want for men. The two or three times I've been hit on here, it' been by Zulu-speaking guys.

She turns out to be a teacher from Kwa Mashu, one of the big townships outside of Durban. She teaches a class of 85 children. All of the teachers there do. It was a rather awkward conversation, because I started out in my classically American way, saying I thought it was really cool of her to do that, how good-works it was to teach all of these kids who otherwise wouldn't really have teachers, and she said;

"You know, when you come from being taught in a classroom of 85 children and have to teach a class of 85 children, really, all you're thinking about is how you're going to get out of there. How you're going to keep getting more education so you can teach somewhere else, have a better career."

This was a blow to my Assumption of Privilege American "save the children, sacrifice yourself" ideal of the happy martyr, something I wasn't aware that I toted around until she said this. She *wanted* to get the fuck out of the township and get a better job in a better area. Duh. She wasn't doing it because she was into self-sacrifice. She was doing it to survive. Because until she had more schooling, it was the only teaching position she could get.

"How do you not lose hope, I mean, teaching kids who don't believe education will help them?" I said.

She sighed. "You assign homework, and the next day, you ask who did the homework. And the five children who have done the homework come up to the front of the class, and you teach those five children."

"But don't they realize that education will help them get better jobs?"

Looking back on it, she was really nice to me and all my stupid American questions.

She shook her head. "There are no jobs. This is what people don't understand. You can got to university and get your honours degree, but when you come out, there will still be no jobs for you. You're talking to children who are from families where no one is formally employed. They would rather learn how to be streetwise. That's all they know. That's how their families survive, being streetwise. Why should they learn all of this book learning when there aren't any jobs it could get them?"

The conversation peters out, mainly because I can see this hopeless chasm yawning out before me. I understand South African cynicism.

I spent the most comfortable part of the night talking to Stephen the post-grad, a 25-year-old frumpy bookstore employee and his boyfriend at the "non-fabulous" table, and later on, B, as we couldn't all fit at one table. I think I was just avoiding the fabulous table, which included J, the flirty A, and some rather lovely looking kid who couldn't have been much past 20 who I assumed was the former geek from high school that J said had become a model, some cleanly pretty guy with a shaved head, B's girlfriend, et al.

I preferred to be at the all-but-me-male, non-fabulous table. We had some interesting topics of conversation, mainly centered around ways the government has failed to support its population and how it could create sustainable communities, and the benefit or drawback of university education for the "masses", and etc. Mostly, I got from everyone a big dose of South African cynicism and hopelessness. Not hopeless in the sense that they didn't have ideas, or didn't know how to do it, but because no one would listen, and the people in power have enough money that they really don't give a shit about how much of the population has to die of AIDS. After all, if they’re all dead, you don’t have to worry about getting them jobs or medical or helping them form sustainable communities, do you?

Talking about President Thabo Mbeki, AIDS, and the purging of 30% of South Africa’s population by simply “letting them die” always makes me want to vomit.

Eventually, as more people wandered away, the tables merged, and I ended up sitting next to J. A was sitting on his other side, the 20 year old model was sitting on A’s other side, B’s girlfriend and a bunch of new people were across the table, and B, Stephen, and the boy couple took up the other end of the table.

I don’t remember much of the conversation. I remember J was drinking martinis. I had only been able to afford 3 rum & cokes, and wasn’t even feeling fuzzy, which I resented. I’ve said that I can only enjoy Bean Bag for 2 hours – that’s 2 hours if I’m sober. If I’m drunk my self-reflecting mechanism turns off, and I don’t care about all the beautiful fabulous people drinking and fucking while 36% of the people in the province die of AIDS and live in squatter camps. Because it’s never just, “Gosh, sucks not to be one of the beautiful people.” It’s getting to all that by passing through abject poverty. Literally.

We drove through bits of downtown Durban to get to Bean Bag (not my usual route, but one B chose or accidentally stumbled onto, for some reason). I’m still thinking of the teacher in Kwa Mashu as I’m watching A cheek-kiss all the acquaintances of his who’ve wandered over to the table. Durban is a small town in the sense that there are very few places that people who have money can go, so no matter where you are, you’re always running into someone you know.

There was a part of me watching people fluttering in and out as I smoked cigarettes and stared into J’s empty martini class that wanted to shout: “None of this shit is fucking important! None of this matters! You know what matters? People. Just people. Not the fucking sneakers you’re wearing! Not what kind of cigarettes you’re smoking! And all these fucking people are dying and all these fucking kids in Kwa Mashu are going to starve or start their own rape gangs and nobody cares!”

I went outside to get some air and get away from the fabulous A and B’s drunken girlfriend and the joint being passed around.

I eventually got myself a table inside, both because it was cold outside, and because I just couldn’t stand sitting with the gang any longer. I got a glass of water and thought about Alaska. Were things really so romantically different there? I always had this idea that it didn’t matter what you looked like there. People assessed you by where you’d been and how much you knew. At least, I thought they did. I know I learned to.

If I’d ever had anything against physically imperfect people, or socially imperfect people, I had to get over it really fucking fast in AK, because *everyone* was physically and socially fucking poor. No, not squatter camp poor, but it was fucking cold outside, we couldn’t afford new clothes, it was dark all the time; a big night out was to pile into the stolen van that didn’t have a heater, wrapped up in our tatty clothes, and go out to buy salmon chowder and fresh-baked bread at the chowder house across from the movie theatre: it was good, cheap food. Everybody dressed in bulky, crap clothes, nobody had a tan, everyone had that extra layer of subcutaneous fat, and nobody really cared, because when it’s fucking cold outside, all you give a shit about is whether or not your bed partner is warm.

J wandered in after me, apparently because B was asking where I was. I tried to articulate some of this stuff to him, about the superficiality of this place, about how this was so outside the realm of my experience, about how this place and these people were different from everything I’ve ever know. But I don’t think I said it very well.

Finally, all I could say was, “This just really isn’t my milieu.”

B drove us home soon after, and I got to say goodbye to him, as I wouldn’t see him again before he flew out.

Mostly, I spent the night not being able to sleep. I was thinking about being beautiful and being alive and being a teacher in Kwa Mashu. And thinking about madness.

I always feel thumped on the head with the idea that female madness is the result of being female, of not being able to accept your place in the world. Sure, you can blame some of this on oppression, yea, but how long can you sit around and blame oppression for your inability to interact with the world?

But that night, after sitting in Bean Bag, wishing I was drunk but too poor to afford to be, talking about 30% of the country dying, just dying, and not even dying, but being left to die, and the impossible poverty, and teachers who teach to survive and help 5 kids in 85, and street kids who beg for money until they’re too old to be cute and then start stealing cars and raping women, and car guards groping at you for money, and beautiful people fluttering over martinis and talking about expensive sneakers… It was just too much for me. It was too much for me to know that I was one of them, that I wasn’t doing anything to help anybody. I was just consuming alcohol and feeling faintly ill about it.

And I thought, god, what’s wrong with me? Why do I care about a bunch of people dying in a third world country? They’re poor. So what? People are poor. People die. That’s life. Birth, poverty, death. That’s all. Why do I care?

I care because these are the people who walk next to me every day. These are the people next to you on the bus. These are the people you walk past downtown on the way to the beach. When I did an interview with P, a former MK (the militant arm of the ANC) affiliate, I was introduced to Dludlu, the woman who comes in to clean her house once a week. Dludlu was a nice, polite, smiling woman in a clean pink domestic worker’s dress and apron. Over coffee, P told me that Dludlu lives in a squatter camp. During the heavy spring rain we’d had a few days before, her bed, which was just a mattress on the ground, had finally gotten so soaked that it had fallen apart, and P had her take out one of her old mattresses, and told Dludlu to use bricks to keep it off the ground.

These are the people in my life, however, peripheral. And they’re living in squatter camps and subsisting on mealie-meal and dying of AIDS.

This is not fucking National Geographic.

Talking to P about her involvement with the ANC and the liberation struggle, you can hear her hope, and also her bitterness about how it turned out.

“All that happened was they just changed the people who were in power,” she said. “We were so poor. We were in such poverty. These men, I remember bringing these men home from prison, and having to buy underpants for them, and they were thin, and they stank, and they couldn’t even afford to buy their own clothes after coming out of prison. And now they get paid R250,000 a year and pay their domestic workers R400 a month. They think they deserve it, but they have forgotten what we fought for. Sometimes I hope I’ll die soon. This world is too much glitz and glamour for me. I’m not from an important family. We lived in poverty. I ate dal and rice for three years when I went to university and drank water at night. That was how we lived, that was how they lived, and they have forgotten.”

When I first arrived to do the interview, P was still showering, so I had some time to read and look at everything on the walls of her flat, the ANC posters, the free Mandela posters, the pictures of fellow comrades, the banners, the flyers, the flags, the funeral notices for the deaths of her sons, and you know, I started to cry. I got all weepy and had to wipe the tears away before she got out of the bathroom. So many people died for this, for this, and nothing has changed except that all the rich white people who could leave, left, and all the black people who fought or their families or supporters filled all those positions. And 80% of the population is still poor, and everyone is dying.

I really thought there was something wrong with me for getting all emotional over this.

Which brings me back to madness. Are we really mad? Is this madness, to weep for people who died and are dying so a handful of people can pay their domestic servants R400 a month?

What I realized, lying awake, unable to sleep, was that it’s not women who are crazy, it’s not women who are mad:

It’s the world that’s fucked up.

There’s a reason that in every story you read, the first time a character is exposed to violence - bloody, gory, real violence - their initial reaction is to be violently ill. That’s the natural reaction.

If violence is “natural” to human behavior as people say it is, why does it make so many people sick? Why do soldiers have to be so rigorously trained and hyper-masculinized in order to face it?

I thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t stand on-screen violence in movies anymore, after living here for six months. Watching one woman get knifed with a pair of scissors and another get repeatedly drown throughout the whole of Minority Report made me ill. And now, thinking of my reaction to teaching children in Kwa Mashu, and Dludlu’s mattress in her shack being inundated with water, I’m starting to think that if I *didn’t* have such an alarmed, emotional response to it, there would be something wrong with me.

That’s when I’d be really crazy.

I remember the first time I killed something beautiful.

Not like an ant or a spider or a bee, or something that seemed more like annoying dust, but something big, something substantial, and something that, in all my giddy girlishness, I loved.

Me and my cousin used to run around my grandmother’s garden in the summer and try to catch flying grasshoppers, the big ones. I guess they’re actually called locusts, but we called them flying grasshoppers. I was only four or five, so they seemed terribly big to me. One of them was nearly the length of my palm.

The problem was that they were really fast. They saw you long before you could grab them, and they would hop up and spread their beautiful wings – some had black wings lined in yellow or white, and those were the best. Later, I’d become fascinated with dragonflies for the same reason: they were just so beautiful.

I finally caught one of the locusts, a big beautiful one with black wings with yellow fringes. My cousin always said that I wouldn’t be able to catch one, but I had, and I decided I would keep it in a jar and feed it leaves, and then I would let it go the next day.

I poked holes in the lid of the jar, which my cousin had taught me to do so the locust wouldn’t die, and I put the big locust inside and gave it some wet leaves and things.

I walked out into the front yard behind some trees and set the jar down next to some bushes. I talked to the locust and told him how pretty he was, and I told him I would let him go tomorrow, but I just wanted to look at him for awhile.

Then my parents arrived back from work to pick us up from my grandmother’s place and take us home for the night, and I said goodbye to my locust.

The next day, I arrived back from school to discover that my locust was dead.

I had left the jar in the sun.

I wasn’t so much heartbroken as horrified. I couldn’t believe I had killed this beautiful thing. Because as soon as I saw that the afternoon sun had eliminated the shadows of the trees, I knew what I had done. I knew even then that you can’t leave animals inside a car in summer with the windows rolled up. I knew better.

I opened up the jar and let the big dead locust slide out, and I cried over him, because he was really pretty, and he was dead. And it was my fault.

You’re supposed to believe that dead things: squirrels, mice, cats, dogs, rats, don’t die the same way people do, that what you’re looking at isn’t what you’ll be when you’re dead. You’re supposed to believe that people are different.

This isn’t true.

I remember working at the vet clinic on weekends, and there was this beautiful little brown dog who was really sick, and I tried to get him to go outside for a walk with me, but he just looked up at me with these really big brown eyes like, “Honey, it ain’t gonna happen.” And I patted his head and fed him, but he didn’t eat, just gazed at me.

I stood up, and the dog died in from of me. Just died. Just leaned his head back and gave a sort of cough, and the last breath left his body, and he was dead.

Why is it so much more terrible when it’s something so beautiful?

If we don’t even care about the woman starving to death on our front stoop, who gives a fuck about a dog?

You get people to kill things, or not care about things, by making them ugly. By convincing people that they’re looking at something Other, something inferior, different. This is how men get “trained” into killing each other. This is why men hurt women. Not because rape and torture and mutilation is “natural,” but because they’ve been taught that women or black or gays or whites or Indians or poor people or diseased people or Americans or Russians are somehow ugly. Are somehow monstrous. We are told that we must hurt them before they prey on us.

You learn to look at the world as ugly and beautiful. You learn what the world believes is ugly and beautiful, but the world is fucked up. It’s not real.

But how can you live if you try to give a shit about every starving woman on your stoop?

You’d go mad.

There is a little gray-haired man who haunts my block. He wears the same blue sports coat with a red handkerchief sticking out of one pocket. The sleeves are too long, and they nearly cover his hands. The coat reaches his knees. The too-long ends of his trousers pool around his too-big shoes. He has never asked me for money. Maybe this is because I’ve never sat through his entire spiel.

Instead, what he wants to tell me is all the love Jesus has for me. He wants to tell me how I am one of God’s children, and I am loved. He wants to tell me that everyone is loved, everyone is beautiful.

I usually ignore him. He’s fruity as a loop, but harmless.

Fruity, but sometimes the fruity have bits and pieces in the right places.

The world is not full of ugly people. It’s full of beautiful people, but not the kind of beautiful you see on MTV.

What happens to the world when you pull off the veil and see that everyone is beautiful, that everyone is you? What happens when you realize it’s not just the locusts you’ve been killing, but people? What happens to you then?

Because there’s no such thing as the Beautiful People. I keep thinking there is. I keep stepping into it and thinking, god, where the fuck am I? But it’s better to see it as the drag show it is, a veil, hiding real beauty behind booze and expensive shoes.

We’re trying so hard to separate Us and Them. There’s got to be a reason We go home to houses with indoor plumbing and drive around in our white cars. It has to be that we’re Beautiful. Or brilliant. Or both. Because if it’s not because we’re beautiful, if everyone’s beautiful, and beautiful people are dying of AIDS in squatter camps and getting raped and beaten, if that’s happened to the beautiful people, then there’s something wrong with the world. You can’t pretend anymore. The veil comes loose.

And you’ll go nuts thinking about it.

Because sometimes, when I’m not careful, I’ll look up and I’ll see it. I’ll look up and into all of these faces, and they’re all so heartbreakingly beautiful. And it isn’t what they’re wearing, and it’s not where they live, it’s just in their faces, in the fact that they’re alive, that they’ve survived to be here, that they share this place with me, and when I look up, I see that B is beautiful, and P is beautiful, and J, and B’s girlfriend, and Dludlu, and Stephen and the teacher from Kwa Mashu and even bitchy A is beautiful in his own way, and yes, even me in my denim and boots, smoking cigarettes and contemplating Alaska at a table by myself, even I’m beautiful, and it’s not because we’re so different from everybody else, it’s because we’re the same.

And in our madness, and in our drag show, we forget that. We forget and we become really superficial, and drunk because we’re not sure what’s wrong, we’re not sure what we’re trying to do except be Beautiful, because everyone knows that no one kills Beautiful People, and Beautiful People don’t live in squatter camps. Beautiful people don’t die.

But they do. And it’s us. And it’s madness pretending it’s not, every day. Not just today.

Every damn day.

Gotcha

Woke up this morning with a title and a plot for my painter story.

It's about damn time.

That's what good media gluttony and blog reading at midnight will get you.

Here's to another `05 here in uptown (and, possibly, Denver)



My front stoop



Where it all goes down...