Sweet Home

Stumble home, unpack, pile up laundry, try and find a fourth frickin' quarter... turn the house upside down to try and find a damn quarter, nothing, fuck it, these kicking pants are clean enough, leave `um to air out.

Pack wraps, belt, shirt, towel, (boxing class tomorrow) ignore two coffee cups in the sink (at least somebody in this house is getting laid), grind coffee, stumble toward bed, find that my roommate left me a fucking birthday present, goddamn it. I hate this. I'm so bad at getting people stuff.

Find she's left me a dragonfly pin, oh! Excellent (long story)! Open other pacakge to find --

Holy fucking christ.

Golden States, by Michael Cunningham. His first novel. I have literally read and re-read The Hours over a dozen times. I bring it on trips with me, as comfort reading. I read it before bed on bad days. It's the book of the hours, of life, and I'm crazy about his other stuff too, but you can't get Golden States because apparently he absolutely hates it, refuses to have it reprinted, and doesn't even list it on his list of "books by the author" page.

Fuck, where did she get this?

"It'll Cost You More Money."

The age-old battle between the people on the ground and the people heading it all up from on-high:

When corp. comes in next and tells us how incredibly complicated we need to make things, we've collectively agreed to use this knee-in-the-gut retort:

"It'll cost you more money."

Gets `um every time.... Makes our jobs easier. Gets work done.

The end.

Blah, Blah, Continuing Bullshit

Man, I love it when other people tackle stuff that pisses me off, so I don’t have to.

I read this piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd yesterday. She’s pissed about the recent “study” that “proves” that men are “naturally” drawn toward subordinate women (again, I want to see the study where it’s biologically advantageous for women to be attracted to men who beat the crap out of them – we can put them right next to the “studies” that say that kids born to “mixed-race” couples are “naturally” stupider than those of “pure-race” couples), and I just sort of snarled at it and moved on.

Brendan, however, took it on, mashed up some other recent news bits with it, and has a good look at “guy culture” and society’s tendency toward assuming what’s happening in relationships right now and on TV must be “natural.”

He brings up a couple of good points worth chewing on, one of them being the fact that “equal” relationships are really fucking hard. When you look at the news media, at “guy culture,” hell, at Cosmo, what you’re going to see are the same things that Dowd sees – men looking for subservient mates, women trying to trick men into thinking they’re stupider than they are; insecure women dying to get married to just about anybody, especially Desperate Smart Women; insecure men who find the idea of a woman who makes more money than them unnerving.

Whether or not these things are “true” isn’t the point – governments spoon up “truth” every morning. That’s why we can send House representatives to Iraq who have no idea what it’s like for people living in Iraq. They’ve been given a different truth – and it’s not the real one.

When you grow up looking for an equal sort of pairing with somebody (or a couple of somebodies, depending on preferences), you’re not going to see many examples of it on television, in the movies, in books, plays, etc. You’re going to see a lot of unequal powerplays: evil scheming women trying to manipulate men, or evil scheming men trying to manipulate women, or subservient women trying to please evil men, or mediocre men, or men trying to please the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, so he can then marry her, own her, and show her who’s boss (my favorite. This is why I’m so fearful of being Greek-Goddess-Worshipped by men. The other side of this coin is. “I won her. She’s mine. Now I can show her who’s in charge”).

If you’re lucky, you’ll grow up watching real people in real relationships, and odds are that though some of them will mirror our media stereotypes, and a lot of them will be crappy, some of them won’t, and you’ll find one that intrigues you.

My parents were married just out of high school, my mom was 18 and my dad was 20, and they’d been dating on and off since my mom was 15 and he was 17. My relationship myth, growing up, was this magical romantic one: my mom met my dad in French class. He was the guy in the back of the class wearing the leather jacket, slouching in his seat. When the French professor asked him to stand up and introduce himself, my father did so – in perfect French. He was one of five children raised by my GI grandfather and war-bride French grandmother, and spent the first seven years of his life in France.

My mother was smitten. As the popular version of the story goes, she ran to her best friend immediately after class and said, “I just met the man I’m going to marry.”

There was a break-up, a jealousy play or two, and then my mom finally said to him, “Are we going to get married, or what?”

They got married.

They’ve been married for something like thirty years.

The trouble was, they got married too young, and they’ll be the first to tell you this. Every time they have an argument it’s like watching a couple of 18-year-olds. And I don’t know that some of their life goals corresponded as well as they could have. All my dad really wanted was to have kids, my mom really didn’t, she flirted with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. They waited five years, and had kids. Though they still share some core ideas about love and commitment - which has kept them together - it’s been a long hard road. Such is the nature of relationships.

So though I admired my parents and was really taken in by this Grand Idea of the One True Love, the One True Love idea got me sorta stuck in my first relationship, as I was basing my life on a set of mythos I learned from my parents, and that mythos isn’t gonna work every time, and especially not in high school, especially if you try to force it. I really, really wanted a One True Love, and a great “I fell in love with him right then” story, but I honestly didn’t have one. I had these two warring ideas in my head: the One True Love from high school whose love was so powerful it superceded everything else you wanted to do with your life, and what I was actually looking for…. Growing up, the place where I saw my ideal sort of “I want to live that kind of life, with that kind of person,” example was that of my Uncle Steve and Aunt Kris.

The popular mythos is:

They met as exchange students in Thailand. She was from Ohio. He was from Washington State. Should have been doomed from the start. How many people would you really fly halfway across the country to be with?

We didn’t hang out much, so my idea of their relationship has been formed in pictures, and the one that always clinched it for me was a picture of the two of them coming up out of the water in their scuba diving gear. They’re probably about the age that I am now, and they’ve got their respirators in their hands. As the water ripples around them, they come together into a fun, half-laugh, half-kiss.

And I remember thinking, when I saw that picture: that’s it. That’s what I want.

My uncle worked as a television news anchor for awhile, and in his study, there’s a picture of him in a flight suit, stepping out of an Airforce jet he got to ride in for a news story.

Here were these images of this life, of this way life could be, and something about it really connected with me. How truly egalitarian and buddy-buddy their relationship is now, I don’t know, but I remember those images, and that hope I had that yes, really, there’s another way for things to be. You can have a big, full life with somebody who wants to have a big, full, life with you. It’s possible. You don’t have to backbite and backstab and blame each other for everything. You don’t have to sacrifice your life in order to be with somebody you like.

And it’s that hope for another life that’s kept me happily single for so long. If that’s not what I get, I’d rather have nothing.

I’m an all-or-nothing sort of person.

And when you’re raised in a society that doesn’t encourage those sorts of relationships, they’re really fucking hard. Brendan says this nicely:

Perhaps the hardest sort of relationship to maintain is a true meeting of equals. All relationships have their own internal power dynamics, terms and quirks, but a relationship whose core substance is true regard for and communication with another person respected as an equal requires a level of emotional maturity and openness that's almost wholly absent from popular discourse in this time and place. We tell neither men nor women to seek these sorts of relationships as the/an ideal, nor give them the tools and encouragement necessary to enable them to develop and maintain them. What we have instead, in the broadest terms, is a usership culture around relationships- what can I get out of this other person. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes it's emotional, sometimes it's status. In some respects this is also the child of marketing, in some ways the child of reductionist evolutionary explanations where a relationship is simply about fulfilling needs and obtaining resources and services.

The most equal buddy-buddy relationship I’ve had has been the one with my roomie – non-sexual it may be, but though we’d been friends for about five years, since the Clarion days, there’s a whole other dynamic involved when you live with someone, particularly somebody you really like and connect with on a lot of levels. One of the most difficult things for me to learn was actually how to tell her when I was upset about something, when something she did bugged me, to open up about why I was feeling down. I’m not a big talker (she calls me the “strong and silent type”), but she’s really good at asking questions and keeping open lines of communication so I don’t build up these huge resentments – against her or myself – and we can resolve conflicts pretty quickly.

She gets all the kudos for this. I’ve always considered talking about “feelings” to be a weak thing, and sometimes, I’ve even hated myself for feeling the things that I feel. I’ve just recently gotten to the point where I can go, “Jenn, I hate myself for feeling this way, and I know it’s adolescent and foolish, but this is sort of where I’m at with this, so if I seem down and snarky, know that it’s not about you, it’s just this stuff I’m trying to work out on my own.”

And she’ll go. “Cool. It sucks that you feel that way. You are a great person. Let me know if I can help you with that.”

It has made our domestic life much easier.

And it’s taken me a while to get used to.

Because I have a very guy-like mentality when it comes to talking and showing emotion. You get me and a guy who has the same guy-like mentality together, and bad things happen.

I didn’t have any existing framework of an open-communication relationship before, one where I was with somebody who was just as smart and capable as I was and didn't want to suck the life out of me (again, that "I worship you until you're mine, at which point I will destroy you!" mentality that a lot of women-worshippers have). Even with a lot of my old friends, there are things we Just Don’t Talk About. Sometimes I think we’re all trying to pretend that we’re a lot saner than we are because we’re afraid of what our friends will think of us. I know me and my best buddy Stephanie don’t talk about a lot of things, or slide over them very quickly, usually the Dark Teatime of the Soul things, though we’ve known each other for over a decade now.

I remember going out with her around Christmas, and we were sitting outside Moonstruck on 23rd in Portland, and she said, “I’ve been married for a year. I think I’m becoming boring and domestic. Would you still want to hang out with me if I was boring?” And though she said it with a half-joking little laugh, it was only half-joking.

I sort of looked at her, dumbstruck, and said, “You’re not boring. You won’t ever be boring. I don’t hang out with boring people. You know, there are these people in your life you want to know until the last breath leaves your body…? You’re one of those people.”

It’s funny, how we don’t have a social system that really teaches ushow to talk to each other, friends, lovers, relations. Unless you’ve got a family that teaches it to you, you won’t learn. You won’t get it from the media, or from school. You’re supposed to be looking at people as things, as what they can give you, instead of just people, the ones on this journey with you, the ones who have seen you through the shit and back again. The ones you want to see out to the end.

So when we talk about hetero relationships, and their inequality, I also find myself turning toward looking at other relationships, at how I’ve been taught to handle them, and I realize I come up lacking.

I don’t know that you can assign blame or fault for this: it just is. I have to be aware of what I’m getting fed from the media at large, and decide if one of the reasons I’m uncomfortable on a date is because what I want isn’t what’s being fed to me.

That’s not good or bad, it just is.

Realize that most of this stuff is bullshit, it’s somebody selling something. The minute you start interrogating these “studies,” they all unravel. It’s in the best interest of money makers to keep us unhappy. It’s in the best interests of the government for me to worry more about being smart or fat than who we’re bombing in Iraq and where all the money’s going.

It doesn’t mean that’s how we have to be.

Night Thoughts, Denver

"Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families...; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagent hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows those hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

Heaven only knows why we love it so."

- The Hours. Michael Cunningham.

Living Out of Hotels

Put in almost 2.5 miles on the treadmill, without really getting tired. And wow, do I feel a lot better. They've had shitty food in our warroom the last two days, and the Boys are living on brownies, and I haven't done any exercise beyond get out of my chair for two days. Endorphins are great.

It's so funny, how your body gets used to stuff. When I first started doing these jogging days, I felt like I was going to die after barely a mile.

My record is still only about 4.1 or 4.2 (at which point I thought I was gonna die), so I'd like to average out at 3, but in the hotel fitness room, somebody had put the TV on CNN, and you can only read so many transcripts of the Michael Jackson molestation case before you get nauseous.

There are some images that not even a loud CD player can drown out.

You know, the FCC fined Howard Stern and kicked him off the air for talking about adult sex acts occuring between and among consenting adults, but CNN is blaring out all the lurid details about a teenage boy having his genitals rubbed by Michael Jackson, without penalty. Cause it's, like "news" or something.

Yea. Right.

Yes, we need to cover "news" - like the outcome of his trial. We don't need to read a kid's statement about being molested on prime time. That's the jury's business.

You want to talk obscenity, FCC? This is it. Bunch of frickin' hypocrites.

Anyway, I'm off to shower and heading out to the Mexican place across the street for dinner. Then to bed, to bed. Or maybe play a round of Myst IV.

Anything but watch CNN.

Right Cross to the Face

Feministe has a post up about the man-hating feminist myth and the “has feminism gone too far?” argument that men like to argue about – you know: feminism must be going too far not because we’re making more money than men or are able to keep tabs on our reproductive health without legal or social consequence, but because men aren’t sure if they should open the door for us or not.

This one tugged at me because one of the architects for the project here in Denver is - let’s call him Juan – the same guy who gave all the women in the office Belgian chocolates for Christmas and forwarded all of the women in the office a hysterical “women beware” e-mail.

He’s the sort of guy who does these little things that irk me. Just these little moments where it’s like he’s trying to remind me, “You’re different than me. You’re a woman. I’m a man.” Like if he didn’t remind himself, he’d forget. I don’t mind people holding doors open for me, because I hold them open for them – it’s a politeness issue. You treat everybody around you with respect, no matter their gender. And yes, if you really like someone you’re going to probably treat them even more respectfully than you would other people. What bugs me is when guys go out of their way to show me how different I am from them, like the world will implode if I don’t get told I’m pretty for a day.

Juan gave me and the other architect a ride to the office this morning for our hotel, and stopped the car in front of the door to our building. I thought he was going to back into a parking spot, so waited.

“You can get out,” he told me, “I figured I’d drop you up front so you wouldn’t have to walk.”

Um. OK.

The other architect, of course, did not get out behind me, but waited to park with Juan and came in later.

Did I jump and scream at Juan and tell him he was weird? No.

I realized that he’d been taught certain ways to act toward women, and I let it slide.

Did it bug me?

Yea.

Last night, at dinner, he made a “I get to be here with two beautiful women,” announcement. It’s a generic statement, he says such things around all women. There are guys who’ve been taught that being nice to women means speaking softly to them and telling them how pretty they are.

No, I don’t like it, but I don’t bitch to him about it. He’s operating on a different system.

Why does it bug me?

First and foremost, because we don't know each other well, I'm not attracted to him at all, I have not invited any sort of attention from him, and don't pretend that we're "close." His comments imply an intimacy that's not there, and I think it's rude.

And, more in general, when people give me “special” attention, or “special” treatment, I feel that they’re trying to highlight my difference from them. If this is a real physical difference – my graduate degree advisor was just over three feet tall, so I walked at her pace, made sure to put things within her reach – then so be it, but if it’s just a matter of, “I realize that I must acknowledge your womanliness by treating you differently than everyone else in this car with two legs,” then it feels condescending. It feels like some guy’s going out of his way to remind me that I might be taller and stronger than him, but I don’t have a dick, so I’m incapable of looking after myself.

But would I ever, ever snipe at somebody for opening a door, moving out of my way, or saying, “I’m so glad to be with such beautiful company tonight”? No. I wouldn’t. And if it was somebody I really liked and was attracted to, it wouldn’t bug me at all, because there would actually be a mutual respect and affection.

When I start bitching is when hands go where they’re not invited, and “beautiful company” becomes more explicit phrases heavily laced with sexual innuendo – or just outright sexual.

Then I’ll turn into a man-hating bitch.

In fact, I’d react to such unwanted attention in about the same manner a guy would –

A heated verbal tirade to combat the verbal violence –

And a right cross to the face the minute he touched me.

In Which the Protagonist Pretends to Work For a Living

I'm so incredibly bored. I'm an under-utilized resource.

The good news is: I'm being paid for it.

Sign Up in the Corp. Hallway:

"It is better to be careful 100 times than to get killed once."
- Mark Twain

I know I don't belong here, because I'd say:

"It is better to die once for something grand than to live a hundred years doing nothing."

I'm such the romantic.

"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