random act of bravery

Not quite, but close.

The papers will arrive soon, and I'll be stamped and signed. Should I be pulled over in Arizona and accused of being foreigny, I can hand over my documents with ease: April 30, 2015. Here goes nothing.

Girls. I know.

This is my lunch. It's hideously boring. That's some plain lettuce topped with this couscous/vegetable/kale pesto thing I made earlier in the week. It's showered in feta because that's how I destroy my own attempts at aggressively healthy eating: strong-arming them with cheese. And so I'm trying to be healthier and I bought that bullshit Jillian Michaels DVD because I want to look extra hot at these summer weddings. I mean really hot. I mean, like, cast your eyes to the ground, I'm an eclipse sort of hot. That kind of hot. Plain lettuce and sinewy arms. Let's go.  

Is that gross? That I'm talking about how I'm eating plain lettuce because I want to look hot? Fine, it's a little gross. I agree. Here's the thing: I want to talk about Girls. I'm as sick of talking about it as you are. I don't even like it that much, although I laughed a lot during the second episode and was even moved by the third. But now I want to talk about it. Because I read this article this morning, and besides being poorly constructed, small-minded in its argument, and just as repressive or oppressive as the image it is purporting to disdain, I think it's almost harmful in how it misses the mark and submits for consideration a relationship ideal that is sure to make women feel pitiful in their failure to obtain it (it did for me!). 

Kantor's chief complaint, like other criticism I have read, is that Girls portrays girls having sex that is joyless, degrading, and empty. 

Well, sure. 

That's what sex can be. 

I've had that sex. I've had the flip side of it, too: loving, careful, tender, respectful sex. I've experienced mutual joy and satisfaction. I've had a lot of that sex, actually, and I'm going to be honest: it got super boring. I could have done something about that, sure, and I'm not in any way suggesting that all sorts of fascinating power dynamics and fetishes can't be played out in a way that is equally loving, careful, tender, respectful. I'm taking that lesson with me as I move forward, but what I'm saying is: if even I was bored by my loving, careful, tender, respectful sex, viewers of an HBO series would be really fucking bored by it. Let's try and remember that this is, first and foremost, a television show, a comedy at that, bound by all the rules of television that upend even the best of intentions. And sure, yes, I have great hopes that Lena Dunham will choose to include some of that sex at some point down the road. Does she have a responsibility, as a female, to do so? I don't know. That's a very loaded idea, and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that notion. But beyond that, that sort of sex just isn't what Lena Dunham, as an artist, seems interested in, or at least not yet. Beyond not being very dramatically compelling to introduce a character in the first episode who is entirely satisfied in their romantic/sexual life, those experiences simply aren't the ones she wants to mine. They aren't the ones I write about. They aren't the ones I dig through, panning for nuggets to help me explain why I make the choices I do. If Dunham is hoping to ask bigger questions - and I want to have faith that she is - about what it means to be female, to be lost, to be in your twenties and lonely and unsure and batted about by the media, by friends, by the many weighty generations of women of yore who frequently throw up their hands in disgust when watching how we squander our opportunities and say, I burned my bra for this?, then she has to present characters that have yet to figure their shit out. 

What really twisted my knickers, though, was Kantor's (unearned) thesis statement: that we should be striving for this post-Austen ideal of a love in which sublimation and domination exist as perfectly weighted opposites. 

Yeah. That sounds lovely. And man, I can't count the number of times a guy has come forward and said, Hello. I'd like to now willingly sublimate myself to you in order so that we might share our power in this mutually-satisfactory relationship. 

Oh wait, yes I can. That has NEVER HAPPENED NOT ONCE. And perhaps I'm grossly missing the point of the essay, but doesn't that (yet again) give men a kind of power that I'm not really interested in allowing them to have? I mean, isn't a relationship supposed to be a dynamic, evolving entity? Don't we all have to give and take and give and take repeatedly, fight it out and figure out what we are and aren't willing to stand for? There is never a perfect balance; and frankly, for some people, that perfect balance will involve degrees of sublimation and dominance with which other people might be uncomfortable. That's part of the point: we get to choose, now. It's obvious that Dunham's character, Hannah, hasn't quite figured out what she wants. But don't we owe her the opportunity to do so? Even if "figuring it out" means electing to test her own limits? 

Also, I am irked beyond belief by Kantor's assessment that Hannah, in giving her sexual self to Adam, is experiencing a worse form of submission than the 50s housewife. Who didn't have a job. Or a political voice. Or a sexual identity or the freedom to express it. Or or or or or. Every single choice Hannah makes is just that: a choice. She's choosing to experiment, to lie face down on a couch, to deaden herself to criticism, to go back to a guy who clearly doesn't treat her that well - at least on the scale that society has created for her. Elizabeth Kantor doesn't agree with her choices. Well, bully for you, Elizabeth. You get to make a different one. You are wiser, let's say, older, you've never wandered out into the minefield of modern relationships and, I don't know, made a decision you later regret? Tried something just because you wanted to see how it felt? Been mistreated and mistreated others in kind? Has it really been that easy for you? And if so, would you like to share with the class? It also feels that we, the viewers, are projecting onto Hannah a kind of emotional despair that we have yet to see evidenced. Hannah is not sitting at home weeping because she's helplessly in love, broken-hearted, worn out by pining. All we've seen her do is have vaguely humiliating sex with a guy who clearly holds more power than she does in this particular situation. Yeah, well: Been there. Enjoyed it. Become fed up with it. Learned something. Moved on. Three episodes in, maybe we can all agree to allow Hannah that same chance? Isn't choice part of what we (not me, I'm mostly reaping the benefits) fought for? 

I have been called out on numerous occasions for not being enough of a feminist. I've been glib enough about it to have earned some of that, yes. But it's frustrating, for me, because what I mean when I say that I have a complicated relationship with feminism is not that I think the problem is solved, or that we should all go back to the kitchen, or that the VIDA count isn't pathetic, or that we don't need more females in positions of political power, or that we should all have our clits chopped off, or any other general, ugly, anti-female sentiment. What I mean is exactly that: I have a complicated relationship with feminism. I have a complicated relationship with my identify as a woman. I have a complicated relationship with my sexuality. I have a complicated relationship with Girls. And I am so, so lucky to be able to have that: to sometimes want to be humiliated in bed, and then to bemoan being mistreated; to have loved someone with my full self, in a relationship in which the pendulum of power swung wildly back and forth; to make hideous, obvious mistakes in my dealings with people around me, and to muddle through them for answers, for betterment, all the while knowing that I will make that same mistake again. I'd really like to give Lena Dunham that same opportunity, the chance to explore her own complicated self, the complicated selves of the women around her, to make mistakes, to put up with too much, to ask for too little, to learn. To just, like, be a girl. 

Luckily, this is just my opinion. You might have another one. I'd love to hear it. And you know what's neat? We all get to have opinions, even Ms. Kantor. And I get to eat plain lettuce for a week and wish to be skinnier and feel guilty for that wish and drink a lot of wine to compensate and bend my head to read a poem against the neck of a guy who is trying, and failing, to treat me well, for whom I will continue to care, and learn from, and make mistakes with. And all of this is allowed. 

on today's edition

...of "Whoops! I bought a dress!" 

only connect

I haven't been writing much lately. Other places, a sentence or two, but not here.

I have been spending a lot of time in the company of others.

I've watched this trailer now, like, too many times to count. I find it very comforting, somehow - it reminds me that I am part of a community. A community of women who have been fucked over. This week I ate pizza on the floor with 9 other women, and one who was Skyped in, her face disappearing every now and then from the frame, eating matzoh and smiling at us, fragmented. I don't usually spend that much time around that many women. Earlier this month, when I was asked which celebrity I would like to be in charge of during our work gala, I asked for a straight male: that's my jam. Women - all women - tend to make me nervous. They see through me much more quickly than men do.

But there we were, on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West, balancing our plates on our knees, and one of us suggested we go around the circle and update the others on our life. It was like Estrogen 101. My point is: there was a story told about a sister whose fiancee had cheated on her with a close friend. The wedding had to be called off. We were even shown the bridesmaid dress, an olive green strapless chiffon still in plastic, unrefundable. The story was being told and everyone was nodding, even if it hadn't happened to them, because it has happened to someone. Some girl. Some woman they know and love, somewhere, has been so blindsided, so gobsmacked, so wrecked by someone they thought they could trust. Someone in whom they had deposited their best work. And in some ways it feels good to know that. This particular girl got an awesome hair cut and a killer new apartment and retaliated by calling his family and rehashing every ugly detail of the cheating, so they would know who their son and brother really was. Which I suppose is an interesting way to phrase it, because isn't what I'm saying that we never really know who another person really is? Isn't that the whole point?

Still, it's comforting to think I could sleep with someone in rollerblades and drink to excess and eat chips and that somehow connects me to this grand, sweeping community of women worldwide who have been knocked farther down than they believed to be possible, and then got back up.

(I have already danced on a pole at a club. And then fallen on my face when getting out of the cab I had poured myself into. And then crawled across the street to my apartment while someone, someone, someone I couldn't even bear to acknowledge called to me: "Um...are you okay?" DEAR GOD I WILL BE.)

Today I remembered a moment in Puerto Rico, six years ago now. The 12 of us had rented a room in a hotel in San Juan so that we could lock our backpacks inside while we explored the city before our flight back to Vermont. It was a seedy and cheap place near the city centre. I remember not wanting to leave my bag - I remember some of us arguing about whether it was safe - but in the end we decided we didn't have much of a choice. It was muggy even as the sun was setting. In San Juan there are rats that climb trees just like they think they're squirrels. The city descends to the sea over sharp, lonely cliffs. On our way out of the hotel, we were stopped on the stairs by someone who didn't want us to see what was happening below, a short man who sort of waved his arms and yelled in Spanish: a woman was being carried down the steep stairs of the hotel by two old men. One held her under her young, bare arms and the other had his hands hooked beneath her legs. She lolled against them and didn't open her eyes.  I don't remember if we could tell if she was alive or not. That seems important. Maybe the point is that we didn't know, couldn't ask. There was another woman in the van they brought her to and she was screaming in a closed mouth sort of way, like someone had told her to shut up. Some of us had muscled down the stairs and watched as they put the girl in the van, folding her body awkwardly. As I remember it, we thought they were arguing about whether or not they should take her to the hospital. I think we decided that she was an addict, that she was having an overdose. We must have decided she was alive. If we hadn't made that decision, then we had all seen two men carry a dead body out of a hotel in the middle of the day in San Juan. We have never talked about it. We are a community. Am I making sense? There are things that link us, and some of them are horrible, and some of them are beautiful. We were sitting on the floor eating pizza because one of us is having her breasts removed today, because cancer has come back to her lit-up, young, vibrant body. And I drank too much and danced on a pole because the man I loved for eight years deemed me worthless one day, and left. And we all watched that woman be carried out of the hotel and said nothing, knew there was nothing to be said, and maybe forgot. And I haven't been writing because I have been living, connecting, or trying to. And I'd like you to tell me that's the right thing to do, or the only thing, and maybe those are one and the same.

neither / ice nor mud nor winter light

Did you all know this existed in Brooklyn? 

The bluebells are meant to arrive in May, but it's been a strange spring so far, early and slightly off-putting, although not so off-putting that it couldn't be enjoyed on the wooden benches at the South Street Seaport. Not so off-putting so as to avoid my first sunburn of the year. It's cold again, anyway. But over the past few weeks, New York has flamed into bloom and I've worn out the patience of my friends by exclaiming over every blossoming tree or bush we pass. I've made them walk the long way past the yellow magnolias down the block, or across the street so I could hold the full weight of a string of peach blossoms.

Can you blame me?

What else? My family came to town. We drank.

Then we got $8 manicures.

We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and shared a mango.

We took naps and saw a play and ate more and more and more food. I bought myself a pair of overpriced sunglasses for my birthday.

Yes; it was also my birthday.

You know what I felt on my birthday? Peace. A deep, centering joy. I was also hungover, which may have contributed to that sort of dead calm I couldn't shake. My coworker remarked I have a tendency to get drunk the night BEFORE important events. Curious, that. Drunkticipation!

I got to sit on the couch and eat spicy basil noodles on my birthday. I got daffodils and some Tim Riggins. I shared my licorice with everyone. I am lucky.

The bravest thing I have done recently: bought some unidentifiable green chiles. My knowledge of chiles is circumspect. I taste-test them with my tongue. That seems brave and stupid.

Adrienne Rich died today. She was brave. She was a brave, bold, strong-arm of a woman, an upward climb, a fist in the sky, a brash, vital artist and intellect. She wrote many poems much more vicious and - well, better, than this one, but I like this one, and this is my space, and I will salute you, Adrienne, with the quality I love best, your honesty, your verve. You said it like it is.


Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:

OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

for Frank, on his birthday

ANIMALS Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth it's no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turned some sharp corners the whole pasture looked like our meal we didn't need speedometers we could manage cocktails out of ice and water I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days [1950]

goals

This year, I'd like to become one of those people with the foresight to buy things in the off-season.

not getting any stronger

yes, look!

I love, love, love that someone found this blog by googling "look boobs."

I love you, whoever you are.

Self Portrait at 28

Self Portrait at 28, Albrecht Durer, 1500.

Self Portrait at 28, iPhone, 2012.

(Daffodils by Hanna. Nails by Essie. New York City by New York City.)

Self Portrait at 28

               David Berman

I know it's a bad title
but I'm giving it to myself as a gift
on a day nearly canceled by sunlight
when the entire hill is approaching
the ideal of Virginia
brochured with goldenrod and loblolly
and I think "at least I have not woken up
with a bloody knife in my hand"
by then having absently wandered
one hundred yards from the house
while still seated in this chair
with my eyes closed.

It is a certain hill
the one I imagine when I hear the word "hill"
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown
if our five billion minds collapse at once
well I'd call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful
a place I wouldn't mind dying
alone or with you.

I am trying to get at something
and I want to talk very plainly to you
so that we are both comforted by the honesty.
You see there is a window by my desk
I stare out when I am stuck
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don't know why I keep staring at it.

My childhood hasn't made good material either
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few stand out moments,
popping tar bubbles on the driveway in the summer
a certain amount of pride at school
everytime they called it "our sun"
and playing football when the only play
was "go out long" are what stand out now.

If squeezed for more information
I can remember old clock radios
with flipping metal numbers
and an entree called Surf and Turf.

As a way of getting in touch with my origins
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do
is take a reading of the day and try to flow with it like
when you're riding a mechanical bull and you strain to learn
the pattern quickly so you don't inadverantly resist it.

II two

I can't remember being born
and no one else can remember it either
even the doctor who I met years later
at a cocktail party.
It's one of the little disappointments
that makes you think about getting away
going to Holly Springs or Coral Gables
and taking a room on the square
with a landlady whose hands are scored
by disinfectant, telling the people you meet
that you are from Alaska, and listen
to what they have to say about Alaska
until you have learned much more about Alaska
than you ever will about Holly Springs or Coral Gables.

Sometimes I am buying a newspaper
in a strange city and think
"I am about to learn what it's like to live here."
Oftentimes there is a news item
about the complaints of homeowners
who live beside the airport
and I realize that I read an article
on this subject nearly once a year
and always receive the same image.


I am in bed late at night
in my house near the airport
listening to the jets fly overhead
a strange wife sleeping beside me.
In my mind, the bedroom is an amalgamation
of various cold medicine commercial sets
(there is always a box of tissue on the nightstand).

I know these recurring news articles are clues,
flaws in the design though I haven't figured out
how to string them together yet,
but I've begun to notice that the same people
are dying over and over again,
for instance Minnie Pearl
who died this year
for the fourth time in four years.

III three

Today is the first day of Lent
and once again I'm not really sure what it is.
How many more years will I let pass
before I take the trouble to ask someone?


It reminds of this morning
when you were getting ready for work.
I was sitting by the space heater
numbly watching you dress
and when you asked why I never wear a robe
I had so many good reasons
I didn't know where to begin.


If you were cool in high school
you didn't ask too many questions.
You could tell who'd been to last night's
big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallway.
You didn't have to ask
and that's what cool was:
the ability to deduct
to know without asking.
And the pressure to simulate coolness
means not asking when you don't know,
which is why kids grow ever more stupid.


A yearbook's endpages, filled with promises
to stay in touch, stand as proof of the uselessness
of a teenager's promise. Not like I'm dying
for a letter from the class stoner
ten years on but...

Do you remember the way the girls
would call out "love you!"
conveniently leaving out the "I"
as if they didn't want to commit
to their own declarations.

I agree that the "I" is a pretty heavy concept
and hope you won't get uncomfortable
if I should go into some deeper stuff here.

IV four

There are things I've given up on
like recording funny answering machine messages.
It's part of growing older
and the human race as a group
has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
if I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now.

It's just that our advances are irrepressible.
Nowadays little kids can't even set up lemonade stands.
It makes people too self-conscious about the past,
though try explaining that to a kid.

I'm not saying it should be this way.

All this new technology
will eventually give us new feelings
that will never completely displace the old ones
leaving everyone feeling quite nervous
and split in two.

We will travel to Mars
even as folks on Earth
are still ripping open potato chip
bags with their teeth.

Why? I don't have the time or intelligence
to make all the connections
like my friend Gordon
(this is a true story)
who grew up in Braintree Massachusetts
and had never pictured a brain snagged in a tree
until I brought it up.
He'd never broken the name down to its parts.
By then it was too late.
He had moved to Coral Gables.

V five

The hill out my window is still looking beautiful
suffused in a kind of gold national park light
and it seems to say,
I'm sorry the world could not possibly
use another poem about Orpheus
but I'm available if you're not working
on a self-portrait or anything.

I'm watching my dog have nightmares,
twitching and whining on the office floor
and I try to imagine what beast
has cornered him in the meadow
where his dreams are set.

I'm just letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact --
not even a place but an occasion
a reality for real things.

Friends warned me not to get too psychedelic
or religious with this piece:
"They won't accept it if it's too psychedelic
or religious," but these are valid topics
and I'm the one with the dog twitching on the floor
possibly dreaming of me
that part of me that would beat a dog
for no good reason
no reason that a dog could see.

I am trying to get at something so simple
that I have to talk plainly
so the words don't disfigure it
and if it turns out that what I say is untrue
then at least let it be harmless
like a leaky boat in the reeds
that is bothering no one.

VI six

I can't trust the accuracy of my own memories,
many of them having blended with sentimental
telephone and margarine commercials
plainly ruined by Madison Avenue
though no one seems to call the advertising world
"Madison Avenue" anymore. Have they moved?
Let's get an update on this.

But first I have some business to take care of.

I walked out to the hill behind our house
which looks positively Alaskan today
and it would be easier to explain this
if I had a picture to show you
but I was with our young dog
and he was running through the tall grass
like running through the tall grass
is all of life together
until a bird calls or he finds a beer can
and that thing fills all the space in his head.

You see,
his mind can only hold one thought at a time
and when he finally hears me call his name
he looks up and cocks his head
and for a single moment
my voice is everything:

Self-portrait at 28.