two things

Just this today: 

And this:



Last night my coworker dreamt Glen Hansard was my boyfriend. I have no problems with this dream. I have negative problems.

Happy weekend, y'all.

random act of bravery

YES HE DID. 

in civilized society

Only a heathen would fail to match her manicure to her reading material.

This is an odd duck, this book. I haven't puzzled it out yet. It does make for solid subway fare, however, which is good, because I was running out of ways to hide the cover of A Clash of Kings (folding the book in two, hiding it under my coat, sticking it in my bag and peering in like I was searching for something, something that is definitely not the second title in the Game of Thrones series).

father john misty

I have this friend who is super talented in that annoying way, where you feel like you could hand him a clavichord and he'd hand you back a meticulous symphony and also, like, the woolly mammoth cubs he managed to pull from its insides, and then he'd tie the whole thing together with a performance piece about heartbreak and noodles, as he tickles the clavichord and the woolly mammoths dance - but the thing he is best at, without a doubt, is saying, "Hey, have you heard this band yet?" and then watching me fall to complete pieces over the brilliance of said band.

It's sort of like he is peering into my heart and saying, oh, look, here's what's missing. But he'd make a really funny joke about it, because also he's pretty funny.

Good thing he's not at all handsome. That'd be a little over the top.

So, via my friend, here's the best new thing:


 

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]