career girls

primal scream therapy

2012-02-12T20:56:00.004-05:00

A Voice and Nothing More by Mladen Dolar

a few random items in a nonsensical list...

1.one of the most interesting revelations to me, at present (because theory is only interesting to me inasmuch as its application is immediate) is the following notion: the voice assumes a structural function closely akin to that of time. in terms of student writing, compositions that are deemed successful tend to score very highly in the assessment criterion: voice. a consistent, organized/controlled vocal quality gives a composition the feeling of structure, and can even unwittingly deceive or intentionally con the reader into missing or excusing the writer's lack of content knowledge, as they've been so carried along by the 'voice' of the work.

2. the very brief discussion of the defense of the dissertation was entertaining, comical, and fair. "the corpus of a candidate's knowledge has been written down in the dissertation, which--supposedly and optimistically--the members of the committee have all carefully read, but this is not enough, it has to be enacted through the voice and only thus made effective. the general experience of those tedious occasions shows that they are indeed simply a question of vocal display; the supposed testing and questioning of the candidate's knowledge has very little to do with that knowledge itself, and has an entirely ritual and vocal character (supplemented by narcissistic struggles and departmental politics under the banner of promoting pure science)." if you aren't laughing your ass off right now...then you aren't as swept away by english department horror-humor as i.

3. freud's thoughts on instinct and reason/intellectual life. this has been something i've been meaning to resolve/get to the bottom of since my first transgression. freud says, after countless rebuffs reason prevails. thank goodness. ["this is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind."]

3b. formulating the prob of the neurotic in leibniz's terms: "how can i ever justify my existence? an impossible task in the universe of the sufficient reason. can unconscious desire serve as the name for the sufficient reason of all that lacks a sufficient reason?"

4. the phantasy of listening [belauschungsphantasien].

5. the tragedy and truth of this statement cracks me up, "but nothing is more permanent than makeshift arrangements and temporary measures, which, once established, show a steadfast perseverance and inertia."

6. really beautiful passage in a section about the relationship between language and the unconscious. here's the rough and dirty: there is a time loop--the moment we physically hear, the time in which we make sense of, and the ultimate reckoning with the sound. at any rate, when i read this, i thought of the moment you fall in love--recklessly, impulsively--followed by the fantasy, including the delusional aspects--followed by the harsh reality. "it is gone despite the interpretation which tries to provide it with a framework of sense, the horizon of understanding; or rather, it evaporates through the interpretation which consists of pinning it down to a particular sense, naming its meaning, reducing its nonsense, but loses it precisely by endowing it with a positive content--as if it existed properly only in that instant, if indeed this can be called existence at all." [cut to me weeping.]

7. phonology: "the lever which could endow human sciences with the very strictness which until then seemed to have been the privilege of the natural sciences." yes, in college, i was quite taken with the very idea that phonology was even a word i could throw around.

8. silence.

9. omg. silence is a tricky betch. "silence as the simple absence of speech can acquire the highest meaning, it can be taken as a sign of superior wisdom. silence can be a most telling answer which refers the speaker back to her question and its presuppositions, but it can also be a sign of ignorance, the highest easily mingling with the lowest." and also, "speech always delivers us to the powers of the other." and finally, abbe' dinouart "saw the art of silence in the first place as a weapon against the flood of speech inundating the enlightenment century."

10. the silence of the universe.

11. if the universe is no longer "the expression of the supreme sense, of harmony, of God's wise plan [oh crap] it is the universe which has stopped making sense, and this subtraction of sense coincides with the advent of modern science. this silence is neither the imaginary overwhelming nor the symbolic pulsation. the silence of the new universe does not mean anything, it does not make sense, and in this absence of sense it inspires pascal's anxiety." basically, this was my bitter daily bread during my 19th/20th year on the planet... and from time to time ever since... which i think is unavoidable, maybe. ("le silence eternel des espaces infinis me fait peur." pascal)

12. chapter seven. kafka's voices. final chapter. too many points to pick just one, but in the interest of space and time... "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" needs to be required reading for all, especially those dreaming of becoming reality television stars or those aspiring artists, and writers, like moi. "despite her vanity and megalomania, people can easily do without her, she will be forgotten, no traces of her art will be left." oh shit!

two footnotes:

qui: 'for what is science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money?' henry james, the golden bowl"

qua: "[bernard] baas puts this very well: 'the voice is never my own voice, but the response is my own response.'"

View all my reviews

weirdo.

2012-01-31T16:24:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been overfilling glasses
This is what I do now
Pretend I have a disease, a brain-eating cell
That causes me to unsee limits, to crash into cars
To say: my perception of depth is all off.

Walking from the water cooler to my office
My coffee mug drips, the carpet drinks it in
The cup is like a canvas: maybe I'm pretending
All of this. I wonder. Now
I must develop a theory
For why I would do such a thing.

AMD

Memories, the Night, and Drinking: My Education

2012-01-25T13:11:00.030-05:00

"Because you missed your turn two miles back you have decided to turn on the wrong road, just because you are too lazy to turn around. You have decided to turn here just because of some vague notion [...] You have to follow this road to whatever nowhere it leads."
--Louis Jenkins

"The fear of not knowing overlaid with the terror of knowing."
--Boris Kachka

I remember the first night I did mushrooms. I was still young, in Minnesota. It was the summer and we were all tan and barefoot with the shining eyes that young people have. There were seven of us sitting in the living room. We made tea and sucked on mushroom caps and stems and stared at the flower wallpaper. After many hours I found myself lying in a baseball field, with one of the boys. The boy was Ben. He'd been my boyfriend but now he wasn't and although I didn't want to be with him, I wanted him to want to be with me. I wanted him to acknowledge me. Ben and I lay in the field and looked at the stars and I tried to talk about things—things I thought were important, eternal questions kind of things—but he didn’t want to talk about any of those things. Every subject I brought up hovered in the air, like a lightning bug. He swatted these away with a laugh or by speaking my name or performing a gesture, his hands unbuttoning my shorts in the grass. And in the morning, I crept from his bedroom, through the house until I got to the front door. I turned the knob slowly, indistinctly, and shut it with the same precision. Then I skipped away—towards anything. As I hop-scotched the sidewalk squares I pretended he would miss me. I played a scene in my head where he woke and, finding me gone, felt a pain the size of an almond, a pain that sprouted into something like an actual experience. The experience of realizing you've underestimated someone.

I spent my junior year of college outside the U.S., in Bologna, and although that might sound romantic or perhaps pompous, it shouldn't, because I was the loneliest, most wretched creature on the planet. Morning after morning I would wake to an empty apartment, roommates off to class, and I would think: well, I could go to class. So I'd dress in something that screamed instability and made my way to campus. I remember one outfit distinctly: a navy long-sleeved t-shirt, a khaki skirt with a sizeable slit up the back, gym socks and orange sneakers. In the office, a girl said to me: have you looked in a mirror? I hadn't realized how I was dressed until then. I lived in an old section of the city, about two miles from the center and the walk there was somewhat harrowing--not because of peddling merchants or dangerous men--because my mind had become a dangerous thing, an untrustworthy thing, almost an enemy. Each step bred a new thought of horror, a sweeping generalization that felt equal parts bleak and true. Sometimes I would try to pray, but my prayers came out like automatic translations. During this trek, I'd stop to get a cappuccino, and after placing my request, without fail and despite my best efforts, I'd catch my reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bar. I'd see my face, framed by martini and rossi bottles and I'd feel: I don't know that person. When I was almost to the building where my first class was held, I'd turn another way and walk to another building where there was a computer lab. I'd write letters to Ben, full of love. Then I'd begin the trek home, stopping only once, for a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes. At home, I sat on the balcony, drank wine out of a coffee mug and melted into the landscape. After a while, I became so alone I stopped talking to myself.

“I don’t think she’s a masochist. But one of the things that happens when you write an intimate memoir, an honest memoir, is that you think it will be cathartic—that you can say, ‘I have now positioned this memory, and now I can move on.’ But very often it just doesn’t work that way.”
--Christopher Dickey

In February I went to Egypt. And I got lost in a book. A travel book. You know, those guides, they're great teachers. They read like literature. You can learn history, words, and beautiful trivia.

One night, after a day at the British museum in Cairo, I was welcomed aboard – a bus full of Sudanese camel herders. Two of the men said: sit with us—you'll be safe. The bus moved quickly through the night and one of the men gave me almonds, still in their shells. The bus stopped, once, for coffee, then drove on through the desert to the city of Hurgada. When we got out, the sun was coming up and to the men, I waved goodbye and watched them walk away. The road was dusty and the hem of their garments grazed the earth. I was not the same after that. Not the same.

When I returned to Minnesota it was the middle of 2000. I got a job, finished school through fits and starts, and got close to old and new friends. Then, on a night in February in 2005, I got a letter from the Temple University graduate school and in July, I moved to Philadelphia. I was 25. Not still young, not yet old. Though I'd imagined making friends, having intimate conversations about literature and sharing ideas about the universe, I only met acquaintances; people with whom I exchanged only cordial greetings and measured conversations. It was like Italy, only local.

"But their courtesy, you know, was an attribute shared by the whole class, and I was looking for some remarkable personal quality."
--Edvarda, (Knut Hamsun), ROSA

Many things happened during these years of grad school, but two of them were definitive. First, I started drinking more and, second, I met a man. As Chris Cooper says, darkness descends.

The man was a Ph.D. candidate in literary theory and philosophy. He was seven years my senior, emotive, brilliant, extremely penetrative. He was a fun and social man, who got right into your business and made you feel like he had taken notice. He was also a cruel man--and utterly unstable. I was not ignorant of this fact. Our romps and talk-a-thons and mid-winter trips to the shore were punctuated by his deep depressions, bursts of anger and acts of infidelity. But I was so afraid of the apathy, the boring, the nothing, that I hung in there. Like so many women and men, I believed things would change. I believed he would change. And why shouldn't I believe this? He would come back from these episodes, tail between the legs, eyes full of tears and mouth full of pledges like you, you, you are the only thing that's real, that's worth anything; you are the greatest person I've ever met; I'd be dead without you. I'd lick his wounds—fuck mine—and swaddle him like a baby bird. And soon enough we'd be back in the car, driving across the country, staying in motels, smoking cigarettes and climbing mountains (Hallett Peak, Mount Marcy, Whiteface …)

That drinking was in lock step with this relationship should come as no great surprise.By the end of the graduate program, and in the midst of what had become an abusive relationship, I was shipwrecked. On the day of graduation, two parties were held. One included all the well-behaved popular kids. This took place at trendy bar called Tattooed Mom's. The other party consisted of the rejects: me and two guys named Chris and Frank. We went to an absolute dump called the Lotus Bar. These two guys were not just anyone, however. They were my anchors. They were smart and incredibly funny and most importantly—they were real. Regardless of the social slight, this should have been a night of celebrations. The bartender poured us three shots. He told us a joke. But when I hovered above the scene, I wasn't laughing. All I saw were three outcasts at a dive bar on graduation day.

“This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.” --Joan Didion, BLUE NIGHTS

The boyfriend, of course, had declined his invitation to join us and was at home—at our apartment (shudder), texting his undergrad students and surfing MySpace (still 2007 at this point)... Mind you, I'm not saying the shitty relationship is responsible for my increased drinking. Perhaps I would have started leaning on it regardless of the faithless man. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… but, then, also it is important that I mention this: I lent him a book once. Pan. By Knut Hamsun. It's a beautiful book. By a demented man, but still a beautiful book. And I know for a fact he teaches this book--to his poetry students--so that brings me some joy. Knowing that brings me some solace.

After graduate school ended and the man and I broke up, I moved into this tremendously odd apartment building. It was an L-shaped building with eight units, surrounding a courtyard. If you were to happen upon any one of us, you might've inferred we were the new Bedlam. I say this lovingly. We were a strange bunch. I wrestled with competing impulses during this time: retreat, emerge, retreat, emerge. I'd meet friends at a bar, have a couple beers, then say I had to get home to walk the dog. When I got home to my apartment, I went right to the kitchen. I set down my keys on a table, pulled open the fridge and took out a bottle of champagne. I picked up the dog in my arms and took us all out to the courtyard. We’d sit on a bench: me, the dog, and the bottle of champagne. I’d pour it and muse. Henri would watch me with black blinking eyes. The bottle would console me and stars would twinkle. The night I’d just had with people would replay in my mind – this guy was a tool, this girl was smarter than me, that guy was prima donna, etc. I’d say, fuck it, and drink the champagne and pet the dog and after a while we’d return to the apartment, put in a movie and sleep on a make-shift bed in the living room. Sometimes I’d wake up and Henri’s head would be on the pillow and my head would be on the pillow and we’d stare at each other. What does it all mean, I’d ask? I wasn’t in the bar now, so I didn’t have anyone to look to for an answer. Tonight I just had the question. And the question scared me. The question petrified me. I promise, sometimes the fear was so strong I’d lie awake for hours. What will become of us?

And in the morning, tired yet sleepless, I got ready for work.

good times.

2012-01-16T12:20:00.010-05:00

To Do or Not To or To or To Not Do

2012-01-04T15:11:00.017-05:00

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Picture this. The wedding is over. And the guests, your friends, want to come to the capacious house you've rented and drink champagne and sit by the swimming pool. You want this too. You want to keep dancing and singing, talking loudly and clasping hands with your women friends. You want to keep playing songs from Motown, singing along and whisper a pledge, a secret, a wish to a dear lady from your life before you lift up the goblet, the tumbler, the coffee mug and sip from the glass.

That's the fantasy. That's the trained narrative. The one you've been spinning since your early twenties--well before you met a man worthy of serious commitment, let alone marriage. This play didn't fall out of the sky. It came to you from years of nights spent in scenarios resembling the one mentioned above. You laughed, you drank, you danced. And now on the eve of your MARRIAGE, you are flooded with nostalgia for this night of revelry that is not to be. A night that will never be... Because, because, because you spent the last five years being crazy and now you need to rebuild. And rebuilding takes time. It takes commitment. It takes repetitive action. The repetitive actions of not drinking, not staying up super late, not self-destructing, not carousing. Carouse. From the German, garaus. Literally, to drain the cup. Although to talk about this as rebuilding isn't exactly accurate. Rebuilding isn't exactly right. It's something else. Something like: starting from the beginning. A new beginning. Is there a word for that?

When you first quit drinking you had so much energy—so much unbridled spirit you couldn't wait to put to use or simply put out there—insight, hard won wisdom, the feeling of promise and excitement—and control. As time's gone by, you feel different than that. You feel rather circumspect sometimes or listless or dissatisfied. You love your life and all its parts, but the truth is you sometimes long for a kind of flux—a jostling or inspiration, a stimulation that is absolutely shearing—or simply an unforeseen event, an unplanned moment. Which is (is it?) rather selfish, egotistical, adolescent, perhaps... Cheers!

To not drink is a practice that changes as time goes on. At first it feels NEW. It feels like—wow! I'm really doing something good, smart, even. Later it feels difficult, but regardless the challenge is noble, character-building. At some point it begins to feel misguided, and finally, it feels like crap. It feels like "will someone please tell me why I thought it would be a good idea to quit drinking? And why I decided to share this witless decision?" It's not that you want to be drunk, to get drunk as a skunk and act like a nut and feel terrible and remorseful the next day. No. It's a matter of wanting your life back—the things that drove you to abstinence—you want these back. Or, some of them. You don't want the lethargy and the fear that you could be accomplishing more. You don't want the slight headache on Sunday morning. You don't want to gaze across a playground and whimper. You don't want to toss your book to the ground in disgust at yourself for not making further progress.

You want the easy feeling. The one you don't have to work for. The one you ease right into like an overstuffed chair. You want access to those friends and stories—that special intimacy, the bond that is created in the clinking of the glass. You want to share that special feeling—the heightened and diminished awareness—with someone. In a moment of affection. In a very tender, affectionate, meaningful way. You don't picture yourself standing on a coffee table, playing the air fiddle, singing Wagon Wheel at 3 a.m. You picture yourself at a café, clinking red wine glasses with a close girlfriend, laughing about a story, a circumstance, an observation, a secret...

Snake River

2011-12-15T15:27:00.005-05:00

I'm beginning to remember how to enter the moment
– how to do it without the crutch
The dear thing that carried me, ferried me
Like a raft through a drowned city

There is a man on a mountain
Telling everybody, selling ideas
Has he known disappointment?

I'm worried about two friends of mine
Worried he's taken a turn
down a road that goes no where.
She's in the car
and he's devoted to following its path

Which makes me sound like the preacher, but there's this:
I know what he's thinking. I know this road like the back of my mind.
(That feeling. Who would give it up?)

One day you're driving. She's next to you. Turning the radio dial.
The kids are asleep in their car seats.
Then--suddenly--you're somewhere--where?
You're at the end of a river, pulling yourself onto a splintered dock
Abandoned houses sit miles away, the sun descends, almost gone
You want your life back. Your wife. Your brilliant mind.

You climb up the embankment and stand on the side of a dirt road.
A truck engine turns, far away. There's a strange
beat to your heart, a chill to the wind. You're already wet
and it's just started to rain.

the empty chamber in the heart

2011-12-13T13:44:00.011-05:00

Addictions, after all, are enormously self-protective. They're coping mechanisms.

- Caroline Knapp

Hours: Alcohol in a Woman's Life by Jersild
My rating: of 5 stars

Excerpts from Happy Hours, by Devon Jersild...

If you look at the studies of enzymes and the studies of responses to alcohol together, a certain commonsense logic emerges. If drinking makes you feel terrible, you're not likely to drink much or often. If, on the other hand, you have to drink twice as much as others to get a buzz, you might be likely to drink more, and therefore become susceptible to addiction. Similarly, if drinking makes you feel especially great, and you don't suffer hangovers, you have more incentive to drink. Negative physiological responses can be overridden, however.

When alcoholism does develop in a genetically susceptible individual, this is because alcohol plays a unique role in that person's life. … In every step, genes interact with the environment.

Alcoholism has a complex etiology that includes personal, social, and cultural factors, and the belief that, ultimately, the alcoholic must assume responsibility for her own life.

There is a strong tendency today to pull alcoholism out of its social and psychological context and to redefine it as a biological illness that needs strictly medical attention.

Critics of the disease concept have feared that it strips the alcoholic of responsibility for recovery, but most clinicians find that when alcoholics understand the physiological processes of addiction, it frees them from shame. Only when that has happened can they effectively take responsibility for managing their lives in the context of an addiction that would otherwise kill them.

Some people conclude that they or their loved ones are not "real alcoholics" because the reality of their problems is more complex than what they hear described.

Everyone agrees that letting go of blame is crucial to recovery.

Alcoholics describe the canny ways of their disease, how it sneaks into nooks and crannies of their lives, looking for a foothold. That's why recovering alcoholics are best at counseling one another. They know about cravings; they know the kind of thinking that means danger is at hand.

She always thought she was a failure, except when she was drinking.

It's hard to imagine the courage it takes for someone to acknowledge the devastation alcohol has wrought in them and in their family, and then to remake their life.

Physiology is only the beginning. Alcohol problems express themselves in a person's whole life: in work and relationships and psychological well-being.

The alcoholic beverage industry is aggressively marketing to women, with ads linking drinking with glamour, independence, and liberation.

Most men leave their alcoholic wives; most women stay with their alcoholic husbands.

For a period of time in these women's lives, the release they found in their evening cocktail ritual seemed like a godsend. Only gradually did they realize that this pleasant habit was not serving them well. The alcohol kept them from experiencing the frustration that might have impelled them to confront the sources of pain in their lives and find creative solutions.

Yet I suspect that any woman who has ever worried about her drinking, or had a few quick beers to be sociable, or to get in the mood for sex, or—like Sophie—to be "funnier, prettier, warmer" will find something familiar in these stories. There's a way of thinking that goes along with alcohol problems but is not unique to alcoholics. It has to do with looking for solutions outside yourself. It has to do with finding yourself unacceptable, trying to make yourself right, and having your efforts backfire.

Alcoholism is referred to as a "shame-based disorder" because very often a drinking habit develops in part to drown out feelings of shame. Once addicted, the drinker has more to be ashamed of, and another drink helps dull the feeling of despair. The cycle takes another turn.

A study using college students and rape scenarios found that a man is considered less responsible for raping a woman if he was drunk when he did it. But if the woman he raped was drunk, she is considered more to blame.

Both women and men who are dependent on alcohol are likely to be deeply dissatisfied with themselves. They frequently describe themselves as awkwardly self-conscious and somehow "different" from other people.

In many cultures, as Sandmaier suggests, a drunken woman is not considered merely irresponsible, as a man would be. She is a metaphor for potential social disruption.

Daphne found herself waiting all day for that time with Paul, when they shared their days, and the wine took away her weariness and made her feel loving and warm.

Alcohol was a helpful friend, an ally in her battle against depression. If she couldn't destroy the enemy, at least she could cope with it. Alcohol could help.

Daphne's focus on her partner as the primary source of her self-worth is also typical of women with alcohol problems.

The inadvertently "enabling" behavior of the codependent was at first seen as a response to living with an out-of-control drinker. You have your nose in the other person's business and you don't even notice that your own life is falling apart.

Detaching with love is important. It means you can be compassionate and still have boundaries. It means you're allowed to care for others without going down the tubes with them, or being in constant emotional turmoil because you can't save them.

Alcoholics need to take responsibility for themselves and partners are most helpful when they focus on their own behavior instead of caring for the alcoholic.

The emotionally underresponsible person expects sensitivity and recognition from others without making his or her needs known, and blames others for his or her problems.

Overresponsible people pride themselves on being the only ones who know how to get things done and take care of others. They feel important and powerful—but they also feel intensely angry because they can never be dependent or expect to have their own needs met. Like their underresponsible partners, they rely on external validation to feel valuable. Since they can never achieve perfect control, they are plagued by anxiety and a sense of worthlessness.

Alcoholism is at its core, a disordered relationship between the drinker and the drink. It begins with an effort to control some aspect of oneself by means of an external agent. Ultimately, this external agent renders the person powerless.

Alcohol disconnects people from their feelings allowing them to deny the drinking problem and the struggles that are arising because of it.

Daphne was, in a way, saying "You don't own me, and you can't make me stop drinking." Typically, Paul reacted to her rebellion by telling her that she was bad and needed help. By taking a position of moral superiority, he reestablished his power. Daphne drank more, reasserting her independence. Paul tried harder to control her.

The power structure won't change unless the drinking stops, the alcoholic dies, or the partner leaves.

There's no self at the beginning of recovery; it has to be built from the ground up. Without the alcohol, they think there's nothing there to help them cope, so becoming aware of any feeling is just terrifying.

Truthfulness is healing.

You can't heal shame in isolation.

Years of drinking narrow the personality without the drinker's awareness. We become subjective, egocentric, demanding, self-pitying, resentful. We are wrapped in a cocoon, aware only of self with no relation to others or the outside world.

Alcoholism is not caused by weakness of will, immorality or a desire to hurt others.

When a mother is the substance abuser, children take much more license in terms of attacking and shaming and holding her to account, much more so than they're likely to do with a father.

So much of the responsibility for family life rests on the mother.

Family members, lovers and friends of problem drinkers learn that what looks like virtuous behavior—picking up the pieces after an alcoholic—can actually help maintain an addiction. In a circular interaction, the drinker becomes less and less responsible, and the non-drinker over-functions. "It gets to look like a saint and a sinner," says Bepko, "but in effect, the overresponsible person is complicit in the problem. And you have to wonder why somebody would continue being an overfunctioner and sustaining a great deal of anger instead of taking a position."

Since drinking removed inhibitions it allowed the pairs to connect emotionally in ways they did not when they were sober—or at least to imagine they were connecting, since bonds formed in the haze of alcohol often appear on reexamination to have been more about an alcohol-induced general aura of good feeling with little actual communication or connection.

I wanted to get outside myself. I wanted to reach that state where I wasn't like a cork. Swept along by the ocean. I wanted a higher perspective, one foot in my life, and one foot out. When I drank, at first, I could finally let go of all the trivial things that bothered me and see myself, and my life, from a larger perspective that is what I wanted; that's why I drank. But alcohol doesn't transcend. It obliterates.

In our secular society, many people have no way of understanding or talking about the basic human desire to transcend the self. When alcohol disinhibits us, and our inner censor and judge takes a holiday, our warm , loving feelings may be as close as we get to being in harmony with ourselves and all of life.

For many women, the experience of oneness is what makes alcohol so compelling. Love, power, and alcohol are all related. They represent attempts to get out of the self and make some connection with the world. The motivations for drinking often include health and striving for wholeness. It's just that alcoholics have chosen, as a Buddhist might say, "unskillful means" of achieving their goal.

Depression, suicidal thoughts, impulsive behavior, and even symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder can all be induced by drinking.

When younger people rely on alcohol or drugs to ease anxiety, they lose the opportunity to develop healthy strategies for managing mood swings and maing friends and to develop skills that lead to sturdy self-confidence. This stalling of emotional development and growth at the point when hard drinking begins is one of the main negative effects of dependence on alcohol.

Stalled emotional development can be combined, heartbreakingly, with precocity and pseudo sophistication. … A veneer of knowledge and sophistication can make them seem wise beyond their years—but they are still children inside.

Still, the drugs kept her from experiencing her own misery.
The bouts of depression she had suffered since college were getting worse, and her anxiety attacks were mounting. "I felt kind of dead inside," said Alice.

I don't think attorneys have more problems than the rest of the world, he told me, but they do have special barriers to recovery. They have great argumentation and advocate skills, so they can keep people at arm's length.

Often women are introduced to alcohol and drugs through a romantic relationship; when the relationship fails, the alcohol and drugs fill the gap.

She had no knowledge of how to access her own resources and be nourished by them. Instead, in a process psychologists call projection, she attributed many of her own positive qualities to the men she adored. For as long as she could, she merged with those men in order to repossess her own powers.

Drinking keeps you from growing up and dealing with life on life's terms. It's a constant avoidance technique. One of my lovers and I used to say that we weren't like other adults. It's a seductive way of thinking.

Their alcohol problems, as painful as they were, became an opportunity to transcend the rigid structure of identity and to experience peace, connectedness, and gratitude. Their new lives are not about miracles but about opening up to a whole range of experience, including such negative feelings as ambivalence, anger, and sadness—the feelings they used to try to medicate. The first months (years) of sobriety can be agonizing. Alcohol used to provide a barrier against discomfort, but now that is gone.

The force that drives addiction is powerful and doesn't disappear when the drinking stops.

It is tremendously painful to live this way, but these cycles serve several purposes. They distract a woman from self-loathing, and they give her the punishment that she feels she deserves. They provide brief relief as well as excitement and drama. They create a comprehensible set of rules and this gives an illusion of relative safety, a familiar set of obsessions. They offer a strategy for shutting out a world that feels increasingly unmanageable and living within a world with a comprehensible shape and structure.

I had to admit I needed help. I was hanging on to hurts in ways I wasn't aware of.

Lindsey's evasiveness alternates with piercing honesty—a pattern familiar to many alcoholics and their families.

The anecdote points up a paradox: Lindsey's need to be entirely self-sufficient undermines her ability to take care of herself. Until she learns to rely on other people, she'll have a hard time relying on herself, and she'll be vulnerable to self-destructive impulses. To ask for help, she'll have to make two leaps—believing that someone can help, and believing that she deserves help.

Alcoholism nearly always refuses to see itself. The tragedy deepens when suffering people place their trust in a health establishment that shares in their own denial.

Kasl urges therapists to ask clients directly about alcohol and drugs—"when, where, how much, and about all the effects."

"Aren't you tired of living like this?"

She, like so many children of alcoholics, may have thought that if only she loved the drinker enough, she could heal his wounds and make him feel good about himself. Healthy and whole, he would turn to her and give her what she needed.

Nice girls and party girls: an updated version of virgins and whores, women idealized as spiritual or scapegoated as sexually degenerate. In either case, they appear as men's objects, to worship and marry or screw and discard.

"He was going to have to find time between me being busy and his being drunk," said Victoria, "and he couldn't do it."

At first, the pleasures it offers are in proportion to the pain. By offering a predictable high, they give you an illusion of managing your own feelings.

Especially in early sobriety, the world is a frightening place.
Contradictions, double binds, and paradoxes are at the heart of addiction and recovery.

The drinker drinks to find love, but drinking chases love away. The drinker drinks to find relief but after that initial release she finds only pain in the bottle. The drinker feels powerless and drinks to escape and to assert her power, but drinking renders her helpless. If she turns to a substitute addiction, it tightens the self-destructive cycle and delivers her back to drink. Her determination to get control of her addiction exacerbates her problem. It's a closed system, and she's in it by herself. The spiral keeps on tightening. There is no way out from within.

The harder one tries to control it, the more powerful the impulse becomes. Compulsion cannot be conquered in a head-on battle. When one has tried everything to control their behavior and found that no amount of willpower has done any good, they sometimes experience overwhelming relief. They are asked to step outside the cycle of mastery and rebellion represented by their drinking and their efforts to control it. In doing so, they enter a new territory, where they can recover their freedom to make choices.

For many alcoholics, the "bottom" they've feared all their lives is a few months of sobriety. Their relapses may be less about a physical craving—which passes over time—and more about a desperate need to return to a life that is known and understood, a life in which they can rest in what's familiar, even if that is nausea or pain or an empty park bench. Once they drink they have no more decisions to make, since drinking carries them through the day. There is something to treasure in this: simply in knowing the contours of one's life, what one is, and what one feels.

We should not underestimate this. Even if we are sober, well-adjusted, and adaptable, our sense of well-being may depend on a clear identity. When our story about ourselves is challenged, we are likely to feel anxious. When that challenge persists, anxiety can lead to despair. When a woman has been a victim of trauma—as is so often the case—and she has held on to this victimization as the truth about her life, then to give up that identity, to take a step toward wellness, is to revolutionize her sense of self.

It might sound paradoxical to say that someone would have a hard time giving up pain—why not hand it over? Why not choose freedom and space and possibility? But to do so requires faith—and faith, the religious will say, is a gift.

all my reviews

shots of the moment

2011-11-29T14:09:00.040-05:00

Epithalamium in Tampa

2011-11-02T16:14:00.007-04:00

Day after Halloween and I remember last year I was on the couch, couldn’t move, hungover like: oh. God. I remember the year before, hungover, and the year before that, and the year before that

at a Professor’s house in Mount Erie, Pennsylvania, lying on the couch with his dog, Luca, a terrier. The professor was away, travelling and the house needed watching. The doorbell would ring. The sound of children begging candy. Then their feet shuffling through fallen leaves, off, on their way to find a lit house in the dark night. The front door would click shut and I’d fill with shame and horror –– how far had I travelled from those innocent little ones dressed as ghosts to the present state of living dead? On TV that night was a show about black holes. The narrator was explaining how they function and to illustrate this there was a graphic, a cartoon of a kayaker paddling, unknowingly towards the event horizon – the doorbell rings – my boyfriend, the faithless man, answers – I watch the figure paddle. The dog looks at my eyes for a sign. I say: you tell me. The oar cuts a stroke. The door shuts. The phone rings. Dowstairs I can hear muffled talking. Is he talking to her? Or is it my fear talking? Shh, I tell the dog. We wait. Yes, he says. Yes, I say. It’s her, or maybe her. I am watching the figure, feeling my heart beat da-dumm, da-dumm – the doorbell – trick or treat – the nose touches the lip, goes farther, farther, ‘til the whole vessel disappears.

By definition, the voice tells us, anything swallowed by the black hole is lost

Irretrievably

But I. I got out of that house. That relationship. That practice of drinking myself dead. And I write to you now – not from the other side – but from an airport in Tampa. I write to you with a heart full of love. And new ideas about the future.

AMD

take your mind back, i don't know when

2011-10-13T14:29:00.004-04:00

Real Men (Joe Jackson)

Take your mind back
I don't know when
Sometime when it always seemed to be just us and them
Girls that wore pink
And boys that wore blue
Boys that always grew up better men than me and you

What's a man now
What's a man mean
Is he rough or is he rugged
Cultural and clean
Now it's all changed It's got to change more
We think it's getting better but nobody's really sure

And so it goes - go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

See the nice boys
Dancing in pairs
Golden earring golden tan
Blow-wave in the hair
Sure they're all straight Straight as a line
All the guys are macho
See their leather shine

You don't want to sound dumb
Don't want to offend
So don't call me a faggot not unless you are a friend
Then if you're tall
Handsome and strong
You can wear the uniform and I could play along

And so it goes - go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

Time to get scared
Time to change plan
Don't know how to treat a lady
Don't know how to be a man
Time to admit
What you call defeat
Cause there's women running past you now and you just drag your feet

Man makes a gun
Man goes to war
Man can kill and man can drink and man can take a whore
Kill all the blacks
Kill all the reds
If there's war between the sexes then there'll be no people left

And so it goes - go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

Meadham Kirchhoff

2011-10-03T13:51:00.012-04:00

How would you describe the Meadham Kirchhoff woman? “Uncompromising, aware and individual.” - Meadham Kirchhoff

i like.

2011-10-02T19:10:00.000-04:00

Long Live User/Reader Comments!

2011-09-28T16:51:00.010-04:00

CREDIT: Popular Science -- POPSCI.COM -- JENNIFER ABBASI

WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE FEMALE ORGASM?
A new study examines "orgasmability" to determine whether it serves a purpose or is just an evolutionary accident
By Jennifer Abbasi
Posted 09.21.2011 at 1:40 pm

Climax Benjamin Rondel / Getty Images

There may be few questions of human sexuality more rancorous than those about the female orgasm. Scientists agree that women probably started having orgasms as a by-product of men having them, similar to how men have nipples because women have them. As Elisabeth Lloyd, a philosopher of science and theoretical biologist at Indiana University put it in her 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution: “Females get the erectile and nervous tissue necessary for orgasm in virtue of the strong, ongoing selective pressure on males for the sperm delivery system of male orgasm and ejaculation.” But why we ladies still have orgasms is hotly debated.

Male orgasms exist, it’s widely believed, to encourage men to spread their seed. On face value, it would be easy to say that women orgasm for the same reason: to encourage them to have sex and make babies. But in practice, compared to male orgasm, female orgasm is very difficult to achieve. There's a lot of variation even within individual women, and 10 percent of women never have them at all. And, unlike male orgasm, female orgasm isn’t a prerequisite for pregnancy.

So why do women have orgasms at all? There are two firmly opposed camps on this question. The first group proposes that it has an adaptive function in one of three categories: pair bonding, mate selection and enhanced fertility. I’ll break these down. The pair-bonding theory suggests that female orgasm bonds partners, ensuring two parents for the offspring, while mate selection offers that women use orgasm as a sort of litmus test for “quality” partners. The enhanced fertility theory, meanwhile, proposes that uterine contractions during female orgasm help to “suck up” sperm into the uterus.

The by-product camp, on the other hand, claims that female orgasms are to this day an incidental by-product of male orgasm, not an evolutionary adaption. “There’s no documented connection between women who have orgasm at all, or faster, having more or better offspring,” Lloyd says.

The schism between the two camps deepened this month with the publication of a new study of twins and siblings in Animal Behavior that seems to rule out the by-product theory of female orgasm. Researchers Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland in Australia and Pekka Santtila at Abo Akedemi University in Finland asked 10,000 Finnish female and male twins and siblings to report on their “orgasmability” (their word, not mine). They looked for similarities in orgasm function between female and male twins. If the by-product theory of female orgasm is true, they say, this similarity should exist. Due to the inherent differences in orgasm between women and men, females were asked to report how often they had orgasms during sex and how difficult they were to achieve, while males were asked how long it took them to reach orgasm during the act and how often they felt they ejaculated too quickly or too slowly.

Zietsch and Santtila found strong orgasmability correlations among same-sex identical twins, and weaker yet still significant similarities between same-sex non-identical twins and siblings. However, they found zero correlation in orgasm function between opposite-sex twins. “We show that while male and female orgasmic function are influenced by genes, there is no cross-sex correlation in orgasmic function -- women’s orgasmability doesn’t correlate with their brother’s orgasmability,” explains Zietsch. “As such, there is no path by which selection on male orgasm can be transferred to female orgasm, in which case the by-product theory cannot work.”

Zietsch says he doesn’t have a favorite theory on the evolutionary function of female orgasm, but if forced to guess he’d say that it provides women extra reward for engaging in sex, thus increasing frequency of intercourse and, in turn, fertility. (There’s no proof of this yet, though, as Lloyd points out.) Zietsch continues: “I’ve shown in another paper, though, that there is only a very weak association between women’s orgasm rate and their libido, so the selection pressure on female orgasm is probably weak -- this might explain why many women rarely or never have orgasms during sex.”

Lloyd and other proponents of the by-product theory agree that weak selection pressure could be acting on female orgasm, but not enough to maintain it over the eons of human evolution. Rather, if female orgasm bestows any reproductive benefits onto the human race, it would be by happy accident. Unsurprisingly, Lloyd has a lot of bones to pick with the recent study. Comparing different orgasm traits in women and men is a textbook case of apples and oranges, she says.

Kim Wallen, a behavioral neuroendocrinologist at Emory University and frequent collaborator with Lloyd, explains it thus: “Imagine that I wanted to compare height in men and women. In women I used a measurement from the top of the head to the bottom of the foot. In men I used how rapidly they could stand up. Would I be surprised that each measure was correlated in identical twins within sexes, but uncorrelated in mixed-sex twins? Such a result would be what was predicted and completely unsurprising. Zietsch and Santtila have done the equivalent of this experiment using orgasm instead of height.”

Wallen also points out that previous research has shown that traits under strong selective pressure show little variability, while those under weak pressure tend to show more variability. With human orgasm this bears out in that men report almost always achieving orgasm during sex, while the ability to orgasm during intercourse varies widely among women. (Penis and vagina size – both necessary for reproduction -- show little variability, suggesting they are under strong selective pressure, Lloyd says, while clitoral length is highly variable.) Wallen asserts that Zietsch and Santtila, “chose to compare apples to oranges because the evidence is so strong that men’s and women’s orgasms are under different degrees of selective pressure, the very point they were trying to disprove.” Yikes.

To their credit, Zietsch and Santilla acknowledged the limitations of their study, both in the paper and in Zietsch’s email to me. More work obviously needs to be done. “Figuring out the function of female orgasm, if any, will probably require very large genetically informative samples, fertility data, and detailed information on sexual behaviour, orgasm rate, and the conditions and partners involved,” Zietsch says. “I do have plans, but the debate probably won’t be settled quite some time to come.”

If, at this point, you’re as frustrated as me, you might be wondering what we do know about female orgasm. Well, we’re closer to knowing why they’re so few and far between during sex. In a paper published online this January in Hormones and Behavior, Lloyd and Wallen found that the farther away the clitoris is from the urinary opening, the less likely it is that the woman will regularly achieve orgasm with intercourse. If this holds up in future experiments, Lloyd says, it would establish that a woman’s ability to have an orgasm during sex rests on an anatomical trait that likely varies with exposure to male sex hormones in the womb. “Such a trait could possibly be under selection,” she says, “but this would have to be investigated. So far, no selective force seems to appear.”

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She has seen every episode of The X-Files. Have a question about the science of sex? Email Jen at popsci.thesexfiles@gmail.com.

COMMENTS
BELOW YOU'LL FIND THE BEST 30 OR SO (IMO, NATCH) OF THE 83 COMMENTS POSTED AS OF 9/28/11 4:56 PM... my seven faves are highlighted in red...
Full disclosure: Several of these comments made shit for sense -- and "mp" only gets better as the comment thread moves along... cheers!

mp
09/21/11 at 2:16 pm
I am not a doctor or scientist. I am just your average human. My best guess why the males and females share common physical, social and psychology traits is we are the same human species. The similarities could just occur because the female in mating is not a kangaroo and the man is not bubble bee.
Yes, male and female human species share like characteristics.
I not surprised.

TertiusGuy
09/21/11 at 2:35 pm
Ok from a guy who has been with well more than his share of women, I can categorically say that for the most part, a genuine real and hard orgasm for a woman will legitimately change the way she interacts with you. Call it love or devotion or addiction, but she wants that feeling again. There are endorphens released as so on and so forth. Women from a sociobiological standpoint are built to find one or very few mates. Thus it is only logical that she is biologically rewarded for sticking to the same mate. Trust me when I say that when a chick isnt into you, she has a lot harder time getting off. It seems like common sense from where I stand. But I have been with lots of women...

Paxalot
09/21/11 at 5:49 pm
People always forget that 90% of men's sperm is designed to kill off and block all the other foreign sperm inside a woman's vagina. Evolution teaches us that females of our species got into heat and had sex with many partners in a short period of time. This has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. The males have been competing in hordes to be the one that gets the lady pregnant. This likely explains the popularity of religion. It was devised to keep women as sexual shut-ins that would guarantee a male his offspring. There is no religion that does not seek to control a woman's sex life (that I'm aware of). In this case the males get an orgy and then get to disappear and go hunting or whatever. Meanwhile the woman ends up pregnant and ends up raising the kid by herself. Sound familiar?

Matt5327
09/21/11 at 6:18 pm
@Paxalot Good theory, but as humanity is (assumedly) not the only species that orgasms, and is the only species with religion, I doubt a connection.

JediMindset
09/21/11 at 6:58 pm
dont guys have orgasms as well? i often hear guys moan alot.

mp
09/21/11 at 10:32 pm
Men and woman are different in life. I hope you find a match that nurtures all the inspires you in life. We all should learn the concept of nurturing. Just love the one your with.

mp
09/22/11 at 8:09 am
I guess the premise of this article comes from everything that exist in your body, exist for some purpose otherwise it would not be there. From that point of view you can stop and stair at you body and just wonder all day long, why do I have that or this and why do people do this or that?
How to fun to just ponder!

KingPatrickVII
09/22/11 at 2:40 pm
Personally, I'd like to see less articles of this nature in PopSci. It's not that they are not interesting, or that they are not science, but...
I subscribe for the sake of my scientifically-oriented sons. But these young men do not need to be reading about how much protein a person gets from swallowing a man's semen or how the length and location of the clitoris contributes to orgasm statistics.
The first article about sex which I alluded to was offensive, to say the least. This second one about sex, not as much, although it borders on details that should not be published unless someone is researching sex-related material. But...that said...if I see ONE MORE article about sex that is graphically detailed and not suitable, in my opinion, for school-aged scientists-to-be, I am canceling my subscription.

JediMindset
09/22/11 at 3:14 pm
lmao @ KingPatrickVII

NikitaJ
09/22/11 at 6:05 pm
I would like to propose what I will call the "Awwwwww Ya!" theory of the female orgasm. It goes like this:
Once upon a time, there was an australopithecine with a random mutation that allowed her to feel real good when doing the nasty. Because this feeling did get in the way of breeding she did, and this trait was passed along to her descendants. Because breeding was rough many women who did not experience pleasure while having sex avoided it, while the women who had more pleasure engaged in it more freely. In addition, orgasms during menstration reduce cramping, and thus led to less homocide. Eventually, most females had some degree of pleasurability during sex, but once again, those that enjoyed it made fewer excuses about not having sex and as a result produced more off-spring, and had happier husbands, who prospered as a result of the symbiosis, allowing him to take care of more children.
If this theory is correct and progressive, in another 100k years you won't be able to look at a women without her having an orgasm, and we will all be filthy rich. Awwwwww ya!

jaime
09/23/11 at 12:45 am
The female orgasm requires the rubbing of the vulva with slow and soft strokes and it may take around 15 minutes. The location of the rubbing may have to changed about every 4 minutes as the rubbed area becomes numb. The clitoris should not be touched. There is a similarity between this process and Ravel's Bolero where the tempo is constant, the intensity increases and lasts about 15 minutes and ends in total disaray. There not such a thing as vaginal orgasms.

BuzzLightYear
09/23/11 at 6:49 pm
Ok, people ... just settle down.
I can solve this dillema AND answer all your questions, with authority.
... Just loan me 100 attractive females and I'll get back to you, in a year or two (once my double-blind study is complete). = glad to be able to help ! =

aligatorhardt
09/23/11 at 7:49 pm
For those who don't care about female orgasms, vinyl partners are available.

mp
09/24/11 at 2:11 pm
Why do men and woman hold hands? Holding hands is not a requirement to procreation. Perhaps the emotional part of us humans to have an organism is in the same context as why we hold hands. It’s just part of our emotional make up and less a biologically function. I love it when my baby ews and ahs… its just beautiful. Oh the word beautiful is not biological too. We humans are really complex and much more than biology and pure chemistry.

sayhi2yourmom4me
09/24/11 at 7:55 pm
My theory is that the point of the female orgasm existance is so females could plausibly fake it if they want. If female orgasms didn't exist, they couldn't fake one ever, because the guy would know that they are lying. So they invented the female orgasm so the guy will think they are actually having one when they fake it.

JazzyCalifornia
09/24/11 at 8:56 pm
MommaMidwife is NUTS!
This from a senior lady with four children, a hysterectomy more than 30 years ago and orgasms (still) whenever I wish with or without a uterus, or a cervix and with or without a guy. Good Lord! Ogasmic births! BS! Pregnant ladies RUN. Run very fast in the other direction from this supposed midwife! In response to those discussing anatomic compatibility, that's where it's at, for sure. A good fit matters. You will know it when you feel it. A bad fit is not worth looking for other good traits in a partner for the next 50 years. You will regret settling. Unless you also have other partners...

jeangif
09/25/11 at 1:19 am
If women have trouble achieving orgasm, it's because they're having sex with men who have never learned anything about female anatomy. Lesbians achieve orgasm with little trouble at all, and are well aware that the clitoris is DEFINITELY touched.

Mojoanne
09/25/11 at 2:42 am
Paxalot writes "This likely explains the popularity of religion. It was devised to keep women as sexual shut-ins that would guarantee a male his offspring. There is no religion that does not seek to control a woman's sex life (that I'm aware of)."
I belong to one of those religions that holds that sexual intercourse is for monogamous married couples only. I emphatically do not feel like a sexual shut-in. Far from being oppressed, my husband and I are liberated from sexually transmitted diseases, having our children grow up without a father or mother, jealousy, adultery, and a myriad of other problems that developed with the so-called sexual revolution i.e. free love. We also used natural family planning to space our children five years apart. Our sex life is great because of the deep intimacy we developed over 28 years of a faithful loving committed relationship. And yes we have orgasms when we want, but our sex life is not directed to orgasm being the goal. Being in harmony with God's plan brings a lot more satisfaction sexually and otherwise.

Phil Rubyn
09/25/11 at 3:23 am
I'm not promoting the Bible, just sharing what it says, however whoever said it knew it. Mojoanne, I'm very happy that you believe that your beliefs provide you with such a meaningful sex life. I'm not sure, however, that the historical church was so progressive. Also, a person can have advanced degrees and wisdom in one area, and be totally wrong and deluded in another.

Divedownthere
09/25/11 at 3:41 am
Let's start off with this...
It is my hope that the non-same sex twins and same-sex twins are not achieving orgasm together

ancientWisdom
09/25/11 at 3:53 am
Does "orgasm during sex" mean "during vaginal coitus"? If so, it's true that few woman have such orgasms. But in my experience many women have orgasms, even female ejaculations, during cunnilingus. Freud, as brilliant as he was, was so mesmerized by assuming sex could only be meant for procreation, that he could not understand why women have orgasms or why a woman has a clitoris. I can imagine all too easily some psychodynamic theorist asking "How did coitus become sexualized?" I wonder how the "sex is for procreation" people deal with the fact that God so loved us that She designed men to get powerful orgasms from being anally penetrated. Both oral and anal sex are profoundly pleasurable to both giver and receiver, regardless of gender, and neither causes conception.

Divedownthere
09/25/11 at 4:27 am
And this comment...
"...The Catholic Church established the university system, the scientific method, observatories, and more in the pursuit of knowledge..." ...is somewhat wrong in its own right. The University system and the scientific method were created by the Greeks.
Observatories were, at first, created to dispel that there other planets in our solar system, then later looked upon as objects against the Church when they couldn't be twisted in that fashion. In short, if the Church believes that something scientific goes against the Church's established views on the World, Nature, Man, and God, they will denounce it. They have even been known to dispel fictional scientific theories presented in mainstream science fiction. Several "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes, especially those dealing with the evolution of life forms and the concept that all bipedal humanoid-type life forms presented in the series came from one Source were denounced and excommunicated by the Church. If they can do this to a show that is set 300 to 400 yrs in the future and is fictional, then they will do it for real theory and real research. Another recent field to come under attack is the research being done by the LHC and its search for the Higgs particle.

11temporal
09/25/11 at 6:13 am
“As such, there is no path by which selection on male orgasm can be transferred to female orgasm, in which case the by-product theory cannot work.” It may not work now, but that doesn't rule out it worked in the past.

DrJKH
09/25/11 at 12:02 pm
This study isn't very good as it suffers heavily from self report bias, hindsight bias, and it is retrospective study. Also, MALE orgasm isn't a prerequisite for pregnancy, either. Try not to propagate any more myths.

travisky
09/25/11 at 1:18 pm
The only explanation why women and men have orgasm is so we can enjoy the procreation experience (not from a religious point of view). Copulating would be a tasking if we didnt have orgasm. We humans are creatures that respond well to rewards.

JohnPopSci
09/25/11 at 1:58 pm
In Russia men and women both have orgasms all the time, since they have socialism. In the United States the females started getting orgasms after Susan B Anthony fought for the equal rights of women. Now to be politically correct, if men have orgasms, females also need to have orgasms. We live in a society where women are considered equal to men. So without orgasms women may feel inferior. Though there are a lot of fighters fighting for equality among men and women, women still haven't gotten on a level playing field with men. Once women start getting orgasms in 1 minute after the start of sex, then men and women will be on a level playing field.

Jahlee Starks
09/25/11 at 7:09 pm
In a Nutshell, Pun intended, to answer the question,The Function of The Orgasm is wane and wax or Respiratory, to detoxify cells i.e. The Orgasm Formula or Mechanical Tension, Electrical Charge, Electrical Discharge, Mechanical Relaxation, can only work properly as a Biological Function of Meiosis/Mitosis and since dammed-up, undischarged Orgone Energy creates toxicity in the Blood Stream, Orgasm is Nature's Means of Phase Modulation in the Heart since the Orgasm Reflex causes the wave of Pleasure to begin in The Mind as Spirit then it transmutes into muscular undulations commencing in the pelvis,down the legs, up the spine to the brain and down into the heart where the Energy is resolved as Spirit evinced by heavy breathing and panting which release toxicity from the Blood Stream, the Climax, which leads to Relaxation! The Point is Mental Hygiene which helps One build Good Character...The Essence of Beauty!

flickstagangsta
09/25/11 at 7:30 pm
WHAT A LOAD OF C*AP.

crackerhead
09/25/11 at 8:04 pm
crackerhead said we were not always ying & yang . we were once unisex , having a-sexual reproduction ! like the worm maybe it would take 2 but both had male and female parts . a mans testicles are a womans ovarys . the vagina is a penis inverted .

CadRat
09/25/11 at 10:43 pm
My church does not try to control the lives of women. The Church of Cum One Cum All does NOT discriminate.

mp
09/25/11 at 11:08 pm
The reasons women have an organism, is because there was no chocolate available in the house and this is the closest thing available.

Larry Fitz
09/25/11 at 11:22 pm
The modern scientific method was not created by the Ancient Greeks, while they did contribute to it with the Socratic method and Syllogism, the father of the scientific method was a catholic bishop named Robert Grosseteste. While one can make an argument for the Greeks being the forerunners of the University system, once again, advanced education after the Dark Ages was brought to you again by the catholic church. Not liking some of the things the catholic church has done (or even all of the things) does not change facts and you should be more enlightened and skeptical than that. There was also a ridiculous assertion that most people with advanced education were not religious. Seeing as less than 2% of the population of the US are Atheists and significantly more than 35% have degrees, well, that idea shows a distinct lack of research as well.
Studies between fraternal siblings of differing genders would produce no more genetic correlation than studies with siblings who were not twins. Though there might be correlation based on pre-natal hormonal exposure. One explanation of the female orgasm could be as simple as a non-selective trait, like baldness in men, or longevity beyond childbearing years in women.

lispngoose
09/26/11 at 10:24 am
Everyone needs to read Sex at Dawn. Women evolved to have sex with many men in sequence for a longer period of time, that's why they have trouble having an orgasm with one man when the sex only lasts a few minutes. We aren't broken! They also have done studies that show orgasm sucks sperm up into the uterus.
Read Sex at Dawn, really explains alot of things about sex that don't make sense if you listen to the standard narrative.

mp
09/26/11 at 8:00 am
JohnPopSci, I have complained in the past of a scientific study being a waste of tax payer money; you should have heard the wailing, gnashing of teeth and so much whining that all studies are considered necessary in the name of science. I imagine some studies are done to help just pay the bills and less about true science and betterment of humanity.

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I Saw Ryan Eckes on the Street Today

2011-09-13T11:35:00.011-04:00

September 12, 2011

You were walking up Montgomery, in a white shirt
and tannish pants. I’d just come out of my building. I was leaving. It was already after 5:30
and I paused before going down the stairs of Conwell Hall. I wanted to fix something in my bag.
When I looked up I saw you at the stoplight and then the stoplight changed and you began to cross the street.

Six years ago we met in a classroom
on the tenth floor of Anderson Hall. You were married.
I was twenty-five. So I guess you were, too. I think we’re the same age.
I was chasing boys, chasing things like feelings. Strong feelings.
In grad school you studied poetry. I studied fiction. We were going

to be writers. Are we writers now? You are. People like your work a lot.

I do. I’m still trying to sweet talk people into liking mine.
I looked down Montgomery, to see if my fiancé was coming. We meet

every day after work and walk to the parking garage and

take the new car home. To our house. Today he was

taking me to a dinner with my lady friends from AA. At the last second

I thought to rush to meet you and catch up. Say hello. But I just stood there
watching you cross the street and head for the train. I thought,
It’s good I’m not nineteen and sitting in your poetry workshop. I’d have been nuts for you.

Do you know what I just thought about? This one night, in 2005

at the beginning of grad school we all went to see

a film adaptation of Tony Takitani. It was so quiet and strange. Like a cartoon

where the shape of the figures' eyes seems to vibrate. Everyone from the program

was ripping it to shreds afterwards. But you stood on the sidewalk under the streetlights

and you said, I liked it.

Two Roads Out of a Feeling

2011-09-03T10:30:00.025-04:00

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/02/140128595/bon-iver-on-world-cafe

In the beginning, the song sounds like Tom Waits, the piano.

From the dark it calls to me and I follow. I go and go

until the road diverges and I flee

down the hall to the stairs, down

the stairs to the cabinet, to

the soft thunk of the door coming

loose from its lodging. And I reach inside--

with the lost friend, the lover who

didn't love right, the memory

of some other time--and drown us.

Once, during a fifth or sixth viewing of Eternal Sunshine, I drank shots of Tequila.

I was in my boyfriend's parents' house. I sat on the persian rug in the living room.

The tequila burned going down. It burned but it felt good.

This boy lying next to me, woke and took my hand. He said, oh, you're crying
then fell back asleep.

Letter to a Young Husband

2011-08-24T15:09:00.010-04:00

for Joshua Rosenzweig

Whenever I happened to hear that someone was getting married, I thought, wow, I guess they’ve got it all figured out. But now that I’m getting married, I realize that, no, they probably didn’t/don’t have it all figured out. During my nearly year-long engagement, I haven’t seen myself as more together, more wise, more anything. I don’t feel more established or legitimate because I’m getting married—and I don’t feel less confused about ‘what it all means’. Perhaps after the marriage is finalized I’ll fancy myself more enlightened, particularly about the business of weddings, but that’s not to say I’ll have it—or anything—all figured out.

I imagine after many years I’ll be able to claim some kind of knowledge about what it means to be married and committed and devoted—but at this point, what I know most, what I know best, is heartbreak. What I know most intimately is pining, longing, cheating, forgiving, remembering, obsessing, resenting, crying, despising, adoring and stalking. Particularly stalking. I have so many stalking stories, it’s possibly record-setting. Driving by their house in the morning, afternoon, night, middle of the night. Walking by their office, workplace, restaurant, etc. Calling and hanging up. Calling and leaving cryptic messages. Calling and calling right back. I mean, I was shameless. Totally, brutally, horrifically shameless.

Once, I was sitting in my parents’ basement. It was a Saturday night and I’d left my apartment in the city and driven to their house in the suburbs to have dinner and spend the night. It was about one thirty in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep most nights, so there was nothing unusual about this. I decided that this night, however, I would not watch whatever was playing on Turner Classic Movies or Nick at Night. I would instead, drive back to Minneapolis and drive by the house of my ex-boyfriend. I would just drive in, and drive by his house, and turn around and drive home. Voila.

This ex was a guy who I’d dated for about five months. His age was the same as mine, 21. His car was a light blue Nissan. And his name? His name was Buck. The relationship was simultaneously monumental and irrelevant. Monumental because I lost my virginity to him. And irrelevant because I didn’t really have a connection with him or an understanding of his humor (it has to be in there somewhere, I insisted, if I just keep digging…) Essentially, we weren’t the greatest match. I knew it at the time, and I’m pretty sure he did, too. No, I’m sure he did. I think he thought I was a bit of a wreck. Smart enough and cute enough to date, casually, for the summer, you know. But ultimately too much of a mess. Too given to alcoholic displays with my coworkers from the wine and cheese shop. Too prone to pontificating on the nothingness of being. Really just too absurd and bizarre and generally wacko.

He himself was a very, very serious young man. Buck worked at a coffee shop and treated this post as though he was doing the very work of God. He studied Latin and ancient Greek at the University. He read feverishly and claimed to despise poetry and Horace. He was a practicing vegetarian, who dyed his hair black and wore a mainly communist uniform (black t-shirt, black frayed jean shorts). He had lovely lips and eyes and a smoldering brow. And he played in a band with the word Midnight in their name. He was often distant and pensive. He was frequently nonplussed by my humor. And, it seemed to me, he was very concerned with how others thought of him—how they saw him.

I knew the relationship wasn’t going to be a lifetime union, but when I realized Buck was losing interest I was nonetheless shocked, and naturally offended. Glenn Close said once that rejection is one of, if not THE worst emotion to experience. When I heard that, I understood immediately what she meant. It just feels bad, like you’ve stepped into raw sewage and can’t get it off fast enough. You know that even when you get it off, you’ll have to deal with after effects. You’ll have to ride it out for a while. Of course, you gain this knowledge through prior experience. I’d been rejected at least twice by this point, so I knew what was happening; I knew what lay ahead; and I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. I also knew it was going to be finite—the bad feeling didn’t last forever. So when I asked him on the phone if he wanted to break up and he said, um, yeah. I cried a little bit, and asked if he was sure and if he was really going to leave me, but I also thought: fine.

In fairness, I should state that I’d been cheating on him. With Sam. An older guy. Technically, my boss. I was really in love with that person (my boss). And although I was old enough to know that boys could lose interest, I wasn’t old enough to know that bosses often had “strong feelings” for the young women that worked for them. Even if I’d known, I’m not sure I would’ve pushed him off. I liked him. I really liked him. Sam was funny and charming and handsome and full of wit. He was also damaged and scared and wounded by life. And it felt like he saw in me that thing that I subconsciously knew about myself. It felt like he was recognizing it, causing me to see it, for the first time. And the truth is, it felt wonderful.

Despite being head over heels for Sam, I was still human. I still had an ego and my ego had been stomped on by Buck. So as the weeks went by—and after Sam moved to Madison with his fiancé—I grew more and more infatuated with Buck. I mean, yes, Buck was slightly pretentious and overly image conscious and full of himself. Yes. But HE had been the one to reject ME. I mean, that spoke volumes. And with each day, I became more convinced of Buck’s grandeur. Wasn’t it true, in fact, that he was a genius? Wasn’t it true that he had the soul of a poet and couldn’t be blamed for his inability to see humor in anything below the level of a Shakespearean barb? Was it not true that he was quite possibly the most handsome man who’d walked the earth? His slightly caveman shoulders were evidence that he was from the very stock of mythic people he studied: autochthonous. I mean, what the fuck?! Buck was a god!

As the Patty Duke show’s theme song began to play, I jumped up from my parents’ basement floor, threw on a coat from their front closet and jumped in the car. The car I was driving at this time was a white Oldsmobile that made a rattling sound. The sound was unmistakable and whenever I was picking up a friend for a night on the town, they knew I was coming a block and a half away, and would be waiting outside by the time I rolled up. Also, the driver’s side door seemed precariously ready to fall off at any moment, but until that happened, I had a car. And I was going to drive it.

I cleared off the car and tossed the scraper in the backseat. It was snowing hard that night. As I pulled out of the driveway, the snow came down in thick, fluffy drops that slid down the windshield. I had the wipers going at full tilt and the defrost working overtime. The radio station played hits from the 50’s and I sang along. As I got nearer to my exit, the snow began to slow and I realized I didn’t remember exactly how to get to his house. He’d moved just before we’d broken up and I’d only been to the new place once. Well, twice, if you count the time I drove over there after a long night at the bar for me and long night of whiskey on the couch for him. He’d called and I’d come. I sat through a diatribe on how money doesn’t exist, followed by an hour long recital where he played the hits of Chopin. Then I showed him how to do a handstand. Then we slept together. The next day I pretended I had to be somewhere and he seemed grateful. So, essentially, it was line by line from the book of predictability. Either way, that incident had only increased my delusional obsession.

After a few random turns through Northeast Minneapolis I realized I was indeed on the correct street. His street. The streetlamps flickered in the night. The snow had stopped and the earth was covered in a white stillness that seemed to audibly hum. It was a nice harmony with the car’s jangling noise. I should get that looked at one of these days, I decided. And just then, at two a.m. on Saturday night, I saw him. Buck. Standing at the end of his driveway, watching as I drove by. He stood. Right there. The only one on the street. Watching the only car on the street. The white Oldsmobile with the rattling muffler just drive on by. His house. At two in the morning.

My first reaction had been to hit the gas and pull the car into some kind of eternal spin. But with each subsequent stretch of road I felt the level of shock and despair dissipate. In its place, increment by increment, I felt the old familiar feeling of self-loathing take hold. And this, this I could deal with. Again, thankfully, experience had taught me I could survive self-loathing. By the time I pulled into the driveway at my parents’ house, the snow had frozen enough so I could gain speed and plow through into a comfortable resting spot. I’d dig it out in the morning. Fuck it, I said, as I trudged through the snow, into the house. I decided it was good that he saw me. Now he won’t call me anymore and I won't have to wrestle with “will I/won’t I?" and I won’t have to wonder why he didn't like me enough to want me to stay. Now he knows I’m psychotic and he’ll leave me the hell alone.

I walked in the door, took off my boots and my father’s winter coat. It was nearly four in the morning and the sun wasn’t up, but I knew it was coming. I could count on that. I knew an old movie would be playing. Something that would take me out of this world and into my own favorite myths. The ones where a boozed up, idiosyncratic woman looked like Katherine Hepburn. The ones where she danced and stumbled and jabbered around until a nice, interesting, good man came along and swept her off her feet--or better, met her toe to toe. The ones where you knew it wasn’t going to be perfect forever after, but it was going to be honest, full of mutual respect and admiration, and love. Which is a nice way for a story to end, I think.

Abbi Dion
August 24, 2011

Running up that Hill, Make a Deal with God

2011-08-03T13:51:00.016-04:00

In my early twenties, I remember stopping by the built in bar on the way out of my apartment to a date. I’d just casually drop my keys on the counter, swing open a cabinet, pull out a bottle of vodka or gin or Captain Morgan's and take a swig. Like, ah, there. Now I’m ready.

When I got into my date’s car I felt thankful I’d decided to take that drink. The glowing dash and dark leather. The music piping through his system. What the hell was I doing here? What two or three or four hours of hell awaited? Whether the suitor was practically new to me, or an ex who’d caused me pain, or a married man whom I was trying to justify, or simply a good friend with whom I couldn’t seem to be honest—I felt bad as soon as I got into that car. If the car was overly spotless, I felt out of place. If the car was a wreck, I felt out of place. If there was a detail, like a child’s toy in the back, or a woman’s lipstick in the ashtray, or a thing from our past, I felt like crawling out of my skin. But the shot had muted all that anxiety to a dull tremor, just out of reach. And I knew we’d be going somewhere that had drinks—wine, beer, cocktails, whatever. Drinks.

At the time, I thought this was probably normal. And if I thought it was abnormal, then I thought it was comical. Bridget Jones and disastrous love affairs and drinking too much to deal. I didn’t feel the pathos of it. Or if I felt it, I didn’t own up to it. I laughed about it to girlfriends and they laughed, too. We all had stories. We all needed one another’s support. We all felt confused about what exactly we were supposed to be doing and feeling. And we all liked to drink.

A few years later, in my twenty-seventh year, I found myself sitting in a graduate school workshop listening to a very famous science fiction writer critique my fiction submission: “everyone seems to like this story, and finds the narrator funny—parodic—but I had a very different reaction. I found the protagonist to be self-absorbed, full of self-pity, and deflective. She is afraid of intimacy and needs to be drunk to have sex.”

Oh my God, I thought. What was he talking about? I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. And true to form, before I’d really considered his criticism, I immediately got defensive. What the hell did he know? What a sexist prick? Why could a man be honest about his darkness (and earn raves) while a woman was seen as gratuitous, vain, and sick. True to form, I got angry, thanked him for his opinion and stormed out of our class as soon as it was over. I took the stairs down ten flights and when I got to the bottom, I was in tears. Was he talking about my story, about my narrator, my protagonist? Or was he talking about me? I considered the validity of his statement: she needs to be drunk to have sex. That’s not true, I said, wiping my eyes dry. In the back of my head I thought of every furtive shot I took while a lover waited upstairs. Here I was in the kitchen, taking a shot of tequila before traipsing back into the bedroom to meet him, both of us laughing. Here I was saying I had to get a glass of water, stopping by the built in bar, taking a shot of vodka and catching my reflection in a window pane. Here I was reaching back for the wine glass as he led me up the staircase, into the dark room…

It hurt to think about these things. I didn’t want to feel this. So I got up, shook myself off and stepped out of the building into the daylight of 3 o’clock. I immediately ran into two fellow grad students. I remember one of them, Salvador, someone I admired, opened his arms and hugged me. It was a hug that said, I’m sorry you had to sit and endure that harsh review. He didn’t say that he disagreed, nor did he write off any of the sci fi writer’s comments. He didn’t tell me I shouldn’t listen to a word of it. He hugged me, empathically, but he didn’t say anything.

A few months later, I was talking to another writer in the class, Melissa. We were having a beer at a local Philly writers’ haunt and I was bitching about what the sci fi writer had said, how it was a cheap shot and not necessarily relevant to the writing, how he’d conflated the writing with the writer, the intentional fallacy, the pathetic fallacy, the fucking fallacy, whatever. “Oh,” she said, “really?” Then she said, “I thought that was really interesting, what he said.” Fuck, I thought. She’s right.

I walked home that night and thought, and thought again about the comments. Was it true? Was I afraid of sex? Was I afraid of intimacy? Drinking did factor in to many of my conquests, and my vanquishings [sic]. Was it by accident. Or necessity. What would I do if I didn’t have that magic potion? What would I do without the thing that made everything less than real? Would I be able to stand it? The realness of the dark, of sex, of another human being? Would I be able to stand it? The pressure of advancing age, the memories of lovers lost, the fear of so many feats still unaccomplished, of things like: what will become of me? Would I be able to stand it? A man in the bed, my own heart beating, and the sound of our breath... When I got home to the apartment I shared with my older, philandering boyfriend of two years, I noticed he was nowhere to be found. I took out my cell phone and called him. It went straight to voicemail. I sat in a chair and stared at the living room and its objects. I breathed in and out. I looked at books lined in shelves, plants in pots, windows in frames. I looked at my hands and my feet and imagined myself from above, looking down at this scene. I shuddered. This was too much. I opened the fridge and took out a beer. I opened it and took a sip. There. Everything was going to be fine. I tried calling him again and this time he answered. “Where are you?” I asked? “I’m at Laura’s” he said, “she’s having a party.” “Why didn’t you answer when I called?” I said. “I was in the basement,” he said. “When are you coming home?” I asked and he answered with an evasive comment, which led to a protracted discussion about my controlling and possessive nature.

I don’t remember if I drank more that night or if I lay in bed and sobbed or if I tried to find information on his social networking profile for proof that he was cheating on me or at least acting dishonorably. I remember that nights like that made me very certain that I was in no place to excise drinking from my life. It was my friend, my accomplice, my lover. It kept me company and kept me safe. It kept the demons away and pushed the bad feelings off. I felt protected.

Drinking often felt very protective, for a range of feelings--everything from rejection to anxiety to ennui to sheer boredom (ironically, the very feelings that drinking helps to create and cultivate). Drinking often felt like a good or at least effective way of dealing with the boredom, the tediousness of capitalist days and unsatisfying nights. It was a way of projecting out of the self into a place that felt good and carefree. I often thought about a scene from a movie I’d seen years before. In the scene a woman, played by Laura Linney, is sitting in bed at the end of the day. She has put her child to bed and is reading a book, drinking a glass of white wine. I remember watching that and thinking, thank God. Thank God she has that. If nothing else, she has that.

She and I, I thought, we need that. I simply couldn’t conceive of a scenario where I’d be spending quality time by myself at night and not want to drink. I spent many nights with myself, writing, making photo albums, surfing the blessed internet, drawing sketches of this, that, the other—and I did it all without a drink. But not necessarily because I wanted it that way. I did it because it proved that I didn’t have a problem. And I did it because I knew on a gut level that I should be ABLE to do those things without drinking and, importantly, without WANTING to drink. I also knew that the time I was spending with myself was not as genuine, felt, meaningful or maximized as it should be—as I wanted it to be—but I wasn’t sure how to get those effects. Perhaps, I thought, I could stop drinking, I could remove that from the equation entirely, so that I could spend zero time wondering if I should just pour a fucking glass of wine and get it over with. But, I thought, life would be so lonely, so bleak, so… unknown.

What’s hard to think about is that living room where I cycled through these thought patterns. What causes me pain is to think—to remember—how lonely I was, how unsure I was of anything really—the future, the past, myself in that moment. I was trying to process, synthesize and neutralize all of it. Of course, I was unable to do this—no one is able to do that—so I did the next logical thing. I went to the wine store and picked up a bottle of red and a pack of cigarettes and then I trucked it back home to get busy on obliterating consciousness. Lots of times I laughed as I walked back home, laughed at the absurdity and futility of existence, of philosophizing, of religion, or any of it. I was defiant and action-less and full of my self.

And in the morning, whatever I’d washed away, washed back up.

How badly I wanted things to be better, to be different. If only I could DEAL with things instead of depending on this chemical. How badly I didn’t want to have a disease. Oh my God, a disease. To help me decide whether I had a real problem, I started reading memoirs and watching specials on the topic of alcohol and alcoholism. I was weeding through all of this, not for signs that I could relate to, but for a sign that would set me apart. She crashed a car or got a DUI? Not me. She got pregnant accidentally? Not me. Not once. She lost her job? Not me. She used hard drugs when drinking? Not me. She drank in the morning before work? Not me. Never. She started drinking in junior high school? Not me. Not me. Not me. In an HBO special, one of the doctors interviewed said, “this disease presents itself early, often in adolescence.” Not me! I sighed with relief. They’re talking about those thirteen year olds who steal bottles of booze, who react to it immediately. And he went on, “it often begins before age 25, typically between the ages of 18 and 25.” Oh shit. That was me. That. Was. Me.

The memoir that started everything was Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp. It was a Sunday and I was leafing through the New York Times Book Review. There was a review of Gail Caldwell’s memoir about her friendship with Caroline Knapp, Let’s Take the Long Way Home. In the second column, the reviewer referenced the two writers’ shared past of addiction, and the line that changed everything: “the empty chamber in the heart that’s at the center of addiction.” This was a tremendously shocking and also validating sentiment. It was like a one two punch. One, wait, I know what this means, even though I’ve never verbalized it this exact way. And, two, if this was written down, that means someone else drinks this way.

I drove to the Barnes and Noble in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and searched for Gail Caldwell’s memoir, and the book referenced in the review, Caroline Knapp’s memoir. I bought the books and started reading Knapp’s book on the drive home. It was like check, check, check. She was looking at people who were worse off than her to PROVE she wasn’t a drunk. She never got a DUI, ended up in jail or the hospital. She'd never been fired, etc. Oh God, and how she loved the rituals of drinking, the camaraderie, the heightened sense of interpersonal closeness, the romance of it all. More than that she loved the escape. She loved the solution drinking seemed to provide to everything that ails: rejection, disappointment, discomfort or unease, regret, fear, confusion, boredom—all of it. It was a job hazard, wasn’t it? Drinking. Writer = Drinker. Grist for the mill. It was such an integral part of her life--or it had become such an integral part--that to live without seemed unfathomable, and yet, she knew, she knew it was what she needed to do. Give it up.

Caroline Knapp's story is a long story. Much longer and much deeper, but just as deep, is the story of this morning. I'll end this with the story of this morning. I don’t think the happiness, the contentedness of this morning, the moments of it, could be captured in words. Waking up—not hungover—not replaying the night before—not ruminating on eternity. But experiencing the moment, the day, for its own sake—in its present state. Washing a few dishes, making coffee, emailing, playing with the dog, doing laundry—it’s wonderful in its simplicity and I’m embracing it in its current state, for its own sake.

In no particular order...

2011-07-29T16:05:00.021-04:00

Coming Soon...

2011-07-11T20:49:00.008-04:00

- a list of chronological ages for both male actors and their female love interest counterparts
e.g., "country star" (or whatever). jeff bridges: 65. maggie gyllenhaal: 28.

- a list of things marketed to women, exclusively
e.g., face cream, vacuum attachments, weight-loss sneakers, juvederm (sp).

- a review of Woody Allen's latest effort, Midnight in Paris...
e.g., when gil (as played by owen wilson) uttered the line "that was djuna barnes?! no wonder she was always trying to lead!" i stood up, and cheered.

... au revoir for now!

portrait d'Andre Derain 1936, Balthus

p.s. in reference to the first and last items mentioned above...

Midnight in Paris (2010)

Old Sage Museum Guide (played by Carla Bruni b. 1967)

Gil -- Male protagonist, aspiring writer (played by Owen Wilson b. 1968)

Inez -- Gil's annoying ass fiance (played by Rachel Mcadams b. 1978)

Gabrielle -- Gil's nubile love interest (played by Lea Seydoux b. 1985)

Truth, Hurts, Feels Good

2011-06-29T15:47:00.008-04:00

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape

I remember this mix tape I made in like (gulp) 2002. It was for a man who was 34. I was 22 and 34 seemed ancient, especially because he had an ex-wife and a real job (lawyer/professor) and THREE (count 'em) kids from his marriage. It is heart-breaking to think of how ploddingly I selected the songs, and taped pictures to the case and probably quoted poetry on the insert -- and it was the twenty-first century for God's sake! WTF was I thinking? A fucking mix tape! Ugh. Painful. He returned the gesture with a mix CD. Half the songs on the CD were songs from his band (I can't). The other songs were dark and gloom and doom, but sort of new wave and/or UK shit. It was a pretty good mix CD. The cover art was a cartoon of how ethanol is made/processed/concocted/whatever. I clearly didn't study it. He was an environmental lawyer. Very big deal.

Some songs from my tape:
Ted's Waltz (Beth Orton)
Words (Low)

New Slang - the EP Version (The Shins) -- that Garden State crap had not come out yet.
Waking Up To You (Hefner)
Colors and the Kids (Cat Power)
Fillmore Jive (Pavement) -- omg I used to die for this song, pretended he said "I need to sleep / I need to sleep / I need you to sleep"

Nashville (Liz Phair)

Some songs from his CD
spiders (His Band)
hamsun (His Band)
Please, please, please, let me get what I want (The Smiths)
Torch (The Psychedelic Furs)

Some songs from the second tape I made (we were totally finished by this point. I was not ready to accept this fact and so decided to plow ahead, with a kind of principled unwitting fuck all attitude. This tape was seriously tortured, almost demented.)
I Break Horses (Smog)

Bad As They Seem (Hayden)

Disaster (The Ashtray Hearts)
The Swimmer (Sleater Kinney)
Sun Don't Shine (Haley Bonar)

Lalala, back to trying to get something done today...

You're Just So Pretty

2011-06-28T12:18:00.005-04:00

love tori, love kevin aucoin

I watched the above, and was reminded of how amazing Tori's song "Putting the Damage On" is, so here is the song:

you said you packed your things, and divided what was mine

Oh mah gawd, and I've looked for this forever on Youtube and am overjoyed to see someone uploaded it! used to listen to this one on repeat, repeat, repeat...

sing you to sleep, now

amazing b-side. gorgeous.

do i hate what she is, or do i want to be her

freshman year, after class, press play...

and i'm just having thoughts, i said i'm just having thoughts of, having thoughts, having

j'adore.

i go from day to day
i know where the cupboards are
i know where the car is parked
i know he isn't you

Official Video for Hey Jupiter -- (1:25 - 1:45) and (3:10 - 3:40) so so so

guess i thought
i could never feel the thing i feel

love the above, love the stripped down more

no one's picking up the phone
guess it's me and me
and this little masochist
she's ready to confess
all the things
that i never thought that
she could feel
and

Young

2011-06-27T16:21:00.000-04:00

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

Anne Sexton

Source: Rory Ponds

You All Know the Story of the Other Woman

2011-06-27T16:19:00.002-04:00

Anne Sexton

It’s a little Walden.
She is private in her breathbed
as his body takes off and flies,
flies straight as an arrow.
But it’s a bad translation.
Daylight is nobody’s friend.
God comes in like a landlord
and flashes on his brassy lamp.
Now she is just so-so.
He puts his bones back on,
turning the clock back an hour.
She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
the unbound limbs, the boards,
the roof, the removable roof.
She is his selection, part time.
You know the story too! Look,
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.

Source: Svelte Stilletto

Kristin Hersh Trailer and Songs

2011-06-26T23:52:00.004-04:00

Source: andshewolfafterthewar

It's moonshine from cactus
Well, I guess it can't wreck us

Two step
behind the rest

dragonhead

Critic, Criticize Thyself

2011-06-26T21:39:00.012-04:00

“Madame Bovary? C’est moi!”

CB

I feel like we have a way of writing crazy--
The Sylvia Plath Effect (a real term coined to describe a different phenomenon)
--And it’s something like this:
I take a pill, dear lover, do this to make you happy
The old doll moves with grace, doesn’t she
With this small turn, this happy face
Or like:
For three weeks I hid her letters, watched red feathers
This hawk take root, she perched

on our deck--curved like a frown--and you
(you have to raise your voice when you say, “you” – like, really
you need to begin with the “and” – so it’s like dot dot dot, monotone, dot dot dot,
monotone, dot dot dot (sharp pause) ANd YoUUU)
Sit like a fan, or fish, barely daring to breathe or achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.

Dear Sylvia, O Sylvia! pulls it off--with her general genial

wit, with anger, with dark blonde curls and dark blonde charm--but I can’t
bear to hear a man or woman take the stage
And dive into the tone of "listen-to-me" or slide

into the raising

and falling, then sighing and pausing.

Unless it's earned

I think we should just spit it out normal.

Perhaps this is a personal problem. Many of mine are,
but I'm tired and stir crazy

and full of projections.

AMD

Lights On, In the Middle of the Night

2011-06-24T10:40:00.006-04:00

a lalala polished version of Greg Brown's Say a Little Prayer, covered by Shawn Colvin...

http://hypem.com/#!/item/11722/

Say a Little Prayer, Greg Brown

put aretha franklin on
i turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, in the middle of the night
cause that'll do as much good
as any medicine
to make her feel all right

Kathleen Hanna on revisiting pain, and Katy Perry

2011-06-23T15:13:00.002-04:00

“Keep on Livin’.” I was writing it originally about coming out as a sexual abuse survivor, but it can really be about any kind of emotional trauma, and you’re like, “I’m totally over it” and then you get reactivated about it. You’re like, “Jeez, I worked so hard. How am I back in the same place?” But each time you revisit it, it’s a little better. So many women have experienced horrific forms of male violence throughout their lives, and why isn’t there a song about how you get depressed because of it? And you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know how to talk to your friends and how weird it is to be a feminist in that situation, where there’s sort of the expectation that you’re super-strong superwoman but you’re just, like, eating pizza in your house avoiding talking about it. I started writing it, and (Le Tigre bandmate JD Samson) was like, “I see a real link between what I felt like as a kid when I was trying to come out as a lesbian.” As we were writing it, we were like, how does this song not exist already? It sounds really specific, but if you think about how many people a song like that would actually cover …”
—

Kathleen Hanna

CNN: What do you make of singers like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Ke$ha who are seemingly touching on themes of gay empowerment in their music, but for some reason it doesn't quite resonate?

Hanna: I mean, is it really that different when it's a skinny white woman in a bathing suit singing these things? None of these women ever wear pants, first of all. Second of all, just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art. I mean, that's just my feeling about it. A lot of the music just sounds like bad Euro disco, though that first Ke$ha song "TiK ToK" was good. But (Katy Perry's) "I Kissed a Girl" was just straight-up offensive. The whole thing is like, I kissed a girl so my boyfriend could masturbate about it later. It's disgusting. It's exactly every male fantasy of fake lesbian porn. It's pathetic. And she's not a good singer. I don't want to trash other women. I mean, I think Jason Mraz is horrible. It's not just like I hate other women performers. Jason Mraz, and the new James Blunt song is the worst thing that has ever been created on the face of the Earth.

The Love That Consumes

2011-06-22T16:59:00.008-04:00

919 North Corinthian, Apt. 8, Philadelphia, PA, 19130
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape

Once,
I remember realizing
Things were not going as they should be—
but not knowing how to make it stop.
I was in the free fall of my twenty-third year on the planet, sitting with Chris Holmes
In a shaded pocket of the University
We were late for class. But couldn’t move.
He was taking conversational French.
I was taking Biology. For the third time.
I just couldn’t get it right.
My married man was gone, somewhere far, with his family, his real life.
My life, my fears were no longer merely real. They’d transcended.
We were taking pulls of Jim Beam, a novelty, but none the less frightening for it.
Mosquitoes were ringing around us and he said
I’m sorry you’re so depressed.
I’m not depressed! I replied.
Well, he said, well – of course you are.
That’s why you’re hanging out with me.

But,
That was then, you see.
I was a child, you see.
And as a child, I thought like a child. I behaved like a child.
I moved like a child and sang like a child. I threw myself to
The wolves and laughed as I was eaten.
Then cried over my blood and bones.

The boy and I
Are older now. He teaches at Columbia.

Just yesterday we spoke

about a movie starring Johnny Depp.
See? That’s what happens sometimes.
You live to see yourself
From a distance—
To see you moving through another time.
You live to see the moment you stuffed a bottle of whiskey in your backpack—
Trudging across the Washington Avenue Bridge to class, a feeling of mounting dread
And fading hope in your chest. A feeling of knowledge that what you thought your life
Would be is not at all what it is. And you have no one to pin this on but yourself. Not even
The boy who sat with you only moments ago; the one who told you he was twenty-one, and
You believed he was, until you found his passport and counted out the years: OMG, he’s nineteen.
Another lie. When you find this bit of evidence, you put it back and go on with your day; it confirms your
Suspicion that people are duplicitous, treacherous, motivated
by virtues other than kindness, love, generosity.

When I was a child
I reasoned like a child.

Beautiful child,
From this distance I see your weary gaze. The pain you clung to like the gospel.
Here you are crying. Here you are drinking. Here you are meeting him at the bus stop.
See? Sometimes you live long enough to outgrow your precious ennui. Your fear of happiness—
So terrifying and loathsome to you—not because it is in itself, bad,
But, because
It cannot be shared.

What was I saying as I walked that day?
I said to myself, learn from this, learn from this, learn from this

AMD

in this dream, there is an open door

2011-06-15T11:57:00.032-04:00

Bar in New York Ci-tay.
Photo by yours trues.

I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.

I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

And the fact that both women ultimately shared and feared the “empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction.”

Gail Caldwell

Part One.

One night, I sat in my apartment and waited for the phone to ring. I was twenty-one and living in a NE Minneapolis duplex with my roommate, a girl I’d met Freshman year of college. We were in our last semesters at the University of Minnesota, and in many respects, we already fashioned ourselves grown-ups. We stood at the end of our youth and looked out at the future: this place was full of promise and possibility--and it created in me a sensation of paralyzing anxiety.

So on this twilit night, I waited by the phone. Tonight an old friend would be calling when he got home from work—we’d agreed upon that through voicemail—and because he’d recently moved to Vancouver, and was two hours behind, I had some time to kill. When I got home from my part-time job, I waited for those hours to pass, and I waited with a drink in my hand. Then another. It felt like a good decision. Or simply, right.

I was nervous about speaking with him as I’d always harbored feelings that surpassed the level of friendship we’d maintained during the past five years. The fact that we’d nearly slept together when he was in Minneapolis a few months ago didn’t make me feel less anxious. I knew he was seeing someone, and I guess I was, too, but I knew going into the conversation that I’d be uncomfortable. So I poured myself a glass of wine and watched the clock spin its dial. Pouring the wine was simply the way I’d begun responding to difficult or complicated feelings—especially feelings of rejection. Whether drinking was right or wrong was something I’d deal with after, later, at some point in the future. I did have a small twinge of guilt, a flash of honesty with myself about what I was doing, and why. I felt like, I should be able to talk to him without this boost of confidence, this liquid courage, this artificial safety net. But these feelings of guilt or worry weren’t stronger than my desire to drink, my rationalization about its okay-ness, its normal-ness—about my decision to give my power over to the bottle rather than push myself to pull it up from inside.

When he phoned, I answered with a slight buzz and this cut right through the awkward and complicated feelings I’d been experiencing. These feelings were marching out the door with every sip, every pour. We reminisced about times gone by, his old apartment, a coffee shop where we frequently met on rainy afternoons, a party where he threw me over his shoulder and spun me around and everyone said: who is that guy! I drank steadily throughout the conversation. And it went well enough. At least the majority of it did. How the conversation ended is something I can’t reveal with any kind of certainty.

All I know for sure is I awoke with a wave of nausea and a present sense of the outline of my brain. I stumbled into the bathroom and simply sat on the rug on the floor. My roommate peeked in and when she saw me said: yeah, I thought as much.
“What are you talking about?!” I asked, honestly shocked.
“I saw an empty magnum sitting on the kitchen table,” she said.
“Ugh,” I groaned, “say no more about this.”
“Well that and I heard you cackling and screaming and howling into the phone all night.”
“I was talking to Nathan,” I said.
“I could tell,” she said. “He kind of sucks, by the way.”
“By the way,” I asked, “is a magnum one and a half bottles of wine, or two?”
“Two.”
“Oh no,” I said, legitimately upset.
Had she had a glass or two? No. Had she poured out maybe some of the last of it? No. Had I potentially poured out the rest? Poured it down the drain in a fit of sanity? No. I reasoned with myself: OK, you drank TWO bottles of wine. In one night. What exactly the fuck is wrong with you? This is not normal! You have shit to do today! What the hell is you major malfunction?
“Come on,” she said, “call in sick and let’s go see a movie.”

So that’s what I did. I called in sick to my job and skipped a study session for an Italian conversation class and we went to see a movie. It is a testament to the power of my hangover that I don’t remember what we saw. We went to the theater and probably drank sodas and laughed over the previous evening. My roommate most likely consoled me with a tale of her own. She was a dear and certainly had her own list of nights gone awry, as well as, her own list of reasons for why she kept drinking, why she should, why she wanted to and would continue to—and why it wasn’t her fault if she got too drunk on occasion (it was that time of the month, or she hadn’t eaten a big enough dinner, or an ex-boyfriend showed up with a new girlfriend) and why it wasn’t her problem if other people had a problem with her drinking. I felt exactly the same way. What do they know? we laughed! Sophists. Judgey Judgersons. Control freaks. Whatever. Whatever we needed to say or think or feel to rationalize our right to drink.

Yes, the phone conversation with Nathan was sort of shameful and pathetic—but so what? He was kind of a dick. And I deserved to get drunk and act like a fool or an asshole every now and then. And he’d done things, too! And so on. Was this grounds for taking a cold, hard look at my drinking? Were women not held to a different standard than men--at least in terms of being allowed to drink and get loud and bombastic? So I got too drunk. I was emotional. I needed it. It wasn't my finest hour, but life would go on.

Plus, there were so many times when things didn’t go wrong. Where I didn’t get too drunk and forget how the night ended. So many times where I spent an evening wrapped in the warm embrace of the glass, of friends, of discussion and sharing and everything feeling wonderful, magical. There were so many nights where my roommate and I played CD after CD and smoked cigarettes while passing a wine bottle back and forth. We laughed, and talked about life and love and experience. We theorized romantic relationships and our families. We talked about who we wanted to be and what we wanted to do and if we were a little tired in the morning, a little rough around the edges—so what? Neither she nor I ever got a DUI. She did get arrested once (from her graduation party), but, we assured ourselves, it was through no fault of our own. The party had gotten too loud and too many people had arrived. More than ten people were ultimately arrested--could ten people be wrong? We were the innocent victims. The police were out of line! The eviction that came as a result of said party? An unfortunate consequence, but, again, an unfair and circumstantial result. And, in the perverse logic that pretty much every drinker I know uses, the whole situation was sort of funny, an anecdote that we would tell later, a part of our coming of age and a testament to the fact that we weren't part of that class of normative, nice, well-behaved young women.

And, yet, I couldn't help but feel guilty and weird about these events. I hadn’t expected to find myself living in Minneapolis, looking for an apartment that didn’t do a background check (I remember hearing at that time that if you’d been evicted, you couldn’t rent for seven years—whether this was true or not was something I didn’t bother to look into). But, again, it was not my fault. And I continued to drink with the people who I surrounded myself with—fellow drinkers. I said we were united by our distaste for rules and order, our love of books and knowledge and animated discussion, our appreciation for the hazards of experience, but it was interesting that when we were together, drinking was always a factor. I think we did something exactly twice that didn’t involve drinking. We saw The Blair Witch Project as a group, and we went swimming in Lake Harriet. I suppose it bears mentioning that we did smoke joints throughout both endeavors.

It was around this time that I started to worry about my drinking. I mean, I’d worried about it before—when I was living in Italy and using the wine store as my compass—but now I was wondering if there wasn’t a bigger problem; a problem that transcended details like circustance; a problem that perhaps, just maybe, was a wee bit beyond my control or free will. There were nights where I stayed up late with friends, eating pizza and drinking beer and gabbing. Drinking felt good at those times, and right. But there were also nights where drinking felt like a way out. Indeed, the ONLY way out. Or, if not the only, the best. The fastest. The surest. The least taxing on my mental and physical energy. I didn’t have to wrestle with difficult questions or answer the mysteries that life presented. I didn’t have to risk anything or challenge myself. All I had to do was sip the wine. The drink did all the work. And on some level, I knew it was all fake—a cheat—but I wasn’t ready to confront that realization yet, wasn’t ready for the work that would need to be done, internally mainly, but externally, too.

I simply wasn’t ready. Partially because I was in my twenties, still, and surrounded by fellow reluctant adults, “smart party girls” (courtesy of Roger), wine consultants, musicians and people with a kind of bitter resentful irony that seemed particularly authentic. We went out. We stayed in. We drank in groups, in pairs, by ourselves—all of it. We reveled. And it felt good. It didn’t feel bad. At least, most of the time it felt pretty good—and if it didn’t, at least it felt authentic. Things hadn’t gotten too bad for any one of us, not yet. Shit had not yet hit the fan. And until it would (and it always does; drinking problems are progressive) I was going to enjoy a beer, or many, on the porch with my friend Patrick.

Around this time, I was both conscious and unconscious of the fact that I seemed to be forgetting how to engage in social scenarios without a drink. I certainly didn’t look forward to an occasion where I knew alcohol wasn’t going to be present. In those scenarios, I wasn’t able to enjoy myself, be in the moment, open up and feel free to talk, share and actively listen. I just couldn’t. Or if I could, I secretly resented the absence of booze from whatever function I’d just attended. I resented the fact that a girl I hung out with at the time was a slow drinker. I didn’t enjoy our conversations very much (and she was brilliant, by the way) because I was so focused on how my wine glass seemed to empty more quickly. Didn’t she need another drink? Didn’t she at least WANT one? What was HER problem? I simply couldn’t deal with life, my feelings and thoughts in a scenario that didn’t involve alcohol. Hard day? How about some wine. Just took a big exam? Let’s have some champagne. First date? Have a drink first. Going to see a play with an ex? Have a shot before you walk out the door. Lonely night where the past starts circling? Whiskey and beer. Bored? Disappointed? Worried? Haunted? Wine, wine, wine, wine.

The writer Caroline Knapp put it this way: one day at a time goes both ways. Just as the alcoholic in recovery says, I won’t drink today—just today—it’s all I have. The person who is loath to relinquish the drink says, I know I’m drinking today—but it’s just today. Change is something that will take place in the future—when you’re more stable, have a great job that you love and a past that makes sense and a future that’s knowable, predictable, all good.

Part Two.

I’ve lived in Philadelphia for nearly six years—it will be six this August—and in that time I’ve had the amazing fortune of developing a few really tight friends. In this collection of people there are a variety of personality types; there are some men in this collection, but the majority are women. And within this collection, there is another, smaller, group: essentially, my circle.

A dear friend who is part of this circle and I were recently discussing a mutual friend of ours, Andy. Andy is a much better friend, as well as, a sometime boyfriend to her. He’s our age (30 +/-), employed in gardening/grounds work, and a fairly quiet fellow. He doesn’t have the kind of personality where you know you can introduce him to your family and leave him at the dinner table, knowing he’ll take care of the rest. He doesn’t post YouTube videos on Facebook or comment under photos or engage in conversations generated by a thought-provoking status post. He doesn’t even have a Facebook page as far as I know. Andy comes to house parties and backyard barbeques and for the most part, he is entirely pleasant. He sits off to the side and laughs politely when someone tells a humorous story or when someone makes a shrewd comment. He says thank you when someone makes him a drink. He says goodbye when he leaves, and tips his ball cap. He doesn’t initiate conversation or ask others about their lives or make small talk--and that’s perfectly fine. That’s just not his style.

The other day, my friend and I were discussing what was behind the silence, if anything. Was it biologically determined silence (the things in our brains that tell us to speak up being at an abysmal level in his case) or polite silence (don’t speak until spoken to) or culturally conditioned silence (in many cultures, including American subcultures it is considered rude to ask someone about themselves) or was it a judgmental silence (i.e., you have nothing to teach me or share with me or add to my sense of what is important, interesting, worth my time, etc.) My friend confirmed this matter. It was, indeed, the latter. “He needs to be really engaged,” she said. “Unless the person talking is really funny or smart—he’s bored.”

This issue was bigger than just reticence. The bigger issue was this: Andy sits to the side and keeps a low profile, well a low profile in all respects except for one glaring detail. He tends to get pretty quietly wasted throughout the hours we spend in one another’s company. He tends to return to the cooler or the refrigerator or the liquor cabinet pretty regularly and pretty unabashedly. And that is OK. Live and let live, right? Right. But there’s something about this situation that doesn’t sit quite right. If he is so bored that he needs to pound drinks, why doesn’t he find friends, people, another community that engages him? Why doesn’t he pursue connections with wildly intelligent individuals or join MENSA or a similar organization where he can be sufficiently engaged? Is it that I’m not interesting enough to keep Andy from opening that sixth beer, or is that uninteresting people/an uninteresting planet/uninteresting living and lifestyle conditions are Andy’s neat excuse for getting plastered. Or, if the honest to goodness real reason he drinks heavily is the boredom he feels from his interaction with others, then it remains unclear why he hasn’t sought out those communities that would in fact engage him. There are a hell of a lot of interesting people out there—smart, funny, weird, inventive, exceptional human beings who, as far as I know, would likely engage the hell out of just about anyone.

If we were to consider – just consider – that alcoholics are at the mercy of their surroundings as much as anyone else, than why doesn’t boredom or boring people or a shitty job make every person on the planet drink in compulsive or unhealthy ways? Why doesn’t the man looking for work, with overdue bills and two screaming kids pound it? He should be pounding it harder than the guy who makes movies for a living and is surrounded by people asking his opinion on world events and cultural trends and pop culture events and the rest of it. Why does the former not need or want to hit the Jack Daniels? Why does the latter ponder having a cocktail with breakfast or, if not that, keep filling his glass at the party in the Valley? Filling and filling and filling… and then, waking up, the sensation that something awry has happened—something he did not intend to happen. Something that he promised his girlfriend, and his family, his producer, and HIMSELF would not happen again.

Part Three.

Drinking is such a funny thing. Such an easy thing to justify and such a tempting thing to cling to. To ask someone who uses it to consider living without it is like asking someone to live on Mars. You have an idea of what it would be like and the risk is sort of appealing, but, nah, better just stick to this world--even if this world has becoming pretty unsatisfying. Once you're used to that release, that relief, it is hard to imagine denying it to yourself. You believe it might be a good thing, or at least a healthy thing, but you're not quite sure how it would work. And this fear, this unknown, this reluctance to step away from it may be simply a choice--but, in my experience, it didn't feel like a choice. I felt like drinking was a pretty crucial part of the equation. Not always, not everyday, not in great quantities every time, yet often it felt involuntary, inexplicable, unmanageable, diseased. And as time went on, it began to feel more like that and less like good, wholesome, untroubled fun.

And the other thing is this. The memory of those good feelings and that special intimacy that drinking generates--you don't just forget. There are times when you miss it, when you desperately want it back. On TV last night I saw a woman who was feeling upset about an argument she'd had with a friend. She was crying and calling for answers and defending herself while asking if perhaps she was in fact to blame. She was with two other women and one of these ladies called out for a drink—a glass of white! Pinot Grigio! she screams—and the wine arrives and the friend puts it in the woman’s hand.

Magic.

Just like that. The pain is already slipping away. She has the wine in her hand, soon to follow is the warm feeling, the good feeling—the feeling of safety from feeling, ironically. Into the real feeling comes the analgesic, and then the unreal feeling, and then the void. Which, truth be told, feels pretty good. It feels like a numb dumb happiness. Well maybe not happiness, or yes, maybe exactly happiness—that blithe feeling with little depth.

The next day the other feeling returns. The complex or complicated feeling. What was it? Rejection? Anger? Boredom? Ennui? Fear? Insecurity? Whatever it was, it’s back. It was always there, despite the cover of wine or the beer or the long pull of whiskey—and it still needs addressing.

Let’s say you are this woman.

Do you:

A. Go to Sunday Champagne Brunch with a couple friends who will encourage you to have a mimosa.
B. Go to therapy (a thought so unpleasant you immediately banish it).
C. Lie in bed, thinking for a while, before returning to sleep.
D. Cry into your pillow. Insist that the world has conspired against you and you are hopeless.
E. Wander around the city all day and all night, buying shit you don’t need, staring at children in the park, asking some mystical force or source that seems to have abandoned ship what the hell you should do. Why can’t you just stop? Why. Can’t. You. Just. Stop.

You don’t know, but you know. You won't know, but you know. You know that admitting you can’t control this would involve taking a step—a huge step into a new world. It would involve taking the kind of searching and fearless emotional, moral, psychological inventory that you really don’t want to investigate. But you can't deny the sneaking suspicion that you’re avoiding something, that your life isn’t going the way it should, that if you keep living like this, something is going to happen. If not today, when?

You leave the house and see a man sitting on his front stoop. He’s reading the paper with a cup of coffee in his hand. He says hello when you pass and you say it back. How does he do it? you ask. Why can’t you be like that?

You’re walking down the street. Where the fuck are you going? You’re twenty-one and lost and scared and full of self pity. You spend the day writing in your journal and decide the time has come to get it together. When you get home your apartment is full of people, friends, drinkers. You almost weep with gratefulness. Patti Smith is playing. People are laughing. Your roommate hugs you hello. The guy you’re seeing walks over and hands you a joint. You take a hit before kissing him hello. “There’s beer in the fridge,” someone says. “Thanks,” you say and march to the kitchen, a smile on your face, almost a laugh.

You don’t have a problem, you say. You’re doing fine. A small worry flutters in your chest regarding the promises you made to yourself, the honesty you'd been flirting with only moments before. You cast the concern aside and reach into the cardboard box for a Premium. When you return to the living room, a friend is putting on a record. “For you!” she says. You hear the beginning of Heart of Gold and everyone starts singing.

Too Controversial for McSweeney's

2011-06-02T17:30:00.010-04:00

SEPTA circa 2006

thanks to Adam Boysen and Brandl Frey and MQT

From the Cutting Room Floor of Jane Austen (AKA Conversations with my Ex)

Me: I can’t believe I let you take those photos of me. Thank God I took them with me.
Him: I have copies of those photos, numb-nuts.

Me: Well, I guess we all need to learn.
Him: Even young girls, Abbi. Even they need to learn. You can’t protect them.
Me: I just wish they didn’t have to cut their teeth on your nuts.

Him: Did I ever tell you about the time my girlfriend got an abortion?
Me: Oh, that old "chestnut.”

Him: Do you know what all guys want?
Me: I don’t think I’m going to be able to stomach this.
Him: They want a row of women leaning over, with just their asses showing.
Me: Ah.

Him: Where the fuck is my notebook???!!!
Me: I don’t know.
Him: I’m FUCKED. It has all my notes. I need it for the exam.
Me: Where did you see it last?
Him: My ex’s apartment.
Me: Oh. Yeah. It’s probably gone.

Me: How’s the collaborative poem?
Him: Someone added “comma”. What kind of word to add is "comma"!? It's like that pretentious but actually middle-brow sentence Wallace lampoons in WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE: "Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival." I hate everyone.

Him: She’s definitely gained weight.
Me: She just ran a marathon! What the fuck are you talking about?
Him: Yeah, but you can see it. Her pants looked tight on her ass. She does wear tight clothes, though.

Him: How’s your Nietzsche paper coming?
Me: I’d rather not discuss it.
Him: I wrote out some thoughts about the first section.
Me: Lay it on me.
Him: So you like this guy. He’s so hot! You’d totally fuck him. But he likes your friend. She’d totally fuck him. So you call your friend a slut! And because she’s a slut, you must be, I don’t know, good. This evil / good, the language of Resentment.
Me: Can I call you back, my dad’s calling.

Me: I found photos of your students on your mom’s computer. Um. Why do you have those?
Him: You know how you have photos of all your friends? Well I don’t. So I have these.
Me: Right, but they don’t know you have them. If I told them you saved their photos to a folder, would they think that was normal?
Him: Abbi, you are fucking psycho. Why were you LOOKING AT MY PICTURES!!??!!

Him: Thanks for letting me borrow your car.
Me: Thanks for picking me up… Why is the passenger seat of my car reclined?
Him: What? Oh. I gave Oscar a ride, and he wanted to sleep.
Me: When? What do you mean?
Him: DO NOT DO THIS RIGHT NOW.

Me: I need to know. Did you cheat on me? If you did, it’s OK. I just need to know.
Him: Aaarrrgh.
Me: Please tell me. I can’t handle lying.
Him: Have you seen my copy of Unterwegs zur Sprache?
Me: It’s in the kitchen.

Me: What did you think about my email?
Him: No, none of these define me. I have passed remorse. And I have been eating my critics, so I feel no irritation from them.
Me: I see.

Him: I’m going to drink this entire bottle of vodka.
Me: They say it’s good to have goals.

Me: [lying in bed] You were flirting with her. You flirt with everyone. It’s an open secret.
Him: That’s bullshit! You are just possessive and jealous.
Me: Maybe, but you are a flirt.
Him: By your definition, if I talk to someone, I’m flirting with them.
Me: No. You talk to people in a lecherous manner.
Him: I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE! [jumps out of bed and flips on the light.] You are not going to be satisfied until you’ve sucked the life out of me! [aims leg at door separating bedroom from living room and kicks the door out of the wall.]
Me: [sitting up] What the fuck are you doing?
Him: You are going to destroy me!
[grabs mattress I’m sitting on and begins pulling it off the bed, dragging me along. I hold onto it for dear life. He pulls it all the way into the living room and collapses on the couch.]
Me: You need to calm down.
Him: [crouching over me.] Do you love me?
Me: What?
Him: Do. You. Love. Me. Please say it!
Me: I can’t right now.
[cut to him standing on a ladder, naked, hammering the door back into its hinges.]

Him: Did I tell you about the time my mom found me masturbating?
Me: Yes.

Me: What is this?
Him: What? Oh. That. It’s nothing.
Me: It’s not nothing. It’s a drawing.
Him: I was drawing. I haven’t drawn anything for a while.
Me: It’s a drawing of that girl, Meryl. Your poetry student.
Him: No it’s not.
Me: Yes. Yes it is. I’ve seen the photo on her Facebook page. This is a drawing of that photo.
Him: IT’S HER FUCKING BIRTHDAY, OK?! I didn’t get her anything last year and this year I want to get her something special!
[later. Looking at Meryl’s F-Book page I note her birth date: it is five months in the future.]

Me: Did you get my friend’s email about the wedding?
Him: I thought it was a Nigerian E-Mail Scam.
Me: They want everyone to make a toast.
Him: I'm certain that wit and intellect will flow from each unpracticed mouth, followed by wailing, later, silence. They want these people to give them a toast??? Asking these people to toast is like asking a hooker to deliver convocation at Radcliffe.

Me: Can you just tell me the truth? Have you slept with anyone?
Him: I haven’t slept with anyone.
Me: Well it just seems like maybe you have. I mean, our sex life sucks.
Him: Well that’s because you are so judgmental of me.
Me: That’s because you come home at two in the morning.
Him: I NEED A LIFE!
Me: One that involves other women. Girls, actually.
Him: I can’t take it! You won’t be happy until I’m living in a cage!
Me: Why is being honorable tantamount to living in a cage?

Me: I said I thought she was a good match for him.
Him: I can only imagine that when you said she was good for him you meant there was no way of accounting for her being with him and so let optimism prevail.

Me: Are you in your office?
Him: I'm at the Anderson lab and am leaving to go over to the usual waiting spot. Meet me there when you get done (no rush of course, I have books to read.)
Me: OK. How was your afternoon?
Him: A large section of bushes burned across the street from the Tech center, uncontrolled, while a bunch of Temple police men stared at it. Eventually it spread to a car parked in the lot there. Then someone showed up with a fire extinguisher. Then much too late the firemen showed up. I was rooting for the fire.
Me: So will you be ready to go by 5 o’clock or not?

Me: [answer phone] Hello?
Him: I’M ON THE FUCKING TURNPIKE AND YOUR CAR IS FUCKED!!!
Me: [walking out of the PA Museum of Art hallway and into a stairwell] Can you be more specific?
Him: The engine light is on and it’s just FUCKED, OK? It’s DONE.
Me: I think you should pull off and go to a garage.
Him: Thanks for the brilliant idea! I already thought of that!
Me: OK, well, I don’t know what I can do. I can’t help you from here.
Him: What the fuck? This isn’t my problem. This is YOUR CAR!
Me: But you borrowed MY CAR so you could go to Jersey City and watch “the fight”; hence, the car is in your care. Can you at least get it somewhere and have it looked at?
Him: It’s not my car! I have to go! I’m in a total SHIT STORM HERE! [hangs up]

Him: What did you do today?
Me: I took the train to Elizabeth, NJ, where you left the car. I took it to a Shell station and got it serviced and then drove it home. How about you?

Me: Just tell me. Please. Did you cheat on me?
Him: Come on.
Me: Please. Just tell me. I can’t handle you lying to me. I can handle fucking up.
Him: No.
Me: Are you sure?
Him: Yes. You’re going to make yourself crazy.

Me: It’s such a beautiful night. I love the smell of Eucalyptus.
Him: I slept with Anastasia the night you went to New York for Brandl’s party.
Me: Oh.
Him: But it was awful. I felt like I wanted to fucking die.
Me: Mmm… was that the only time?
Him: Yes.

Him: Are you saying you’re never going to talk to me again?
Me: That’s right.
Him: WELL FINE! I put up these bookcases and now they’re coming down! [begins dismantling my cheap as shit IKEA metal bookcases].
Me: I’ll be in the stairwell.
Him: You are the most cruel and heartless person I’ve ever met!

Him: I went to a therapist.
Me: Good for you.
Him: I thought you’d be proud.
Me: I am.
Him: She said you were emotionally abusive.
Me: Ah-ha. Well, sounds like you’re getting your money’s worth.

Him: [sends email with subject: “Federal Aviation Releases Crash Transcript Ha Ha”]
Me: I don’t know why you would send this. I don’t think this is funny.
Him: I thought you’d appreciate it. I guess this pile of crap between us won’t allow anything through.

Him: I found this in the classifieds of the City Paper, and seeing how it pretty much speaks for like everything, I wanted to give it to you: YOU, who have become the VOICE of, the woman of letters for this kind of writing. I think it would make an appropriate epigraph for your collection of stories. Here it is:
"Thanks for ruining MY special night
out, ignoring me and making out
right in front of ME! What the fuck?
I deleted both you fuckers off
MySpace. I hope you both get
syphilis!"
Me: Thanks.
Him: How’s the dog?
Me: Bobo’s fine.
Him: I have often thought of Bobo as 'the young phenomenon' and of you as Gustave Flaubert. I suppose that places me as Maxime Du Camp, whom I believe was the first to photograph the Sphinx. I love you of course of course.
Me: I cannot get over what’s happened between us and I won’t pretend to do so. I’d like to come get the rest of my stuff.
Him: Why not wait until the storm intensifies to move your stuff. Why not wait for hurricane.
Me: What does this mean? Why so melodramatic? I’d like to get my TV and books. I left you with $200 worth of groceries. And I paid your rent this month. What else do you want from me?
Him: The groceries rotted. I didn't eat them. I don't watch the TV. It makes me feel sick. You said the suddenness of your move meant you would offer half-rent for May. I don't want your money. I meant hurricane to indicate the volume of water falling from the skies.

Me: How many times did you cheat on me.
Him: A lot.

Finally,
I used to have a social networking profile. It was during the time when everyone was “setting” their profiles to: “private”. I changed my profile name to “This profile is set to: who gives a shit”.
Me: Check again. It appears, indeed, you dropped me.
Him: Well I see that now. But I did not drop you. In fact I was looking at your profile the other day, from my friends list. Maybe you dropped me by accident? I swear that you were on there just last week (obviously I have not been on- line on weekends (on welfare!! ha!)). But here is a prose poem for you:
“You must be this profile is set to who gives a shit's friend to send this profile is set to who gives a shit a message.” I hope you have enjoyed it.
Me: Thank you for that. If I don’t talk to you again before I leave for Minnesota, I wish you luck with everything.

my own place, circa 2008

Two Poems in My Head

2011-06-02T10:53:00.002-04:00

It's all I have to bring today (26)
by Emily Dickinson

It's all I have to bring today –
This, and my heart beside –
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell –
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

A Drinking Song
by W. B. Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Cy Twombly, Leda

Chapter Four from "Jane's Book"

2011-06-01T13:07:00.010-04:00

Chapter Four
Things Happened. Time Passed.

Two years ago, it was a Sunday night and you were probably sleeping. You were probably rolling to your side, lost in a dream that would not trouble you and you would not recall. You were in the third of eight hours of slumber and somewhere in an apartment, I was lighting a cigarette with the burned down end of another one. I was removing a Replacements CD from the player and inserting Tori Amos, dropping a little ash in the compartment and blowing it out. I was twirling around my living room (a great big room with no furniture except six bookcases and a powder room stool). I was searching around my apartment for where I set my glass of chardonnay and there it was--of course!--sitting on top of the toaster.

At some point in the spinning, George, my Chihuahua, trotted to the door and turned to me with his black doe eyes. So I put on a robe and some loafers and we went out to the common area of the apartment complex. I brought my glass. George sniffed the leaves and rocks and trees. I sipped my wine. The moon was full and round and celestial and the sky was deep and throbbing. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I was alive. I was physically and simply alive. I didn't have to think. I didn't have to ruminate. I didn't have to worry about bills and a threatening ex and looming deadlines. I didn't have to worry about where my career was going or if there was ever going to be any career to speak of. I didn't have to worry about atoms and death and decay. I was here. Now. Full of the moment and full of wine.

Perhaps you woke Monday morning with a clear head and clear thoughts and a clear vision of who you were, where you'd been, where you were headed. Perhaps you slipped from bed like a dancer to the shower, where you bathed and lathered with care and time and attention. Perhaps you stepped to the bath mat, spread lotion on your delicate skin and turned on morning radio. And so what if the next morning I woke up on the floor, wrapped in my comforter, the television on from late last night and George curled at my head? So what if my head was slightly pounding and I remembered I had a meeting first thing and I'd not prepared any materials? No one had been hurt. No one's life had been in danger. No one had been called (I checked my phone to confirm this). No one had been put in a position of discomfort, or lashed out upon, or anything at all. I’d walk in late and the admin would say “good morning, Jane” and I’d smile and run to my office. I would plod through the day and when it was over I would leave work a little early and pick up take-out and curl back up inside the same blanket. I'd snuggle with George and a diet soda and watch whatever was playing on TBS. And all would be well.

That's the way things were happening in my life. A day at work, maybe some time with friends, a new date, an old boyfriend, maybe a workout or a run or a movie, then disrobing from work attire or gym clothes into pajamas. Then maybe some hummus and carrots. And maybe some seltzer or crackers and cheese. But always, almost always, a glass of wine, and then another, and sometimes some more. A lot of the time it was just me, or just me and George, but not all of the time. Some of the time other people got involved. I would be getting drunk with someone else. Talking with a friend. Sharing. Comparing the experience of being alive, comparing childhoods and education and love (especially love gone wrong) and drug use and travel and books and art. Comparing siblings and dreams and jobs and indiscretions and airports and childhood fantasies. Things like that. These evenings and conversations were always so well intended and the drinking opened up something between the two of us that I couldn't otherwise access. It opened up a permission to do anything, say anything, give up anything. And I often did. I often gave up things. Secrets about my life or the lives of mutual friends. Declarations of love I didn't mean to impart, sometimes didn't even feel. And of course, physical intimacy. What more needs to be said about that. I got drunk. Things happened. Often, things I didn't want to happen. Things I didn't mean to happen. Suddenly the night would come back to me and I would see it like a movie. You are standing in a stairwell between apartment buildings. You are kissing someone. Someone you didn't mean to kiss. Someone who wasn't your boyfriend. Someone who was barely your friend. You are following him up the stairs, then inside, getting naked, then fucking, then passing out.

You were doing these things and then you weren't. You were doing them again, and then you weren't doing them anymore. You were slipping up and then back on track. You were evading situations and claiming victory, claiming: change. You were succumbing to a moment of folly and the next day proclaiming its absolute singularity, in the scheme of things, the scheme being the design of whatever suited your desired outcome.

Sometimes the mess ups weren't about sex at all. Sometimes they were about loneliness or desperation. Sometimes they were about depression or anxiety. And sometimes they were about your genetic predisposition to respond to booze the way a newborn puppy searches for its mother's source of milk.

One such night went down like this. It was a Friday, or maybe a Saturday. I was in a difficult and upsetting position in my life. I was twenty-eight, recently broken up with Ben Doran and pining for Alan, the man I'd begun seeing immediately after Ben. Alan and I had decided to be just friends. I wanted to be with him, but I wasn't ready. I was still entrenched in my previous relationship and I was not ready to believe in this person's love for me; indeed, I had no love for myself. Ben and I were friendly again. Friendly in a very toxic and dependent way. We were using each other for company and for familiarity. The familiarity was a very cruel and unhealthy dynamic and often involved booze of some variety as well as accusations, incriminations and degradations. On this evening, Alan had invited me over to his apartment to collect some things I'd left there over the course of our initial fling. I was sure he'd called me because he missed me and had used the excuse of the things in order to see me. I showered and dressed and groomed myself with a great deal of care. I wanted him to see me and feel something, the same thing I wanted to feel for myself. I'm not sure if I drank anything before I went over to his apartment (a fancy loft in the city) but I probably did. We spent about an hour or two together and then he announced he had a date and had to leave. I was stunned, but I acted as though this was the most natural thing in the world and I was even happy for him, I was proud of him. We drank a couple glasses of wine and I was feeling only the smallest bit buzzed, but the wine had made me bold so when he was about to call a cab to meet his date, I said: let me drive you; my car's right outside.

When we got in the car he received a call and spoke to someone (I assumed her--whoever she was) and I began to feel hopelessly desperate and pathetic. What in the hell was I doing? This was more than a little wretched. I decided that when I got back to my apartment I would get smashed. When we arrived at the destination he said something like, take care, and then he got out. I drove away and turned up the radio to drown out my icky feeling and then Ben called and said he was at a bar nearby and asked if I would join him. And although I really detested Ben and knew that nothing good could come from our continuing to spend time together, I told him I would be there as fast as I could.

When I got there, the bar seemed like a good choice. It was crowded and noisy, but not packed or deafening. The bartender poured me a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and when Ben went out to smoke the man to my right engaged me in a warm, friendly, unthreatening conversation. We were laughing and I was only on my first (large) glass and then the man swung his arms wide, in order to make a rather ineffable point, and in doing so his large glass of red wine went flying all over me. I was wearing white and the wine literally went all over me like a canvas. He was horrified and the bar was shocked and the bartenders were apologetic and I, in all honesty, did not care. I did not give a shit. I placated him and the staff and laughed and accepted a free glass of more wine--on the house--and when Ben came back he seemed amused. The whole thing was amusing, wasn’t it? What a mess, I thought. What a mess I am--ha ha ha! And I spun the circumstances into a big comedy, the comedy of real life, the comedy of folly and error and forgiveness and LIFE. This was a new outfit, a gift from my best friend and the clothes were expensive and the truth was, if I hadn't been drunk and if I hadn't known another glass was in the mail, I would have been heartbroken. But soon enough the girl to my left was talking to me and she seemed cool. She seemed real and nice and smart and down to earth. And I liked talking to her so much that I kept drinking! I barely noticed when two of Ben’s friends came to the bar to meet us.

The last thing I remember is getting into an altercation with the bartender, but about what, I have no idea. When I woke up in bed I wondered how things had rolled out. I wondered what the bartender said that got me upset and I wondered how I'd gotten home. Had I paid my tab? If so, did I leave a tip? Did I leave my card there? Hmm. It appeared Ben was in bed next to me. We were both in our clothes and I thought: Thank God. I probably said it out loud. I'm sure I paid and tipped and Ben drove me home and just stayed over because it was so late. I'm sure I was on autopilot and no one, except Ben, knew how drunk I was.

But the truth is, I was kidding myself. If I were being honest, I would've admitted that everyone in the bar knew how drunk I was. How? Oh, well, I'll tell you. I was talking to this girl, drinking my wine (it must have been my fifth glass) and looking at Ben out of the corner of my eye. I felt sorry for myself. He was talking to his friends and I was alone at the bar in wine-soaked clothes and I knew I was drunk, though not as drunk as I remember thinking I wanted or needed to be. Alan was on a date with someone undoubtedly more together than me and he was probably thinking he narrowly missed a bullet. I felt like my life had been derailed by fate or chance or circumstance. Maybe it was Ben’s fault. Maybe it was this city’s fault or the University's or my friends’. Whatever. I would drink and the feeling would subside and I was making friends with this girl. That was good. Right? I remember us getting on very well. But at some point I started to sort of paw at her. You see, she was with other friends and she had turned back to them to say something and I sort of leaned in as well, reaching out, trying to get her attention. I was tapping at her and saying things like: wait, I just, listen. And she was being very sweet and saying: I'm listening, uh-huh, oh and the like. After my wine I ordered a beer--obvious choice--and it came in a tall glass and when I reached for it (lunged, really) I fell forward. I grasped at something, anything, to break my fall and luckily my hands found the bar. I steadied myself, my knees buckling beneath me and my hair swinging around and by the time I regained some semblance of balance everyone in the place had stood up and Ben had crossed the room and met the eyes of the bartender in time to say: no need to say it--we're leaving. At the end, I walked through the bar, held up by Ben and told the bartender who was following us out: you're a fucking asshole. He turned to Ben and said, do not come back here again.

This was a story I kept to myself. Girlfriends and sisters share stories of drunken mistakes and indiscretions and hook-ups and hangovers during morning meetings. But clinging to a bar?

II.

After I finally excised Ben from my life, I was able to be with Alan in a way that felt real, loving, healthy. I recall the circumstances of my and Alan’s first date. He'd proposed meeting at a coffee shop, a place in the city that sold coffee drinks and chocolate confections. I replied: how about a place that serves drinks?

He told this story sometimes to friends and everyone always laughed. Hahaha, isn't it funny that I'm bad, that I'm kind of scandalous, that I'm almost male. I absolutely wanted to have some kind of power, some leverage, and drinking gave me that--it made me think so anyway. Of course, it weakened me, it led me around by the nose, it made me stupid and bombastic and mendacious and obnoxious, and it made me sloppy. But, I chose to view those nights as the outliers. The real nights were sexy and smart and I was brimming over with poise, confidence, humor and warmth. In my mind, I was a classy broad who could keep up with men, and maybe even surpass them.

It was getting harder and harder, though, to keep track of which nights were which. When you are drinking, you lose track of time. Of course, I am referring to the phenomenon of 8:30 p.m. inexplicably becoming 11:00 p.m. and again, inexplicably, becoming 1:48 a.m., but what I really mean is you lose whole years. One afternoon, you're twenty-three sitting in a New York City restaurant with pink tablecloths, having a glass of wine with your equally young, attractive best friend and her older male boss, and the next afternoon, you're in your thirties, pouring a glass of wine from the eco-box in the refrigerator into a coffee mug, because, you know, fuck it. The afternoon in New York could be yesterday. But it isn't. It's nearly a decade ago now. And you aren't visiting your girlfriend and immersing yourself for the weekend in her commercial real estate world of wine with lunch and cigarettes under awnings and taxi cab backseat giggling. No. You're in another eastern city, working a job that pays well but is in no sense gratifying or challenging. You're living with a man, the first real man you've ever been involved with who expects something of you. And what he expects, is that you won't come home from ladies’ night tonight and, again, be trashed.

But, unfortunately, you are. You simply aren't ready to not be trashed. You aren't ready to sit with your thoughts and your feelings. You aren't ready to say goodbye to the past. You aren't ready to act on your biggest fears. You thought you were brave, bold, brazen, but you are beginning to see that you're not so powerful as you think. In fact, maybe you aren't bold at all. Maybe you're hiding. Running. Pointing any finger you can at any man, job, friend, time in life that didn't go your way or tell you that you were wonderful. Fuck them, you say, uncorking a bottle of wine. And in the morning, you wake up, dazed and angry and disappointed and full of self-contempt. This won't be the morning where you realize you have to give up drinking, but it's an important morning. It's a morning that pushes you closer. And closer. Until you're ready to be there.

AMD

"A McSweeney's Quest Thing"

2011-05-19T10:06:00.005-04:00

...during a time in life
- photo by Anika Johnson

On 5/12/11 5:43 PM, "ABBI M DION" wrote:
DICKTIONARYAbbi Mireille Dion
(215) 983-9356
abbidion@temple.edu

“If this is chick lit then life is a joke.”AMD

A
Atroche: A man who lives in your apartment (rent free), eats your groceries, sleeps in your bed, uses your shampoo/razors/soap/towels, drives your car and tells you he loves you. In his spare time he cheats on you, lies to you, buys drinks for girls, sends secret texts and emails and tells you that you have mental problems.

B
Barf: What you say when you see your 35 year old boyfriend fawning over one of his 19 year old Intro to Poetry female students.

C
Crapola: This is a story a man tells you about himself that is total bullshit (e.g., "I am incredibly shrewd" or "I have been waiting my whole life to meet you"). It can also be a story about why he didn't answer when you called.

D
Douche Shuffle: The dance done when a man who believes he is not in your presence, realizes you are there. For example, say you have entered the coffee store he frequents, and you see a girl sitting at a table—a girl you believe he is having an affair with—and so you approach and being chatting with her. You notice his book and cell phone sitting on the table. She is uncomfortable. A door opens and he swaggers in. He has a spring to his step, a sparkle in his eye, chin up and hands in pockets. He notices you and changes his gait, his nonchalance, his cheater's stride. He continues forward with simultaneous horror and delight in his heart. This is the douche shuffle.

E
Email Persona: This is the absurd grandiose fun-loving personality adopted by your lover when he is speaking to other women on the web. This persona is full of promise and freedom and excitement; he is smart and passionate and interested; eternally attentive. He will use a phrase such as "I am not a religious person, but you were singing to me on the street and it was the closest thing I've ever felt to religion. I wish I’d gone away with you then." You recognize this as a persona, because it is how he wooed you.

F
Fuck: This is a man who cheats on you and lies about it. For example, say you go to New York for the weekend and call him to chat, ostensibly. Say he doesn't answer but calls the next morning to tell you how much he loves you. Say you talk for a few minutes and ask what he did last night. Say he yells at you for being psychotic and demanding. Now let's say you believe this and begin to detest yourself. Say that one night, after breaking up, you are on his porch and he is drinking a glass of straight vodka. Say he decides to tell you, mid-silence, that in fact he did sleep with a girl that night.

G
Greece Vacation: The trip you take after your relationship has crashed and burned. You go with the purpose of remembering yourself before you met him. One morning you will wake up from an all night drink-a-thon and find a block of feta cheese exploded across your hotel room. You will not be able to account for this.

H
Happy: The thing he tried to extinguish within you; the thing you watched die down, as if you were helpless and could only stand there, holding vigil.

I
Introspection: When you wander around the city of Philadelphia, lie awake at night, write in journal after journal, lose your focus at work, drive in circles and circles and circles, trying to figure out why he couldn’t love you.

J
Jello Shots: A beverage (?) you watched him consume at the undergrad parties he took you to. You always wanted to go home – to go home and sit and stare at each other and talk about anything, really. But you’d often go home alone, and you would lie in bed, listening, waiting for the sound of the apartment door opening.

K
Kristmas with Kransuzisch: Title of the movie that will made about your life during this period. It will make no fucking sense and provide no solace or answers but recognition.

L
Love: The thing you can be in…with someone else. Someone who isn't a coward and a liar and an insecure fucked up a-hole from hell. (Oops. Tried to cut that, but couldn’t.)

M
Martini Marathon: The race you run to the finish line of complete forgetting.

N
Naked Photos: What you find on his camera. She will be twenty-two, but will look almost twelve. She will have blond highlighted pigtails. Wide doll eyes and a rosy lip-glossed mouth that she will mold into a pout with every flash. She will have small breasts and her body will be virtually hairless. He will have photographed her in the shower, twirling in the living room, kissing his adult male mouth. You will put the camera back in his bag and that night play a game of gin rummy with him. You’ll feel like you’ve been shot in the chest, but you don’t know how to tell him, where to begin, or what you'd want him to say.

O
Out of Proportion: The accusation he will level against you every time you try to bring an issue out of your inner world of fear and anxiety and into the real world where it can be discussed (in theory). He will tell you that you're blowing (insert example) totally out of proportion. You will say: "I found a receipt from August 11th. It says you got four beers and two burgers at one in the afternoon on Wednesday. You told me you were at Barnes and Noble all day." And he will respond: "We just went out for drinks [in the middle of the day, secretly, and with an age difference of 15 years—and a history of inappropriate mutual flirtation]. I didn't tell you because I knew you'd do this! You're blowing it way out of proportion!"

P
Parenthetical Naming/Shaming: This is when your lover sends you a note or text that clearly establishes dominance such as: "It takes two to be miserable, Abbi" or "We're just different people, Abbi."

Q
Quiz: This is something he gives his students. He makes it up at eight in the morning as he takes the train to campus. He hasn’t planned a lesson, so he makes up a quiz on the back of a loose sheet of paper. He gives it to you and asks you type it. And to print it. And to copy it. He says he’ll pick it up after he gets a coffee. When you say, “I have a lot of work this morning and I’m hungover, too” he will scream into your face “well you have a FUCKING OFFICE JOB AND I’M THE WORKING POOR – I’M A FUCKING ADJUNCT AND IF YOU DON’T DO THIS I’M FUCKED!” You do the tasks. You deliver the quizzes to his classroom yourself.

R
Relief: What you look for, pray for, long for – but the truth is: you don’t even know where to look, or how.

S
Signature Move: The shit he tries to foist on people as genuine and inspired behavior/reactions. Like: feeding the birds in Rittenhouse park. Or: sending an email image attachment that is wry and inscrutable. Or: making you feel sorry for him while he simultaneously tells you how isolated he’s felt his entire life and that you are refreshing, bright and redemptive.

T
Therapy: A place where you go to bitch about your life. But, secretly, you hope it will work and you will find a way to change. One day, driving to therapy over your lunch break, you stop at a stoplight and see one of your ex’s girls standing at the corner. She is laughing, tossing her young hair in the breeze and her eyes are literally shining with joy. You stare agape and when the light turns, you pull on.

U
Understanding: What you try to provide over and over to the person who does not give a shit about you and/or your feelings. You will say things like: "I don't get it, actually. I don't get why you have pictures of your students on your parents' computer – pictures that you saved from their social networking profiles. Please help me understand." Or you will think things like: he's had really difficult experiences in life—I just need to be more understanding of his behavior, in light of all that."

V
Vomiting: What you feel on the verge of every time you step out of bed, out of the shower, out of the apartment onto the street, out of your office and onto the bus, out of a bar and into a cab, out of your skin and into the psychic awful terror of realizing how bad things are going for you.

W
Wine: What you consume by the bottle(s) when the love of your life – the man who you’ve shown to everyone, who you’ve envisioned a future with, a forever – is gone and now you are lying in bed – you are unable to sleep, unable to think about anything except how terrifyingly sad and alone you feel.

X
Xanadu: A literary reference. One of many that his other girls don't recognize. But intelligence, recognition and associative abilities don't mean shit to him – despite his claims otherwise.

Y
Years: Time that will go by. And guess the fuck what? You will be grateful for every moment, every learning experience, every night you woke up breathless, moving through the house, looking for something you can't quite place; every car that drove away and you never saw again; every day you found a spot on the wall to stare at, waiting to feel safe in your mind, your body; every moment that came – right out of nowhere -- and when you felt it, you took a deep, restoring breath: a glimpse of you without agony, a preview of a new life.

Z
Zero: the amount of tolerance you will have for yourself if you find yourself in a shit relationship with a shit man who gets off on giving you shit. You will give him no excuse. You will give yourself no excuse for sticking it out. You will be on the move, out the door, hitting the black box of sauv blanc in the living room with your best girls, hitting the street with tennis shoes, hitting the keys with finger tips, and hitting yourself with the kind of love and humor you know exists – no matter what that Dawkins’ quoting poetaster had to say. That MoFo doesn’t live here anymore. Your bookshelves are filled with the kind of rage that’s in the interest of peace. Experience that is honest. That is real. And while he rhapsodizes about The Real to a girl who’s just left her parents’ house, you will be working on your own definition of The Real. A definition that will turn into a book. One day, he’ll pick up a copy and though he won’t read a word, he will still send you an email of felicitous congratulations.

The End

---
From: McSweeney's Web Submissions [mailto:websubmissions@mcsweeneys.net]
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2011 8:20 AM
To: ABBI M DION
Subject: Re: Dicktionary_by Abbi Dion

Hi, Abbi -

There’s a lot to like here, the voice definitely has bite, but the tone is a little too angry for our use. Appreciate your considering us, though.

Best,
Chris

---

Christopher Monks
Website Editor

And The Hits from McSweeneys Keep Coming

2011-05-12T15:53:00.001-04:00

From: Abbi M Dion
To: websubmissions@mcsweeneys.net
Subject: If This is ChickLit then Life is a Joke__AbbiDion

If This is Chick Lit then Life is a Joke
By Abbi Mireille Dion
(215) 983-9356
abbidion@temple.edu

I'm standing here. You're typing.

This is no one's problem. There are bigger ones. What does this particular problem tell us about culture; how does it say what isn't said better by the sparrow standing in the window sill as I write this… What does sill mean? Where does it come from? I remember drinking all night with you. Carousing. Carouse. From the German, garaus. Literally, to drain the cup. That night. I said. I want this to be the last time I tell someone these stories. You said, I remember saying that when I was your age. Hmm. What kind of statement is this making about people? In Harpers magazine this month there is a picture of a man and a woman, home erectus 600,000 years ago.

And just recently I learned they walked the earth alongside homo sapiens, which means of course, not that they hung around together, but that, at some point, walking across Asia, they might have seen one another from a distance.

It was strange to learn this when I did. Strange because the question of such a prospect had been in my thoughts, the wonder, and I had been meaning to find out. But then on Sunday, you just dropped the information in my lap. In passing conversation. Like, hey, don't you think it is amazing that in the course of evolution...

We were sitting in the apartment. You were studying for an exam. I was picking up clothes from the floor thinking about how to end my story, and ginger, how to make crystallized ginger. Thinking you must have to shave the ginger root into strips to start, then cover the strips with sugar, then lay them flat to dry. But I needed them now, for something I was cooking. To pass the time. So I did steps one and two and put them in the oven in a bowl; there weren't any pans. And then I started writing and listening to music and I forgot about the ginger in the oven and it had turned to slime. But I used it anyway and if you ask me, the rice pudding was exquisite.

I wonder if the man and the woman in the picture thought about each other as individuals, as unique and singular in the universe. Maybe this question is too modern and banal. Maybe I should ask, did they speak a language that resembles our own? Did they think things they would not say. Like, I'm afraid of a lot of things.

In the dictionary, above carouse, is the entry: carotid. Meaning either of the two principle arteries which convey blood from the aorta to the head: one is on each side of the neck. From the Greek karoun—to plunge into sleep or stupor.

You told me while typing out thoughts on the notion of cultural studies that Neanderthals buried their dead, that they put flowers by their graves. Neanderthal comes from the name of a man who wrote hymns: Joachim Neander.

And once

I saw a ghost.

It was winter. Minnesota. I was walking across a frozen golf course. Like a landscape painting of a hunter in the snow. You came from behind a tree. The wind in fir branches. You were the snowman.

And so was I.

Did we invent God to explain the messy apartment, the messy instance of washing the dishes while you recite Arnold, the messy war and messy unforeseen deaths?

Or to explain this moment in the snow.

The bourgeois explanation is less fun. And I like fun.

What kind of statement am I making by saying this.
__

From: Web Submissions [mailto:websubmissions@mcsweeneys.net]
To: Abbi M Dion
Subject: Re: If This is ChickLit then Life is a Joke__AbbiDion

Hi, Abbi -

Well-told, but not a good fit for the site. We’re primarily interested in stuff bent on making us laugh out loud.

Best,
Chris

once upon a time...

2011-04-27T19:04:00.005-04:00

C’era una volta. This is how a story begins. There was a time. There was a time when I was musing upon something. Something like a future. A real life. I was nineteen when I left the states for Italy. I was to stay for a year and attend l'universita di bologna. This seemed good, as I knew that my life at the University of Minnesota was bleak: it involved a lot of skipping class, smoking pot out of gravity bongs and developing disastrous love affairs with people for whom I had little real feelings. I knew it would be good to go away. But I didn't know what a year was. Do you know what twelve months feels like?

The day before I left I was standing in my cleared out apartment. I was holding an ice cube on my wrist and melting it into the hot skin. A bee had just stung me. My wrist was swelling and throbbing. My heart was pounding. The landlord signed the check. I got in the back of the car and my parents drove 80 miles per hour down 35E to the Lindbergh Terminal. There, I kissed them goodbye, took photographs, waved and walked through the gate.

I was drunk and probably still stoned when I got off the plane. In the Bologna airport, Radiohead was playing. Oh, yeah, we in Europe now, I said. It was 1999 and I was not even in my twenties yet, but the weariness hung over me like a dull worry, like rain on Sunday morning, like a letter from the bank. I pretended it wasn’t there, wasn’t real, was something I was concocting and therefore could easily unconcoct. I got drunk at dinner, was propositioned by the waiter, and when I refused, he pinned me against the bathroom stall and shoved his tongue down my throat. I wandered home and promised to be less friendly. Laugh less. Talk less. Keep a low profile.

The year was long and strange. I went to the doctor frequently. Am I dying? I asked over and over. What does it all mean? I asked the descending sun from my balcony. What does it all mean? I asked the wine from its bottle. What does it all mean? I asked the hole in my head that grew wider with each successive inquiry.

I knew only one thing for sure that year. That Parmigianino was a genius and that discovering him had made something tolerable inside me. The miles I walked, in search of a thought, a feeling, an understanding that would bring everything together. How to make sense of the randomness? What did it matter if I could quote Ungaretti or Saba if there were people dying, including me? The infinite was acute, and so was my loneliness. I wandered home everyday, pulled a kitchen chair out to the balcony and lit a cigarette. I unwrapped what recent purchase I’d acquired at the Virgin record store. That year Moby’s album Play came out. I listened to it endlessly. A single by Blur that was unimaginably depressing. Un cantautore chiamato Ligabue. A disc called Hits of the 80s full of songs I’d mostly never heard. A No Doubt single called Simple Kind of Life that struck me as particularly apt, despite finding the rest of their work unspeakably awful. I’d put in one of these discs and open a bottle of wine and smoke and drink and wait. I marked off calendar days like marks on a prison wall. I knew my mind was hanging by a string and rather than do the difficult work of rebuilding it, I decided to cling to that last thread and ride it till morning.

The day I left was a comedy of errors that if I relayed would lose some of the magic of that enterprise, but one thing’s forever in my mind: running alongside a train, my friend’s boyfriend holding the door, my luggage inside, and last night’s dress blowing back as I ran.

AMD, il 16 di aprile. 2011.

A Happy Story, by AMD

2011-04-27T13:40:00.003-04:00

Abbi and Mandy, June, 1994

At the end of my freshman year I made the curious decision to try out for the cheerleading squad. Now, we can agree that the reputation of a cheerleader is commonly one of less distinguished merit, less respect, less illustrious charm and profound admiration. And while these labels are all fitting, they are more accurate in a throwback sense. Cheerleading, frankly, has less to do with ra-ra, and more to do with acrobatics, physical strength and general rhythm and dance. I’m not an apologist. Just turn on ESPN2 at one a.m. and you’ll see what I mean.

On the day of tryouts, we filed into the gym and were told that this was it: our big chance. We had two minutes to prove that we deserved the honor of cheering on the Mounds View Mustangs! We were also told that one of the judges had neglected to bring her calculator. Did any of us have one on hand? What luck! I proffered my TI-Eighty??? from my backpack and resumed stretching. The tryout was brief and uneventful. We did no-handed cartwheels and back-flips and a complicated handclapping cheer called Get the Beat. A week or two later, the results were posted and then, after a summer of practices and carwash fundraisers, the real fun began.

I got in trouble almost immediately. My “sense of humor” doesn’t always translate. And it may well be that it does translate, but it’s just not funny. Either way, I was captain. That’s right, I was crowned captain solely based on my performance at tryouts. It would probably tarnish your image of this dubious honor if I mentioned that it was captain of JV soccer – so I’ll leave that detail out. At any rate, I made up this cheer called: Eat Me. I don’t know, it seemed funny to me. It involved the familiar hand gesture and, well, bottom line is: I was reprimanded. I was also reprimanded for insisting we do lifts and tosses. It gets pretty GD boring on the sidelines and because we weren’t explicitly told NOT to, I encouraged the girls to be brave and allow themselves to be hoisted five feet up in the air and then dropped into the baskets we made with our interlaced arms. We hit about 75% of the time. The JV soccer coach even commented that he’d never seen such feats in all his days as a head coach. (“All his days” is apt as he looked to be about nineteen and a half.)

Well, we were told that lifts and tosses were not allowed. So fine. Whatever. We could still have handstand contests and I could spot the other girls on handsprings and we could take breaks, as needed, so all was safe; all was sound. All was good, as they say, that is until the epic offense came to pass. Homecoming. 1994. The cheerleaders were in charge of decorating the gymnasium where Pepfest would take place. This was a school-wide song and dance that would occur the afternoon before the big game. We, the sophomore cheerleaders, were given a large white sheet upon which we were to write our class name and decorate, accordingly. This sign would hang above the bleacher section where the sophomores sat. The junior and senior cheerleaders did the same for their class sections – freshmen didn’t get a sign – and lalala, whatever, pretty straight-forward, right? In the past, the sign had always been fairly literal, as in, big bubbly letters that spelled, SOPHOMORES. Well, we weren’t going to do that this year. Instead, we drew a picture. We had one of the cheerleaders position herself on the sheet to depict the shape of a man. Specifically, the shape of a man dancing. We traced her with dark blue ink and added chains and jewelry, tattoos and some kind of braided hemp-belt. And around this ghastly image we wrote the lyrics to Warren G’s Regulator. I say “we” did these things, but perhaps “I” is more correct. When it was finished, I recall gazing upon it with wonder not unlike a High Renaissance artist gazing upon a portrait full of play in light and shadow. It was fun, engaging – different. I was proud. In hindsight, I should have noticed – or cared about – the faces the other cheerleaders made as they passed our sign. I should have listened to the words “interesting” and “risky” and “avant-garde.” (I made up that last one.)

We stayed late to finish hanging the other accoutrement and spread tinsel and some other bullshit. At the very end, we hung the sign above the bleachers where our class of 500 people would sit. Then we stood in the circle drive and waited for our parents to pick us up and bring us home. I retired that evening with a blind ignorance to what was in store. I’m sure I had dinner and lied about having no homework and then slipped to my room where I worked on my living will. I had no intention of doing myself in, I just wanted to make sure that if something happened, my shit would go to the right places. I probably updated this and that and then held my crucifix up to the school pictures of my friends that were tacked to the wall and whispered blessings to them. (I was going through my diehard Christian phase.)

The next morning I got in the minivan and my parents swung north, to pick up my friend, Mandy, another cheerleader. She was not the kind of person you’d have thought would try out for cheerleading. She wore t-shirts with Robert Smith on them and smoked cigarettes and played the piano and had black curly hair and bright blue eyes and kind of didn’t give a fuck about any of it. I think she might have been hoping that she’d become a cheerleader and suddenly she’d get excited about something or get involved or simply care. So Mandy and I walked into the gym that morning and lamented the fact that we had to practice at 6 a.m. As I said, it was Homecoming, and as such, we spent the week leading up to the event practicing an elaborate routine that would be performed during Pepfest and making sure no detail was left to chance. As we strode in I felt a pallor fall over the room. I saw a girl with dyed blonde hair and the fakest bake of all time standing at the helm. Her arms were crossed and her orange-lipsticked mouth was formed into something like a pinched bunghole. I felt all eyes upon me.

The sheet unfurled and a gasp echoed around the gymnasium as the dancing fellow was exposed, along with the words, “G-Funk Step to This – I Dare Ya.”

“Who is responsible for this?” the blond haired girl screamed.
The crowd of ponytails bobbed in protest: not me! not me!
“I did it,” I said. “Why?”
I saw her eyelids roll back as she bared her fangs: “this is disgusting!!!!!!!!!!”
“Why?” I repeated, thoroughly confounded.
“Because,” he crony piped in, “it’s offensive!”
What the hell was this? I was shocked. I stood there, looking at the poster for clues.
“Mount up?” the leader, Emily, said.
“G-Fuck Era?” her assistant, Megan, followed up.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Warren G? Nate Dogg?” (RIP)
“This is offensive to black people!” Megan screamed.
“What?!”
“My dad lives near black people,” she continued.
“I know black people,” Emily interjected.
I was speechless.
“Um,” Mandy began, looking at Emily and Megan, “I think you sound offensive right now.”
“WHAT?” Emily intoned. “Who the hell are you?”
“Mandy,” Mandy said with her trademark guileless brilliance.
“I am NOT offensive AT ALL,” Emily insisted.
“But YOU! (meaning me) – you are going to make a new sign and you are going to apologize to everyone. I don’t know who the hell you think you are – but you’re no one!”
“I don’t think I’m anyone,” I said.
“APOLOGIZE!”
“Oh. I’m sorry everyone. I did not mean to offend with my stupid poster. I just like the song. Sorry.”
Well, Pepfest came and went. Ironically, or not, I did the final trick of our cheerleading performance. A move that involved being tossed some 15 feet into the air and spreading my legs wider than miles. Bam. End scene. Our Sophomore sign was blue and green and boring. Fine. Who cares? I didn’t. Life went on. All that bullshit was behind me and I didn’t give it a second thought. That conflict with Emily? A misunderstanding. A mis-fucking-communication, I said to myself. Those girls who yelled at me just misunderstood. And if anything, in their quest to take me and my silly sign down, they exposed their own bigotry or simply their ignorance. So cheerleading wasn’t for me? Big deal. One of many things. At this point I was fourteen going on fifteen. I’d made a lot of mistakes, taken a lot of wrong turns, said/done/felt the wrong thing more than I could count. I didn’t quite know what the problem was – but I knew there was one. And so, I took the position of basically putting my head down and barreling through. I’d coast beneath the radar. When I was seventeen, I’d graduate and then I could find a place – the great, good place, as Pete Hamill calls it. I’d find it and my chemistry would find its home and whatever I was trying to do – whatever that was – would get done.

But before all that nonsense, I had one more battle to do. One more round to go with these ladies, specifically. Of course, I’d have many more indignities and challenges to bear before graduation, many of them self-inflicted, and the great good place would seem forever out of reach, but at that time, it was all I had.

So. The day of the final duel arrived. It was a day. Like any day. A lunch. Like any lunch. Me, at a table, along with my girl, Mandy. Around us tables bustled with fully occupied seating and chatter – the signs of life from which I felt so distant, though I’d grown used to it. WaaWahWaa – either way – this pastoral nightmare was soon to be encroached upon by that blonde, tanning bed loving monster named Emily.

“Who the fuck do you think YOU ARE?!” she shouted in my face.

Mandy and I snapped to. Emily had a friend with her – she always had someone backing her up – this girl appeared to be a fellow tanning bed aficionado. She wore a similar color lipstick and her name was Becky. Looking at them side by side was like looking at the ghosts of Christmas past. You could already see them lounging by a pool in Florida, talking about some trivial bullshit and remarking how much better they were than everyone else. And maybe they were. What do I know?! I thought quoting Warren G and Nate Dogg was a fitting idea for a school spirit-trumpeting event.

“What are you talking about?” I said, with equal parts supreme fear and clueless despair.
“You tore down our hockey sign!” she screamed.
At this point all lunchroom conversation had ground to a halt and attention had been fully diverted in our direction.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Yes, you do!” she howled. “Someone tore down our hockey sign on the second floor – and it was you!”
“No,” I said in the same tone of dumb terror. “No, it wasn’t.”
“You’re a fucking liar!” she wailed.
“Why are you screaming?” Mandy asked in her trademark rational flat affect.
“Look,” Emily said to me, ignoring Mandy, “you are in deep trouble.”
“But I didn’t touch your sign,” I pleaded. I didn’t want to seem weak – and didn’t deserve this humiliation – but I wanted her to stop. You would, too. She was a scary bitch.
Suddenly Mandy stood up. “Let’s go,” she said.
Somehow, I’m not sure how, we left.
The room remained silent as we trundled out. Silent but for the insults hurled at our backs from the blonde beast.

I don’t remember what happened next. I must have wandered through the day in the stupor of someone who’s just been bitched out in front of a lunchroom of their peers. I was familiar with demoralization and humiliation and general shame regarding my own existence – but this was too much. This was a new kind of awkward horror. A poet once asked, “What fresh hell is this?” Exactly.
I probably sat numbly through biology – mitosis and meiosis and blue eyes and brown eyes and all the rest of it, just washing over me like so much shit I’d never retain. I most likely went to Civics and failed my way through a current events quiz. By the time Spanish 2 arrived, I was likely in full on blackout. I’m sure I took the bathroom pass shortly after class began and excused myself down corridor after corridor, a flight of stairs, then another, until I reached the girls’ bathroom.

The high school had several ladies’ rooms, of course, but the one I preferred was far away and desolate – desolate, but cheery. It was like the bathroom time forgot, like something untouched since 1952. Anyway, it’s where I spent a lot of my time during high school. Just sitting, really. Killing time. Just looking out the window or locked in a stall, writing in a notebook, doodling, whatever. Just waiting for…for… something. Waiting for the final bell to ring, I guess, so I could get the fuck out of there and go be weird and absurd in the privacy of my own home. At least until Emilie got back from junior high school. Because as soon as she roared through the door, it was on. I mean, it was ON. The battle for the remote – the phone – the microwave – what have you. It. Was. On. We are talking epic encounters. If you know me, then you may have noticed I have a chipped front tooth. Yes. That’s correct. Emilie Motherfucking Dion.

Well, I feel myself getting distracted and bored as hell with this whole trip down memory lane, which means you probably dozed off long ago. One way or another, folks, we both know this story’s got to come to an end, and now’s a good a time as any – so here we go. Last Act.

When the final bell rang I slung my backpack over my shoulder and flailed down the hall to my locker to retrieve my books – always important to keep up appearances – and as I turned to go I felt two hands clasp my shoulders. I jerked awake from my stupor. It was Mandy.

“Oh my GOD,” she said.
“Basically,” I replied.
“No,” she said. “Oh my GOD, you have to hear what happened after we left the lunchroom today.”

So she told me.

After we crawled out of the lunch room, a hush remained, an eerie silence that was punctuated abruptly by the sound of not one, but two chairs being pushed back from the table, then the raised stature of these two individuals – and not just any individuals, but dudes. Men, practically. Seniors. Nathan and Ryan. The Homecoming King, in fact, and the Hockey Captain.

They got up and marched over to the wall where a 20x3 ft sign was hanging. The sign said something like: HOCKEY GAME TONIGHT! GO GUYS! And was decorated with green and black and gold glitter paint. Ryan and Nathan each grabbed a handful of paper and ripped that shit down from the wall. The girls who had just bitched me out were still standing, conferring apparently on how they were going to make my life miserable, and as this happened they were, at first, too stunned to speak.

Emily regained her composure first. “Put that back up,” she said. She said it in the casual tone of someone who is trying to convince us that she’s in on the joke. “Seriously, real funny,” she said. “C’mon, guys,” she said, tossing her hair and pouting her mouth.

Nathan looked at her and said, “that was really mean–what you did to her. You were really mean to her.”
Then Ryan said in pitch perfect deadpan: “you’re a bitch.”

Emily looked around the room, and laughed. She laughed like: they’re only kidding, you guys – everyone likes me – I’m the best! But no one laughed back. So she flipped her hair and marched out of the lunch room. Then Nathan and Ryan sat back down and people started to talk, and started to eat, and although I missed the whole thing, I can picture the exact sway of Emily’s bright blonde bob swinging as she marched away, her orange lipstick radiant against her bronzed skin.

And as for the calculator I lent to the cheerleading judge… I never got that fucking thing back. And I am positive it led to my enrollment in Trig B.

The End!

The Great Good Place, August, 1999

caroline knapp is one of my gods.

2011-04-21T17:05:00.003-04:00

Caroline Knapp, and Lucille

The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays by Caroline Knapp

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Caroline Knapp is part of the pantheon of writers who know how to write. I admire her work tremendously—her insights, her turns of phrase, her sheer intellect, her honesty and wit. The following quotes are from her collection of essays and commentary, brilliantly titled: The Merry Recluse.

On life without booze…

From Life Without Anesthesia:

Anxiety looms and you think: This is why I drank. Sadness washes up: This is why I drank. Rage surfaces, or doubt or self-loathing: This is why I drank. Addictions, after all, are enormously self-protective. They’re coping mechanisms, antidotes to strong emotion. […]

Life without anesthesia often has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment, gone through without one’s substance of choice, serves to build up an emotional muscle. When you drink away feeling—or starve or eat or gamble or obsess it away—you deprive yourself of the chance to really understand it, to come to grips with fear and self-doubt and rage, to truly battle the emotional landmines that lurk within. Addictions may protect you, but they also stunt growth, prevent you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring your from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you give them up, when you begin to get through those difficult moments, you find yourself flexing muscles you never knew you had. You find yourself growing.

On Sunday morning coming down…

From On Loneliness

I have had a long, intimate relationship with this particular form: sometimes I think I was born with it, born with a particularly acute sense of myself as apart from the world, as somehow different or lacking. I can remember sitting in my bedroom on a spring day as a child, watching leaves rustle against the windowpane, aware of a feeling I was far too young to name: it was a sense of absence, I think, a belief that the world bustled on outside that window without me, that I was unable or perhaps unwilling to join in. It’s not that I didn’t have friends—I always had, and still have, many friends—but the loneliness of my experience tends to be immune from reality, from circumstance or logic: it lives within me, a small, persistent demon that stirs in my quietest moments, during unplanned evenings, on Sunday mornings. It is a sense of void.[…]

I’ve tried drinking loneliness away, exercising and shopping it away, scouring it away in fits of housecleaning. I’ve also had some success with all of these strategies, particularly the one involving bad men: there’s nothing quite so distracting as an obsessive love affair, and if a sour romance makes you lonely—well, at least you can blame the feeling on someone else.

On the man selling young girls experience…

From Harassment 101:

The professor in my case was someone I’d admired tremendously, someone whose counsel I’d sought and valued. He’d praised my work, inspired me to go into journalism. Me? I was just out of school, shy, unsure of myself, overwhelmed with the prospect of being let out into the world, scared. I had a terrible time letting go of my idealization, seeing him as wrong or out-of-line. I also worried that I’d been naïve, sitting there drinking martinis with this man and not acknowledging any possible romantic implications. And I worried about whether I’d done something to bring the incident on, sent out some kind of signal of availability.

More likely, I’d sent out other signals: insecurity, a wish to be seen as special, a yearning to be valued by people I held in high esteem. Those feelings are powerful, and I think some people (some men) are equipped with special radar for them; they pick up on precisely that hunger for approval and move in.

The day after he phoned me, we went for a walk near the campus and he talked about how “interesting” he thought I was, about my “fascinating mind.” […]

Looking back, I think what bothers me the most is the confusion I must have felt about what it means to be valued. This culture has such difficulty producing girls who feel good about themselves in terms that are not purely physical, who feel intrinsically worthy as whole people, and I see myself back then—21, scared, insecure—as utterly representative of the times. I knew a lot about being pretty (which seemed important), but not much at all about being powerful (which seemed abstract), so intellectual respect and sexual interest from men felt tied up together, inextricably linked.

On the complexity of female friendships…

From Grace Notes

Sounds familiar right? We women have a gift for closeness. So why was this friendship so wonderfully surprising to me? Contrary to conventional wisdom, sustaining a close, trusting friendship can be a dicey business for women—at least in my experience. This may be true by definition: institutionalized relationships like marriage and family are bolstered by social supports. Friendships, on the other hand, are subject to few rules, few measurable standards of success or failure. When things get rocky with a girlfriend, you don’t cruise the Yellow Pages for a Friendship Counselor. When a friend lets you down or goes through a major life change that makes you feel left behind (marriage, babies, moving cross-country), family members don’t urge you to “work” on the relationship. Friendship bonds can be very real and vital but they’re also among our most transient ties, and so a certain degree of attrition is natural and predictable: people change, they go their own ways.

On starving and obsessing, in pursuit of…

From Food as Enemy

At some point in any addiction, a behavior stops being something you use to control your feelings and turns into something that controls you instead. I probably crossed that line that summer. Whatever I was trying to starve away—loneliness, uncertainty, anger—gradually became less important that the starving itself. […]

One night I came home and found my roommates in the kitchen with a friend. They were sitting at the table drinking beer, sending out for Chinese food, and they were all laughing. I felt incredibly wistful for a second, watching them there. It was such a relaxed, normal picture, and I was so far removed from it.

But it didn’t matter. The rule was not to give in, not to give in, not to give in. It was the way I organized my life, the way I defined myself. So I went out running instead.

On her sister’s daughter…and everything…

From Letter to Zoe:

It’s odd for a person like me, who doesn’t have kids of her own and doesn’t spend much time around them, to feel such a range of potent feelings around someone as tiny as you. Kids used to scare me a bit—I saw them for the most part as little unformed psyches, just waiting to be irrevocably damaged—but I feel less of that fear around you—or, at least, the fear has given way to other, mo9re powerful emotions. A few weeks ago, I came over with a small gift, a bee knapsack, black and yellow with wings on it. you put it on and you marched around in it, and times like that you look so cute I have to physically restrain myself from scooping you up and hugging you to death. I stare at you sometimes like I’m watching a fire, mesmerized by your tiny presence, your perfect child’s skin, your two-year-old saunter. I spent most of my life assuming you had to earn the affection of others, that being loved required passing tests and jumping through hoops and proving yourself worthy. It’s amazing to me to see, in you, that it’s possible to be loved, and deeply so, simply because you exist. That is your gift to me, as precious to me as you are.

View all my reviews

Another Fucking Facebook Demystification

2011-04-14T23:02:00.006-04:00

I met a man and a man met me
Though I have heard he’s denied it.
I met him in the budding season
He wore his hair like a gentleman.
In between something quite serious and
Something full of play, like our hero Hugh Grant
Like Hugh Grant on the twenty dollar bill.
Me, my hair, my likeness, well
Picture anyone. Is that too hackneyed?
Well then picture a twenty-one teeth smiling schoolgirl.
And then the borrowed motorcycle boots of my roommate
And then frenzied references to literature
And then skirts
And then the bottle.
The blessed dear thing.
In a movie I saw later that year
An older man and a younger woman were having an affair.
In a New York hotel they clutched at each other.
There was a bottle of whiskey on the dresser. Naturally.
I said out loud. To my sister’s empty apartment.
I wonder if I would wonder where he is, whom he’s with
If I didn’t already know quite well
I wonder if I’d try to cross his path

on the avenues of the university

in the casual dress of someone who's labored, and utter

the casual remarks of someone who's rehearsed for hours in the street-parked car

"I see you're still trolling around the schoolyard when the bell rings"
I enjoy demoralizing myself, you see. I enjoy destroying

any burgeoning illusion of self-respect.

I enjoy a good terrifying shame.

How's that Novel Coming?

2011-03-29T10:40:00.016-04:00

I had a boy say to me
in high school
"That's why you don't have any friends--you're so angry"
And I remember I was shocked
Because
I thought: he's considered me at all.

This boy and I, we're adults now.
We aren't friends on Facebook.
And I'm sure he doesn't remember
that I lent him a copy of a Camus novel
in study hall.
I think I thought we were supposed to be friends. Which is the sad part,
maybe.
At some point after college I ran into his older brother at a bar in Uptown.
We sat in a booth
and talked and maybe flirted in a depressing way. Like, half-hearted.
He told me how his brother was writing a novel.
I could tell he thought that was pretty much incredible
as well as, legitimate
Akin to running for office or sailing around the world. Anyway,
something pretty miraculous.
I said, wow, that's great. I might've asked what it was about.

The older brother called me a few days later
and left a message on my answering machine
But I didn't call him back.
I wanted the mean one to call
and tell me about his stupid book that was probably beat up Kerouac bullshit. I wanted him to say
"I was always in love with you."

Which explains a lot.

Photo by Josh Rosenzweig

Josh at the Wedding

2011-03-11T18:18:00.003-05:00

Abbi at the Wedding

2011-03-10T17:12:00.019-05:00

The really perverse irony of this is that what has been taken away from me are my legs. And for somebody who had always been very flexible, I'm very stiff. And, it's only now that I know. It's only when you're paying for it. You're paying for it then, you see, but you don't know. The cash register hasn't rung. It's ringing now. And it's not until it rings. It's like sleeping. You can have your alarm clock set, but it's not until it goes off that you're going to awaken.
-Erika Goodman

image credit: Vera Wang

One of the most exciting parts of getting married is thinking about the other person being bound to you forever. It’s also one of the most frightening aspects. It’s almost as frightening as shopping for a dress to wear on this blessed occasion. If you are a man or a non-traditional bride-to-be, then this isn’t really an issue. You’ll slap on whatever they hand you, or you’ll don a jumper with pedal-pusher length pants, or maybe you’ll wear a black sequined minidress with blood red lipstick and dark penciled eyebrows. Whatever. The point is, you won’t be doing what I did last weekend, which was get up at 8:30 on Saturday morning in the soon to be once-great city of Nueva York. You won’t be jumping in the shower, snipping your bangs, shaving your legs and doing twenty push-ups in your towel. You won’t be hopping in a cab and zipping across town to Bella Bridesmaid, with your best friend from childhood in tow, and your future mother-in-law and sister-in-law en route from Long Island. For the “I don’t give a fuck” bride, there will not be a day spent at four separate salons, alongside three grown women with widely differing views about what you should be strapping around your bod. For you, there will be a day of brunch, followed by a matinee, then a walk in the park and, finally, the much earned two glasses of Petit San Josef with bread and salad.

Meanwhile, in Vera Wang’s bridal salon on the Upper West Side, I'll be doing this: trying the never-before attempted technique of sucking in my chest. You see, bridal gowns are not exactly kind to those of us with the dubious blessing of being well-endowed. The zipper seems to revolt as it nears the top, and an attendant alongside a friend need to press the sides towards each other, as a third party steps in to pry the zipper to its natural resting point. Success! The interesting thing about this kind of success is it comes at the agony of other parts of your anatomy. Suddenly your sternum seems ripe for a crack and your arms feel as if there’s an invisible wire connecting your triceps, pulling them oddly together behind your back. The wind rushing from your lungs, not soon to return, causes the expression on your face to look something like a fox trapped in a hole. And as you gaze across the room to find three faces nodding in approval and hands clapping while a single tear trails down a stranger’s face – it’s at that time you hear the following two words echo somewhere deep inside: abandon ship.

You see, it’s not as if I’m huge. I’m not. I’m average. I’m not skinny. I’m probably not even thin. But I am not overweight. Not according to the current schema delineating average height to weight ratios. I’m not even a pound over-weight. But according to the reflection that day in the mirrors dotting the bridal salons of New York City, I was not only larger than normal, I was a monster about to take over the world. I made a pact in my mind: lose ten pounds by the time you parade down the aisle. You know, or die trying.

I’d anticipated this being what I would take from the experience. I was pretty sure I would walk away wishing for the metabolism of a gazelle and the will-power of David Blaine. In fact, I’d prepared. For the two months prior, I’d walked three miles five times per week, gone to a spinning class once or twice a week, done yoga and tae bo videos on the weekends – and, yes, restricted my food intake. I bought a scale from Target and learned to hate myself if I ate after 9 p.m. or indulged in something fried. I basically reverted to myself ten years ago, when I was a gymnast, profoundly afraid of never meeting a guy who would like me “for me”, and worried about becoming old and fat. It seems that I am experiencing a renaissance of those glory days. (Did it help when mid-day the future mother in law noted, “you’ve lost weight—you were getting a bit of a tummy”? Probably not.)

Eating disorders are common in the worlds of dance and gymnastics. The girls on my gymnastics team were vigilant about what everyone was eating: is she eating enough, is she eating too much, is she eating right, is she puking? Someone who is more dear to me than myself was a gymnast and as she approaches thirty, will have struggled with bulimia for nearly two decades. A girl who was on the team a few years before I was passed away in her teens from anorexia. The world of ballet was recently critiqued by Black Swan, and although the movie is hyperbolic and mawkish, it’s not pulling shit out of its ass. These girls starve themselves. And suffer lifelong consequences from this starvation.

But dance and gymnastics aren’t the only arenas where the body is put on stage and looked at, examined, pushed and poked and prodded. The catwalk is the ultimate forum for the ascetic. I mean, we aren’t talking about thin. We aren’t talking about “normal” ideal weights, like you might think of the lady at the bar in the tight jeans and trendy sweater. We are talking about a weight that is 15-25% less than that—a weight that is achieved and maintained through starvation. And if the runway is the high stage, the magazine rack is the common medium. As is the latest rom-com with actresses who seem to disappear as they move from a Lifetime movie or CW sitcom to leagues of Hah-lywood. Suddenly they have a “high metabolism”, “can’t gain weight and have always had to struggle to keep weight on”, and at the age of twenty-six claim to be “just losing my baby fat.”

Take a look at a spread in a high fashion magazine or a weekly tabloid – these splashy spreads aren’t about someone struggling with a psychiatric illness – they are about idealized beauty and perfection of a very specific type. As stated, a model’s body weight is about 25% less than the average American woman, if we put that average weight at the number: 140 lbs. This is considerably thinner than ever before in history. So what is the deal? What the hell is driving this trend? Natural Gas leak? Hormones in the milk? Genetically modified corn? Roman-style lead poisoning?

Women have been depicted in art, in the pages of literature and in society pages for centuries. The form of the woman described has varied from age to age, but the type revered by the Victorians seems to most closely accord with the figure we see pasted on billboards today. What did it mean to SHOW your thin, taut physique in the 19th Century? It meant you had conquered your carnal appetites – desires including food and eating. It meant you were not an animal. It meant you had a control and reserve that made you the object of affection for a specific kind of partner. A woman who doesn’t need to eat! What a catch! She probably doesn’t use the bathroom either!

On the way back from New York, my fiancé and I stopped at a Barnes and Noble in New Jersey. I did the ritual perusing of the Criterion Collection aisle, and the cartoons, and the bargain bin, and then the documentaries. And it was here that I found something that five months ago wouldn’t have even registered as interesting. Dying to be Thin, narrated by Susan Sarandon. I plucked it up, along with (I shit you not) The Middle Ages, Hush, Hush,…Sweet Charlotte, The Brave Little Toaster, National Treasure Two, and Addiction, an HBO Special (yeah, I’ve had my share of probs with the bottle, as well).

What’s interesting is how easy it is to slip into, for the first time or after a long hiatus, an obsession with one’s body. It’s been years since I actually counted calories, or cancelled or delayed plans so I could slip in a workout. And yet how easily I found myself doing push-ups that night, touching my toes to my hands during reps and reps of something I call V-Ups, and saying “no, thank you” to anything more than coffee for breakfast. I mean, what the fuck? I can’t stand that kind of shit. I’m appalled by it. Who the fuck benefits? The only one who is punished, ultimately, is yourself. So is that it? Is that who you’re mad at?

I don’t know. Since I don’t drink, my mind and thoughts and feelings are much clearer, and I have to admit, I don’t feel that mad. I also have to admit, when I stopped drinking, I thought: one of the awesome incidental benefits will be that I’m no longer ingesting empty calories. I’ll probably lose a few pounds. And I did. Victory, right? But enough of a victory? It doesn't seem like it. It should be stated, I’m not trying to be stick-thin. I don’t think that could happen even with rigorous exercise and severe calorie restriction. I mean, perhaps it could, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to be the elusive size 2 of my twenties (a size 6 in bridal wear). That that body type is not in accordance with my “curvy” physique is a technicality. At this point, I seem to believe that if I work out right and eat well, I can have my old body back. For someone who believes "nah, it won't be the same -- but it shouldn't be" I'm worried I might be getting a little nuts.

Anorexia can express, physically, a number of things beyond this tremendous ability to control oneself. It can express fear. The struggle to grow up and the fear of maturity can be combated by keeping the body in an immature state. It can express pain. More than not, women and girls who suffer from anorexia have experienced trauma, which could be sexual abuse, abandonment, or a single, isolated incident that was scarring. It can express anger, rage, perfectionism, desperation.

There have been interesting studies done regarding the brains of people with eating disorders. In these individuals’ brains, unusually high levels of serotonin are found. Serotonin is associated with obsessing and harm-avoiding or nervous behaviors, thoughts and feelings. Over-activity of the serotonin system reduces appetite and affects your mood. Moods are funny. Remember that time you missed lunch and when your boyfriend called you answered the phone and screamed: WHAT?! But not eating can also make a jittery person feel better. Not eating may be a way of the body attempting to lower these levels of serotonin, thereby reducing anxiety. Dieting and starvation may be an attempt to reduce intense anxiety. Unfortunately, the brain adapts, and the food needs to be decreased further and further.

Perhaps this is why anorexia is one of the most difficult illnesses to treat, with a relapse rate of 50%. Despite the consequences, someone suffering from an eating disorder may be principally ignorant or ignorant by principle of the effects of starvation or induced vomiting. Dangerously low blood pressure, severe osteoporosis, damage to the kidneys and liver, and heart failure. Low estrogen levels, equal low bone density, which equals osteoporosis. There is simply no way of reversing bone loss. Giving up the addiction is hard. In fact, it sucks. You know the addiction. What you don’t know, is what life would be like without it. You know the check is in the mail, you can see the edge of the cliff is just ahead, but you can’t seem to turn the car around.

The underlying causes, however, are not always known. We might see the symptoms and hazard a guess. “She’s trying to bend to the pressures of Hollywood” or “a producer must have insisted she lose weight” or “she was mocked for the way she looked in those paparazzi pictures.” Or if she’s a woman we know we might say, “she’s going through a divorce/bad break-up” or “she has a big event coming up (ha!)” or “she’s a fuckin’ control freak.” But of course, we’ll probably never really know. I know that during one of the most profound periods of anxiety/depression I’ve ever known, I couldn’t eat a damn thing. A family member had unexpectedly committed suicide, my boyfriend was a lecherous, verbally abusive and threatening graduate student at the same school where I was getting my MA, and I was living in a city where I had no friends or family. I would eat because I knew I needed to eat, but sometimes swallowing made me gag. I was such a nervous wreck that even when I exercised (to combat the anxiety) I felt my heart race and my thoughts race and the whole human race conspire to let me know that I was a fucking mess. My weight plummeted. Not a moment passed that I didn’t feel like I was in agony. I was clinically depressed and didn’t feel like I had anyone to reach out to. On a trip back to Minnesota to see my parents, I got on their scale. The number shocked me so much I made an appointment with a therapist for 8 a.m. the next morning (my mother flipped the phone book pages until we found someone). The doctor confirmed my suspicions: I was in trouble.

I had a thought during that time that has come back to me when I’ve seen friends or acquaintances or women and girls on the big screen start to disappear. At that time in my life I remember thinking constantly about death. I made this connection between my body’s inability to manifest desire or appetite as its attempt to die. I saw my body/mind as an organism that was trying to kill itself. I wasn’t wishing to have no desire to eat. I had no desire. The feeling of “no desire” is sort of like a living hell. That’s probably why I started drinking heavily. That kind of offset the awareness of my apathy. (I know what you’re thinking: sounds like a dream existence, right?)

So when I see girls getting smaller, I don’t think: she’s a vain bitch. I think, she’s not happy. Or she’s probably a ball of fucking nerves. (Now you’re probably thinking: oh, you’re pretending to feel sorry for the rich, skinny girl.) But I don’t feel sorry for her. I just think she’s got some shit going on that truth be told, is not so pleasant. People who are grieving tend to lose weight. People who go through divorces tend to lose weight. People who are suffering from severe anxiety and depression tend to be underweight (as well as overweight). This is not my personal opinion. Powerlessness is an awful feeling. Whether you stop eating consciously or unconsciously, your weight goes down, your organs suffer and your one precious life is spent in more pain than I’d wish for someone, anyone.

“Not eating” is not a characteristic of a “naturally skinny” individual. The stories that come from publicists, trainers and the people themselves who describe their body type as naturally thin are frequently hard for me to believe. Most of us are not naturally obese or even over-weight. But most of us are also not size 0’s. If you have to skip a meal, workout twice a day and/or not eat fat to fit into size 2 jeans – you are not naturally skinny. You might be naturally fabulous and naturally intelligent and fun and hilarious and interesting and talented and generally just fucking terrific. And what about those things...what is the value placed upon those qualities? In a memorable scene from PBS's version of Anne of Green Gables, Anne Shirley asks, "which would you rather be, divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?" What is the value of your intelligence, your humor, your kindness and compassion towards others? What is the value of being a blast to hang out with and be around? What's wrong with a culture that valorizes a thin woman without a voice?

To return to all that bullshit about my future wedding dress. I hope I am able to keep myself aware of what I’m doing and why—in terms of what I ask of my physical body. I am a healthy person. I’m active and I am very cognizant of what I feed my body and mind. In the documentary about eating disorders, Erika Goodman, a former ballerina with the Joffrey said “the scale becomes your alter. It becomes the site where you pray every morning.” She said, “you pray that it will be down a pound or an ounce – something to show that the work that you’re doing, the work of starving, is working.”(1) It’s about transformation. From this…to that. Weddings are so fucking tied up in the idea of transformation, whether we’re talking about the bride being revealed at the end of the hall, or the belief that your relationship will become immutably solid, or the hope that you’re existential longing will be sated. Growing up I always said: I don’t want to get married, and if I do, I don’t want a bullshit wedding. When I got engaged to one of the nicest, funniest, coolest people I've ever met, I thought, well, ok--but I'm not going to get wrapped up in that nonsense. Yet here I was, last weekend, with my piece of shit Target scale and my obsessive thoughts about how my ass will look in the dress, and a file full of photos of dresses that are cut to fit a twelve year old. And I thought: I am buying into it. In spite of my better sense. In spite of the hard fought freedom from cultural ideals. Ideals that my education and parents and friends—as well as my own experience—taught me to despise. My fiancé would be elated to see me wearing a potato sack tied with bejeweled sash--so when I look at bridal fashion photos, I have to ask: whose fantasy is this?

1.
http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/18455-erika-goodman/

A Quick Poem

2011-03-07T14:51:00.002-05:00

Photo Credits: Abbi Dion (subject: Emilie Leroi Elaine Dion)

The woman looking for a bridal dress
Is like the nihilist’s nihilist—
There’s some contradiction
That borders on profundity.

Thirty-one may be ancient or the age of a child
To a world, a woman
Without the eyes of youth
The reflection means something new

but what

The rest of us are conscious of our self-delusion & this is what distrubs us. It will be what remains after we've finished with our dreams & ambitions

2011-02-22T10:40:00.008-05:00

"Odd Outsourcings of the Human Race"
From HARPER'S Magazine, March 2011
A selection of undated entries from Diary, by Richard Selzer

Recently Rejected by McSweeneys

2011-02-17T13:11:00.008-05:00

"This belongs in a Museum" -- Michael K

--
ORIGINAL SUBMISSION

On 6/17/09 3:45 PM, "Abbi M Dion" wrote:
How Much for an MFA in W.T.F.?
By Abbi Mireille Dion
(215) 983-9356
abbidion@temple.edu

I'm starting to think you have to go through an MFA Program if you want to be a real writer. Fuck experience. Fuck drinking, fuck reading, fuck camping by yourself for six weeks, fuck prison, fuck fucking.

Here's the real tortures of the damned: stay up all night writing about the time you parked outside the suburban home of your married lover while your father sat in the passenger seat and asked you how things were going. This was the night you played a mix-tape from high school (a tape Married Guy praised as "heart-breaking") and the psychedelic furs sang burned down days like cigarettes and your father told you a story about men and love and deciding not to hurt people when presented with the possibility to do so, and then you picked up a handful of pencils from the backseat and threw them on Married Guy's lawn because they were all you had.

Write about this night and then face down a room of writers your own age and listen to them say: I don't find this narrator very convincing.

Or if you're lucky, maybe they'll say: I like what you're doing; subverting the patriarchy. But I'm not doing any such thing, you'll protest. But you'll be drowned out by side conversations in which you will not be invited to participate.

There will be professors who can't ever seem to remember your name or why you've come to their office--but they will remember they haven't had lunch and excuse themselves, quickly.

In their office you will wait. You will sit, quietly, in the burnt orange chair watching the large classroom clock spin a steady arc (a word you cannot say without cringing) calculating the price of each minute using a formula that looks like this:

_____1_______________ ________$$$$______________
Total minutes in grad school = $40,000 in sub and unsubsidized Stafford Loans

Of course you don't actually calculate this figure--that's why you're in a writing program to begin with: you simply cannot be fucked to do anything other than indulge the most trivial of pursuits. Let's say it: you're lazy. You admit this. Freely. The others insist they are not, though they are, and this is why they despise you.

By the middle of the second semester only two people are speaking with you. Coincidentally, they are both heavy drinkers. But at least these dudes don't accuse you of mimicking Lorrie Moore. They don't even know who on earth she is, and if they did, they still wouldn't accuse you of that. Why? Because it is irrelevant. I bet in a better world no one would say "one of the greatest liabilities to your work is your further bureaucratizing of Lorrie's style." Loudly, to make sure everyone knows they're reading theory on the side. (Because we playin' a language game!) So, I say, why do you refer to Lorrie Moore as Lorrie and Knut Hamsun as Hamsun? I'd prefer we stick to a universal default, if you will--nome or cognome--you know, or some other agreed upon system. The young woman who has made the gaffe (it wasn't really) looks at me with the expression referred to by my current officemate as the "if looks could kill" look. The instructor is inspecting his sandwich.

I'll excuse myself, I say and exit stage left, turning right and heading for the stairwell. God forbid you run into another classmate who doesn't know your name and who'll be forced to share the descending box with you down twelve floors in a manner not unlike boredom mixed with irritation mixed with 'tevs. You've pressed the button for an earlier floor in the past, simply to relieve them.

When you get out on the fifth floor you watch children trundle by, you brush your fingers along their bags, swinging ponytails, and shifting limbs. You are praising them, adoring them, wishing them fame and fortune.

If they are in this God forsaken wasteland, then they're in CLA and that means a lifetime of regret and what-ifs. No, no, I'm kidding with you now. It might mean a lifetime of love and joy and music playing and film watching and enlightened traveling, what do I know?! I'm the joke of the English Department! People cross halls to avoid me.

On the fifth floor, I walk past these malleable creatures and I do not think of my ex boyfriend, a 40 year old PhD Candidate in Literary Criticism and inventor of new lows, specifically regarding professional misconduct with students (rich!). No, I think of myself at their tender age. Nineteen--ten years ago--and I was an absolute mess. No drugs. No alcohol. No sex. Just an emotional tree branch in the flood. Just driving my parents' car through downtown St. Paul in the middle of the night, looking at old buildings and houses, wishing to spend whole winter nights inside them, whispering, lighting matches.

Well, back in class, we are doing a writing exercise, because someone has just figured out: can't none of us write! I scribble about being nineteen and sitting in the car with my dear Pa outside of the house of the Town Heartbreaker. I call it, Woebegone Country People. Because I am from Minnesota and everyone in Philadelphia thinks we speak in the accented language of the Lundegaards (which we do) and wear long johns in July (which we also do--but this has a lot more to do with mental illness than weather conditions and regional phonology). So I read my story and someone accuses me of playing off Flannery O'Connor. It's true, I say, Flannery--have we determined first names are the way to go?--Flannery's distinctive style can never be imitated, only travestied.

No one thinks too long and hard about this, which they shouldn't because it's a line I got from a Norton Anth. It was used to describe an American writer who writes absolute tripe (not Flannery!) Well then class ended (an hour early, inexplicably) and all the writers went to a bar called The Mad Horse for one beer and light discussion (that would be heavily and darkly competitive) and I went home to smoke pot and drink red wine and work on my dystopic maximalist novel about radioactive beetles who work in an underground hotdog factory called Tiananmen Flatts for a boss named Frank B (who may or may not exist) in an effort to cater the next world war, until one day they leave the totalitarian cave and discover joy and pain, love and grief, and through this journey discover the meaning of what philosophers call life. (This work will receive unanimous praise, with the proviso the entire ending be cut). The End.

--

ORIGINAL EMAIL FROM MCSWEENEYS

From: McSweeney's Web Submissions [mailto:websubmissions@mcsweeneys.net]
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 8:23 AM
To: Abbi M Dion
Subject: Re: How Much for an MFA in W.T.F.?_AbbiDion

Hi, Abbi -

This one has its moments, but I think maybe the venom overwhelms the humor a bit too much. Hope it provided you some catharsis, though. Thanks for the look.

Best,
Chris

Christopher Monks
Website Editor

He was a Monster

2011-02-15T11:46:00.008-05:00

2009

When you are young – it is 10:54 – it is 10:54 and you have all the time in the world – to what? – to make lists – to list the qualities you wish to embody – the person you aspire in earnest to become – You'll never care about money – You will drive faster, farther – You will memorize maps – And rivers – Correct spelling and grammar unconsciously, judiciously – You will meet someone, a gift of the universe, the same gift as you, Galatea – This is the list you write again and again – after boarding a bus in a foreign country – after a kiss that leaves you empty as a shell – after a new apartment in a new city – The list will change – but only in the most irrelevant, inevitable ways – The countries whose capitols you will photograph, the friends you wish to find, the language you will study by tape – And master

When you are twenty-eight you do not spend time crafting lists like these – you refuse to kid yourself about the future, the promise of anything – you are different now – your dog, your child, asleep in your bed – you've experienced betrayal and deceit – you've lost your mind – chased it – and lost it again – you are in love with men from the past – men who never really wanted you – you write to them now – think of them when you've had a drink at a work party and are walking home along the parkway – past the museum – towards home, sleep, something

You are awake – it is dark –

You are making a list – It is a list of things you cannot touch

Old Man and the Sea

2011-02-11T11:26:00.002-05:00

Story: An old man is sitting at the fire with his grand-son. It had become dark and the only sound you could hear was the crackling of the fire. After a while of silence the old man says: "Do you know how I feel sometimes? It's like there are two wolves in my heart, fighting against each other. The one is vengeful, aggressive and evil. The other one is loving, soft and caring." "Which one will win the fight?" the boy asks. And the old man says: "The one that I feed."

it's just like breathing underwater--your body will remember

2011-02-09T12:31:00.006-05:00

One of the interesting things about not drinking is when you aren’t drinking, you know you aren’t. For example, you say to yourself, I’ll go out tonight and I won’t drink – as if “not drinking” is one of the activities you are intentionally engaging in. And, well, it is. You are consciously choosing not to drink. You aren’t just going to a party and only realizing later, oh, I didn’t even have a beer. You aren’t going to dinner and forgetting to look at the wine list. You aren’t going home at the end of an event and simply not thinking about mixing a nightcap. You are deliberately and actively not doing these things.

But before all of this not-doing, you are going to a party. And you’ve decided that tonight you won’t drink. Maybe someone’s made a comment about your drinking. Maybe your boyfriend has said, I hope you don’t get plastered tonight—you become so argumentative with everyone. Maybe you, just you, have been wondering if things are as in control as they should be, if your drinking is as healthy and normal as you’d like it to be, if there isn’t maybe just a wee bit of a problem. Either way, you’ve come to the decision: I am not going to drink tonight and by the time you pull up to the house or apartment and turn off the engine you are already regretting this decision. You are putting on a good face, but in fact you are already trying to rationalize your choice to drink, if necessary; your right to drink, if necessary; your good judgment in choosing to drink, if indeed you do. It’s a fucking party for God’s sake!

You walk up the driveway or through the lobby and you think about your pre-determined commitment to “not drink” tonight. You think about how this is going to work exactly. How are you going to enjoy yourself without drinking, without the option of drinking? You knock on the door or ring the bell and enter the party. The room has people in it; they are holding cups and bottles and the easy smiles and warmth of the drink. You immediately feel ill at ease. Unfamiliar. Agitated. Soon, you feel angry. I mean, everyone else is carrying on with the glow of the drink and the ease of amusing conversation that the drink provides. And you are supposed to stand here, chatting idly? Sipping…seltzer? You are supposed to engage in conversations with strangers and pretend to give a fuck about the most mundane bullshit? You are supposed to suffer the pontifications of the latest trick to publish a chapbook? You are supposed to watch some lecherous fuck tool around the room? You are supposed to hold court in a circle of women, women who’ve made it clear they think you’re a flake? You are supposed to feel alone and weird and depressed and anxious? And all without a drink?

Fuck that. Walk to the kitchen. Crack a beer or open a bottle of wine like the pro you are or pour yourself a glass of whiskey if it’s all that’s left on the counter. Drink it like a champ. Rejoin the party and feel yourself engage. Feel the tension slide off you like a suit of armor clattering to the floor. Feel the disappointment with this/that/the other thing dissipate into bad or unfortunate memories. Feel your resentment at the arrogant prick across the room or the self-righteous bitch casting a lowered, then raised eye at you wash away into a general feeling of whatever. You have a drink in your hand. You are fine. You’re even enjoying the conversation you’re having with the kid who published a long poem in a journal you’ve admittedly never heard of. You are laughing and debating jocularly; teasing and winking; opining and conceding. You have achieved the sensation that everything that’s happening right now is important, magical. Fun.

It’s important though to mention that you believe your relating to others in this way was made possible by the drink. That without it, such connections would not be possible or, simply less meaningful. You think of the secret special intimacy drinking creates. You observe the quantifiable amelioration it lends to these situations, these conversations, these relations. Here you are lighting her cigarette, sharing a joke. Here you are trading notes and observations with a former classmate. Here you are on the balcony, clinking glasses with the young poet, now with an ex, now the air. You realize the common denominator for a great many of these intimate moments has been the bottle.

And the truth is, this bothers you. But not enough--not yet--to take the realization further, into the uncharted territory of change. Into the waters of oblivion, as D.H. Lawrence put it. In a way, the realization validates your opinion that drinking is very important—nay, crucial. It is, in fact, your best and surest link to the thing that you are trying to run from and trying to pin down or maybe actually embrace; it has become your well-known bond and well-worn bridge to the thing you call and recognize as yourself.

overheard on campus today

2011-02-08T16:13:00.002-05:00

"why is this happening? and why is this happening to me??"
-- an undergraduate Temple student, walking up the stairs of the 1810 Liacouras building.

isn't she a little young?

2011-02-08T16:11:00.007-05:00

These images are from the Vera Wang Bridal Collection. I felt weird looking at them. It reminds me of a girl playing dress up. Sort of chilling. Typical. But still fucking chilling.

What's the point exactly of showing an old bag like me what the dress is going to look like on my twelve year old daughter? I don't have a daughter. I have a chihuahua. But unless I'm looking for formal wear for my theoretical daughter's "Quince" I ain't tryin' a see that. Cheers. What the hell is wrong with everyone.

from an interview

2010-11-02T13:27:00.006-04:00

When I wrote about him, I wrote about a man I wanted. I wrote about a man who was complicated and wonderful, who was selfish and critical and funny and wounded and sad. I wrote a man into being whom I'd written before. I'd written him many years ago, in actual days, where our paths actually crossed. I knew him, yes, but not as I said I knew him. I knew him briefly and romantically -- and forgettably and regretfully and truly. I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to spend real time with him, together, because the time we spent was always fleeting and fraught and charged with his impending departure. He had me, and he had his real life. He had his home in a wooded suburb and his new wife and his children from his first marriage. And I had, I had …

this is a good story

2010-10-13T14:38:00.005-04:00

i wish i had a river so long

2010-09-22T13:56:00.002-04:00

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing

[On Irony]

Well--the pleasures of irony, one sometimes has to think, are the only consolation when contemplating the human story…

[On the Comfort of the Group and the Odiousness of the Group]

It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community's ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process…But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, revere the pack.

Opponents are never hated as much as former allies.

[On Knowledge and Cognizance]

As I said in the last essay, I believe that people coming after us will marvel that on the one hand we accumulated more and more information about our behavior, while on the other, we made no attempt at all to improve our lives.

I believe that we are in the grip of something very powerful and very primitive, and that we have not begun to come to grips with it. To study it, yes, that goes on in a hundred universities. But to apply it--no.

Meanwhile, we observe later generations going through it and, knowing what we are capable of, fear for them. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest, wisest wish we have for the young must be: "we hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country's history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice."

But it is one thing carrying a burden of knowledge around, half conscious of it, perhaps ashamed of it, hoping it will go away if you don't look too hard, and another saying openly and calmly and sensibly, "Right. This is what we must expect under this and that set of conditions."

[On Fear of Ambiguity]

People like certainties. More, they crave certainty, they seek certainty, and great resounding truths.

[On Mind Control &, just, Control]

Brain-washing has three main pillars or processes, by now well understood. the first is tension, followed by relaxation. This one is used, for instance in the interrogation of prisoners, when the interrogator is alternatively harsh and tender--one moment a sadistic bully, the next a kind friend. The second is repetition--saying or singing the same thing over and over again. The third is the use of slogans--the reducing of complex ideas to simple sets of words. These three are used all the time by governments, and always have been used. While I said before it is interesting to speculate to what an extent the use of these methods is unconscious,…separate for example from some sophisticated operator knowing exactly what he is doing.

One mass movement, each a set of mass opinions, succeeds another: for war, against war; against nuclear war; for technology, against technology. And each breeds a certain frame of mind: violent, emotional, partisan, always suppressing facts that don't suit, lying, and making it impossible to talk in the cool, quiet, sensible low-keyed tone of voice which can produce truth.

[On the Collective Mind: Follow-My-Leader]

It has all been very entertaining but it has also left me feeling sad and embarrassed for my profession. does everything always have to be so predictable? Do people really have to be such sheep? Of course there are original minds, people who do take their own line, who do not fall victim to the need to say, or do, what everyone else does. But they are very few. Very few. On them depends the health, the vitality of all our institutions, not only literature, from which I have been drawing my examples.

[On the Individual]

Meanwhile, we may note that we all rely on, and we respect, this idea of the lonesome individualist who overturns conformity.

I see what a great influence an individual may have, even an apparently obscure person, living a small quiet life.

[On Laughter]

It means, and I hope this won't sound too wild, choosing to laugh… The researchers of brainwashing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resistd best. The Turks, for instance… the soldiers who faced their torturers with laughter sometimes survived when others did not. Fanatics don't laugh at themselves; laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can't laugh. True believers don't laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea. Tyrants and oppressors don't laugh at themselves, and don't tolerate laughter at themselves. The liberated person, however, can laugh at herself, himself.

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if you wanna write

2010-09-20T17:23:00.006-04:00

from "life, and what it would be like"

2010-09-15T11:21:00.012-04:00

I'm a competitive bitch. My therapist says, you need to find new ways of talking to yourself. You need to change the unhealthy sentences you tell yourself. I say, I wish I wasn't competitive, but I am, and in a bitchy way. What do you mean? My therapist says. Like, I say (I say "like"), every time someone is talking about what they're reading or where they're going, I want to say: I read that! And I went there! Sometimes I want to say it even when it isn't true. My therapist says, that's normal. I say, it shouldn't be. And anyway, now that I don't drink I'm less given to uttering deliberate and direct lies.

Do you know that when you're bombed, you sometimes tell lies about yourself? These lies can be innocuous little bits of rubbish that are forgotten by all the moment after they're uttered. For example, "I read that article" or "I know that painting" or simply "I totally know what you're talking about". But sometimes you tell significant ones, like, "my book's being published" or "I have feelings for you, too." In 2000, when I was studying abroad, I told a guy named Itay, a fellow student in the Bologna program, that I was a zero-generation French Canadian. Now, my grandfather's father's family is French Canadian, but clearly that puts us back multiple generations. I frequently lied about how many people I slept with. I did this, frankly, because the number was so low for someone in their twenties. I never felt bad about this lie, and I'm sure it's not terribly uncommon. I lied about things like where I'd lived, because saying "Minnesota, and a year abroad" sounded less exciting and cosmopolitan than I fashioned myself. I'd usually throw in Colorado and New York as previous domiciles, because I'd been to both states several times and figured: what the hell. Before I was in college I lied about being a student at the University of Minnesota. I didn't realize it then, but I was trying to achieve status. I was trying to gain prestige. I was aspiring. (Do you know aspire comes from the Latin aspirare, literally, to breathe upon. Incidentally, in my last year of college I decided to take Intro to Russian and learned that the Russian word for graduate student is aspirant.)
If I can, I'd like to return, briefly, to the year in Italy. When I was living in Europe I thought: wow, I am not making the most of this experience. And, although in some respect this was tragic, I'd like to focus on how it was nonetheless undoubtedly true. I would say I was unprepared for certain aspects of living in a foreign country (social skills, level of independence), but the truth is I was unprepared for the whole enterprise. My ego was so frightfully fragile that with each failed attempt at success, each awkward romance or even with each slightly difficult interaction with a shop-keeper, I retracted. My language skills were above average (simply the truth) but in the face of a challenge--a real challenge--I realized quite unexpectedly and disappointingly that I was timorous, fearful, shy (note to the reader: all these words mean the same thing). I was never a rigorous academic or fanatical student and now that the courses were being taught in Italian, I had the perfect excuse to stop going to lectures altogether. I didn't really relate to my colleagues, the other American students, and I felt equally intimidated by their home institutions, their lack of inhibition and aggressive intelligence, so I passed on social engagements or if I attended, I took frequent smoke breaks and quietly got drunk in the corner.

The grocery store on my residential block was named, delightfully, PAM, and it had an entire wall of wine bottles. These went for the equivalent of approximately two to four dollars. At some point each day, I got the courage to wander out of the apartment, walk to PAM, pick up a bottle of Est!Est!Est! and a bottle of San Giovese, along with a bag of crackers and a block of Pecorino Sorrentino (which in the ten years hence I have yet to find in the U S of A). On the walk back, I often picked up a pack of Camel Lights from a machine on the side of an abandoned building, and then (nota bene: you're never supposed to say "and then") after this herculean effort, I returned to the apartment and called it a damn day. I'd set up shop on the balcony, unscrew the first cork with a Gauloises corkscrew I'd picked up ??? and pour a glass of wine into a pink or green coffee mug (no wine glasses in the pre-furnished apartment). I'd light a cigarette and look out across the parking lot (the balcony overlooked a parking lot) and watch the sun make its descent. I drank until it was evening, and then I drank until it was night, and sometimes, I drank until it was very early.

My therapist says, if you're competitive, why didn't you join the fray? I say, sometimes competitive people hide. Recently, though, I've been wondering if maybe it's normal. Maybe being normally competitive, predictably bitchy, is being a regualr person--nothing extraordinary. Maybe I'm just a person with feelings and desires, regrets and nostalgia. One of those desires is to be a better person, less neurotic and image-obsessed. Now that I'm older, now that I live in Philadelphia, I feel less interested in status and prestige. Philadelphia has one of the poorest collections of people you'll ever meet. Poor is a relative term, but if you take a walk or a drive through north Philadelphia, it won't seem relative. I think about how I can be less introspective and actually make somebody's life qualitatively, if not quantitatively, better. I have this theory that if we all did something for someone with less than us--and I mean that at every level of socioeconomic status--the world would be a different place. At any rate, I get out of the apartment more. I work at a college and volunteer at two charter schools. I'm taking a class on urban education (Jonathan Kozol is a good starting point). The truth is, I sometimes miss the self-created desert island. I miss the smoke filling my lungs and the wine filling my body. I miss the longing and pining and phone-dialing. I miss the weird thoughts; the fears and epiphanies. And I miss the sheer feeling of oneness that infatuation creates (infatuation? yes, infatuation. caroline knapp knew all too well). But it's easier to miss the island than to live there (is this a cliche? I don't know). And when I remember it honestly, it was a really lonely time. I don't have time to be lonely now. There's too much to be done, to much to do. My therapist tells me, see, you aren't a competitive bitch. I say, thank you, but that has yet to be seen.

AMD

the chimp named nim, what happened to him?

2010-09-10T10:31:00.012-04:00

why don't I like poems that go from one thought to another?
declarative sentence, incendiary exclamation, illogically juxtaposed parts of speech.
noam chomsky said "green ideas sleep furiously" or something similar.
the truth is, I can't recall because it's been eight years since linguistics, and my dad would say, that is no excuse.
my mom would say, your dad dragged me to see him once. (was that a logical digression?)
also I am here, at the computer, and today the internet is working. so why don't I check and find out what it was, what he said to prove that a grammar works just like this?

it's so easy today to appear as though you know it all.

but I don't know it all. I don't know what a line like "I can buy shoes" means, and
perhaps it means something wonderful. so many times I've thought I knew it all
or, at least, was on the path to something profound, something that would show them all
(I would show them all)
love songs apparently are common.

mermaids have gold teeth.

I can buy toothpaste.

see? it's just language. (ha! someone said, "just language") and I agree.
teeth, toothpaste. it's too neat. not dramatic. not unstable enough.
do you know what stability is? ignorance.

but also
it's love.

so anyway, I've been laying off the bottle lately. and I've been thinking.

did you know when you stop something
you still dream you're doing it?
here you are toasting champagne on a balcony in the rain
now running to buy wine before the clock strikes nine, last night you were
ordering winter beers in winter bars

you still watch the light from passing cars
still see ghosts in moving shadows on the wall
you still see mermen smile and frown
still stay up late writing: wreathed in seaweed red and brown
still piece together thoughts and memories, adjectives
and nouns

lalalalalaaaaaa AMD

more notes...

2010-09-02T14:58:00.005-04:00

She goes into a room in her mind, and pulls down the shade

The night takes shapes, this one a lion
this one a ghost

summers in Minnesota we rode our bikes
around the block
we rode the block
again and again and again

with wind, with sun, with children
thoughts of death
why am I thinking this?
we counted to one hundred

The night proposes a solution

the houses were known, the people inside
we knew
once
at the house across the street
there was a garage sale

The night shows me a cabinet
I know what they look like, the bottles
how they feel
how they pull me out

my sister's friend and I are walking up the driveway
we skirt the table edges, clasping trinkets
I want this one, no, this one
shirts waving, late summer night
books, pages flipping
and I see it, a blue bracelet
metal

The night shows me my own face

I slip it on
we whisper laughter and
hear someone coming
let's hide in here, she says

The night shows me the dark dark dark
the inside of a cabinet, where we pull the door shut
sit in silence, waiting
what are we waiting for?

What are you doing!
She's yelling, get out! go home!
and we run, we run down the driveway, across the street
to our houses
we are next door neighbors
don't tell, she says

but she doesn't know I would never tell
why would I tell
and prove to my parents, to my sister
that I am what we fear

bad

The night leads me to bottles, bottles promise things
I want to believe them
a gnawing says I need to

the backyard of our house on lion lane
is an ocean
my parents are shadows in the kitchen light
a bird circles far away
I see the bracelet still on my wrist
a sky grows dark and a bird is lost against it
a pain in my chest so tight I scream

The night is long, and every night is just as long, and every night is just as long

my parents are holding me
my sister's hand on my hand

abbi, they say, abbi
it's okay, it's okay

The night is here, still here
and she is still in me

A.M.D.

To Be Revised into an Epic

2010-08-31T16:18:00.009-04:00

notes...

Go ahead, walk
maybe there is a beach to comb, girls hair
clips and bracelet gems

The last time I wanted
revenge I drove to the top of a hill
and read a poem
over and over and over

We are strangers
more strange
with each year
hard to believe

Do you share this fear?
That if you skip a page--that page
will be the one page
that mattered

A.M.D.

Drinking: A Love Story

2010-08-30T11:12:00.000-04:00

Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Simply one of the best books I've read in my life.

Excerpt:

She wrote, "I withdrew in other, more subtle ways. My husband used to say, 'When Nan gets bombed, she goes off into some little room in her mind, and pulls down the shade.'"

That line stuck with me for many years. It was quite unlike anything I'd ever read about drinking or drunks, quite contrary to the images of alcohol I'd encountered in the past: the manly and tough drinker, or the smooth and elegant drinker. "She goes off into some little room in her mind and pulls down the shade." Without stating so explicitly, that image had to do with the places alcohol can take you. it had do with transportation, with the very real--and, to alcoholics, enormously seductive--phenomenon of taking psychic flight, ingesting a simple substance and leaving yourself behind.

I read it over and over and over.

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The Jailor, Sylvia Plath

2010-08-26T11:01:00.002-04:00

That being free. What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me.

Robert Browning: the Pied Piper of Hamelin: Front cover of the Book

2010-08-24T11:44:00.000-04:00

Robert Browning: the Pied Piper of Hamelin: Front cover of the Book

When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-side shut fast.
Did I say, all? No! One was lame,
And could not dance the whole of the way

2010-08-19T16:07:00.000-04:00

Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

She'll go with you to those uncomfortable memories.

from "Folk Song"

However, with her lame' bathing suit and her camp ring walk, appealing to everyone's sense of fun, she would be the fundamental female as comedy: The killer could sit comfortably in the audience and laugh, enjoying this appearance of his feminine colleague. Maybe he would feel such comfort that he would stand and come forward, unbuckling his pants with the flushed air of a modest person finally coming up to give testimony. Safe in her sweating, loose, and very wet embrace, surrounded by the dense energy of many men, his penis could tell her the secret story of murder right in front of everyone. Her worn vagina would hold the killer like it had held the husband and the lover and the sharpie and the father and the nitwit and every other man, his terrible story a tiny, burning star in the rightful firmament of her female vastness.

Hell, yes, she would "show what women can do"!

from "An Old Virgin"

Well, but who could blame her? When she was still a teenager, out of nowhere her mother asked Laura what it had been like to lose her virginity. She wanted to know if the experience had been "special." It was late and the living room was dark. They had been watching TV together. Laura was startled by the question. "Was it someone you loved?" asked her mother.

"Yes," replied Laura, lying. "Yes it was."

"I'm glad," said her mother. She still looked straight ahead. "I wanted you to have that."

What a revolting conversation, thought Laura. She couldn't quite put her finger on why; her mother had only been expressing concern. But her concern seemed somehow connected with the nun in the water, and the dirtbag trying to set the little girl on fire.

from "Mirror Ball"

Because the dark-haired elfin girl was also a secular-minded person, she didn't know he'd taken a part of her soul any more than he did. But she knew she would not hear from him again. And she knew something was gone. She woke the next day feeling bereft and heartsick. She sulked and drooped around her flat while her roommates exchanged knowing glances. She vacillated between anger and contempt and terrible longing, and a sense that she must see the young man again no matter what. Because she was a rational person, she was sure that her feelings were illusory. Because she was a proud person, she was determined that she should not act on her feelings and call him. Rational and proud, she controlled her feelings by categorizing them in terms of obsession and projection. "I don't even know him," she said. "I'll get over it." And she waited for it to pass.

from "The Agonized Face"

I thought of my daughter, standing before the mirror, pushing her lower lip out, making seductive eyes. I though of her sitting at the kitchen table, drawing scenes from her favorite book, Magic by the Lake. I thought of her frightened awake from a nightmare, crying, "Mommy, Mommy!" I remembered washing her as a baby, using the spray hose from the kitchen sink to rinse shit away from the swollen petals of her infant slit--a hole she may fall down if she opens it too early, a dark Wonderland of teeth and bones and crushing force. The hole in life, a hole we cannot see into, no matter how closely we look.

and

Wordless knowledge can be heavy and dark as the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes you want the relief of dryness, of light, bright words. Sometimes you might be on the side of a smart-aleck middle-aged woman who thumbs her nose at the agonized face and fellates a snotty, sexy man, just for a dumb little thrill. Sometimes you wish it could be that easy.

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Praise for Mary Gaitskill's story "Today I'm Yours"

2010-08-18T16:46:00.005-04:00

Ms. Dion writes: I read the story about the two lesbians and I felt like, I know I'm supposed to be feeling something. This story is supposed to tear at me, gnaw actually at my insides and I'm supposed to want to cry and die simultaneously. But I felt like, I don't care about these horrible people who are too humorless and vain to be believed. I felt like, she's a fucking asshole and you are a dumbass who is such a follower, such a timorous little creature who can only attack people in this hip bourgeois nightmare you've created -- and I haven't got any use for it! Then I thought about my story. My tale of love and woe and longing between an older intellectual alcoholic and a young eager to please shop-girl, of course. Maybe all those compact scenes, the arch dialogue, the precise detail of neckties and mix-tapes and law school and wine drunk handwriting -- maybe everything that I thought was so affecting, was actually only affecting to me. Maybe the last scene, with all the drawn out mawkish, yet restrained, dramarama about the girl driving around in the evening snow and watching the stoplights changing over and over again -- maybe all of that was neither tragic nor hopeful. Maybe it was all a big bunch of bullshit.

Please see the Labels for this post, btw. Cheers.

Quote of the Day

2010-08-05T12:32:00.002-04:00

Now I am quietly waiting for /

the catastrophe of my personality /

to seem beautiful again.

Frank O'Hara

i thought it was already heavy as can be

2010-07-09T09:40:00.004-04:00

Continuum peruse perusing
how the day starts

The drive, the dream and all its symbols
The woman who doesn’t wave hello at the dunkin donunts
could be every one who didn’t
tell you, take you, try to

Heavy for a morning in an office chair
Hot on the street, a heat wave
Hot in the coffee, the cup
Lifting one thing to your mouth, one to a desk
one thing from a place to
a place

And when it's over
Where do you hide

Self-Portrait in Office
July 9, 2010

Half Nelson scene

2010-07-06T13:08:00.002-04:00

i find this very beautiful.

the song, in full.

ode to kay nielsen

2010-06-28T13:58:00.003-04:00

Again, it's like this. I had a dream last night. You came to me in a letter, or a phone call, a message with your picture on the screen—I can't remember. Only, that you would be here sometime later and you wanted to meet. Above all others, you said, you wanted to see me. And so, first, I went back to the place where we first met. I went to the shop and walked behind the counter to see how things were looking. I was pleased somehow. Pleased perhaps that things had changed for me, while others swam in place, pleased that things were so similar in the shop, customers wearing the same coats and hats, young girls with brown braids and young men who felt out of this world, and were. I walked towards the door, to leave, but stopped. There were people waiting. They needed help. How could I pass, even if I was no longer employed? So I stopped, began to ring a woman's items, but she'd emptied her purse and I was scanning everything she'd laid on the counter. By the time I realized this I had quite the list. I turned to my left and J was there, judging me, in his way. So instead of asking him to cancel the ticket, I went back and deleted each item, one by one. And when she had thanked me, and me her, I turned to J, as we did, when everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us, and we were ready to confess. He said, A is in town. And I said, (I hesitated), I said, I know. I'm supposed to meet him tonight. Then J said, there he is now. And there you were. You came through the door of winter and afternoon and bright sunlight. You were wearing a heavy black jacket. Your wife looked exactly like she does in the picture. I walked back, as if I hadn't seen you, as if I could escape and never be seen. You came to the center of the store and everyone working was looking at you. Of course you were a god and we were your children. Except I was Mary Magdalene. And you were looking right at me with your well deep eyes and your wife was chatting with J and I felt like he was buying me time and I was overcome with love for him. You pressed your lips into the shape you always made and sort of opened up your face and pressed it forward—which makes no sense, but trust me, it's something you do. And then what happened? I can't remember quite, only that I left, that I made an excuse and fled, because I'd said something and your wife said something and we were laughing, sharing a joke, and I thought, oh, that is fucked up, now that is wrong. Affairs are what they are, but lies like that, lies like sharing something, a common feeling with your wife, well, that, that is something different; that is something worse. So I was out the door and in the apartment of a stranger and my dear friend was there. She'd just had her baby. She was ready to have a few glasses of wine. And so we did, with another friend of ours, a party girl. And we raised our glasses and I wanted to tell them everything, but they would say: but you're too old to still be doing that. They would say: do you learn anything? They would say: what about the other woman—you've been the other woman to a child—you've been awake at 4 a.m., looking out the window—smoking a cigarette and drinking champagne. And I would say: but we share something, something that people miss, miss by a millimeter, but we, we are like two arrows shot through the dark, from opposite sides of a field, and we hit, we can't miss, can never miss, even if we wanted to. And so the girls and I drink and the lovely, dear baby with her own baby now says she's tired and must go and I think: if I call you and tell you I can't see you, then I will have changed, and that will be that. She is getting up. I am waving goodbye, holding a question in my mind, looking for the best path to take and for you to be standing on it, always, no matter what.

"Couldn't care less," she said.

2010-06-23T14:27:00.000-04:00

I am reading a book* with lines of dialogue like: "My dear, the man's a raving maniac!" she finally cried. "I must talk to you about this. When are you free?"

=

Nice departure from reality**.

*Paul Bowles, Let it Come Down, page 92
**Office Life