Savannah Lee

I wish I could speak the poetry of solitude, but it's too fragmented; it's slices of cold ground and bright air from seven different years. A table you know better than you know how to eat the food nearby (another woman's been beaten to death; every fucking day in the fucking paper). Shirts leaping up and up as if by their own will in a drier who speaks only to itself.

It's days and days of the road salt you tracked across the wooden floor, it's the way the carpet you don't even like is pounded down harder over here, it's the black sheet you threw up over the blinds. That's why it drives people mad.

Meaning won't stick to it. It won't go anywhere. No matter how hard you pound it, it gives nothing. But it's everything.

Chipped paint on the green door being stalked by that kudzu. A living bridal veil married to everything else and now reaching for that door. You broke your key in it. You still don't know how; you didn't mean to. The boy is disgusted with you. He won't meet your eyes. You remember the other boy managing to shut the school-bus door from the outside and then blaming it on the girls.

Purple clouds in the night and the feel of the engine. Speed is a false freedom. So maybe the four walls are a false prison. The moon likes to look in.

The man in that movie said, "The second you do not respect this it will kill you."

"Good!" I said. "We can do it. Let me go to the bathroom and I'll come back naked."

"No, see...I don't want to be awake..."

"Oh. Okay." I slid into his arms and snuggled up.

"But now I'm thinking about you naked, dammit."

#

What is erotica?

Since I seem to write the stuff, I demand the right to be confused by it. What is it? As is true of most genres which appear to be rigidly defined, things get (hmm) slippery when you take a closer look.

Who, for example, is the sex in an erotica actually for? I've read stories where it's clearly for the reader, it's aiming to get the reader off. I've read a lot of stories which are no less oh-my-stars-and-garters, but what's happening is strictly for the characters. Very different feel.

Then there's the erotica's relationship to Story. So many eroticas are giddily free of The Rules. We all know why we're here. We all know why we care. On to the fun stuff!

And the stuff, even if it's rough, is indeed supposed to be fun. Erotica is one of the few branches on the great Tree of Fiction where conflict and suffering are not on the menu. I should say where unplanned and unwanted conflict and suffering are not on the menu. Kinky stories are full of implacable doms and their trembling subs, but it's obvious that this is all negotiated and consensual. Genuine danger or cruelty is...not exactly unwelcome, but needs to be negotiated with care, and generally people don't bother.

From one perspective, this is "bad," because there can be low stakes to a story like that (except whether it will get you off). But you have to understand what the form is after. The reader wants great sex to happen. He wants what he wants for himself. Those kinds of stories need to go gently.

I bet other characters are wildly jealous of erotica characters. I bet they pound on the windows, yelling and picketing. "THRILLER CHARACTERS UNITED: WE DEMAND EROTICA RIGHTS!"

Let's picture the rally. A standard thriller fodder--curly red hair, eyes that'll break your heart--steps up to the mike. Voice trembling: "My nonconsensual ordeal at the hands of the villain covered eight different scenes, each one worse for me than the last. This was done for no other reason than to make some jackass in an airport 'care.' Meanwhile, my sister got in an erotica, and the author sent her to Folsom to have multiple orgasms with a safe, sane and consensual top."

No doubt one of them will discover that it's a conspiracy.

Let's not even get started on what horror characters would be saying about this. In fact I don't think they're saying anything at all; I think what's left of them is scattered over there on the lawn. The eyes are blinking expressionlessly at the picketing thriller characters, and the mouths are saying "I remember springtime."

(Probably some Stephen King characters are together enough to picket if they want to, but they don't; they're walking the edges in tight silence, catching eyes where they can and signaling 'Stop.' Be careful. Who, these shrewd-from-experience creatures ask, are we petitioning, anyhow? The authors themselves? Or...or the thing that's in control of us all? "Here's what I'm afraid of: I'm afraid it will answer. I'm afraid it will answer our prayers...")

Erotica is the tender face of the god.

I try to keep faith with her always, no matter what I'm writing; you do have to go there, but I try to do it with my people rather than to them. If that makes any sense. You have to be truthful, but you can still go gentle.

Gentle as naked in the night.

When I came back to bed, he was awake.

It hit me midday yesterday. The coughing I mean. Everything hurts. I couldn't sleep last night. I was reduced to watching TV at 1am. Boy was it ever disorienting to see all those pay phones in "In The Line Of Fire"--it was like watching something from the technological stone age, yet that movie didn't come out that long ago. How quickly things have changed.

Okay so anyhow, I must now go down to the couch and cough some more while glaring and muttering at my cough medicine. Maybe I'll watch that episode of "Behind the Music" that I taped. It's the one with George Michael. I think he's a victim of our society's rigidity about sexuality.

My husband and I were talking about that this morning, actually. Or more precisely, he was talking and I was nodding and coughing. He was telling me how the Samoans have a third sex, the fa'afafina (iirc), who are men who live as women and have sex with men but are not considered gay. They are fa'afafina, a category which, like the better-known berdache, does not exist in western culture. Mr. Husband went on to say that Samoan culture does not define you by what equipment you came with, but how you live.

I got a few words in edgewise around my Camille shtick to the effect that it truly amazes me that western culture doesn't do that too. The west has never bowed to the innate ambivalence of human sexuality. No fa'afafina, no berdache, no exceptions, no escape. You are either a man or a woman and if you don't fit the expectations of your gender reasonably well, you go through life with an asterisk next to your name. The best we seem able to do is something like "drag queen/king," which we see as performative, or "transsexual," which we see as a problem that needs to be resolved. That's so crude and unsophisticated I can't stand it.

Similar to this is our bovine insistence that sex is always sex. I'd never thought about that before. But then I read this bracing essay by Mark Simpson. "Is it really absolutely clear what 'sex' is?...Isn't it a form of erotic totalitarianism to insist that all sensual contact is 'sex?'" Simpson is arguing that people should be allowed to define their behavior how they want, to decide with their partners what "counts" and what doesn't.

Personally, I blame Freud for 'the sex terror' (as Simpson calls it). It was Freud who began policing the inner mind, locating its interpretation outside the individual. It was Freud who began overruling people, interpreting their dreams, saying he knew better. And for Freud, everything was sex. Images in your head. Slips of the tongue. A blush. An unplanned glance. When even that gets judged, what chance does 'sensual contact' have?

#

Here's the thing, though. Simpson may be too assertive to realize this, but despite all the risks and loathsomeness, we need our Freuds. Not Freud himself--god forbid--but people we can go to for reality checks, people we can give our stories to and ask them for understanding and coherence in return. We don't always see ourselves very well. We don't always see the world around us clearly. We need our shamans, we need our dream warriors.

The question, as always, is when. Context is everything. And that seems to be what we always get wrong.

#

Okay. Couch. Television. See you tomorrow.

ED. 3/4: Mr. Husband sent me this link about the fa'afafine, and sorry about the misspelling above. Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry suggests that fa'afafine might be somewhat of a ghost in the machine, much like the controversial "cargo cults." If that is the case, then it brings up a whole bunch of neat issues about projection--westerners looking for escape from rigid gender categories. They project that escape onto nonwestern cultures, pretending to find in 'the other' what is actually in themselves. Wish fulfillment on a grand scale--which can definitely be seen as an aspect of anthropology :)

If you read the literature, many 20th century anthropologists have "found," in this culture or that culture, something they dearly wish existed in their own--free sexual utopias, perfect aggressive masculinity, saintly environmentalism, etc. Then someone else comes along and says "What was this person smoking?" Here's an abstract, in fact, of exactly this kind of thing, showing how a single group (the Ho'hokam) has been made to reflect the different fantasies of subsequent generations of researchers. In a weird way, it's almost like what fans do to their favorite stars. I wonder what Britney Spears would have to say about it all.

Charlotte Allen's astounding screed of internalized femophobia, that is. They're saying it was supposed to be a joke.

I realize my brain is clouded by whatever bacteria or virus has gotten hold of me right now--you should have seen me yesterday trying to figure out my lunch--but I gotta say, this thing did not look like a joke to me. It looked like Allen was seriously saying "Okay girls, let's admit it: we really are inferior! I mean, we scream like Beatles fans for Barack Obama and crash our cars!"

You know, at least with Lori Gottlieb's article about "settling," there was something to argue. But this...? Where do you start?

#

I'll say this much about going to a girl's school (which I did for high school). I didn't particularly like it and I wouldn't do it again. But it does clear your head. It gets you right over crap like this. You do learn, and I guess I've taken this for granted, to see girls and women as people. When they're all you've got, that's what happens.

And you do learn things...subversive little things...like the fact that girls don't primp for guys. They do it for each other. The bathrooms in my high school were toxic with fumes as the approximately third of the school who was into that kind of thing tried to out-hair-and-face each other in between classes.

Oh yeah, anyone out there thinking that sending your daughter to an all-girl's school will protect her from reckless displays of vanity? No.

And money differences, which are allegedly covered up by the uniforms? We could still tell who had it and who didn't. After all, even with uniforms, you still wear your own shoes, hair and sweaters.

But. But. We were people to each other. During those years, within those walls, we were people. Some of us shallow and stupid, some of us boy-crazy (and they were not necessarily the same ones). Some of us mean, some of us lost, some of us driven. Some of us lucky and some of us cursed. Some of us children, and some sadly not.

You know. Just like everyone else.

At this point I am watching, or more precisely staring at, 1988's "Cocktail" with Tom Cruise. A film I managed to miss at the time. By a wide margin. But it will have its revenge. It has come for me.

What else have I stared at. I have stared at infomercials for acne medications, mineral makeup, and some kind of all-in-one workout contraption. I have stared at "Project Runway" reruns. I have stared at "Millionaire Matchmaker" and "Real Housewives" reruns.

To help me cope with the brutality of the narcissism on those last two shows, I tried to imagine what Andy Warhol would think of them. And then I realized that he wouldn't think anything at all. He'd just stare at them, like me. Which didn't help at all! Poor Andy.

Poor all of us.

...Why aren't you taking it, Mama?"

This is on Sunday. I strive to stop coughing long enough to explain.

"Because. I. Already. Took. My cough medicine. And I don't know. The active. Ingredient. In the Sucret. Bring me the box. Okay?"

She brings me the box and shows me the front.

"No. The back. Where it says 'active ingredient.'"

I peer at it through my tears.

"Menthol. Okay. Now. Bring me the cough medicine."

She is puzzled, but does so.

"Guaifenesin. So it's not the same stuff. But. Let's read the warnings. Okay? Let's see if it. Says anything about menthol...about not taking guaifenesin and menthol at the same time."

"Why does that matter?"

"Because. You always. Have to be. Careful."

#

You will need to sit through an ad to read this physician's account of how an accidental overdose like Heath Ledger's can happen to someone who is neither an addict nor suicidal.

If you are anything like me--e.g., anal and mistrustful enough to refuse to take a Sucret lest it clash with the Vicks 44 in your system--you will turn inside out with shock as you read the doctor's story of a hypothetical insomnia-and-back-pain patient who decides she knows how to dose herself.

"After leaving the drugstore, the patient realizes that the wise doctor has given her only thirty pills, not enough, since one pill no longer gives her what she requires: deep, worry-free sleep or relief of pain and anxiety. If she has all three problems, she will need more pills or other kinds. She goes to another doctor and gets a second supply."

I guess I was naive, but I was under the impression that people who aren't doctors do know they're not doctors. And that if a doctor tells them to take one whatever per day, they take one, and if it's not working, they go back and say "It's not working." Not start taking two on their own say-so. I don't mean to insult anyone who may do this, but considering that Heath Ledger did in fact just drop unintentionally dead after playing doctor the wrong way, I think it's worth pointing out that improvising your own doses is at the very least potentially dangerous. After all, who the hell knows what it could do to you?

And that is exactly our hypothetical patient's problem:

"She has no idea that drugs have an optimum dose, that combinations of drugs might be like taking too much of a single drug, that often dissimilar medicines can affect the same organs..."

Yeah, see, I don't know any of that stuff either...which is why I don't make up my own doses.

But then, here's the catch, the secret underlying issue: I got a decent education.

Education, as many have said before me, isn't about knowing the answers (although American students could stand to know a few more of 'em). It's about learning to ask the right questions.

Such as: "Why does it specifically say to only take one a day? Does that mean two might hurt me? Why is there this long sheet of information about these pills? Why are the names 'Elvis,' 'Judy Garland,' 'Marilyn Monroe,' and yes, 'Heath Ledger' popping into my head right about now?"

Education teaches you to know what you don't know.

And respect it.

This hypothetical patient who "has no understanding of physiology, how the body works, what controls vital functioning...and how drugs can affect these functions" but who blithely takes more anyway--this patient, I am sorry, is arrogant. Not personally, but in mindset.

"She only wants relief," pleads the sympathetic physician-author, explaining her behavior.

Yes, but look!! Look at the pills!! The label on them is shouting ONE A DAY and probably NO REFILL and there's a red sticker going MAY INTERACT WITH OTHER DRUGS and another one saying DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL and there's a big long Drug Facts sheet, to say nothing of the fact that she had to go to a doctor to get the damn things in the first place instead of being able to buy them over the counter. Really, I hate to sound like a libertarian, but how much more warning does Madame Hypothetical need in order to figure out that she ain't swimmin' in the kiddie pool?

I think that's where the arrogance comes in, though. It's not that she doesn't see the warnings. It's that she can't imagine the reason for them...so she figures there must not be one. What is beyond her horizon does not exist.

A good education pounds it into you, one way or another, that what's beyond your horizon very much does exist. Or as Depeche Mode put it, "Everything counts in large amounts."

Moral of the story: fund our schools better!!

(And don't EVEN try to tell me that money isn't the answer--go look at Choate and tell me that with a straight face. Go on, I'll wait. Back now? Yeah. It's nicer than your college, isn't it?)

Fund our schools better.

Or people will die.

Seriously.

He came to bed last night shaking: "I'm so cold. I'm so cold. I'm so cold."

While I mustered some extra blankets for him, he chattered out, "I even turned the heat up."

That's one of the Seven Signs right there.

Yes, whatever I'm just getting over has well and truly clobbered my lifemate.

At least when he's sick there's someone automatically there to take care of him...when I am, I got nobody. The loneliness of the Angel of the House is the loneliness of the sentry. You're there for everyone, but no one's there for you.

I sound like I'm complaining. I don't mean it that way. I have my own Angel--my keyboard. It's just when I'm sick, I'm cut off from it, and it hurts.

But I'm back now.

Following a link from Shapely Prose, I went to Big Fat Deal and found this post on The Big Ballet, a troupe of Russian dancers who defy the tyranny of the Skinny Ballerina fetish.

Here are some images from their show. There are four pages; I particularly recommend the last one, where a ballerina in a swan tutu shows magnificent grace and passion.

Ballet should not be about how you look--it should be about how you move. Your hands, your feet...your heart.

The gatekeepers of the temple rejected these acolytes, but they would not be denied. What god could fail to be moved?

Art is love or nothing at all.

It started with the skirt.

This was a magnificent skirt--sweep to the floor and heavily, heavily gathered, meaning it was roomy enough to sublet if I'd wanted to. I could sit down in the car wearing this thing, pick my legs up, and plant my feet on the seat without even feeling a tug. Its voluminous folds were more than equal to the challenge.

Plus it was pretty. Its black rayon was hand-painted with delicate green, blue and white swirls.

As you can imagine, I relied on this thing pretty heavily. It was, as the inimitable Twisty Faster would put it, my Number One Jam.

(Twisty is a "gentleman farmer and spinster aunt eating dinner in Austin, Texas" who has some bracingly uncompromising views on Teh Patriarchy. I like to read her like a lapsed Christian likes to stand outside the church door Sunday morning.)

(She would probably not totally appreciate that analogy.)

So anyhow...I'd been wearing this skirt pretty much every day for the previous two or three years. I'd even worn a tiny hole in it. And one day when I got home, I fell prey to a fit of American self-hatred about it.

Why did I wear the same skirt every damn day? Why didn't I vary my clothes like normal people? Why did I have all this clutter? Why couldn't I get it together? It was time to PURGE! It was time to SIMPLIFY! I got a trash bag.

Six or seven bags later, I had a clean closet and no skirt.

Or jeans. Or shirts. Or anything except a pair of flowered capris and a couple of T-shirts. It all went into the refining fire. The funeral pyre of the old, the confused, the weak, the self-defeating. I think I even threw out my cute little black miniskirt. All of it I dragged to the Dumpster by our garage.

My boyfriend, when he got home, could only stare. I had done what!? Thrown out my clothes!? Jeez, and he'd thought it was bad when I chucked out the cleaning supplies.

(Yeah, I'd gone into a fit about chemicals and eighty-sixed everything from the dish soap to the laundry detergent. Then I went to our city's late, lamented local hippie store and bought one of everything from the Earth Rite line.) (At least I'm pretty sure it was Earth Rite. The stuff in the pale beige bottles, with pictures of almonds or oranges on them to show the main ingredient. Do they still exist? I googled them and couldn't find anything.)

Even as he'd objected to the waste of perfectly good Windex...I couldn't have used the old stuff up before buying the new?...my boyfriend shall we say demurred at my decision to junk an entire closet full of wearable clothes. Including that beautiful skirt, to which he'd become just as attached as me.

I stood stupidly firm. I was free!! I was liberated!! I was...whatever, let's have dinner!!

Two days later--too late, of course--I regretted it.

Other than that, nothing happened. Which was exactly the problem. The New Me that I guess was supposed to emerge from my purge...didn't. I didn't change, I didn't get "better." The new spaces in my closet and heart just grew more me. Meet the new me, same as the old.

And of course I never found a skirt like that again. Never anything so pretty, so airy or so incredibly comfortable and...yeah, free. Exactly what I'd thought I was becoming by getting rid of it.

I learned something from that.

The next time I threw shit out, it was for revenge.

What do you think of this quote from Robert E. Howard?

"His beauty was not altogether human--like the dream of a god, chiseled out of living marble."

And this exchange:

"'...The gods of old times mated sometimes with mortal women, our legends tell us.'

'What gods?'

'The nameless, forgotten ones. Who knows? They have gone back into the still waters of the lakes, the quiet hearts of the hills, the gulfs beyond the stars. Gods are no more stable than men.'"

Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, has not gotten enough credit for his poetry.

Both of those quotes I took more or less at random from his story "Iron Shadows in the Moon," reprinted in "The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian."

I feel like there's room to dance inside them.

Though he rarely had a chance to show it, being too busy narrating the rise of Lovecraftian horrors from sinister depths and/or the treachery of muscled pirates on forgotten shores, Howard did have "sensibility," as Jane Austen no doubt would have termed it.

Of course I think Ms. Jane would not quite have known what to make of so bloody, sensual and extreme a consciousness as Howard's. She was not a fan of the Gothic mindset.

Nonetheless. I read an entire book once about nameless gods--Ursula K. LeGuin's wondrous The Tombs of Atuan--which rarely touched the haunted feel of that throwaway elegy.

I almost wonder if that's because, rather than in spite of, the fact that "Atuan" is a conscious work of art while "Iron Shadows in the Moon" was likely written in haste for money. (It has a half-naked babe in it, which, the foreword informs us, is a sure sign Howard was desperate.) Some kinds of eloquence only come when people aren't looking. Some forms of poetry can only live in the cracks.

Howard's work is odd; he himself said that the Conan stories came to him piecemeal, out of sequence, and it's as if he tells the edges of the tale rather than the heart of it. He can't find the center.

Does the fragmentation in his work echo something similar in his mind? Does it prefigure his suicide?

I should probably look up his Wikipedia entry and do some more reading about him and think back to that Vincent D'Onofrio movie about him and suchlike.

But today I'd rather just read his actual words, plow through the shards he gave us of a larger story that might not have existed even in his own mind (but which I swear I can feel), and wonder. Wonder at the unstable gods that made his road.

It was a really good recipe--beans, tomatoes, zucchini, corn, and spices. We ate it out of black bowls. On the bedroom floor, next to the box spring and mattress we slept on without a frame. A friend, soon to die, had given it to us.

We had a bag of thick salty Bearitos corn chips. I think we drank water. And for our listening pleasure, what other than the classic "War Ensemble" would ever do? "The final swing is not a drill!!"

(Actually that was getting to be the end of the metal road for me. I was due to discover Emmylou Harris and Lyle Lovett.)

I don't know why I was thinking about that this morning. Maybe because it was a time of beginnings. A particular kind of freedom which was not about autonomy or self-determination but about not having the least idea what came next and not caring. Soon that feeling would be gone.

I had it for a moment, though. Just a moment. That moment.

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My daughter had a dream last night.

She told me: there was a bomb in the house, and we were all running to get out, but my father (who doesn't actually live with us IRL) realized he wasn't going to make it. "So he went down to the basement," she reported. "And the bomb went off and we thought he died. But then we heard his voice. And he got some splinters, and he got blackened from the explosion, but he was okay."

Just when you think there's no collective unconscious.

In metaphor, that is my father's story.

When the bomb hit, he knew he'd never get away. So he went to ground. And he was scarred, but he lived.

There's a whole silent army of people like that. Those of us who know them live half in their shadows and half in the light. When you're young, that can be odd; you don't understand why the world feels different when you're with them.

You're not in the world anymore. You're in their world.

The final swing is not a drill.

Can you tell that I've been to the bookstore?

There's a book out there called "Body Language," and it wants to make very, very sure that you are never the victim of a dominant handshake.

Apparently, this threat to all that is right and holy occurs when the person with whom you are shaking hands turns your palm, so that his is on top. (And that pronoun is not an accident. It's pretty much always 'his' in this case.)

An 'equal,' by contrast, is when the hands are parallel--which is the way 99.9% of the people I have ever met on this planet have done it. And I certainly have met men who were ego-driven. I suppose they didn't see any point to showing little old me who was boss. I was not, after all, trying to negotiate a business deal with them...which appears to be the arena in which dominant handshakes occur. That and politics.

To me this was a fascinating little bit of anthropology. If you'd asked me, before I read this book, what a dominant handshake was, I wouldn't have thought about palm position. I would have thought about grip strength. As far as I can remember, I've never been topped, but I've certainly been crushed.

Perhaps in those instances I failed to show enough neck. "Body Language" informs us that women show their necks and smile a lot to show submission to men. "Hi! Not a threat. No need to start hitting. Thank you." Of course there are those who take that signal as an opportunity--'good, she won't be any trouble'--so perhaps I showed too much neck.

Or perhaps I had the wrong kind of perfume.

I antidoted "Body Language" with a glance at "The Bombshell Manual of Style." As in the 'va-va-voom' type of lady. I hung around long enough to discover that she never wears green perfume.

Green, in case you were wondering, is a scent category for perfume. You've got your floral, oriental, woody, and fresh, of which green is a subcategory.

It made sense to me. You can see why fresh scents would be anti-bombshell; they range from bracing (citrus) to elusive (water), two things that bombshells are not. That type of girl wouldn't get along well with scents which evoke hiking or rain. The one is too vigorous, the other too eternal and spiritual.

I have a perfume sitting on my desk that smells like the cold. In a good way.

I should wear it more. But these things are hard for me.

You might think I'm interested in psychology and personality because I write. I mean, duh.

Actually, I'm interested in it more because of my own long travails with under-treated affective disorder. It's about survival for me.

The people in my head create themselves and just expect me to write it down to the best of my ability. They don't actually care what I think about it. If I want to crack the books and use personality typologies or, in the more dire cases, DSM descriptions, to try to understand them, that's my own business.

So I study these things for my own sake, not theirs.

Yesterday I read Jean Shinoda Bolen's classic "Goddesses in Everywoman." It's different from a personality typology; it's an arche-typology. It tells us that humans are subject to the will of various archetypes--the Huntress, the Mother, the Lover--which are bigger than any one of us. Yes, it's very Jungian, very collective-unconscious.

I'm not sure what I think about it. Bolen says that people can have more than one archetype present in them, but she only discusses them separately, and quite frankly they seem pretty mutually exclusive.

There's the "virgin goddesses" (self-directed, self-sufficient, goal-oriented figures who put their own priorities first)...

the "vulnerable goddesses" (other-directed, relationship-oriented figures who need to be needed--and suffer the consequences)...

and the "alchemical goddess," Aphrodite, who mixes self-sufficiency and relationship-orientedness in a way that sets her completely apart. (This is a delicate way of saying she's a total slut. Which, if you are an enlightened, sex-positive sort of person, you will see as a high compliment, and if not...not.)

It's really, really difficult to imagine a single human being seriously containing several of these archetypes as major ongoing components of their psyche.

I don't mean it's hard to envision people acting like various archetypes at different times. They can and do. Almost every mother, for example, has a "mother bear" in her that dives for her toddler if someone comes between them in the grocery store. (That's "Demeter energy" in Bolen's system.)

But as a basic orientation to life, a prime motive...? It's hard to imagine someone being both "virgin" and "vulnerable" at the same time, or teetering between the two and needing to choose. "Well, I could put my own plans first, but then, I could also devote myself completely to Jock..."

I really don't think someone in that situation is actually torn between "Athena" and "Hera."

Instead, there are a couple of possibilities.

(A) She could be an "Aphrodite" who's either going to divorce Jock two years from now, or, if she decides to go on that Andes expedition after all, will find another Jock and shortly be asking the same question again. I.e., rather than being a conflict between two archetypes, her dilemma could be the sign of a different archetype altogether.

(B) The system isn't really all that valid and her conflict would be better explained by Enneagram typology (she's a 2/3, maybe) or neurosis.

#

Take me, for example. You might have noticed I'm kinda intellectual, a trait which Bolen reserves almost exclusively for the "virgin goddess" Athena. And I do put my own priorities first. Except that my priorities are inward ones, like Hestia. But I can't be her because (A) Bolen goes out of her way to say that Hestia is NOT intellectual and (B) you should see my house. Bolen insists that Hestia loves keeping house. Not me; my house is a pit. Bolen would run screaming. Plus, in marching to my own inner drummer, I have outwardly gone along with what people wanted for me, like Persephone, the eternal daughter/victim (who I frankly think Bolen despises; she takes a much sharper tone towards this "princess" who "wants to play at life" and has "the illusion that she is eternally young").

So in Bolen terms, I'm all over the map, yet in Myers-Briggs terms I'm a probable INFP and in Enneagram terms, I'm a slam-dunk 5/4. It's all there: intellectualism, following my own star (which includes total neglect of my surroundings because I'm too busy analyzing "Goddesses in Everywoman"), and even going along a bit externally so I can be left alone with my inner world.

But here's the thing.

"INFP"..."5/4"...these are categories, laundry lists.

Athena, Hestia (kind of), Persephone...they have faces.

They have stories.

They may not fit exactly...but then, they may not need to. They may be poems in a world of prose. Moon and stars in a world of streetlights.

I think, by the end, that is indeed what Bolen's getting at. It's not how you act or "who you are," as if anyone could know; it's which narrative you need, which compass to steer by.

#

Sometimes I wish we knew where we were going.

Apparently, brides are all about the hotness these days, wearing curvy dresses with plunging necklines and backs.

Some snippets of wisdom from the article:

"Brides today want to look sexy and glamorous."

"They want to be the celebrity of their own event."

"Women...are looking at their weddings more like a movie premiere."

"[These dresses are] for the bride who envisions the march down the aisle as a long-dreamed-of photo op, and the reception as an after-party on the scale of Oscars night."

Well...if this is how people want to look at their wedding, that's their business, but I would strenuously advise anyone who's on the fence to put down the red carpet fantasy and back away.

I believe in the karma of things. And I believe that treating your wedding "like a movie premiere" where you can be a "celebrity" is asking for it in a big way.

Sure, a wedding should be fun and joyful, but--you're talking about joining yourself to another human being. Madeleine L'Engle wrote of "the terrible promises" that couples make each other on that day.

Oh, I know. In the wake of Eliot Spitzer, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Jim McGreevey, etcetera, etcetera, and I'm assuming here that the wives were not clued in to their husbands' extracurricular activities and thus that cynicism prevailed...In the wake of all that, we should take our weddings so seriously?

Yeah. Not despite that crap. Because of it. Because life is cold and you don't really know, not even when he's standing beside you. Not even when he's standing inside. Because you're both so appallingly human. So selfish, so vulnerable, so confused, so mortal and so afraid.

Yeah, I know, that sort of thinking messes up the photo op. How can you "be the celebrity of your own event" when you're filled with uncertainty, humility, and awe before your choices?

Really. How can you.

Women are miserable.

Or that's what Vicki Haddock says in this alternet reprint.

Apparently, women report less happiness now than we did thirty years ago.

The article tries to figure out why. Are we too busy? Trying to do too much? Over-prioritizing everything? That certainly seems to be the case with a bunch of teenaged girls mentioned in the article. When asked what was important to them--"finding a successful job, staying close to friends, having a family, looking good"--they answered "everything." Good luck with that, ladies.

Here, by contrast, is Jean Shinoda Bolen: "The true cost of anything is what we give up in order to have it. It is the path not taken."

In other words: you can't get something for nothing. In other other words: "everything" is not on the menu, folks.

#

You know, I was thinking about it, and that's what really bothered me about the "hot brides" that I complained about the other day.

It's not just that a wedding strikes me as the wrong time to pretend to be a celebrity.

It's that pretending to be a celebrity at all is kind of disrespectful of the sacrifices people make in order to become real celebrities.

You'll notice that Britney and Xtina aren't medical doctors, for example. They gave up their chance at higher education, which is a considerable risk to take. They gave up their time, their privacy, and a lot of their dignity, as their every move is dissected and judged in public. They gambled with their sanity and emotional stability, a bet which Spears tragically appears to have lost.

As if all that weren't enough, they could lose the thing they risked and gave up so much for--their fame--at any time, leaving them worse off than if they'd never tried. Maybe it's because of my depression history, but that is what I see when I look at a celebrity.

I will say it: those who get to walk down the red carpet while flashbulbs pop and people cheer, have earned it.

I know a lot of people disagree; the standard line is that celebrities are by definition over-rewarded. The argument tends to be that they can't possibly be that talented.

Well of course not! Whoever said anything about that?

When they actually are talented, like George Michael or Russell Crowe (both of whom realized they were gifted after the fact), it's a great bonus. But celebrity is not about that. It's a whole different goal. It may be selfish, but achieving it takes fanatical dedication and massive risks and sacrifices. I begrudge it to no one.

And I think trying to capture what we think they feel when they sashay down the walkway is like robbing them a little. We're trying to have a piece of what they have without paying the price. We're trying to get something for nothing.

Or if you turn it another way...we're trying to choose everything.

#

In Haddock's article, we meet Lisa Boucher, a 46-year-old working mom who chose everything and lived to regret it.

Boucher is not an obnoxious Bridezilla for whom "everything" means keeping both your looks and your social life. She's a scarred individual for whom "everything" means mere survival.

"Having watched her own parents divorce when she was 13, forcing her homemaker mother to get a job, Boucher vowed that she would never be felled by a similar fate. 'I swore that I would never depend on any man, that I would establish my own successful career, that I would never let anybody into my life that much,' she says. 'But now I have somebody to share my life with, and what I really want most is to be able to stay home and spend time with my daughter.'"

It hurts to read something like that. It hurts deep.

And if Boucher did stay home? If she switched tracks? Well, she'd have her daughter. But she'd lose everything else. Status in the world, a feeling of effectiveness among adults, a presence. Traction. Control over her own resources.

"The true cost of anything is what we give up in order to have it."

#

But let's stop for a minute. It's one thing to give up chocolate milkshakes and lazy afternoons to become a ballerina. What I just described above is something else. Why should your autonomy be on the block when you choose to honor primal bonds of love and connection with your baby?

Unexplored in the happiness article is the possibility that women are unhappy, not because our expectations are so high (although they often are), but because OUR CHOICES ROT.

Those teenagers who answered "everything"--maybe they were being dumb or narcissistic. But maybe they were kicking back against the rigid dichotomies that rule women's lives. Maybe they're trying to say, "I will not give up either mothering or status. Or friends or even being pretty. Why should I?"

Here's the answer:

"...she dashes around the kitchen serving breakfast to her 2 1/2-year-old daughter with the phone tucked into her ear as she resolves an urgent snafu on her job as a project manager for a high-end residential construction company. There isn't a minute to spare: She must whisk her daughter to preschool, make a meeting in San Francisco, use her lunch hour to retrieve her daughter and a nanny and deposit them at home, then return to work until almost dark, whipsaw back home, throw together a quick dinner, hang out to play with her daughter, tuck her into bed, then crash -- and, with luck, get sufficient sleep to do it all over again when her alarm rings the next morning."

She chose "everything." What is she giving up in order to have it?

Well...everything.

ED. Whoops. I actually posted this thing on 3/16, but I didn't know what day it was and entered 3/15 into the scheduler. Sorry about the confusion.

I know there are political blogs to take care of this sort of thing, but while the recovery team digs for my jaw (which did not merely hit the floor upon reading what I am going to share with you, but fell right through it), do allow me to quote the following comment from President Bush to the troops in Afghanistan.

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks.

"Fantastic." "Exciting." "Romantic."

I take back absolutely everything critical I ever said about women who want to wear cleavage-popping wedding dresses and pretend they were Ashlee-Rihanna Aguilera as they work it down the aisle. Really. I humbly, humbly apologize for dissing that mindset. Our president just called war "romantic." This turns any bride who Just Wants To Have Fun into an automatic moral giant. Weddings against war!

#

I found Mr. Pesident's kicky little bite in a terse Slate article by Fred Kaplan, who acidly replies:

He won't be employed in the White House for much longer. He is 62, too old, alas, to join the military. But a spot could probably be found for him on an A.I.D. mission, a Provisional Reconstruction Team, or, perhaps through his vice president, some contractor's expedition. He put our soldiers over there, and, as we all know, there aren't enough of them. If he pines for a taste, let him have one.

Amen.

Okay, so I read both Twisty and Matisse--and Bitchy too, because three blogs which espouse radically opposing and mutually hostile worldviews are even more fun than two.

The best part is, I think they're each right.

That is, they're each speaking their lives, each telling their bite marks and signposts, and what they're running from and towards. It's sad to me that, in doing so, they've taken stands that would make it (shall we say) awkward if they met at a tea party. Because, the way I see it, they're really on the same side; each of them idealistic enough to chronicle their lives.

But I'm not getting to the part about Twisty's post.

Twisty's father recently died, and she just posted a description of retrieving his ashes that would make Hunter S. Thompson fire fifty rounds in the ceiling of heaven. The high point for me was her description of the funeral-home director: "He wore an ill-fitting suit made of larceny and doom."

Now if you haven't read that post, you're probably thinking, "That line could be funny or serious." As it happens, it's part of a post that's outrageously funny.

But like the best humor, it's also stark as...death.

My deepest sympathies to Twisty and my deepest thanks for that post. I laughed. Til I cried.

I have a really packed schedule today. I have to watch TV and eat snacks with my daughter.

That's right, it's spring break...and she's still at the age where that means staying home with mommy and talking and laughing and eating.

Tough job, but somebody's gotta do it :)

See you later.

I will be late today. Sorry. Thanks.

As part of my arduous Spring Break duties, I took Child to see "Horton Hears a Who" yesterday. And I'm actually not kidding about the whole "arduous" part, because I have managed to get sick AGAIN. It was "Two for 'Horton:' one child, one zombie."

Child and Zombie stumbled down to the UltraScreen. She watched, I stared.

You could really see the gears of the story grinding. "Here comes the next test of Horton's mettle--a rope bridge!"

The Seussian surreality-machines of Whoville were delightful, though, and Carol Burnett as the smarmy kangaroo nemesis was glorious. (She won't let her kid play with other children or go to school with them so that he won't be tainted by any viewpoints which differ from her own.)

I felt, though, that Jim Carrey and Steve Carell's voices sounded oddly alike as the two leads, Horton and the Mayor. Maybe it was just me. But that was how it seemed to me, and I ended up wondering if it was deliberate; a way to show kinship, that a kindred spirit is a kindred spirit no matter what sort of differences in scale may exist between them.

Speaking of which: I was not happy with the Mayor's motivation to be "one of the greats." They stop the whole movie for him to wander down a hall full of portraits of past Mayors and rhapsodize about how he someday wants to be like them in stature. That never really seemed to be his story, to me. The Mayor and Horton are outsiders by temperament, gentle, whimsical, imaginative, openminded, and poetic; that's how they find each other, against all odds, and have the capacity to believe in each other despite the improbability of each other's existence.

(And by the way--the movie's stern line that "If you can't hear it, see it, or touch it, it doesn't exist," which is meant to show how narrow-minded people can be when it concerns the imagination, is misplaced. The whole point is that Horton CAN hear the people of Whoville, and they can hear him, when they gather to listen. Whoville's existence is totally empirically verifiable. Imagination's got nothing to do with it. The other animals around Horton can't hear the people of Whoville simply because their own ears aren't big enough.)

But anyhow--Horton and the Mayor are poetic dreamers, not strivers burdened by fears of mediocrity. So I felt that the Mayor's desire to become "great" was tacked-on.

Well. It's easy to criticize. I don't mean it that way. I'm trying to engage with what I saw, and that often means saying where I disagreed with it. That doesn't think I meant it was bad.

(Um. I meant, of course, "That doesn't mean I think it was bad." Sigh. I really need to get back to bed.)

Anyhow: that doesn't mean I think it was bad. Just that I saw things a different way. Bottom line: Horton and the Mayor came through to me strongly enough that I wanted to defend them where I felt the creative team was misunderstanding them.

You know a film has won the day, after all, when even a zombie tears up a little at the end.

(By the way: sorry to be so late today.)

Here's Paul Theroux on Georges Simenon (and Albert Camus, with whom Simenon carried on a one-sided rivalry).

During the six years I studied French, I had to read both Camus, the famous existentialist author, and Simenon--a wildly popular and prolific writer best known for his Maigret detective series. (If you look on that Wikipedia entry, you will see that there is an ungodly number of Maigret books. Simenon wrote around 400 novels in his lifetime. Yes, scholars believe that is actually the number.)

Simenon has not received the same love from academic circles that Camus has. Simenon was too accessible, too enjoyable, too successful for that.

But Theroux points out that Simenon was just as existentialistic, even absurdist, as Camus. (Existentialism teaches that, if your life is going to have any meaning, you have to create it yourself; absurdism raises its eyebrows and smirks, "Good luck with that!")

So why didn't Simenon get the honors that Camus did?

There isn't really an answer, but Theroux, as the actor William Hurt is alleged to have once put it, "plays the question."

(I wish I could remember where I read that. It was a very long time ago. A co-star of Hurt's talked about running up against a question he couldn't answer about his character's motives. Hurt told him, iirc, "You don't need to know the answer. You need to play the question."

The actor reported, again iirc, "I don't know what that means. But I believe it does mean something."

One thing led to another yesterday and I ended up posting really late.

And now...fairly early, by most people's standards.

That is how my life is.

Although I do manage (almost) daily blogging, not to mention picking the kid up from school, my life is total chaos otherwise. Productive chaos, but chaos. I never know how the day is going to turn out.

“Whoops, we're rolling on Project A right now, let's clear the road.”

“I appear to be sitting in silence with a mind so empty the Buddha would kill me out of jealousy. Um, okay.”

“Child needs to talk/wants me to stay for her entire 3 hours and 40 minutes of classes this evening/both; there goes everything else.”

“Why yes, it can take twelve hours to write a 400-word article, why do you ask?”

This is just how things are for me. Most people with chaotic lives have the chaos up on the screen, as it were--they're juggling calls and emails on their iPhone while their beeper goes off while they're trying to drop three kids off at three different places and plan a dinner party and get to the gym.

(Yeah, this would be the Power Housewife version of a chaotic life. I'd do an arbitrage lawyer, but frankly I'm not sure even they know what the hell they do, let alone me.)

Anyhow, most people's chaos is on the outside. Mine is within.

My heart drags my day around by the hair.

The snow has mostly given way now to the flattened grass.

Some people have been very excited to see its return. Not me. To me it looks like the coat of an exile. Faded, drained, pressed down. Dirty in places. He's been walking too long. Doesn't think he'll ever find a bed except for death.

Funny that should bother me.

I guess because it bothers him--the grass looks so sad. It feels diminished. Tired. I don't like that. If it would help, I'd run my fingers through it, the coat of the exile, the soft hair of the earth. I'd kiss it and tell it I love it.

Maybe I should. Maybe the earth would know. Maybe that matters.

#

I've been coughing for so many nights now. In his sleep, he puts his hand to my back. Trying to help.

#

I remember our earliest days, inventing tenderness in narrow beds. Hoping that the walls would keep our sighs and secrets safe.

#

Here in the northern places, the earth comes out of winter stoop-shouldered. As if the sparkling of the snow was a lie, or a pleasure bought at the cost of suffering below. Yes, that beaten grass is the cost of the snow.

But then the buds come.

Growing up, my bedroom faced the street. It wasn't a busy street, but there would always be headlights swirling by. They threw the outline of my window onto the ceiling in light, and, as they advanced, made it reel like a dancer.

I was often awake in the middle of the night, 2, 3, 4am. And even at those hours, one or two cars would go down our street.

Again, we're talking about a narrow residential street in a town of around 35,000 people at that time. Not particularly near downtown or any place that would be open at those times.

So what were these drivers doing on my little street at that hour? Where were they going?

Just to ask the question meant knowing you would never know the answer.

Good training in existentialism.

Pregnancy is a creature of Murphy. When it would lay waste to your life like the Book of Revelations, you'd better use pills, a Mirena, a Nuvaring, condoms and spermicide gel, because it's comin' for ya. Oh yes it is.

If, on the other hand, you have always longed to have a child and you are now in a perfect marriage, at the perfect stage in your career, and living in a lovely home with a couple of extra bedrooms and a yard as deep as dreams...your baby is going straight to a tear-stained sixteen-year-old with an abusive boyfriend and fundamentalist parents. In Mauritania.

Every infertility article I have ever read (or written) always--ALWAYS--features stable couples with plenty of money and solid careers who really want to be parents.

You never hear single 19-year-old alcoholic chainsmokers on Lithium going "Dammit, I can't get pregnant." No, you hear their social workers wailing in despair, because they already are.

I firmly believe that infertility is the act of a petty, vindictive god. This god takes special pleasure in tormenting the harmless. He puts gay children in fundamentalist households, he took George Michael's beloved mother from him, he made that hypothetical 19-year-old what she is today (and found her a great '68 Mustang with no doors to live in too), he doles out eating disorders and depressions, and he either makes you miss chance after chance or he gleefully lets you win so he can make you sorry you ever tried.

This is the god of infertility. Since he seems to reserve it especially for people who have worked hard, been good, and want just one simple, humble thing, it is obviously his ultimate punishment.

The other day, I was in a waiting room, and I saw an article about fertility challenges.

I went home and looked up some more online.

In many cases, the tone of these articles (I won't mention sites or publications because I want to stay focused on the topic itself) seemed...how shall I put this...

Let's just say I was ready to slit my wrists, and I had all the kids I wanted. If I were actually infertile, the last thing I would do is read any of these articles with their horrible phrases like "failed mother" (as in YOU'RE NOT A!! failed mother, so DON'T THINK THAT!!--gee thanks) and their harping on invisible enemies like fibroids and hormonal imbalances and other things that are just wrong, wrong, wrong with your body.

Next up: Are your eggs fresh enough? Well, are they?

A lot of articles on infertility are fairly neutral. They give the basics: what is it, what's thought to cause it, what can (possibly) be done about it, what are some of the exciting ways it can totally suck, and what can you do to lighten your load.

Then there are the articles with titles like "How Fresh Are Your Eggs."

For example, I found an article about accepting childlessness and transitioning to being "child-free." Difficult as such a transition must feel, I think it would have to feel even worse after you read things like this:

--getting people to understand your decision to stop just might turn out to be "a monumental task."

--After all, "would-be grandparents" are "just waiting to stuff their wallets with photos of adorable grandchildren."

--But nonetheless, you must persist. You are not a "failed mother" doomed to "a life of sorrow, regret and sadness"--as the word "childless" apparently implies, which is why you must call yourself "child-free"--and who feels like "a disappointment to my mother." You are going to reframe this whole thing and move on to...something else!! Yes, you'll find a substitute!

--But first, of course, you have to mourn "the death of [your] dream."

In my opinion, this kind of rhetoric just escalates the pain.

Of course it's hard to talk about a painful subject in an honest way without running the risk of reopening people's wounds.

But look at this description I found of many women's decision not to adopt. Some can't afford it, some can't adjust, aaaaaand:

--"Other women look deep within themselves and realize that, for whatever reason, they aren't sure they'd be able to love an adopted child enough."

Excuse me?

Couldn't that statement simply have said "Other women don't feel adoption is right for them"? Why on earth bring someone's capacity to love into it?

And this:

--People transitioning to child-freedom must grapple with "the sloppy-kiss factor," which is "the thought of a two-year-old giving you a big sloppy kiss and telling you she loves you."

And that is where we reach the full depths of Germanic sentimentality. "The thought of a two-year-old giving you a big sloppy kiss and telling you she loves you." Imagine casting someone's infertility in those terms: you'll never get kisses from your two-year-old! How painful!

How utterly false and mendacious.

As a parent, I am truly offended that this is the picture of parenthood that infertile people are peddled, and appear to be peddling among themselves. Parenthood is not sloppy kisses and "I love you, mommy." If that's why they're trying for it, they're in for a big disappointment--not when they don't get pregnant, but when they do.

You know how two-year-olds express their love for you? By demanding things from you. Care, comfort, time, attention, juice. I remember reading the book Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Alinsky wrote, "The organizer is the toilet. He gets all the shit. And then he gets flushed."

The parent, particularly the mother, is the toilet.

"And the towel!" added my friend Louisa after I told her this, showing off the dried snot on her sleeve.

Everyone who wants to be a parent should clearly understand that they are signing up to be the toilet. Parenthood does NOT make you happy. It brings you joy--something much deeper, harder and more elusive. But it does not make you happy. It's not about getting the love. It's about giving it. Not the way that suits you--a nice sunny trip to the park, say, although you'll be doing that too--but the way that suits them. I.e., you're in their room at midnight because they're sick or had a nightmare or they're colicky (I know two moms of colicky babies, both of whom went gray in six months) or they're just physiologically unable to stand being separated at night. (And for good evolutionary reasons, by the way, from the days when humans huddled together for protection.)

You'd think that an article about accepting biologically-mandated child-freedom would mention things like that. The very simple, true statement that "It's often a grind and it really does take you away from things you might otherwise have done" could have maybe helped, instead of melodramatically talking about "the death of a dream." How about a nice, bracing "Shit happens"? That's a way of sharing sympathy too.

How about remembering women in crisis pregnancies? The "dream" can be a nightmare under other circumstances.

How about telling the "would-be grandparents" to mind their own business? Or reminding them that we're not in control of our fates?

How about not quoting women who say they struggled with feeling like a "failed mother"? Or finding another way to phrase it?

How about that.

Last night I was complaining to my husband: "And the worst part is, I don't even want dessert anymore!"

(This is after four or five weeks of being sick. Whatever I've got, I just can't shake it off--I'm living on Tylenol and Sudafed.)

Upon hearing of the demise of my sweet tooth, my husband drew himself up to his full height and pointed at the door. "Get in the car. We're going to the emergency room."

'Cause you know it's bad when I can't bring myself to eat a fun-size Milky Way :)

#

I would blog more, but I have to clean up the living room now because our furnace broke (again) and the repair guys are coming (again).

Commenter Ulla Lauridsen, who is from Denmark, has raised some really interesting cultural questions about American marriage habits. In particular, she said, "What's up with shopping around for a husband or wife for 10-15 years?"

Being American myself, I'd never thought about that. More precisely, I'd never questioned the assumptions behind it. I clumsily replied that, hereabouts, people who marry later are thought to be more "responsible" than those who "rush into" marriage earlier. But that just raises the question: why?

For an answer, let us turn to the Dixie Chicks and their pithy tune "Goodbye Earl." The story of two old friends who team up to murder the unlucky one's abusive husband, it perfectly encapsulates the darkest American fears of early marriage:

Mary Anne and Wanda were the best of friends /All through their high school days /Both members of the 4H Club /Both active in the FFA /After graduation Mary Anne went out lookin' /For a bright new world /Wanda looked all around this town /And all she found was Earl

That's pretty much it in a nutshell: if you "go out lookin' for a bright new world," you'll find it, but if you stay where you are and take the first guy who seems to be nice and right for you, you will pay. Possibly not as dramatically as Wanda, but you will pay.

An older (27-35) person, the theory goes, has had time to make some mistakes, figure out who they really are and what they really want, broaden their horizons, and find their place in the world. Theoretically, they're less vulnerable, less naive, and more able to hold their own. Such a person should not only choose a better mate, but be a better mate themselves.

#

Now, for me, it didn't work out that way at all. My husband and I found each other in college and we not only loved each other but acted "like an old married couple" right from the start, as my sister-in-law once laughingly (and with a tinge of horror) told us.

I was a bit shocked by this, because it so went against what I'd always heard and believed life would be like. I had fully expected to marry at 30-35 after dating at least a couple of guys. That was how it was, right?

But I obviously wasn't going to break up with a man I loved, liked, and walked sweetly with, just because our relationship didn't fit the script.

So I ended up partnered very early and without any of the comparison-shopping which is deemed to be so essential. For me, it's worked out well.

But I guess I should add that I already had a clear sense of what I wanted in a man. I'd spent years hiding in my room (or wishing I could), rocking back and forth and fighting off delusional feelings of not being able to breathe or swallow. Pretty boys and party time meant nothing to me. My mission statement came straight from the ironically-titled Van Halen classic "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love:" "I got no time to mess around."

Instead, I wanted--well, let me give you an example. Remember the movie "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," starring Uma Thurman and Janeane Garofalo?

Okay, my husband took one look at the poster and went "Who the hell would want Uma Thurman when you could have Janeane Garofalo!?"

Everything that remark stands for is everything I wanted in a man.

I knew that, no matter how much I might change in my life, that wouldn't. I wasn't going to wake up one morning and think "I'm bored with being tenderly and idealistically loved for who I am! I'm done with being listened-to and put first! I'd rather date a competitive alpha male who will treat me like a trophy or try to outdrive me on the freeway!" Not gonna happen, you know?

What I'm trying to say is, though...I actually did follow my culture's ideal of really thinking it through and knowing what was important to me. It's just that I arrived at that knowledge by suffering instead of dating. But I did arrive at it. Someone who's more instinctive and has less of a sense of why they like the people they like should...well, probably wait.

At least if they were born here. It does mark you, your culture. For better and worse.

Two days ago I complained to my husband that I'd (gasp!) lost my sweet tooth to my ongoing flu/sinus/cough drama, and he ordered me into the car for the emergency room. Because yes, it is that big a deal when I'm not interested in a donut.

Last night, my husband, sitting at his computer, got a look of sad frustration on his face. "Three hundred and sixty!" he said.

"Three hundred and sixty what?"

He eyed me towards the screen. "Three hundred and sixty [potential computer] games I've scrolled past, and none of them interest me!"

"Okay, babe. Your turn to get in the car."

Because yes. It is that big a deal when he's not interested in a computer game.

See you this evening...

(Note: I am sorry I didn't get to this last night. Last night had some illness-related specials.)

Smithsonian Magazine had an interview with Environmental Leadership Program fellow Patricia Zaradic in which she put out the alarming statistic that attendance at our national parks has gone down 25% over the past 23 years.

That's bad.

What's worse, however, is that she blames it on what she calls "videophilia," or obsession with "electronic recreation."

With all due respect, I really don't think so. I think there are two much likelier culprits:

We're working more hours.

We're (basically) making less money.

These trends have accelerated during the exact same years that our National Park attendance has declined. I don't think that's a coincidence. It takes time and money to go camping.

The problem is that those trends can't easily be reversed. A lot of people refuse to acknowledge they even exist, or have any real meaning.

But scolding people to get off the computer--that's different. That feels like something more under our control. "If only people wouldn't play World of Warcraft online! Then they'd go camping like they used to!"

I've never gone camping in my life, but I feel sad that other people have stopped. It feels like a real loss.

It looked like trackless Mongolia, but it was a frozen lake.

The high glass that held me away from it felt like a prison. I don't know why. I didn't want to be out there with those two fishermen, one all in brown and one all in blue (that flat, dark, manly kind of blue). I wanted to be inside where I was. But it still felt like I was penned in.

Maybe it wasn't the glass making me feel that way, maybe it was the lake itself. Frozenness is a kind of fury. It seemed angry at the land. Maybe that was why I felt trapped.

I've walked along that lake in summer and watched the ducks hang-glide into it from flight. The same ducks will do this over and over: fly up, wheel, and come in fast and straight, drifting their legs into the water with a big WHOOSH. It looks like fun.

Now the lake belongs to those two men who sit and watch their holes. They don't move. They don't speak. No fun, no feathers.

I'm sick of this winter.