August 2005 Archives

Yesterday was the first day of classes. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't write much about my job, mostly because I like it well enough to want to keep it. But I figure there a few safe job-related topics, and I'll hit some of those.

For instance, here were some good things about the day:

1. I finally got to wear these fabulous new red d'Orsay pumps

I bought five or six months ago and have never had an occasion to wear. When you get really great new shoes, you can't wear them just anywhere the first time.... But now these shoes have been introduced to society and can go anywhere they want.

2. The M&Ms that have been sitting in my desk since April were still fresh.

3. Someone very kind left a box of lavender jasmine tea and someone else left a bag of goodies in my mailbox.

4. A student rushed into my office with an mp3 and said, "I've been waiting all summer to play you this song about falling in love in a concentration camp. The first time I heard it, I instantly thought of you." I'm not entirely sure I was flattered by that.... I mean, I did talk about love a lot, especially the traumatic kind, in the classes he took with me, mostly because he wrote about it a lot.... In any event, he showed me these features on my computer I didn't even know about and played me this cool song.

Few things piss me off more than the statement, "I never meant to hurt you," since it's usually mustered in defense of some fairly heinous act.

"I never meant to hurt you... by sleeping with your best friend."

"I never meant to hurt you... by failing to explain that my estranged ex isn't always so estranged."

"I never meant to hurt you... by taking your credit cards and running up charges in excess of your student loan debt."

"I never meant to hurt you... by A) having sex with and B) impregnating you in your own bed while you were passed out from a night of heavy drinking and unable A) to give any kind of consent or B) tell me where the condoms were or C) remember a damn thing."

Well what DID you MEAN to do, asshole? What did you think your actions would result in? I hate that phrase because what it usually translates to is, "I was too lazy/selfish/stupid/mean to consider how my actions would affect you, so I just did what I wanted and hoped I wouldn't have to deal with the consequences."

I like to sit around my motel room after my show in my bra and panties and I’ll say to somebody, “Get me a Remy Martin and a water-back, goddamnit!” -- Sandra Bernhard, WYIN

At some point during the summer of 1990, I went to the Catalina Theater on the corner of Campbell and Grant in Tucson, Arizona, to see the film version of Sandra Bernhard’s smash one-woman show Without You I’m Nothing. I went by myself; I know people who won’t go to movies alone, but I’ve always kind of liked it, liked sitting wherever I want and being able to watch every last credit without someone saying, “Can’t we just go?”

I remember sitting in the theater, my jaw slack with wonder, my stomach clenched like a fist with envy. How does someone work up the audacity to do a performance like that? I knew I didn’t have a personality that would let me dance around on stage to “Little Red Corvette” in pasties and a sequined g-string bearing the stars and stripes, but I did decide that I wanted to use my life as the basis for my art, just like Sandra did, and that I was willing to bare almost every crevice, crack and contour of my soul.

Last Saturday afternoon, SBJ and our new friend Anesthesia and I went downtown to Celebrate! the city we live in. It was your typical street fair, with jugglers and really cool chalk drawings on the pavement and a couple dozen tiny girls (three, four, five years old) doing fierce tumbling routines along the main thoroughfare of town.

We walked around, looked at crafts, searched without success for a stand selling funnel cakes with tomato sauce (SBJ claims they're all the rage in Connecticut), drank beer in the park. We talked about important things, like emoticons. We agreed that the only acceptable emoticons are the plain old print ones, like :-), and that the cartoonish ones you sometimes see online should be banned from use forever more. We spent some time figuring out what Anesthesia should be called in this blog–we were happy enough with the nickname we came up with. At first she said, "Yeah, but it puts you to sleep!" I said, "That's not my main association with it. I think about getting general anesthesia before surgery, and how it feels really good, but it's dangerous--too much can kill you." Which didn't reassure her all that much, but then SBJ pointed out that the word would make a great album title for some metal band, and then we couldn't think of anything better, and this word sounds like another name that is meaningful to her, so we went with it.

SBJ asked about really bad haircut stories. This is a competition I always win because I almost died from a bad haircut. Seriously: I cried so much my intestines exploded and I nearly hemorrhaged to death. (That's the short version--the long version is truly fascinating, provided you're not afraid of being grossed out. I'll tell it someday.)

We found a stall where girls were selling samosas and painting on temporary henna tattoos. SBJ wanted something to complement his three questions, so the girl gave him a straightforward geometric pattern an inch or so below them--she said she had never hennaed a man before and wasn't sure what would be appropriate, so she went for something simple. It looked fine, but SBJ was not overcome with pleasure at the finished product. In fact, he said he felt gypped.

Then it was my turn. I got a paisley (one of my favorite designs) on my shoulder, which looked pretty awesome, and felt very celebratory. All in all, a very satisfactory day.

Sweet Baby Jesus's biceps, it should be stated at the outset, are pretty great. Lately he has been spending a decent (not a ridiculous) amount of time at the gym, and he's bulked up since I first met him a year ago. He looks good.

Not long ago he began toying with the idea of decorating one of those biceps with a tattoo. Of course he came very close to getting a band of barbed wire around his upper arm.... Just kidding. He'd never do that. Nor would he opt for the ribbon of celtic knots--yes, they look fabulous, but they might be one of the few tattoos more ubiquitous than Chinese characters.

What he finally decided on were the three questions posed by Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason: "What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?"

Which are pretty f*cking awesome questions.

This is kind of maudlin and strange, but what the hell.

Every couple of weeks I drive 20 miles for a block of alternative health therapies: a chiropractic adjustment, a massage, an acupuncture treatment.

I start off with an adjustment from Jack, the chiropractor, whom I really like. He's young, 6'5", well muscled, blond, and affable. If you're going to let some guy you hardly know cradle you in his arms and squeeze until all your joints crack, it might as well be some hot guy with a slow, sly grin. Yesterday I told Jack I was just a mess, and he agreed–said my adrenals were shot and marveled at how toxic my system was, until I told him I've been treating my insomnia with booze, benadryl and prescription sleeping pills.

Last night was one of those nights I go hang out with the guys and talk about writing. Sweet Baby Jesus was there (the tattoo on his arm looks so fabulous! I promise I will get around to writing about that soon), as was Tom, as well as a guy I'll call Lemonhead, because he told me that's his nickname, and another guy I'll call the Monk, because he said he is one. The weather was pleasant, so we sat on the patio of a bar where the drink special was "anything Stoli for two bucks," and I had no problem sucking down four cranberry stolis and one stoli & tonic.

We are all writers, so we workshop our stuff. SBJ and Lemonhead had some really great poems up, the Monk gave us a very poetic short story, and I submitted an essay about menstrual problems I had as a fifteen-year-old anorexic recovering from a bizarre and traumatic illness. The piece is actually kind of funny and I like it as well as anything I've written in a while, but I was still worried the guys might be freaked out by the subject matter. I shouldn't have worried. They gave me really smart suggestions for improving the piece, and didn't seem a bit weirded out that they now know all kinds of details about my menstrual cycle. They also claimed to be grateful for a little clarification about what happens in a gynecologist's office.

Right now, I'm kind of one of the boys. My two best friends here are Tom, who is married, and SBJ, who is not, but as I said, my affectionate mocking of him is tinged with the fond feelings of a slightly snotty big sister.

By a significant margin, most of my colleagues are male. I do have some fabulous female colleagues, but most of them are married with small children. These are women with PhDs, diverse research interests, cool husbands, and very busy schedules. For various reasons, it is harder for these women to socialize than it is for the guys I work with. Although I manage to meet these women occasionally for lunch or coffee, a more common event in my social life is to find myself the solitary woman at a table with three or four or five guys, drinking a round of Arrogant Bastards (a local brew), talking about poetry and tattoos and bowel disorders and gross medical procedures and how the fact that SBJ likes neither Pink Floyd nor Led Zeppelin is one more thing that makes him odd.

I sometimes say that Madonna saved my life while I was a missionary in Taiwan, because it's really kind of true. I hadn't much cared for her before my mission--I loved the song "Material Girl," because it was so witty, but so much of her other stuff just seemed like the silliest, shallowest dance music, and I liked my dance music rife with complexity and angst. But as a clinically depressed missionary given to long bouts of crying, I guess I felt that since the whole God thing wasn't working for me, I might consider looking to other things to offer me happiness.

I got transferred to Taichung, one of the larger cities in my mission (which covered the lower half of the island) at the beginning of June. It was monstrously hot, and spending all day riding a bike when it's 100 degrees and 100% humidity really takes something out of you, even if you're not being treated for depression. To escape the heat, my companion (an assigned working partner, not my lover) and I would do something we called "shopping first-contacting," which meant that we would go to some department store with air-conditioning, then wander around passing out flyers advertising the church until we at least felt human again.

Our favorite department store was called LaiLai's. It offered many attractions, including a restaurant in the basement that served barely edible pizza (as opposed to the inedible kind of you found everywhere else--Pizza Hut had not made it to Taiwan in 1986) and an electronics department featuring a big-screen TV that constantly played Madonna videos. We would often position ourselves right at the top of the escalator, which was also midway between an air-conditioning vent and the television, thrusting flyers at people without saying a word as the escalator crested. They almost always took them, looked at them, looked at us, and shrugged.

My friend and colleague Sweet Baby Jesus is roughly the same age as my younger brother, and I am chagrined to say that something about SBJ brings out the bitchy big sister in me. A fairly common sequence of events is this: a bunch of us go out for beers; mocking SBJ occupies a good portion of the evening; I go home, think about how I teased him, and feel bad; I stop by his office the next day, and apologize for tormenting him so, saying it seems out of character for me, since I don't treat my other friends that way; he says he doesn't mind at all--in fact, he insists, he enjoys being the center of attention and finds it all good clean fun as long as it's a gentle mocking rather than malicious bullying; I go away reassured, but full of resolve not to tease him so very much next time.

I'm still working to identify the reasons why this happens. So far I've come up with two: 1) he's telling the truth about enjoying it; he plays along and laughs good-naturedly, and even after the conversation has moved on to something other than his most charming foibles, he provides us with information that almost seems designed to provoke more teasing, which means that 2) he deserves it.

In some ways, Sweet Baby Jesus is one of the oddest people I know. Don't get me wrong; I like him, quite a lot, actually. But he has some of the strangest ideas, opinions and behaviors.

In addition to my friend and colleague Tom, I also have a friend and colleague, Sweet Baby Jesus. That's not the name his parents gave him; that's the name he gave himself. It rather fits. Sometimes we call him SBJ, and sometimes we call him Dr. Sweet Baby Jesus, because he has a PhD in one of those silly, useless areas of the humanities.

Sweet Baby Jesus just moved out of a horrid apartment complex full of old ladies who hang wreaths of dried flowers on their doors, changing the wreath to match the season. He never fit in because his door remained unadorned, no matter what the time of year. But now he's living in a cool semi-detached house across from a park.

SBJ does not have a lot of stuff--people who name themselves after wandering mendicant faith healers often don't--but he still has more stuff than he could move on his own. So he asked me, Tom, a new colleague ML, and her husband HC, to help him load up a truck and shlep everything across town. He said that if we did, he would reward us with pizza and beer, and as an added treat, we could watch him eat an entire large pizza on his own.

It took only an hour to get everything in the truck from the old place and out of the truck at the new place.

The church's approach to homosexuality is to "hate sin but love the sinner." For a long time that was my approach to the church: I hated the sexism, the racism, the homophobia of the church; I hated its smug certainty, its foolish and self-defeating attempts to stifle creativity and questioning; I hated its more illogical and vicious doctrines; I hated and I still hate the Book of Mormon, which lacks the linguistic beauty, the human diversity and the spiritual complexity of the Bible. But I told myself that I loved the church: Loved the community, loved the heritage of sacrifice and striving, loved the hymns, loved the habits of discipline and self-control I was taught to cultivate. The problem, I eventually had to acknowledge, was that the church simply would not let me love the sinner while hating the sin: I had to love the sin as well; in fact, I had to convince myself that the sins were not sins at all, but were instead God's righteous decrees, and that by not loving them, I was the sinner.

And trips to Utah are traumatic because there, I encounter people who want--oh so generously, oh so magnanimously!--to help me see how I've sinned against God's righteous decrees, and bring me back to a fold I cannot survive in.

I'm WAY fucked up.

I feel like someone has punched me, well below the belt, and left his fist there.

My colleague Tom is one of my best friends here in the Northwest corner of Pennsylvania where I've ended up. The other day he stopped by my office to see me and I asked, "Do you speak New Age?"

"A little," he said.

"If I start talking about my root chakra, are you going to know what I mean?"

"Not really," he said. So I explained: in various schools of eastern physiology and philosophy, you have seven energy centers running along the center of your body, from the base of your spine to the crown of your head. The lowest chakra (Sanskrit for wheel), the one at the base of your spine, relates to issues of physical safety and of the unit that provides you with that safety--in other words, your tribe, especially the one you were born into.

My birth tribe is the Mormons, and I recently returned from a week in Utah, and my first chakra got a heavy dose of weird, weird energy, some of it good, and some of it not. That's the fist I can feel gouging into my intestines.

Yesterday on campus I told my colleague Tom that one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was to share with the world my recent insight that the Mormon god is the ultimate motherf***er: he's up there in the celestial kingdom, having sex with all those mothers in heaven.

Tom wanted some elaboration. I said, "According to Mormon doctrine, we are supposedly all the literal spiritual offspring of a father and mother in heaven. Our spirits were conceived by the sexual intercourse of God with one of his wives--according to Joseph Smith, he might have plenty--that's the whole polygamy thing."

I love self-portraits, partly because in grad school I read this fabulous essay by Philippe Lejeune called "Looking at a Self-Portrait." Lejeune is a literary critic whose primary interest is autobiography, verbal and visual. He asks, "What is it that makes a self-portrait recognizable as such? What special interest can their be in looking at a self-portrait?"

Of course there is nothing in a painting that marks it as a self-portrait for anyone who does not know what the painter looks like, hence the existence of titles like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by Parmigianino (which John Ashbery borrowed for the title of one of his books). Painting, Lejeune points out, has no obvious first person, whereas "For the first person, writing is invincible."

Not long after reading that I started writing self-portraits: "Self-Portrait as Hungry Nude." "Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering." "Self-Portrait as Someone Who Looks Exactly Like Me."