cramps

My cramps are better and worse now that I have the copper IUD.  Better in that I don't seem to need as much Ibuprofen as I did before.  Worse in that the pain is different, deeper, more cervical than uterine, a bruise held fast by a pin, a clamp on my Fallopian tubes, a nauseating ache that spreads to my ribs.  My new GYN suggested that I get the hormonal IUD instead but based on past experience I am terrified of progestin which sent my depression into a tailspin.

The insertion was terrible.  It went smoothly but the pain was bad.  They said it would be.  It's strange being a woman and realizing that half the population has no idea how it feels once a year or every other year to fit your heels into hard plastic stirrups and spread your legs awkwardly into the position you were trained never to assume since girlhood, hitch your pelvis to the farthest edge of the exam table and lie back on crinkly wax paper with a giant napkin draped over your lap and watch over the slope of white paper between your knees the foreheads and hairlines of strangers who are fishing around in your body.  The napkin makes all the difference.  You can crack jokes and they can laugh and banter back and it's all safe and removed because of the napkin, like they are in another room and it's not your genitals they're looking at, prodding, scraping, while they talk to you, like you are the woman sawn in half on a stage and your bottom half is entirely separate from your top.  In your head you're wondering who signs up for this as a career and hoping you washed well enough and worrying that your labia look weird but knowing you'll never have the courage to ask, while outside you're complaining about the weather.

Getting the IUD hurt.  Having never been pregnant I'd never had much of a reason to think about my cervix but forcing it open to get the little plastic T in was painful.  I felt like I'd been skewered with a hatpin and then punched with cramps.  I sipped air slowly while tears leaked out the corners of my eyes and my hands ached from clenching them hard against the wax paper and the GYN and her assistant told me how well I was doing.

A month later I went back.  Something was wrong.  I don't remember what it was -- some sign you were supposed to watch out for in the first six weeks after insertion.  What I remember is after the exam.  I had gotten dressed and was sitting in the chair next to the door waiting for the GYN to come back.  I was tired.  My relationship was falling apart.  My new job was stressful.  And then the office assistant came in to talk to me.

My white blood cell count was high. It was maybe an infection from the insertion but they wanted to run tests for chlamydia and gonorrhea.  I started to cry.  For a long time I had suspected that my boyfriend was cheating on me.

When the tests came back negative I was almost disappointed.  It would have been simpler if they hadn't.  I was miserable in the relationship but I didn't want that to be the reason I broke up with him.

In the end it was the reason I broke up with him.  Unhappiness is reason enough.  Now he and the infection are both gone, and my cramps are better and worse.

Dear Men on Online Dating Sites

In the course of the last few weeks trying to get to know some of you, I have come to realize that perhaps boys and girls attended different Dating 101 courses.  Either that or a bunch of you are mystifyingly stupid.  So I thought, for courtesy's sake, I would bring you up to speed on some misinformation you appear to labor under.  Because I am frustrated and annoyed, I am not bothering to be polite, because you should know better.  Like honestly.

How to Earn My Resounding Silence

1.  Comment on my physical appearance.

Please, go ahead.  Say anything about the one profile picture I posted.  Say "Hey beautiful" -- that'll hit me right in the naughty bits, because all I care about is how I look; it'll also hit me in the brain, because it's so winningly clever and definitely displays your interest in me as a person, with my own thoughts and feelings and agency, and not as an object you're trying to talk out of her pants.  Say "nice hot" because without your approval I am lost.  Say "cute pic!" because I am a child and you are a child and in a kingdom by the sea children who love with a love that is more than love say "cute."  Say "you make me wish I was 30 again" especially if you're in your fucking 60s because damn that makes me feel so valued and not at all grossed out.  Say "why don't you have more pictures posted?" because I am a couch that someone is attempting to sell on Craigslist.

By all means, continue to demonstrate that you don't see me as a human being, just a sex dispenser for you to stick your dick into if you do your coding right.  Show me that the most important facet of me, to you, is the package I come wrapped in.  That helps me immediately dismiss your value as a human being to me, and move on with my day.

2.  Make your first message a lengthy dating resume.

I don't give a shit that you like long walks on the beach, or that you say you're caring, supportive, and funny.  I could say that I poop in rainbow colors and can fly on the first night of the full moon and it doesn't mean jack shit if I can't back it up with evidence, which comes through knowing someone, which comes over time.  Also, you're not applying for a job.  And even if you were, only shitty resumes say "responsible forward-thinking self-starter" and just leave it at that.  "Oh, you say you're responsible?  YOU'RE HIRED."  No.  Prove it, asshole.

I dunno, maybe instead of throwing all your credentials at me you could try something crazy like just talking to me.  Feeling like an HR exec shuffling through a thousand shitty resumes does not put me in a lovin' mood.  Or even a chattin' mood.  Jesus.  Fuck off.

3.  Assume that because I responded to you once we are now boyfriend and girlfriend.

If mentioned that I made meatballs last week and your response is "ME TOO I LOVE MEATBALLS OMIGOD WE SHOULD DO A SPAGHETTI COOKOFF WE ARE CLEARLY MADE FOR EACH OTHER AND ALSO I HAVE FREQUENT FLYER MILES" I will quietly and casually run like fuck in the other direction.  Do I really need to explain this?  Dude.  Cool your fucking jets.  I think maybe you're planning our wedding and naming our children and we haven't even met face to face yet.  Has there been some dramatic gender role reversal in the last ten years?  I feel world-weary.  I also feel like setting my phone on fire.

4.  Push me to meet you in person immediately.

Because that always ends well and doesn't look in the least creepy, desperate or suspicious.  No, I'm not grabbing a coffee/sleeping with you.  If it isn't promising over online chat that we'll get along, rushing onto the IRL meeting isn't going to help.  Also makes me wonder what you're after.  Back off.

5.  If you don't hear from me for two days, send me whiny-ass messages about it.

This takes the cake.  From the age of about zero I have absorbed the cardinal first rule of dating: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES APPEAR NEEDY.  Like, that's pretty much it.  Don't look needy.  Now granted, this can be a misogynistic-as-fuck way to dick a woman over with impunity, but if you have no reason to expect anything from another human being, then, I dunno, don't expect anything from them.  You're on an online dating app.  We've never met.  We've had one mediocre conversation.  Maybe two.  A 48-hour window of silence on my part is not a reasonable time frame to start sending me messages that say "I don't get it. :( What did I do" or "Did you change your mind?" or "Why aren't you talking to me?" or "Don't you like me anymore?"  Well, I don't NOW.

God.  You would never survive as women.  How do you know why I haven't responded?  Maybe a parent died.  Maybe work has been crazy.  Maybe I'm just tired.  Maybe it's not *gasp* about you at all.  Although, now that you've insisted on making it about you...

...Consider that maybe, just a thought here, you might not want to appear really fucking self-absorbed and entitled.  "Hey, haven't heard from you for a couple of days, how's it going?  Here's a funny story from my day" is WAY more appealing than "wahhhhhh where did you gooooo I'm lonely and desperate please validate me I'm such a great guy."  (I have a great skeptical-disgusted face that goes really well here.)

I'm frankly just shocked that this isn't common sense.  I can't even tell you how many of these kinds of messages I get.  Oh, my god, I don't owe you anything at this point, and you don't owe me anything, and if you don't hear from me for an extended period of time, send a casual follow-up, and if there's nothing after that, cut your fucking losses (since they're not even losses, because, again, WE ARE STRANGERS) and move on.  Be a goddamn adult.

Or not.  I mean, if you want to show me your wet-diaper self, you go right ahead, that makes my choices narrower, but simple.


So, in short: Behave like the stereotype of every person another person wouldn't want to be with, and you will succeed excellently in never hearing back from me.  A lot of you are off to a great start so far.

God, dating is the worst.

Doing the (mm-mm) Pigeon

I used to hate pigeons. I thought they were ugly and stupid and shaped like footballs, which apparently made it okay to loathe them. (What the hell, younger me?)

I can't pinpoint an exact moment when that changed, although for some reason a reading of Zadie Smith's White Teeth factored in, which is odd because I recall pigeons or some other city fowl described as an object of intense hatred in that book, which I otherwise don't recall with much clarity. Maybe holding up a mirror of pointless pigeon hate was the point. At any rate, as with other paradigm shifts over the years, this little inconsequential evolution occurred slowly, subtly, and largely subconsciously so that I only noticed it six months ago upon disembarking from the bus for the first time to walk the few blocks to my new job in downtown Detroit, where, picking my way through the flow of pigeons moving in eddies and swirls around my feet, I regarded them with delight.

I read once that pigeons are among the only birds that can swallow (hold the dick jokes, please, god, what's wrong with you), an adaptation to city dwelling where the water sources consist mainly of puddles. Other birds have to capture water in their beaks and tilt their heads back. If it's true (yeah okay I'll look it up eventually), it's a surprisingly innovative attribute. Pigeons, stolid, quiet, slow, with their ungainly head-bobbing gait and such awkwardly large bright pink feet that you almost want to give them fashion advice (like seriously guys those don't go with ANYTHING), possess this unassuming, nearly unique, incredibly practical power that enables them to live their humble pigeon lives near people.

Once I realized my loathing had transmuted into respect, I began watching them as I walked among them in the mornings.  I found a calm dignity in their staring gold-ringed eyes to match the wild pride I see in seagulls. I noticed the multiplicitous diversity in their coloration -- no two alike -- delightful waddling snowflakes cast in all existing shades of gray and white and brown; I love the brown ones best. I enjoyed their unhurried wariness toward human passersby, liked seeing how closely I could approach before they edged away.  Doubtless I look a little unhinged, eyeing these flocks of winged city waste with a huge grin on my face, but god, they're so pretty.

Yesterday as I stepped off the bus and walked briskly toward the crosswalk, something in the sidewalk caught my eye.  A little self-consciously, because people in cities are supposed to be in a constant state of striding purposefully toward some important destination, not pausing to admire the scenery like tourists or weirdos, I stooped to see, impressed into the concrete, a line of pigeon tracks.

It made me unbelievably happy.  The impressions in the sidewalk there are reserved to the stamps of the manufacturers.  Handprints and initials (and faceprints, if you're Michael Scott) haven't touched them.  And yet some pigeon, at some point in the past, ignorant of the yellow tape and "sidewalk closed" signs, walked calmly across a freshly poured sidewalk and left, in a simple, humble monument to human progress, a human legacy.

In the pale light of an early autumn dawn over a city still coming back from the dead, that little line of accidental tracks was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

let me eat cake, dammit

So my birthday is Tuesday.

I realized last week that I'm almost in my mid-thirties which means I need to stop pretending and just admit that my birthday is a really big damn deal to me.  For years I've done the stiff-upper-lip I'm-so-low-maintenance-meh-to-birthdays schtick but last week I clued in to my own bullshit when I spent all of Wednesday a puddly mess of tears because my birthday is coming up and there's no one to celebrate with because I'm single and all my family and closest friends are far away.

But hey, at least this birthday won't be last year's.  Last year's pretty much has to take the cake (bwa. ha. hardy ha) because my then-boyfriend got me exactly zero presents, zero cards, zero flowers, zero balloons, zero cakes.  He did take me out to exactly one dinner at exactly one lame restaurant that he liked, wished me exactly one happy birthday, and was miffed when I expressed a wistful desire for something more, brushing off my request for even a belated present with "birthdays aren't a big deal in my family, we just go out to dinner."  The icing on the cake (HARHARHAR) came a month later when he bought his best (female) friend a birthday present and responded to my pointed "so you got her a present and not me?" with "that's just what we do."  (Never mind that the previous year for my birthday he had three dozen gorgeous roses delivered to me at work.)

So last week after mopping up my face and then dripping everywhere with tears all over again in a repeat cycle that lasted for hours, I set about determining what I could do to mitigate the harsh misery of a birthday alone (but slightly less harsh and miserable than a birthday spent alone while actually dating someone).  It's less that I'm having a birthday without a boyfriend -- after all, I've only had a handful of birthdays WITH a boyfriend, and they weren't that fabulous -- than that I'm having a birthday really really alone -- since in some ways I might as well have just moved here, and am still building a life and a social network, I don't have any close local friends yet who can participate truly naturally in a birthday bash.  But it doesn't have to be totally solitary for all that. So I'm having dinner with a couple of friends tonight, and going out to dinner with a friend on my actual birthday, and going out for lunch with some work friends on my birthday too; I just up and asked and told them why, and, people being nice, they were more than happy to accommodate me.

And today I made myself a cake.

That's the crux of birthdayness, in my mind.  Birthdays in my family constituted a Very Big Deal.  We didn't have much money, so no one received a shower of presents; but Mom hung a homemade banner on the outside of the house displaying the name and birth year of the celebrant, and on our birthdays we got to pick exactly what we wanted her to make for dinner, and exactly what kind of cake we wanted her to make (white cake with white frosting for me; spice cake with white frosting for Dad; yellow cake with chocolate frosting for my sister), and we got cards from everyone, and a few little presents, and a wonderful warm feeling that your birth and existence were meaningful and special and this was your day.  (Especially important in a household where kids typically didn't have much say in day to day life and preferences.)

In the short-hand forced on by the busy life of adulthood, birthdays boil down to cake.  I didn't get one last year, and I might be alone and putting together a makeshift birthday, and who knows, I might spend it partly in tears (although I'm feeling better today, so maybe not) but by god, I will eat some fucking cake, and it will be iced with my mother's homemade frosting that could bring kingdoms to their knees.  And since adulthood means I spend most of my waking weekday hours tired, that means I'm baking a cake today.

I am not a baker.  I'm not a butcher or candlestick maker either, but I'm especially not a baker of desserts.  Bread, yes.  I love baking bread.  (And I love eating bread so much that I don't bake it very often.)  I tend more toward the savory than the sweet, in my mouth palette as in other areas.  So baking a cake is sort of a dicey, slapdash prospect.  I bought a cake mix from Aldi; mostly cake is a vehicle for frosting, in my book, so I don't care if it's not the best cake in the world.

Which, judging by the appearance of the thing I just removed from the oven, is a good outlook.  I haven't baked much in this apartment because I've spent the year that I've lived here too harried and harrassed to undertake anything artisanal like my usual cooking, so I had no idea how very unlevel the oven is.  The cake looks like a topography map of the Appalachian foothills.  The slopes aren't even uniform.  If I had any hand at decorating I'd figure out a way to put Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship somewhere toiling up one of the ridges.

But instead I'll just slather the whole thing with Mom's divine frosting.  Maybe I'll even use the frosting to make it look level and feed the cake-ier portions to my roommate.

At least it all smells wonderful.

anxious

Finally, the outdoor temperature has dropped enough to render the open window in front of me an enjoyable experience, instead of a nasty sensation reminiscent of drilling a hole into a bowl of warm soup.  The vista never improves -- nothing poetic or restful to the eye about a parking lot and the neighboring apartment building -- but I'm choosing to focus on the strip of grass just below my window, and the tops of the trees standing in vibrant green and sunlit gold against a backdrop of pure September blue.  Fall is coming, and I couldn't be happier about it.

It's been a bad week fraught with pointless anxiety tightening all my blood vessels and gnawing on my stomach lining, as if I am constantly five minutes away from delivering the most important speech of my life to a crowd of millions.  I can't say for certain when the anxiety reentered the core fabric of my consciousness -- probably around the time of the start of my most recent relationship, just over two years ago -- but I've only really noticed it as a medical condition more than a product of circumstances since the breakup in early June, when the anxiety persisted with nothing specific to attach to.

The constant worryworryworry is annoying.  It keeps trying to fix on the usual sources, but those sources aren't legitimate sources anymore.  OH MY GOD MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY.  *Checks bank account balances*  Oh. We're totally fine.  Okay.  HOLY SHIT RELATIONSHIP YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS BAD.  *Blinks*  Oh we're not in one anymore and life is good again.  Um.  JOB! YOUR JOB IS STRESSFUL AND MISERABLE AND INSECURE PANIC PANIC PANIC!!!  *Pauses*  Oh.  We love our job and are kicking ass at it and our bosses appreciate the hell out of us.  Huh.  HEALTH HOLY CRAP OUR HEALTH COULD GO AT ANY MOMENT.  Well, maybe.  Blood pressure is high again and I haven't been exercising regularly for a really really long time.  So on Wednesday I put myself back on my old BP medication dosage (I'm so annoyed with my current general practitioner that I don't even want to write about it at the moment), and Friday night I started working out again, which felt fucking AMAZING, so much so that I did it again yesterday, with plans again for today, and a resolution to return to my hour-plus-long evening workouts, since I'm finally adjusted to my work schedule and need the extra time slots I have in the evenings to get the kind of workouts in that will get me back in shape.

Which, you know, is one of the purposes of anxiety, evolutionarily; I read somewhere that people with anxiety tend to notice and react to problems more quickly, and think more creatively under pressure to solve them -- probably at least in part because they have already considered the fifty different ways a situation can go wrong and planned out ahead of time what to do for each one.  So my busy brain's constant planning can come in extremely handy, and makes me more quick-footed and competent at work, and swift to notice and solve my own problems (like not exercising enough, which affects, among other things, my blood pressure and my anxiety levels).  And I do tend to respond cool-headedly in crisis.  Which is nice; it's preferable to freaking out and melting down when moments matter.  But anxiety running amok means a shit ton of wasted emotional energy and unnecessary bad feelings when everything is fine.  I'd like to strike some kind of reasonable balance so that I don't lose any of my preparedness while still feeling relaxed and peaceful and empowered on an average basis.

So I have an appointment to see about getting medicated, at least temporarily, for the anxiety.  Unlike the depression, for which I plan to remain medicated for the entirety of my life, the anxiety only requires medical attention periodically.  I waited a few months to see if it would pass, but it hasn't, and it's interfering with the quality of my daily life.  And fuck that.  I've spent enough time feeling helplessly miserable.  Life is GOOD, goddammit, and I've worked hard to make it so, and I refuse to let a chemical problem detract from my enjoyment of my achievements, or prevent me from achieving and enjoying further.

One of the best aspects of learning to cope with trauma, depression and anxiety over the years has been the acceptance that comes with growth and healing -- learning to look at these problems in less polarized terms.  In this instance, I could hate my anxiety and hate that I have it and think that I'm screwed up and need to get rid of it altogether; or I could view it as an occasionally useful product of human evolution (quick responses to potentially bad situations and rapid, creative solutions) and accept its purpose while finding ways not to let it steamroll me into the ground or immobilize me into a glassy-eyed bundle of twitching nerves.  Looking at it that way has the added benefit of moving me out of the "I'm a failure for not being perfect" paradigm and into a place where I can fully accept myself, and forge wholeness and health from that acceptance -- be my own best ally, recognize the ways my coping mechanisms and responses are intended to be helpful, set appropriate boundaries for them, and know exactly what goals I'm striving to reach in order to live a full, healthy, happy, satisfying, meaningful, purposeful life.

So anxiety, thank you for caring about my wellbeing, and thank you for your watchfulness.  Also, prepare to chill the fuck out.  I have shit to do and you're overstepping your bounds.

Surprised by

It hits me at odd moments.  Blinking my eyes slowly on a Saturday morning, savoring the recent darkness rendered by the blackout curtains I purchased earlier this month.  Glancing out my office's twentieth floor window over the Ford Field toward the horizon just beyond Detroit.  Inhaling the spice of a humid August morning waiting for the early bus into the city.  Surveying the electic, artfully arranged beauty of my living room.  Or just now, washing off my hands after scooping out Simon's litterbox, which I carved out by hand from a large plastic storage bin so he would have more headroom and higher sides to accommodate his aging and slightly arthritic hips.  Moments when my mind is idle, thinking of nothing in particular, at rest in the ease of a quiet moment.

Joy.

It happens more and more often, lately, especially in the last month.  Adjusting to life post-breakup takes a huge toll, mental, emotional and physical--a shift of identity, a drastic change to a long-envisioned future.  (Especially when you move across two states for the guy and undergo two huge career changes in less than a year.)  On the whole, exhaustion won out over even grief, bitterness and anger (although I had/have those in abundance).  But as I've rested, as I've started to mend, to think, to heal, to convalesce, a sweet, pure joy has begun to flash through me in the moments when I'm thinking of nothing.

My life now holds so many more and brighter prospects than it did a year ago, two years ago, three years ago.  I'm living in a bigger place, with more to do, more opportunities, more happening (I love Detroit).  I have a living space that's as beautiful and settled-in as I can make it.  I love my job, where I can keep busy and solve problems without feeling overwhelmed, where I am deeply appreciated by bosses and coworkers, where I know my own worth.  I have fallen in love with public transportation, where I can read for two hours a day instead of grinding my teeth through traffic.  I'm reading more than I've read in years.  I finally bought a new (used) car.  I am free and unfettered, both relationally and psychologically.  And I'm making friends.  I love that I'm finally starting to have friends.

I'm still tired, most days.  But it's the tiredness that feels like healing, not the tiredness that needs healing.  I'm still focusing on getting as much rest as I want, and hopefully before too many more months have passed I'll feel rested and alert.

And I take a quick, childlike pleasure in those flashes of joy.  It had been a long while since I felt them.  I'm glad to have them back.

A is for Asshole

So out of curiosity yesterday I found a site that offers the Big Five Personality Test for free.  Also called the OCEAN or CANOE test, the Big Five measures five attributes that seem to be universally applicable to humans: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  For each component, you fall somewhere on a spectrum between the poles of the attribute and its opposite.

In the past I self-diagnosed where I fall for each of the Big Five but had never actually taken the test, so yesterday I figured, what the hell.  Mostly my results didn't surprise me; I fall in the middle on the Extraversion scale (drives my therapists nuts when they can't determine whether I'm an introvert or extravert), and my Conscientiousness appears to have increased to being neither conscientious nor disorganized (depending, I guess, on whether or not I give a shit).  The big surprise came from my Agreeableness score: Among the other respondents, I landed in the 38th percentile, far, far closer to the harsh, abrasive, callous end of the spectrum than the nice, accommodating, cooperative end that I expected.

The test's impressively tactful diagnosis: "You find it easy to express irritation with others."

A quick life-montage of my interactions with others would show an overwhelming skew to the accommodating. From childhood on, I did what others asked, bent to others' needs, mostly in terror of disapproval or the resigned conviction that I had no choice.  Apparently agreeableness isn't quite in my nature, though -- I resent impositions like hell; I detest when people behave contrary to my wishes; I do not like to share; thoughtlessness and stupidity annoy the shit out of me.  I am, in short, a grumpy bitch.

I just don't often act like one.

Jeff used to describe me as compliant.  It's a key concept: I didn't accommodate others because I liked to; I complied for other reasons, largely having to do with a lack of boundaries.  I had to learn assertiveness and self-advocacy.  As a result of my early schooling in compliance and my late training in noncompliance, I'm better equipped to express my disagreeableness in healthy ways, while refraining from ripping people to shreds (unless they really, really have it coming).

So I guess it's to my credit that most people don't have any idea how easily irritated I get; I reign that shit in hard because social acceptance is, you know, important.

But my tending toward the disagreeable possibly explains why it feels so, so good to let loose on someone who is begging for a setdown.  And perhaps why, however politely I frame requests when I'm annoyed, the person I'm talking to usually gets the point.

Here's to being cranky.

Liberal White Male Syndrome

"So I met this guy at this atheist social group I started attending.  Not my type, but pretty smart, and really seems to appreciate how smart I am."  I recentered my Bluetooth collar to make sure Leigh Ann could hear me.  "Into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and stuff.  And I was like, 'okay, awesome,' until this weekend.

"I just don't get how smart people can be so fucking stupid sometimes.  We're at this picnic for the group, and he starts complaining about political correctness."

Leigh Ann groaned, and I grinned while I continued, "He's liberal as shit, but he's complaining about how liberals are unfairly censoring comedy and policing jokes.  His example was this chalkboard sign outside a bar where a server wrote 'We like our beer like we like our violence: Domestic.' Once the Internet got hold of it, the server and the manager were both fired, and this guy thought that was ridiculous and unfair because the joke was 'objectively funny' and shouldn't have caused an outcry."

"So let me just ask something," Leigh Ann said.  "Was this guy, by any chance, white?"

"Boom," I said.  "Nailed it."

Because of course he was.

There's this pernicious disease rotting away at the heart of a certain sector of liberalism, where otherwise relatively enlightened people hold fast and firm to a really ugly sexism all the more damaging for its subtlety and for the denial in which its carriers live.  (Incidentally, it also makes dating really, really, REALLY hard, instead of just really, really hard.)

I call it Liberal White Male Syndrome (LWMS).  My last two exes had it.  These are the dudes who espouse the usual, good beliefs that racism and sexism are bad, that poverty is terrible, that government should intervene to promote equality, that higher taxes for the wealthy are imperative.  They call themselves feminists.  They support equal wages and reproductive rights, and oppose overt sexual violence.  They don't really think beyond that.  Because they're feminists, all right?  They've already thought it all through and they stand on the side of equality and women's rights, so there's no possible way that anything they think could be clouded by the systemic sexism that permeates absolutely everyone absolutely everywhere in our society.  They have magically transcended all sexism, and so every single one of their opinions is just fine the way it is, no further examination required.  To suggest otherwise is profoundly insulting, because they're feminists.

And they are giant, flaming dickholes.

Take this guy from the atheist picnic.  I'll call him B.  You can tell at a glance that he is sensitive, cripplingly insecure, and deeply resentful.  I'm not unsympathetic to this.  I listened to him ruminate angrily about his college students' complaints against him, especially how they didn't talk to him about the things they found offensive, but went right to the dean.  I didn't need to ask to determine that the complainants were women; I could tell by the tone and by the attack on their passivity.  (Never mind that woman are socialized never to be confrontational, and have only recently begun to be encouraged to report situations that make them uncomfortable -- report, not confront.)  But sure, okay, nobody likes being complained about to their boss, I would hate it too.  Guy's probably in the wrong profession for his temperament, which he seems to be realizing.

But then the diatribe on the damage that liberal censorship is inflicting on the comedy world.  The server and manager who wrote the "domestic beer and violence" joke shouldn't have suffered repercussions, because that joke was objectively funny and none of the bar patrons were offended by it.  B argued that it's a shame that people can't make jokes about whatever they want anymore; they have to be careful not to be offensive, and that's stupid.  After all, George Carlin said, probably shaking his head sadly while he did, that forty years ago the liberals were the ones decrying censorship, but now they're the ones enforcing it, and it's a tragedy, one that Carlin never thought he'd see.

Yeah, well, as Clint Eastwood recently reminded us, forty years ago nothing anyone said was racist.  Pretty sure forty years ago wasn't a good plumb line for what is or isn't sexist either.

I asked B to define "objective" humor.  He defined it as the unexpected association of two unrelated things.  Okay, I can buy that.

But what about objectively funny jokes that are mean? I asked.

Well, those aren't funny.  A joke has to come from a good place to be funny.

And a joke making light of domestic violence is coming from a good place?

Well it was a general joke, about a general topic, not directed at someone who had actually experienced it.  It wasn't intended to be harmful.

And -- the clincher of B's argument -- the server who wrote the joke on the chalkboard was a woman.

And there you have it, folks -- a perfect indicator of Liberal White Male Syndrome.  Textbook case.  You have special pleading (something is objectively funny when two unrelated things are brought into association.  But suddenly, when the joke is cruel, intent matters and it's only funny if it comes from a "good place," which has nothing to do with the previous definition, which contained no qualitative element).  You have privilege-blindness to a gender-specific subject (domestic violence is most frequently wrought against women, and therefore something that a male is unlikely to experience on the receiving end and so, from this position of privileged removal from the brutal reality, can look at the entire topic as something distant and "general" and academic).  You have privilege-generated defensiveness toward being called into question (the intent wasn't harmful so the effect shouldn't be; the offender's intent matters more than the victim's reaction or the reasons for it; the victim should merely stop being sensitive).  You have the instant dismissiveness of objecting opinions and the refusal to engage in self-scrutiny.  You have the reactionary blame-shifting so that the problem is the person who is offended, not the person who committed the offense.  And you have that mainstay defense of prejudiced opinions everywhere: The perpetrator of this particular example was a member of the group claiming offense (a woman made the joke, so it cannot be offensive to women -- which betrays a breathtaking ignorance of the internalized, systemic nature of bigotry, as only a LWM can pull off).

Fuck LWMS.

As B made his angry defense of his own sexism, the Avett Brothers' lines from "Ten Thousand Words" ran through my mind:

But their good times come with prices
and I can't believe it when I hear the jokes they make
at anyone's expense except their own--
would they laugh if they knew who paid?

Yeah, dude.  Intent doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  That joke comes at the expense of battered women, murdered women, brutalized girls.  It's not fucking funny.

And I lost all respect for your LWM ass as soon as those arguments came from your mouth.  I know exactly who you are now, and in some respects I'd prefer to deal with an overt woman-hating bigot because at least they're upfront about being total assholes.  You're in denial so deep you're lying about it without realizing it.  And sure, it's possible that you might learn, over time, to empathize, to think, to accept responsibility for your part in a sexist system from which you benefit daily.  But with defense reactions that strong, with that much anger and resentment, Imma kinda doubt it.

Also, I've dated your type before, and it never goes well.  Misogyny will out, and dealing with both the misogyny and the vehement denial of it is doubly taxing.

Jonah Day

Well, this wasn't going to be a good day from the beginning.

Last night, exhausted, I turned in at nine-thirty anticipating a much-needed eight hours' sleep, only to toss and turn for two hours before falling into a state of fitfulness that barely counts as rest.  Woke up shaky and weepy with tiredness, had to take a different route to work due to a traffic accident, took several wrong turns, ran over a curb because Detroit has a few stupid randomly placed parking lanes that are indistinguishable from turning lanes except for the curb itself rearing up just before the intersection which blends seamlessly into its environment especially with the morning sun screaming into your eyes and now I have a bulge in one of my tire sidewalls which I will need to fix tonight costing up to $250 and I just bought the car last week, and then a lady behind me lay on the horn for about ten years when I was driving too slowly trying to figure out how to get to the correct turn and worrying about the damage to my car (I was a giant dick about it and stuck my hand out the window to flutter my fingers at her in a really passive-aggressively nasty-polite wave because fuck her; the rage that contorted her features before she had to take her turn while I kept driving straight gave me an ugly satisfaction that I've felt bad about all morning), I'm so tired that I'm dropping everything that I touch and running into things and awkwardly slow on my feet in conversations and nothing that I say or do is coming out right, and I just want a hug from someone who loves me but I don't have one of those and I've been struggling with loneliness and old hurts the last few days and I just want to collapse into tears and hide from the world until this miserable day is over.

And I have to clean the house tonight because my childhood best friend is coming to visit tomorrow and all I want to do when I get home is stare at the TV for ten minutes and then go to bed.  And that's without taking into account the necessary visit to the tire shop.

I would say "someone shoot me," but this is Detroit, and I try to be careful what I wish for.

Sarah, Then and Now

It's been about seven years since I blogged regularly, I think. New posts aren't going to have a lot of context unless I fill in some of the gap between then and now.

Some things have changed, some of them drastically; some things have remained much the same.

I have gray hairs now, glistening at my temples, worked in shining threads throughout the many-shaded, gold-edged brown of my hair.  I let them be; I like them.  When I attended the First Baptist Church of North East as a teenager, I always admired the hair of a woman who sat with her husband several pews ahead of us -- she never dyed it, and the gray and silver mixed beautifully with the range of natural brown. I always hoped I would go gray that way, and I'm still waiting to see if I will.

I give less of a shit what strangers and bare acquaintances think of me.  That might not appear to diverge much from my younger self on the surface, but it feels more secure and less defiant than it used to; Meg and I agree that something magical happens after turning thirty, where you feel freer to shed all your fucks and do what you want.  So I dress as I please (having developed, since my last serious blogging days, a fairly fantastic sense of style all my own); I wear my hair in a ponytail and wash it once a week because I couldn't care less about fussing with it (and it's curlier now); I speak my mind frankly, with varying degrees of courtesy depending on the occasion; I stay home when I want to stay home; I go out when I want to go out; I don't apologize for feeling "peopled out" and wanting only the company of my beloved Simon (who is now fourteen and just as frisky and affectionate and grumpy as he ever was).

Where then I read entirely fiction and poetry, now I read almost entirely nonfiction, having developed a ravening hunger for the facts, the knowledge, the information denied me from my earliest childhood.  Where I then listened to indie folk and indie rock, I now mostly listen to instrumental jazz (heavy on bebop) -- an exploration completely my own.  In 2008 I moved from Michigan back to Pennsylvania; in 2015 I moved from Pennsylvania back to Michigan (full circle and a half).

I have better boundaries now, a stronger sense of self.  Often I have won them at great cost.

Back then I struggled under the weight of depression; I have since learned to manage it.  I walked through the valley of the shadow of death to get there, and feared, and faced, and relived much evil, and I learned to comfort me.  Now the occasional rough patch is milder, and I have learned to listen to what my condition is trying to tell me when the ground swells rise more than they ought.  The listening has led me out of some deep darknesses into light of my own making, and some of that very recently.

My life is quieter now, less ambitious.  I feel no burden to change the world, although I would like to make a meaningful contribution, to leave the world a little better than I found it--I still haven't determined how.  In the meantime I take pleasure in my work and leisure; I have a job that I like--I am still a legal secretary (after a brief and loathed recent stint teaching high school), much better paid now, and loving work at a large city firm which offers a brisker pace and greater challenges--and I satisfy my brain in other ways while I work out how to satisfy my soul...

...a word that I now use in metaphor.  Once I counted myself a Christian; now I don't.  My journey out of faith was long and strange and wonderful, and I have never encountered such fullness, such miraculous satisfaction, such shattering, transformative joy, as I have on the other side of belief.  My deconversion is a story of love and liberation that I am still learning to live in.

I am still profoundly lonely.  In the last seven years I have entered into two serious relationships; neither worked out.  I ended the last one two months ago.  It was necessary; it was wonderful, if sad, to break free; I have become again the self I recognize, happy, whole, complete and sure in myself, and, hopefully, a little surer, a little wiser, a little more shrewd for the latest experience.  I have deeply loved only once, a long time ago, before either of the last two relationships.  I never had the chance to tell him, and evidently not sharing my regard, he married someone else.  I have never met his equal since, and I'm not sure how likely it is that I will.  I hold out some hope, while resolving, without condition, to be fulfilled with my own company until such time, if ever, as I do.

So there you have it--the comparison in a nutshell.  I remain (as Lizzie Bennett might say) much the same in essentials, although some essential things have changed, and for the better.  Every year I find life a little richer; every failure, setback, disappointment, shows me my way a little more clearly.

I am, ever, Sarah.

Tenuous

Found myself on the verge of a panic attack this morning.

It was a weird feeling, only half familiar. The nausea. The almost atomic-level trembling, invisible to the naked eye but beginning to quiver through the particles of my body in subtle, seismic portent. The fluttering almost-hitch in my breath. The internal barometric pressure building to some black-clouded break. The ache tightening my tear ducts. The flash of adrenaline through my blood. The pinned wide eyes sweeping lightning glances around the room, the desperate urge to flight. I experienced it half-distantly, thinking, oh. I remember this.

The weirdest part was the emptiness behind it - not the emptiness of loss, but rather the emptiness of any real cause. I cast around in my mind for what might be causing stress, anxiety and panic, but couldn't locate anything.

Which, I think, is what triggered the panic.

My mind keeps racing, trying to latch onto one of the many anxieties that have consumed it for the last two years. It grabs at a shadow that looks like job worry, to fall back confused that job worry is gone. It scurries to relationship worry, but that has vanished too. There's some sadness and loneliness and exhaustion there instead, but those aren't sources of anxiety. In mounting consternation my mind leaps to money troubles, but those are well in hand, bills paid, bills scheduled, budget accounted for. Kerflummoxed, bewildered, it starts whirling in frantic circles, spinning up a dervish of emotional turmoil.

I keep thinking that there's something I'm forgetting to worry about.

But there's...nothing. And I have lived in stress and chaos for so long that I can't relax my CONSTANT VIGILANCE. (Pseudo-Mad-Eye-shout-out.) Non drama feels strange, and strangely threatening. Ominous.

We've been here before. Convalescence from trauma can be traumatic in itself. (Does the butterfly ever have a panic attack because it's not a caterpillar anymore?) It's taxing, changing your brain wiring to be adapted to happiness instead of misery. Happiness is unfamiliar, feels fragile, alien, suspicious.

It'll take some time to relax my rigid muscles, calm my racing brain. My working memory will be occupied for awhile, relearning what it means to operate from happiness as a baseline normalcy. I'll forget things. I'll feel scared and nervous, unaccustomed to a lack of reasons to worry.

But this is better. I just have to batten down the hatches when the panic brews, curl up with myself, and talk me gently down. It's okay, it's okay, you're okay.

And I will be.

I hate baseball.

Dissolving a long term relationship and starting over in your mid-thirties does weird shit to your psyche.

Today's bus commute home mostly involved sitting still in a glinting vehicular sea of day-game Tigers traffic - the American pastime apparently being to drive exhausted office workers longing for the quiet of home to the brink of suicide  for the sake of something to do while they wait for traffic to move forward another half-inch. Staring absently out the window - an occupation in which I decidedly revel as part of my public transportation commuter lifestyle - I caught my reflection in the window of a neighboring SUV. The convex pane of glass, presumably just to be cruel, gave my mouth the appearance of jowls.

And I panicked. Yanking out my phone I stared at my mouth in the reflection and started poking at my face thinking,

Shit I need to stop frowning so much.

Oh my god I'm turning into Jon Voight.

The person who someday falls in love with me will never know me looking young. No one will get to love me while I'm still pretty. Shit shit shit.

About half a minute later I was kindly telling myself that millions of women look gorgeous into their 90s and I have many years before I turn into Jon Voight.

But still. I'm smiling a lot just to ease my face muscles, knowing full well it won't do a goddamn thing.

Incidence

Saturday night as I waited to pull out of the condo complex where my friends K. & E. live, a cop car drove past me.

Shit.

I contemplated returning to my parking spot and waiting awhile, but figured that would look even more suspicious, and in a sleepy affluent small town where not much happens the cop might wait for me, so I carefully turned left, watching my rear view mirror. The marked SUV spun a U-turn.

Shit shit shit.

When the lights flashed I was already pulling over. I gathered all the necessary documents, rolled down the window, and waited.

A surprisingly pleasant voice said, "Hey."

I craned my neck around and smiled at her and said "Hey..."

She didn't waste time on condescension. "Where's your headlight?"

With cops I don't normally cry or waffle or make excuses. "Gone."

She took my license, registration and proof of insurance. As she glanced them over, I offered, "It's an expensive repair, and I'm going to be replacing the car soon."

"Oh? How soon?"

"Like two weeks?"

She nodded. The scant midnight traffic pulling past stared, offense on their faces, looking to see what kind of monster gets pulled over in their town.

"Where are you heading?" she asked. I named the town. "You heading there for the night?"

"Oh yeah, yeah, I live there, I'm just here visiting friends."

"So the headlight is completely gone?" Her tone was matter of fact but still pleasant, with a thread of humor tucked away in the back like a hidden seam, which made it easier to answer frankly.

"Oh yeah, the whole assembly, just gone. It's like a $200 repair and since I'm getting a new car soon, I haven't replaced it."

"How's your driving record?"

In my nervousness I blanked on a humble way to say it. "Perfect."

She nodded again. "I'll be right back."

While I waited I laughed sourly to myself. The last time I visited K. & E. I thought my chances of getting pulled over were significantly higher here, where probably the only crime was kids TP-ing the occasional house on Halloween. I've driven past so many cops all over the county since the headlight assembly fell out (due to a really stupid careless maneuver on my part, no further comment) and none of them had ever even blinked. Oh well...bound to catch up with me sometime. Fucking money.

I heard her coming back.

"Here's your paperwork," she said. "I completely sympathize. Just be careful."

"Thank you so much," I said fervently.

It's been a rough few weeks, and as I drove carefully home over the dark highways that hold the far flung neighborhoods of Detroit together like webbing, my heart felt a little warmer. A little humankindness from an unexpected source.

Good people are everywhere.

Well, I'm back.

shaken

I am enjoying my new job, my new life; enjoying the time I now have to myself. I find my position as a legal secretary far more satisfying than I could have predicted. I am saturated with the relief of no longer being a teacher. All is going well when suddenly I get a call from my old job: There is a teacher shortage, and I have to come back. I want to say no, but they inform me that my official quit date has not arrived, and I have no access to the proof I need to show them otherwise.

Filled with impotent anger, I take precious time off work from my new job, terrified that somehow I'll lose it and have to teach forever; filled with dread, I walk back down the halls that still suffocate me with the haunting smell of decriptude and despair that leaks from the mortar of a building fallen from glory to ruin. I try to slip into my classroom unnoticed; I fail. Students drift into the room to confront me, rage at me, mock me. Some are kind. Most are not. I am tired. In the midst of their questions, beratings, insolence, I am inexorably aware of the clock ticking toward the first bell. In a few minutes I will have to teach them, and I have no lesson plans. My nerves, my bones remember this potent cocktail of stress, anxiety, and indifference.

The bell rings and I attempt to call the room to order. The students laugh at my raised hand, my raised voice counting backward from five. They point while they laugh, and I look down and realize that I am wearing a long summer gown, low-cut, beautiful but utterly unsuited for teaching. The boys are all leering, their eyes bright. Now I must try to rise to authority over their view of me as a sex object. The vice principal walks past my room, a malicious half-smile on his face. I flip him off. Everything disintegrates in a kaleidoscope of chaos. I wake up sweating.

I still have nightmares about teaching.