Gwen Alison Wonderland

Not Dead

2011-02-04T18:59:00.007-05:00

I recently received an email from a reader asking if I were still alive. "Alive" being a relative term, in my opinion, I'm not really sure how to answer that. In any case, I'm not dead. Which is probably good, depending on who you ask.

I just wanted all my readers (those that are still left anyway) to know that I'm contemplating starting a private blog. Anyone who is interested in having access to it please send me an email.

For now I will leave you with some pictures of the neediest creatures on earth, also known as "the only things keeping me alive". Enjoy.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Dead Now

2010-06-14T14:20:00.004-04:00

The babies lay sprawled on the ottoman as I go back and forth between them, kissing their bellies, trying to elicit laughter. Bronwyn's buying what I'm selling but Brody is having none of it. Big, liquid eyes full of confusion gaze up at me. "What the fuck are you doing, ma?" I can almost hear the words coming out of his mouth. I have no idea.

Todd comes in from his cigarette with a goofy smile. "Haaaappyyyy Birthday" he sing-songs and I'm a little thrown. Holy shit, it's my birthday and I didn't remember. I mean, I knew it was coming for days because people saw fit to remind me of it by way of Starbucks gift cards, wine, and sweet, sweet cold hard cash. But it's like I don't care at all about it. I'm 35. I am a year older than my big sister. I've got diapers to change, mouths to feed, wash to fold, and a dress rehearsal to attend where I will witness my daughter perform a rousing tap dance to the tune of "Hounddog". I'm going through the motions of my life, the way I have for the past 35 years. Trust me when I tell you that merely participating in my life is not the same thing as joyfully living it.

Lately, I've been doing strange things to my fingernails and toenails. I'm not biting or grooming my nails, I'm like attacking them systematically. It started out as nervous picking at the base and has now graduated to active and purposeful infliction of injury. This is my fucking spare time project. I even have tools for this activity. My thumbs in particular are raw and bleeding. And my toes are so bad that it's painful to walk.

I have a familiar feeling bubbling up again: revulsion. The desire to crawl out of my own skin. I am a snake shedding an old, scaly coat. A skinned rabbit hanging from a tree.

Am I unhappy? Decidedly not. I've said on this blog quite sincerely that my mind is amazingly empty of negative, depressive or suicidal thoughts. But that's just it - my mind is amazingly empty. There is a vapid numbness to my thought processes. I'm devoid of humor - even that dark and vicious humor that sustained me all those years in that virtual hell of my own making. The absence of sadness is not the same thing as being happy. It's like the way you're so grateful for the numbness that novacaine brings to avoid unspeakable agony, but when that numbness lingers and lingers and lingers - well that...that's just a different kind of pain.

Last year at this time, I was sinking into quicksands of madness and despair. When insanity knocked, I answered the door. I invited him in for coffee. And then I hit him over the head with a vase and stole his identity. It's easier to say, "I'm crazy" than to take responsibility for my failures as a human being, to admit that my 35 years have been a series of mistakes and wrong turns and, mostly, of standing still. When you look in the mirror and still don't know who you are looking at and you haven't the foggiest idea of what you believe in, throwing on a cloak of crazy can be pretty appealing. The problem is that once you do that, once you try that thing on and like how it fits you have to really commit. It's a cause you have to be willing to die for.

I'm not saying it's always a choice. But to a certain extent, for people like me, it is. Once I have the tools to combat irrational thoughts and ridiculous feelings, I can choose to use those tools or I can put them away and pretend that they don't exist. I can wallow in the perpetual grief I experience for the loss of my sister. I can feel sorry for myself that I had to sacrifice my breasts for a life I'm not even sure that I want to live. I can be angry for losing my childhood and young adulthood to a cult, a belief system that tortured and controlled me. Or I can try to feel...something else. Maybe it's merely a delusion that there are other options for someone like me, a person so very paralyzed by fear and possibility that I build a wall all around me and then despair that I am lonely.

I think back to last year and I realize that my desire to die was very real. I reached a crossroads and pretended to make a choice. I said, "Gwen, either you will go into that wall at full speed or you will embrace life." What better way to embrace life then to have a baby? But put in that perspective those choices became one and the same. For me, I think that having a baby was just a very clever way to die. What is more life murdering than this - this thing that I am doing here? All day long, a zombie performing rote tasks in the service of others. Two babies and a toddler- a perfect excuse for getting out of doing anything real at all. I am a ghost of a person, a skinned corpse hanging on a meat hook in an industrial freezer. It's sad, really, because I know that something living once hummed inside of me, this huddled wraith who doesn't even bother to crouch in dark corners. But that little heartbeat is gone now, a distant thud. There is only the shell, a person all hollowed out and sleep deprived. I love my children with all my heart - blue eyed, smile faced cherubs - but they have killed me. No...no, I did that. That's the thing with suicide. You have to do it yourself.

Mi Hijo en el Sombrero

2010-05-05T16:58:00.004-04:00

So Liv made this at school today:

And I couldn't resist doing this:

Happy Cinco de Mayo to all those who celebrate it and to all those who just use it as an excuse to overindulge in tacos and get shit-faced drinking Tequila!

The Death of a Blog

2010-05-03T21:16:00.003-04:00

My blog didn't just die. I think it was murdered. I was there, in the moment, composing in my head, scribbling ideas on restaurant napkins, looking at the world through a twisty lens, crossing my fingers for strange events and other blog fodder. I was a blogger, not big time, but I had readers - really awesome readers who thought about what I wrote and cared about what happened to me, what upset me, what woke me up in the night.

But something stabbed the heart of me. I found myself abandoning this thing, this glorious thing that had become so precious to me. Something broke inside of me and I could not go on.

Wait. That's kind of a lie. Presently, I'm more fixed than I've ever been. My emotions and thought processes are all spackled and glued and scotch taped up. It not a neat result but a functional one. If my life were a movie and I rewound it a year, I would be standing on the balcony of a tall building looking longingly at the pavement below. I would be holding a bottle of painkillers in my hand and wondering how they would feel going into my belly all at once. I would be driving my car, staring down at my hands and waiting expectantly for the hard turn into oncoming traffic. I wanted to die something awful. It was all my little brain could think about. The end of Gwen. The end of me.

There is a vicious pattern to my mind. It takes me to really gross places at intervals. Like this bubbling up of self-hatred. It makes me want to hurt myself in the sickest ways. I've given up on trying to figure out why it comes. I only know that it does.

But not lately. Not today.

This is the problem. It seems I only have the ability to write beautifully when my soul is in a hideous condition. There exists in me a strange mating of creativity and misery.

I wonder if I have anything worthwhile to say while I am well. If anyone would care to know that part of me.

I know the sickness will return. It is a very reliable visitor and arrives in many forms. But for now I am all OK and boring as hell.

Float like a Butterly, Sting like a Bee

2010-04-25T19:55:00.006-04:00

This is what happens when you misbehave in the Jackson house:

Ok, not really. But what you see over my daughter's eye is not purple eyeshadow applied in a game of "Let's pretend I'm an Atlantic City hooker." It's a genuine, bona fide shiner. Some child didn't bother to look before coming down the slide and slamming her fucking foot into my daughter's beautiful eye. A playground is a dangerous place and apparently rife with miniature assholes. If anyone tries to mess with my girl again, they'll have this to contend with:

Devil in a Blue Onesie

2010-04-22T15:01:00.007-04:00

This life is a whirl of soiled diapers, milk stained bottles in the sink, Desitin smeared on tiny asses that are too cute for words. But mostly this life is swollen with desperation born of post partum misery and exhaustion.

Behold the face of a torturer -

This photo was taken at 3 am. Gaze into his magnetic eyes - but not for too long. He is a wolf in cute baby's clothing, a charlatan selling torment and crippling lethargy in the guise of coos and helplessness. Here is his accomplice:

Cute bow? Check. Precious baby pout? Yep. Beady, piercing eyes? You betcha. Bronwyn is the biggest bitch to ever don footed pajamas. She plots and schemes from her lair, otherwise known as the comfy swing. My babies chain-suck binkies instead of Parliaments and wail like banshees when they don't get their way. I am a prisoner of war. Their plaintive wails at 1:02 am, 2 am, 2:15 am, 2:45 am, 3:07 am, 3:55 am, 4:00 am, 4:10 am, 4:32 am, 4:40 am, and 5:15 am surely violate the Geneva Convention.

I think Brody actually wrote "I will break you" on the nursery wall with his urine the other night. He will.

Yesterday, I held Bronwyn up, pulled the waist of her red stretchy pants up to the chest of her blue onesie and made her dance like a marionette to the tune of "I can go, go, go in my Hover-round, this way, that way, all over town". This made me laugh maniacally, hysterically like a person driven mad by a peculiar brand of torment. The only way I can exact revenge is to make them look ridiculous.

God Help Me

2010-03-16T19:57:00.005-04:00

The first time I heard the word "mommy-blogger" I instantly recognized it as derisive. I thought, "Who are these women who can't stop writing about their progeny? Who are these women who immerse themselves in the lives of toddlers and have subsequently lost their identity? These mommy-bloggers with only their children as blog fodder?" I pictured them as cookie cutter mothers, having nothing better to do but make lego castles and playdough pizzas. I felt instantly superior. Well, maybe not superior but..."otherly". It didn't occur to me that I actually was one, that I was a mommy-blogger - by virtue of being a mother and a blogger. Which is understandable considering that my first year of blogging I barely wrote about my child or the trials of motherhood. Liv was a ghost. I didn't write about being a mother or parenting issues or anything of that nature because my writing was a way to escape that - to escape a reality that was foreign and overwhelming. Including that reality in my writing felt invasive.

But I feel differently now. I stumbled upon some wonderful moms who are bloggers, (like her and her and her), and some awesome dads who are bloggers, (like him and him and him) who have taught me that writing about the challenges and joys of parenting can be interesting and funny and kind of amazing*. Is there any undertaking more daunting than raising up a baby to adulthood? Kids are strange little creatures that will make you laugh hearty laughs and cry salty tears and sometimes blow your fucking mind. There are a million different ways to be a parent and you don't have to sacrifice your soul in the process. I have three children now. And the truth is that right now I am immersed in motherhood; the kind of immersion that, 3 years ago, would have made my skin crawl. These three little people are the ocean in which I swim. Whether I drown or tread water remains to be seen.

*This is just a handful of the bloggers who have inspired me over the past year or so. There are so many more that I wish I could include!

Robin Williams: Wanted Dead or Alive (Actually just dead would be nice)

2010-03-05T21:35:00.003-05:00

So, not only is Patch Adams a horrible shitfest of a movie, it's now responsible for at least one 13 year old girl getting molested. I was reading this article yesterday and noticed this interesting quote by the prosecutors in the case:

Gardner of Lake Elsinore pleaded guilty in May 2000 to molesting a 13-year-old female neighbor. Prosecutors said he lured the victim to his home with an offer to watch "Patch Adams," a 1998 movie starring Robin Williams.

Is it just me or is the mention of "Patch Adams, a 1998 movie starring Robin Williams" in this context pretty goddamn weird? I mean, why did the prosecutor feel the need to mention that little tidbit? What does the reader gain by having this information? What does the prosecutor gain by relaying it? Why wasn't it sufficient to just say that the molester lured the victim to his home with an offer to watch a movie?

I can't help but feel that this group of prosecutors is disgusted by the pedophile's luring this young girl not only to molest her but, even worse, to subject her to the horrible antics of Robin Williams. I mean, subjecting a child to one of his comedic film efforts surely qualifies as an aggravating circumstance, don't you think? But then again I think anyone who lets their kid watch Mrs. Doubtfire should get the electric chair so maybe I'm not the best judge and jury on this one.

Anyway, this whole situation just adds more weight to my argument that Robin Williams is in league with the devil. How the hell else did he get so famous?

The Burning Bagel

2010-03-03T14:30:00.002-05:00

I don't want to drone on indulgently about my brand new, fucking adorable babies. Well, actually I kind of do. It's not all kittens and rainbows here at the Jackson house, though, what with the sleepless nights and the grotesque, after-pregnancy body and my mother-in-law visiting from Florida. She is simultaneously saving my life and destroying it at the same time. We actually argued the other day about Nancy Kerrigan. Nancy fucking Kerrigan. She was insisting that that washed up hag was currently competing in the Olympic Games. And I kept insisting that unless I inadvertently entered a time warp and was somehow unknowingly existing in 1992, I was pretty certain Nancy Kerrigan was not taking the ice in Vancouver in 2010. I had to actually go on the internet to convince her of my absolute rightness. How many times do I have to prove to this woman that I'm right before she understands that I am always and forever right? Apparently, I must do this to infinity.

I am exhausted in this new reality in which 1 straight hour of sleep is an elusive luxury. But I am not too tired to champion the important causes, i.e. generic ketchup can't hold a candle to Heinz. Don't even try to bring that Walmart "great value" watery "catsup" shit home and tell me it's the same fucking thing as yummy, red, thick Heinz. Because post-partum depression means never having to say you're sorry for stabbing someone in the face for buying the wrong condiment. It also gives me automatic immunity from prosecution for burning a bagel, which is apparently now a capital offense. I watched incredulously as my mother-in-law leaned over the trashcan, sadly but with determination scraping the burnt black shit off the everything bagel I had just burned in the toaster oven. There was much sighing and mumbling under the breath about the "cost of things" until I finally asked why she wouldn't just let me throw the fucking thing away and make a new one. "Oh no", said the martyr, "I'll eat it. It won't taste that bad."

And then today, she is the one who commits this heinous criminal act. But since my mother-in-law is not post-partum and thus does not have immunity, she actually says, "Well I'm just going to have to punish myself by eating it." And I have to ask her to repeat herself because my ears cannot believe the nonsense she is spewing forth from her fucking mouth. "What on earth are you talking about, Tatty? Why would you have to punish yourself for burning a damn bagel? It's just bread?" And she says, "Weeeeell, if I punish myself and make myself eat the burnt bagel then maybe I won't burn one the next time I make lunch." And this is the part where I kind of lose my shit. "Ummm, it's just bread. It's BREAD. We do not live in a third world country ravaged by natural disaster where foodstuffs are scarce." She doesn't say anything but starts to put cream cheese on what is pretty much a lump of black ash. And she eats it, too, just to make a point.

Isn't it amazing that I haven't replaced her Centrum Silver vitamins with cyanide capsules? Aren't you proud of me? She could be easily tricked, too. All I would have to say is that I bought these great vitamins at Walmart, that I got a deal. She would be all over that shit.

But I kid. I love my mother-in-law. She is very awesome when she is not being tight and judgmental and touting the economic value of low-watt light bulbs and reusing dryer sheets "2 and 3 times" or asking me to get my crockpot from storage every 5 seconds or telling Liv to calm down when all she is doing is dancing and laughing like, I don't know, a normal 4 year old. In any case, she's changed a lot of shitty diapers for me. And do you want to know how she knows when the babies need to be changed? Not by sniffing around their asses for foul odors like normal people, but by actually sticking her finger into the diaper. Yet this same woman who has no problem putting her fingers in potentially shitty drawers says that aspirating boogers out the babies noses is "nasty" and would make her "dry heave".

Does anybody know how long it takes to kill someone with undetectable levels of arsenic?

Anti-Depressants

2010-02-20T11:47:00.009-05:00

With two screaming, pooping, milk-gobbling preemies at home keeping me awake 23 out of 24 hours a day, it is next to impossible to find time to write a meaningful, worthwhile blog. I'm still "upset about a lot of things" and mighty pissed off at the world. I still have a whole lot of shit I want to bitch and moan about on here to all you fine people. But until I'm no longer a zombie with formula stains on my stretched out comfie clothes and baby shit under my fingernails, cute pictures will have to suffice. Unless you all want to hear about how being a mother to twins is amazing and fucking awful at the same time or about how my 4 year old is still a total bitch or about how I still have a pregnant belly only now it's just not cute because there aren't any babies inside anymore. Because that's the extent of my inner monologue.

You'll be happy to know that I'm staving off post-partum depression quite successfully with the aid of looking into the faces of my adorable babies. Here's a little sample of what makes it all worthwhile.

Where for art thou, babies?

2010-02-04T14:38:00.005-05:00

I don't know why this has been so hard to write about. I've stopped and started so many times and yet no words I put down can fully capture the aching emptiness I feel at giving birth to babies and coming home from the hospital without them. What we endure to bring our babies into the world is easily forgotten when we cuddle the thing so hard won. When we smell its soft head, trace our fingers down a chubby, pink body, whisper silliness and love into its ears. But I don't have that now. I sit alone in rooms and wonder about the new lives I just ushered too early into the world. I carry guilt heavy in my chest. Why wasn't I strong enough to carry them to term? What defect brought on labor at 33 weeks?

Also, I carry envy. As I endured an extremely painful recovery from a C-section, I was exposed to the sounds of happy moms and healthy babies in their rooms. Sweet, hungry cries for the bottle. High-pitched mommy voices soothing and playing. My room was eerily quiet at times, nothing but a frigid wind against my window. A phone ringing followed by congratulations that felt hollow and meaningless. The nurses told me to walk. So I did. Walking the long hallways of the maternity suite, I bore witness to a new horror. Affixed to the walls were picture after picture of babies. Pink-cheeked, happy, healthy babies. A baby in a flower pot wearing a crooked hat. Two babies dressed up like purple cabbages. Anne Geddes knock-offs that were even creepier than the originals. Everybody's perfect baby. Everybody's but mine. Thanks so much for hanging these prints on the walls, morons. It's just torture to see a robust newborn baby hatching out of an eggshell, when my babies have tubes coming out of their faces.

I know I shouldn't compare. If we were to really play that game, there are preemies much worse off in the NICU than my little guys. Teeny-tiny preemies that will fit in the palm of your hand. That isn't cute. It's a fucking tragedy. My babies have been given a great prognosis. They will come home in several weeks and most likely be completely healthy. But right now, they are not. Right now, they struggle to do the normal things. Sucking a bottle is a difficult undertaking. Even breathing was hard for them at first. They been here a week and I've held them in my arms maybe 3 times. I've given one bottle to their sweet, hungry mouths. I've changed one diaper.

I know once they're home it will feel like they've always been. But right now I'm in purgatory. I sit at home with all these nurturing chemicals searing through me and strangers are caring for my babies. It just plain hurts a whole hell of a lot. That's about as eloquent as it gets these days, folks. My heart is just broken.

Yellow Babies, Blue Mama

2010-02-01T00:48:00.005-05:00

Dorian Brody

5 lbs, 4 oz

1/27/10

Lilah Margaret

5 lbs, 8 oz.

1/27/10

born at 33 weeks gestation

Christmas Pictures

2009-12-18T14:12:00.016-05:00

"Mom? You know how you said God gave me to you as a present?"

"Yes. Yes, he did. It was the best gift I ever got."

"Well, I hope you remembered to send him a thank you card for that."

What she doesn't know is that there are no words that could ever convey the gratitude I feel for her existence.

Nuvaring Bitches

2009-12-11T19:23:00.006-05:00

Am I only one who hates these Nuvaring birth control bitches? I seriously loathe these women. It's apparently girls night with three "besties" sitting around a coffee table nary a wine bottle in sight. The TV is on in the background and the old Nuvaring commercial starts playing. The stupid wavy haired one says, "Ooooh, I love this commercial!" and then proceeds to sing along to the most unimaginative jingle ever penned by a human. I mean how untalented do you have to be to come up with these lyrics? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Everyday, aaaa aaaah. Everytime I see her bob her head back and forth singing along to it I have a strong urge to bash her head into a million tiny pieces of bone and brain matter.

Then her "friend" tries to be all nonchalant, leaning forward pretending to get a snack while asking with a devilish gleam in her dead eyes, "Would you guys try Nuvaring?" But you can just tell that she's been waiting all night for this. This whorebag has some kind of an agenda and it creeps me the fuck out. Like, why is she so invested in her friends sticking a plastic birth control device in their vaginas? The black woman sitting next to her is the least annoying of the bunch but I'd still murder her with my bare hands. That is, if her grotesquely shiny shirt doesn't give me a seizure first. She says, "I don't even know what it is." Don't worry! Because Nuvaring pusher is going to tell you all about it. Her voice gets all weird and affected "It's. A. Monthly. Vaginal. Birth. Control. Ring. That. delivers a low dose of hormones."

Wavy haired, dumb commercial loving woman finally gets it. You can see how it just clicks and she realizes that this is the birth control you have to...Gasp!...put in your vagina! "Don't you have to...put it in" she says while making odd hand gestures. But Nuvaring pusher won't let her go there. Because for her it's easy. "It's small and comfortable, plus" (she leans in conspiratorially) "you don't have to take it every day." And there it is, folks. There you have it. I don't know how feminism has survived all these years, how we women have managed to lead meaningful, productive lives while attached to the oppressive tether that is swallowing a pill every day. But Nuvaring will set us free from this tyranny. Indeed, Nuvaring pusher has declared, "Let my people go." She is Moses parting the Red Sea, except the Red Sea is more like the labial lips of women everywhere.

If Margaret Sanger were alive today she'd be slapping some bitches. Not even a century ago, women weren't allowed to vote for our leaders, obtain a legal and safe abortion, or maintain any control of our own reproductive powers. The Comstock Laws made illegal the dissemination of information on contraception and the distribution of contraceptive devices. That is oppression, Nuvaring pusher. I don't know who you sold your soul to or why, but you are obviously in league with some Satanic element. And if I never see your smug, creepy smile on my TV again, it will be too soon.

Twins in utero

2009-11-26T09:35:00.008-05:00

My sweet, baby boy

Girl parts. I'll just take their word for it.

Money shot: Boy parts

Twins touching hands through the membrane.

Thankful

2009-11-25T19:37:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow I will celebrate Thanksgiving for the 7th time. Out of my 34 years, I have spent only 7 Thanksgivings seated at smooshed together dinner tables over-eating turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce with my family on the 4th Thursday of November. Only Jehovah's Witnesses could find something satanic about such an innocent celebration - eating delicious food and expressing gratitude for the myriad of life's blessings.

Indeed, my Jehovah's Witness childhood was full of what I could not do. Traditional celebrations were forbidden:

Birthdays
Halloween
Christmas
New Year's Eve
4th of July
Valentine's Day
Easter
St. Patrick's Day
Mother's Day
Father's Day

I could not participate in after-school activities, such as sports or drama. Because my participating in these things would bring me into contact with people who were not of my faith and thus under the influence of Satan and destined for eternal destruction. I could not attend school dances, homecoming, or prom for the very same reason. I was not permitted to go to college because Armageddon was imminent and I needed to concentrate my efforts on preaching the so-called "good news", which was really an ultimatum: join us or die. Saturday mornings I spent out knocking on doors, dreading that the next door I knocked on would have someone from school behind it. When this inevitably happened there are no words for the humiliation I endured, the gut-wrenching shame I experienced.

My thoughts, my feelings, even my dreams did not belong to me. It is so painful to visit that now, the memory of those empty years. I was forced to make so many sacrifices and it was all for nothing. What they called "The Truth" was a complete and total lie.

Who knows what I would have become if it weren't for that fucking cult and it's brutal influence over my family. I struggle with so much anger and grief. I think about the little girl that I was, so full of potential for great things. And then I look in the mirror at what I have become and I want to spit in my own face. I have spent the past 10 years trying to make sense of what happened to me and attempting to undo the damage. I don't know that this is possible. I can't go back and retrieve memories of what never was. I can't have Christmas mornings tearing open presents. I can't have dressing up in a princess costume for Halloween. I can't have exchanging Valentines with secret crushes. I can't have sparklers on the 4th of July. I can't have pictures of me in a terrible, taffeta dress arm in arm with my prom date. I can't have living in a dorm and figuring out how I'm going to change the world over a dozen cheap beers.

What I had was not enough. I feel like I have these huge gaping holes inside of me, paths not taken, wounds that won't heal, abilities never realized. This emptiness is nauseating. I wonder what it would feel like to be a whole person. What does it feel like? Tell me. Somedays I want to crawl into the skull of someone else. Just for a little while. So that I could know.

Tomorrow I will pretend to be whole as I dine with my family, celebrating Thanksgiving as if it always was this way with us. Pretending we are normal and that we have memories tucked inside of us of so many Thanksgivings past. My daughter will never know any different and sometimes I resent her for it. I watch as she circles things in a catalog. "I want all these things for Christmas, mom!" She doesn't notice the tears gathering, the deep breath. "Anything you want sweetie. Santa knows what a good girl you've been."

That's all I can do now - Live through her. And I know that despite my past, I do have the present to be thankful for. My wild Liv, two babies having a party in my womb, a mom who's cancer was caught early enough to treat (stage 2), a husband who loves me despite what I am. I guess most of all, though, I am thankful to have control over my own mind and freedom from psychological tyranny. I know how precious that is. I will never take it for granted.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Kick Me

2009-10-24T19:54:00.003-04:00

There's nothing in the realm of my experience that compares to that first swoosh in the womb. I'm not talking about those soft flutters or the quick ticklings or the questionable bubbles. The quickenings. Those can all be explained away in my mind as something else: hunger pangs, gas. I'm talking about the moment, the feeling, the unmistakable proof of life. The rolling and tapping of a tiny life that is moving of its own accord within my body. Before this movement, of course, I was aware of the pregnancy. I had taken the test and seen the plus sign. I suffered through the 1st trimester nausea and fatigue. I took the blood tests, even saw two little human-ish figures flipping me off in black and white ultrasound photos. Twin gestation confirmed. A baby boy and a baby girl.

But everything is different now. The image has come into focus. The lens has been defogged. This is the beginning of a lifetime of knowing. A lifetime of discovering what they like, what they dream, who they are. Two people are alive inside of me. They are attached and dependent, but they are separate from me in every imaginable way. Baby A, the girl, is already making me laugh. She is positioned over my bladder and tickles me with her rolling. Baby B, the boy, can't make up his mind. He is jabbing me on the left one minute and then jabbing me on the right the next. One day he plays hard without rest. The next day he is lazy and making me worry.

I like to shake the twins awake when they are sleeping. This is a sort of pre-revenge for all the sleepless nights that are surely in my future courtesy of the two of them. I grip my uterus on both sides with my hands and shake it firmly, but gently. Without fail those two creatures start up their distinct activity, no doubt flipping me off in the process. Why does it delight me to irritate them? Because it's my way of saying, "I love you". Liv will vouch for that. Everytime I tease her by telling her that I've changed her name to Willis or Barney or Leroy and then proceed to call her that for the rest of the day, I am actually saying, "I love you enough to take this time to irritate the shit out of you." Also it makes me feel powerful to pick on someone smaller.

These sweet fetal movements fuel my optimism for a joyful future. Without them, pregnancy is just a miserable, desolate experience. Before my physical awareness of their existence, I felt cursed. Sickness, exhaustion, heartburn, low back pain, deformity. Yes, deformity. Because let's face it: I look like I have a beach-ball sized tumor growing out the front of my abdomen. I would say, "Men are lucky sons of bitches...no, saints. They are sons of saints." But the fetal movements change everything. They remind me that my body, no matter how deformed, is performing a miracle. The blessing, the privilege of carrying and making human beings far outweighs the discomfort and the agony of pregnancy and childbirth.

The kick and the jab of my unborn babies' feeble limbs are my reward for enduring so much annoying shit. So if I have to wake them up to get my fix, they'll just have to fucking deal with it. They'd better get a thick skin real quick if they are going to be my kids.

Best Case Scenarios

2009-10-17T15:03:00.003-04:00

"Do you feel it?"

I'm standing in my mother's kitchen pressing my fingertips against her right breast looking for the thing that left her sleepless the night before. Searching in a circular motion, the way the brochures they hand out at the gynecologist tell you to. At the 2 o'clock position, I find it. Nestled against her breast bone, a tiny object - a cross between a pebble and a marshmallow. I've felt similar things in my own breasts, when I still possessed them. I remember laying supine on my bed, topless, doing this private work. Every ridge or bump causing my heart to beat faster, my mind to orchestrate the worst possible thoughts. In the moment of discovery, I am already in a chair with an IV pumping chemotherapeutic chemicals into my body. I am already composing my last will and testament. I am already the deceased mother of a motherless child.

But for everyone else I offer best case scenarios.

"Yeah, I feel it." My brow furrows. "It feels too soft to be cancer."

"Would you be worried? I mean, if you found this in your breast?"

I almost laugh because when you have a BRCA2 mutation, you don't even need to find something suspicious to worry. You spend every moment of your life waiting for the axe to fall. You are on high alert, tensed and pretending to be ready for the inevitable moment your body betrays you.

"I would definitely get it checked out. I mean, I've had similar lumps that were biopsied and turned out to be nothing. Just get it checked out. It couldn't hurt."

It is October 1st. The first day of Breast Cancer Awareness month. In my family, we don't need a government sponsored month to remind us of the horrors of breast cancer. I don't need to buy a pink kitchen appliance or a ribbon magnet or hot pink M&Ms. Nothing I could see or buy could make me more aware. Because I am constantly made brutally aware of breast cancer by what is not there. My breasts and, more terribly, my sister. The savage memories of Amy's death and my mastectomy linger tenaciously in the brain.

This is why I hate Breast Cancer Awareness month. I don't need more reminders of the things I have lost. I don't need to watch perky women recount how they've conquered breast cancer and reassuring doctors sing-song how early detection saves lives. I don't need to see shelves of pink goods at the grocery stores. It is infuriating that some corporations are exploiting a disease to increase their profits. Breast cancer cannot be represented by a cutesy candy pink Kitchen-Aid. Breast cancer is a horrible, disfiguring disease that destroys lives and the emotional health of families. Fuck Breast Cancer Awareness month. How about living Breast Cancer Awareness life?

In the kitchen, there is a quiet. We are both thinking the same thing, my mom and I. Not this again. Please God, not this again. Cancer has taken his seat at the table. He is sticking his dirty finger in a fresh wound.

"Just call Dr. Kr--sher. Tell her what's going on and I'm sure she'll order a test right away."

"I'm scared."

"Don't be. I'm sure it's nothing. Just for your own peace of mind, get it looked at. You're due for a mammo anyway. You'll get the test and it will be nothing and you'll feel better." Best case scenarios.

But it isn't nothing. It's cancer. Confirmed by biopsy. My mother has breast cancer. My stomach does a sick flip to see that in writing. I had lied to her the way I lied to Amy a million times.

You're going to be fine.

I'm sure it's nothing.

It's probably been caught early.

They have so many medicines and treatments now.

You won't die. You can't die.

Sometimes I lied so well that I even convinced myself. What I want to know is, Why? Why is this disease attacking my family? Why doesn't it leave us the fuck alone already? Haven't we given enough? Haven't we lost enough? Haven't we cried enough? Haven't we watched a beautiful, young woman deteriorate into a sallow, dead shell enough?

For my mom's sake, I will keep spinning out best case scenarios. Maybe this time they'll turn out to be true.

Fun with Names

2009-09-21T10:45:00.003-04:00

Choosing names for the aliens is not easy. I have 5 months (hopefully) to work on this but it really is an important decision. I still haven't found out the genders, so I'm considering multiple options for each sex. I'm going to throw some names out there and get your opinion on some of these.

I noticed how many people are naming their daughters boy names these days. Ryan, Evan, Charlie, Tristan, Drew. So I thought - why not Richard? I could spell it Rychard. The Y makes it feminine, don't you think? Y is really a magical letter. It can change any boy name into a girl one. Bruce turns into Bryuce (the Y is silent). Michael turns into Mychael. Stephen turns into Stephyn. Of course, I could just do it the old-fashioned way with this one and call her Stephanie. But who wants to be traditional? I want my daughter to be Uneeeeeek. I mean, if I give her a normal name how will she know that she is special and different than everyone else?

Another name I was considering for a girl was Lillith. But it's just too common. So I wanted to make it different. Y to the rescue! Lyllyth. Now its a totally different name! Lylly for short. Lily is getting too popular. But Lylly will surely set her apart from any Lilys running around the playground.

Now for possible boy names. I noticed names like Gunner and Hunter are fairly popular. What about Killer? Murderer has a great sound to it but it's too long and I can't think of any good nicknames for it. Can you? Another one I'm thinking about is Bladen. At first I wanted just Blade. But Bladen is so uneeek.

A lot of people I know have given their sons a surname for a first name. What a cool idea! I mean, who needs a first name when you can have two last names? Carter, Walker, Cooper, Sawyer. These are all great but just way too popular. What about Zakowski? It's not a family name or anything. I'm not even Polish. I just think it sounds cool. We could call him Zak for short.

Oh sweet Jesus, I can't do this anymore. I'm actually in physical pain after writing that. You want to know what the truly scary thing is? If you go to any number of baby name forums on the internet you will find the same kind of pathological reasonings as would be mothers contemplate and decide on names for their offspring. I'm terrified after reading some of that shit. Can we, as a culture, band together and stop trying to be unique when naming our children? These are not housecats or hamsters we're naming. They're human beings who will one day grow up and have to live in the world with these monikers we've so lovingly and thoughtfully bestowed upon them. These names will be on test papers and ballots and driver's licenses and resumes. Your 5 year old little girl named McKadylynn is adorable now, but what about when she grows up? Can you picture a federal judge with this monstrosity for a name? I don't even want to think about a future where that happens.

Childbirth is Nasty

2009-09-01T13:29:00.008-04:00

It's weird the way we mothers look back with fondness on an experience that is (for the most part) quite painful and horrific. I'm talking, of course, about the experience of giving birth to our children. I'm specifying children here, because in about 6 months I will be giving birth to a couple of aliens, as evidenced by the ultrasound pics I posted last week. My first baby was a human but she was hell to get out of my body.

In the week before I finally expelled her, I wound up in the Labor & Delivery emergency room three times. Twice for false labor. It was my first baby and I didn't really know how it felt. If I had known how it felt, I probably would have killed myself before I ever had to actually do the work. The third time I wound up there, I thought for sure that this was it. I was in so much pain - gnawing, unrelenting agony. What I had thought for sure were labor pains, turned out to be a nice size kidney stone working it's way down my ureter. The doctor gave me scripts for Percocet and Ambien and told me to "go home and have a beer." I loved him. I think I still do.

Hurricane Katrina was raging on the Gulf Coast, and I remember sitting at home watching the news footage. I couldn't really emotionally connect to what was happening in the world, to the awful things that were happening to those poor people, I must admit. My personal world was in turmoil and I was high on painkillers. It was completely surreal.

I was scheduled to be induced the day before my due date. But I had heard so many horror stories about inducement that I wanted to go into labor naturally. So I said to Todd, "You know, sex can induce labor. What do you say? You want to do it?" He was totally game, my horny husband. It must have felt like fucking a manatee.

Hours later I was having active contractions and out of my damn mind with pain. Todd held my hand tight as an inept nurse tried to stick an IV into my arm to administer pain medication. My dear, sweet husband said, "I'm here...You're Ok. I'm not going anywhere." As the nurse stuck me over and over again in her futile attempts to find a vein, Todd stood up and sauntered right out of the room. Like, he just left without saying a word. I was in one of those rooms that just has a privacy curtain as a wall. Seconds later I heard a loud crash and under the curtain I spied Todd laying on the ground unconscious with a small pool of blood gathering around his head. He had fainted, and taken down a large metal cart along the way to the floor. I just started screaming. Like obnoxiously screaming.

It took a team of people, including my obstetrician, to calm me down. My OB explained that men faint all the time when their wives are in labor. I thought that was only something that happened in stupid sitcoms. Apparently not. They took Todd to the ER and I was assured that he was going to be fine after he got a few stitches. Then the doctor ordered some strong sleepytime medicine for this crazy lady. God bless him. Did I tell you that I'm in love with this guy?

Waking up from my blissful coma to godawful pain was just indescribable. You know, pain that makes a woman beg for someone to stick a fat needle in her spine must be pretty fucking awful. Todd had finally returned to me with fresh stitches in his chin and was full of apologies. He spent the rest of the day on his cell phone doing his Fantasy Football draft.

Twelve hours later, I was still not fully dilated. My epidural had worn off and when I pleaded for another one, a fucking snooty nurse said, "You're supposed to be in pain. You're in labor, hon." If I wasn't catheterized and partially numb from the waist down, I really think I would have attacked her like a wild animal. I hate those fucking people who think that childbirth is supposed to hurt. I especially hate those woman who think they are somehow superior human beings because they gave birth without pain medication or an epidural. What the fuck does that prove? If someone said to me, "I had my appendix removed without anesthesia. It's just more natural that way," I would think that they were insane. That's kind of how I feel about these "natural" childbirth women. Don't get me wrong - people can have their babies any way they damn well please. If somebody wants to endure excruciating pain for absolutely no reason, then godspeed. Just don't expect me to admire you for it. It doesn't make you a superhero or even a better mother than someone who opts for pain management.

When my OB came to me at 2 am and said, "We're going to need to do a C-Section," I wanted to kiss him. After 16 hours of labor, I knew that I wouldn't have the strength to push the baby out. I was relieved that my vagina would remain intact. I had had nightmares about needing an episiotomy. Yes, I'd rather have major abdominal surgery than be sliced open along my perineum. Then and now and always.

For my C-section, they laid me out on an uncomfortable bed with both my arms strapped down on extended boards at my side, I felt like I was being crucified. Why it's necessary to restrain a woman during this process is baffling to me. Helpless feeling. Paralyzed from the waist down, arms tightly strapped down, a blue sheet hung down between my eyes and some truly gruesome activity. When they cut, I could feel the blade opening my abdomen. It didn't hurt at all; But I could feel it happening. I could feel my doctor's hands inside of me tugging Liv out of her warm, snuggly home. And then: silence. For a brief moment after she was born into the world, she was quiet. I felt this sick panic and screamed for her. I heard my voice yelling "My baby - is she ok?" And finally - I heard her crying. It was the last time I'd be happy to hear that.

Childbirth is just nasty. I think that's why God made pregnancy so horrible. By the time we're full term, we're willing to go through anything for it to be over. Why am I telling you all this? Because Liv had her 4th birthday yesterday. Four years ago I became a mother. And I'm about to do it again and again. I feel insane right now - more so than usual.

Me and Liv 9/1/05

Aliens

2009-08-28T11:21:00.003-04:00

My kids look like aliens.

They even look like they're flipping me off with both hands. I love them already.

Worst Blog Ever

2009-08-18T13:18:00.002-04:00

I'm not dead. But I really, really wish I were. Yeah, I'm back to that but for different reasons. You see, no matter how much I rest, change up my diet, drink ginger ale, take Zofran - I still feel like I have a stomach bug 24 hours a day. I'm still dry heaving and vomiting and nauseated at all hours of the day. Nothing will kill your creative drive like this situation. I want to curl up in a ball and wait for it to be over. Yet I can't. Everything needs doing. Dishes, laundry, doctor's appointments, eating. Oh god. The fucking eating. It's like an added job I have now. Eating. I can't wait until the nausea tinged ravenous hunger goes away forever and ever.

So I'm nauseous, constantly hungry but with zero appetite, in pain from a few large cysts that have made a cozy little home on my ovary, fatigued, and worst of all I somehow got sucked into watching that horrible show More to Love that I blogged about a while back. I'm so ashamed. I hate the show. It makes me feel gross. Here's why: The women are pretty and yet all they do is complain about the fact that no guys ever like them because of their size. Every bad thing in their life they manage to blame on their weight. Everything. They don't talk about anything but their weight. I'm screaming at my TV, "Don't you have anything else to fucking talk about? Books? Movies? Politics?" And it's become painfully obvious to me that the reason these women are unlucky in love is because they have zero self-esteem whatsoever. Are there men who don't like heavier women? Sure. But I still see heavyset women in relationships all of the time. If you have large boobs and a vagina, you're bound to find a man at some point. Right? Just having a vagina means never having to beg for sex.

Which is why I'm really confused about that new HBO show Hung. How is Ray finding all these women to pay him for sex? I realize he has a big dick and all, but even so. He is sort of a pompous ass about it. Eh, I don't get it. But I still watch it. Honestly, my TV watching is out of control and it's about to turn into a full-blown addictive disease once September comes.

What I am most excited about (aka what is keeping me alive):

1. Sons of Anarchy
2. Mad Men
3. House
4. So You Think You Can Dance
5. Fringe

How about you?

Fairly Badparents

2009-08-05T23:35:00.000-04:00

Originally posted Jan. 28, 2009

I get a lot of flack from a lot of people for letting Liv watch "South Park". Apparently this makes me a terrible parent. And maybe that's true. I don't deny that my parenting skills are amateur on a good day. I don't deny that I struggle with the complex nature of proper bedtimes, balanced meals, and the importance of saying "No". I do, however, take great pride in the fact that I'm a better mother than Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and all those mothers on Lifetime made-for-TV movies "suffering" from Munchausen's by Proxy. At least my kid is still alive and not slowly dying from arsenic poisoning. Her teeth may be rotting out of her mouth with multiple cavities from all the candy I use to bribe her to behave herself, but they're just her milk teeth. I'll get it right with the second set, I promise.

South Park might not be the most appropriate TV for a toddler. But I have this to say about South Park: At least the parents on this show seem to give a fuck about their kids. No matter what horrible shit those kids pull, no matter how mouthy they get, no matter how they curse, or lie, or run away, or see imaginary feces singing Christmas tunes, their parents are there for them when it counts. I can't say the same from what I see of the parents on most traditional children's programming, Compared to them, I might just be Mother of the Fucking Year.

Take for instance, Dora the Explorer - This poor little girl. Her parents are so selfish that they have basically signed over all their parental rights to a backpack. And even though the thing does contain limitless amounts of useful objects and monies, it's no replacement for, you know, actual emotional support from loving parents. A magic backpack isn't going to wipe her tears, remind her to brush her teeth before bed, or, most importantly, deliver a well-deserved spanking to her bratty ass on occasion. Besides, that backpack is a sycophant. Dora needs a parent not an accessory that answers to her every whim and desire.

Dora's parents suck. Instead of spending quality time with their daughter or perhaps sending her to school once in a while, they send Dora off every day on "adventures", with not so much as a "Be careful". Most of these adventures happen to involve regular encounters with a conniving fox whose sole purpose in life is to fuck with her and steal her belongings. This Swiper character is really my favorite. He steals Dora's shit and then hides it. It's like he doesn't even steal the stuff because he wants it;He steals it for the sheer pleasure of watching Dora and her friends get upset and scramble around trying to find it. And then there's her frequent encounters with the grumpy, old troll who, if you ask me, more closely resembles a grumpy, old child molester. And let's not forget that malevolent witch who taunts and threatens her with ungodly world calamities (e.g. stealing Springtime) unless she and her monkey friend perform dangerous tasks at her behest.

Damn Scary if you ask me

I guess ever since the unmonikered twins were born, Mami and Papi are just too busy to spend more than a second or two at a time with their eldest daughter. Poor Dora has to fend for herself like some sort of feral cat. It's a good thing she has a naked monkey, a cow, a buck-toothed squirrel in a technicolor dream coat, and a marauding marching band of bugs to look after her. She's got quite a menagerie of incompetent guardians but they can never fill that empty place in her heart left by Mami and Papi's absence.

Here's a perfect example of what could happen if you let your daughter be raised by a backpack, a monkey, and a map:

Yeah, she might end up endorsing products that purport to be children's toys but in reality are meant to penetrate woman's vaginas. (Now that I think about it, I might have to get one of these. Dildo incognito)

And look at her cousin Diego. I mean parental neglect must run in this fucking family. Diego lives in a tree house and has constant forays into the jungle with zero adult supervision. His everyday activities there include, but are not limited to, playing with deadly, carniverous animals, hang gliding, white water rafting, and rescuing venomous snakes. In the rare moments his parents are seen onscreen, they appear to be more interested in helping endangered animals than in caring for their own offspring. Diego, though a minor child, is often seen driving a car, riding a jet ski, and travelling by way of zip line. Diego's parents are negligent assholes, and I, for one, think cockroaches are better equipped to raise healthy human beings.

And what's the deal with Calliou's parents? They look good on paper, true. But when you really stop to think about it, they're the most passive aggressive people you'll ever encounter. When Calliou misbehaves they
always make him talk about his feelings. Fuck that shit. What ever happened to good old fashioned ass
whoopings? Calliou is a pussy just like his dad. And when are they going to openly acknowledge the fact that
their son has a severe case of alopecia? Ignoring it isn't go to make everything okay. Kid is bald. Time to start
talking about that shit. If this were South Park, you just know Chef would be singing a little ditty about how
"we need to show everyone we care, even if they don't have any hair". Granted, he might end the song talking
about the bald nubian goddess he fucked years ago, but at least there's a dialogue about the issue. Calliou's baldness is like the elephant in the fucking room and it's high time they addressed it.

Then there's Fairly Oddparents, a show which details the adventures of Timmy Turner and his fairy godparents. And thank the Lord Jesus for those damn fairies, because Timmy's Fairly Negligent Parents seem to be so self-involved that they fail to notice the regular abuse he receives at the hands of a sadistic, psychopathic babysitter named Vicky.

Dragontales? Should be called "Dragon your ass to family court for a parental competency hearing". Where the hell are these kids' parents when they're taking constant forays into magical lands? Why doesn't anybody know they're gone? I could go and on about the horrible parenting skills and the dysfunctional relationships I see on Nick Jr and Sprout every day. I could write an entire thesis paper on Disney Moms & Dads and their numerous parental transgressions. Maybe one day I will. But I think I've more than proven my point with what I've already laid out here. I rest my case. The verdict? I'm a better parent than these assholes any day of the week. The damages you're going to pay me for talking shit about me for letting Livy watch South Park? Leave me the hell alone about it. And buy me a Starbucks cafe mocha with extra whip cream. Then, and only then, will I grant you an official pardon.

Peanuts

2009-08-04T15:44:00.003-04:00

First of all, I want to say thanks for all the congratulations and well wishes on my pregnancy. I had an ultrasound Friday and here's what happened.

The tech says, "I need to get a better look at that..."

"What?"

"Well...there's three. I don't want to scare you but there's three."

"Three what?"

"Three babies. I see three babies."

"Shut up."

"I'm serious."

At this point I started shaking and tearing up. God is punishing me for my Hating Fetuses and Children post. He is punishing me for being an awful person.

"Are you alright, Gwen?"

I nodded and she started checking the gestational sacs for heartbeats.

"I'm only seeing 2 sacs with heartbeats. There's no cardiac activity in the third sac."

So I finally started breathing a little because twins are better than triplets. But twins? Really? God has a really funny sense of humor. Or he hates my guts. I'm guessing the latter.

I'm on vacation now trying to process the news that I have this long, high risk pregnancy in front of me. I already have a baby bump and I'm only 2 months. It sucks because I'm not obviously pregnant, I just look like I have this big beer belly or something. This is not attractive at the beach. I also have an appetite that could support a 700 pound man. '

Alright, I'm done talking about my pregnancy. I promise. I'm on vacation until Saturday. I'm going to post a couple old blogs that probably nobody read because I used to have like 3 readers for the longest time.

I Hate Fetuses and Children

2009-07-30T17:14:00.004-04:00

I haven't been spending much time reading or writing blogs the past few weeks. It's not because I don't love you guys - you know I do. I would tongue kiss all of you, such is the depth of my enduring love. I've been absent and a few of my blog friends even noticed I was missing. I can't even express how special that made me feel. I've been immersed in this personal crisis of pregnancy because while not wholly unexpected it still managed to shock me. I pledge in all seriousness that I will not turn this joint into a pregnancy blog (excepting this post). Mmmm...a joint would be so good right now. For the nausea. Don't worry, I'm not going to smoke one. I can want one, can't I?

I've noticed in recent years that people get so up in arms about pregnant ladies doing pretty much anything. And people assume they can get all up in your business about shit when you're pregnant. I remember when I was pregnant with Liv, I would have a cup of coffee in the morning. People would always say, "Is that decaf?" And I'd say, "No. I actually got shots of espresso in this bitch. Pregnancy makes me really tired." People were completely horrified when I said that. It felt good. Now, I didn't actually put extra shots of espresso in there, but that's really not the point. A little caffeine during pregnancy is not going to hurt your baby.

I watch that show Hell's Kitchen. One of the girls on there was serving tableside shrimp scampi to the guests. One of the shrimp she served was a little under-cooked and the woman at the table said, "I have to be careful because I'm pregnant." Ok. That's fine. There is a tiny bit of danger in eating raw seafood while pregnant. Does it mean automatic death of a fetus if you consume something raw while you are pregnant? Ummm no. But this girl's competitors seemed to think so. Some of them were actually saying, "She tried to kill a pregnant woman and her baby." I was screaming at my TV, "Shut the fuck up. Pregnant women and their fetuses are not that fragile!"

Remember that episode of Weeds where Nancy wasn't sure if her drug kingpin boyfriend was going to kill her for ratting his people out? And she was pregnant with his baby so she went to a sushi place and ate raw fish and had a shot of sake and smoked a cigarette? And then afterward she went to the guy's house and tried to make him shoot her with a gun but instead he kind of raped her but not really because she was all smiling afterwards? That was hot. Anyway, I was reading the forums after the episode aired (because I'm a total TV nerd like that) and people were actually saying shit like, "Maybe she was trying to kill the baby!" And the same thing happened after that episode of Breaking Bad, when Walt's wife smoked a cigarette in the car after a stressful day dealing with a cancer-afflicted husband and a teenager who has cerebral palsy and all the crap that comes from just being pregnant. She just wanted a cigarette to relax and everyone on the forum was like, "Skyler is trying to kill the baby! She's a terrible person and mother!" Like people actually believe that there is a high chance that a baby will die in utero if the mother smokes a single cigarette, drinks one shot of liquor, and has a sushi lunch. Retards.

Anyway, I'm not advocating that people smoke, or drink, or overdose on raw shellfish whilst pregnant. I'm just asking, "Can we put things in perspective a little bit here?" I'm sure eating McDonald's food every day of your pregnancy isn't good for your baby either but people wouldn't crucify me in their minds if they saw me eating an Egg McMuffin. My mom smoked and drank while pregnant with me and look how awesome I turned out*. My OB, who is cool as shit, told me that it was really okay to drink 1 glass of wine with dinner or whatever. She said, "We used to give women in pre-term labor IVs of alcohol to stop their contractions." And then she laughed heartily at the memory of OB ER rooms full of drunk, pregnant women.

I received so many disapproving glances from people when I sipped my wine at dinner in a restaurant, or at a party, or at my wedding. And I just stared right back at them and said, "Bottom's up!" and dumped it all down my throat. Normally, I liked to savor it but it was so worth it to waste my one glass of wine like that just to piss people off.

People are really on my last fucking nerves these days with their righteous indignation. I feel like people have this need to continously prove what amazing human beings they are because they love children. Every day on Facebook I see something about how somebody's mad because a child got hurt or molested. Don't get me wrong, I get upset when things like that happen, too. I just don't feel the need to announce to the world just how concerned I am about the plights of children all over the globe. I want to ask, "Does that make you special somehow? Who doesn't feel indignant about helpless people being abused?" I just hate when people state the obvious and then feel all unique and good about themselves. (In fact when people feel good about themselves, it irritates me. That's why I surround myself with people who have low self-esteem). When someone says, "I hate child molesters", it makes me want to respond, "Really? Because I totally love them. I wish one would move in right next door to me and come within 25 feet of my daughter's pre-school."

So now I'm sure I've pissed off everyone. Give me a break - I'm in a delicate condition. And I will be reminding you of that often. I will blame everything on this pregnancy - bad writing, terrible attitude, car theft, cursing at old people, laying on my couch all day, murder. Well, maybe not murder. Unless it's a child.

I hope I don't need to tell you that I really don't hate fetuses and children. You know me well enough by now that I don't need to explain my dark, twisted, unfunny sense of humor, right?

*well, I'm not really awesome. But I'm also not stupid so that's got to count for something, right?

Peanut

2009-07-29T19:04:00.003-04:00

There is a peanut sized creature in my abdomen wreaking havoc. This thing is sucking the life out of me. Sleep, sleep, all I want is sweet slumber on soft pillows. I am a ravenous wolf. I feel as though I've been deprived of nutrients for years and my body is demanding payment in full. I can't believe that there was a time when I lived with this hunger and actually enjoyed it. Now it is gnawing, distracting, all-consuming. The nurse said, "Eat carbs". I'd be saying "God bless her" if it weren't for the fact that I'm nauseous 24 hours a days and then vomiting ingested carbs. So gross. So my life right now. I want to curl up in a ball and sleep. Wake me up when it's over.

If it seems like I'm complaining, then I'm sorry. I realize that there are a lot of people who would do anything to be pregnant right now.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

2009-07-22T13:52:00.003-04:00

I saw something over at ED Bites that made me so angry; so angry, in fact, that I think my rage could fuel a sizable nuclear reaction. Are some people seriously judging the competency of public officials now based on their body weight? How the fuck is that even a little bit OK?

I have spent nearly a quarter of my life attempting to overcome the obsessive, pathological idea that my worth, my competence, my beauty, my intelligence were all inextricable intertwined with the size of my waist, with the number on the scale, with the amount and types of food I put into my mouth. I have suffered and toiled and railed against this thing inside of me, this monster that wouldn't let me live for a single second without thought of how much space I was taking up in the world. It is a mental illness. And now that I am better, now that I have learned how to think more "normally" about my body and try to love it despite it's lack of conforming to some random and ridiculous feminine beauty ideal, I have emerged on the other side of the abyss to a world that is basically immersed in the same pathological nonsense I have just escaped from. Fucking nonsense.

If I hear one more person lament a bite of food, if I hear one more person talk about their diet, if I hear one more person mention the obesity "epidemic", if I hear one more person make a disparaging remark about an overweight person, I really just might explode in my fury. I seriously can't take this shit anymore. It's a constant onslaught - everywhere. You're fat. Lose weight. You're lazy. Lose weight. Lose weight. Lose weight. Lose weight. Sometimes I feel this malice bubbling up inside my veins and I get a stronge and difficult to repress urge to scream, "SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP."

I realize I'm more sensitive to this shit because of the fucking monster that lies dormant in my brain, but is anyone else sick to fucking death of this bullshit? Am I all alone in my confusion? What the hell has happened? What is particularly upsetting to me is the way that not only has thinness been thrust upon us as a beauty standard, they are now insisting that thinness is a health standard. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that being thin means you are healthy. You can be overweight and be healthy. In fact, recent studies suggest that overweight people tend to live longer than "normal" weight people.

Perhaps the worst thing of all is the fact that we, as a society, are pushing a thin, anti-obesity agenda on our children. Kids I talk to are literally afraid of fat. They see it as a death sentence. Where did they get this idea? The other day I overheard someone talking to a 9 year old girl. This person said, "You look like you've lost weight. You look great!" I just about lost my damn mind. This child is not fat, nor has she ever been fat. So what does this comment tell her? That losing weight is appropriate, and actually encouraged, during a time of life when weight should actually be gained. Growing and gaining weight is a good thing. Are kids getting that message? I sincerely hope so. My daughter isn't a skinny thing. She's a sturdy 4 year old with a good amount of baby fat on her bones. I think she is absolutely beautiful. Even is she were to put on a little weight and look "fat" by our society's standards, she would still be beautiful. Being a little chubby is not the end of the world. There are more important things for her to focus on than that.

If she ever came home and told me that she hated her body or wanted to go on a diet, I would lay down and die a little death. I am bracing myself for that day, because I know it is surely coming.

I Don't Care Where You Are

2009-07-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

Is it just me or are there way too many "Where Are They Now?" articles and TV segments in the media lately? I'm sick to death of it. Sick, as in I don't give a shit what happened to Danny Pintauro, or the unfortunate looking son from Roseanne, or Kimmy Gibbler, or Steve Urkel, or any other obscure child star of a TGIF sitcom. If I gave even a tiny fraction of a fuck where these people were, I would already know that information. I feel like every time I turn on my computer to AOL I'm rewarded with a smarmy glamour shot and a question: Remember Brad from Home Improvement? See what he's up to now... Then I have to remember something that I really don't want to remember and that's the fact that no I don't remember Brad from Home Improvement because I spent my Thursday nights sitting in an ass numbing chair while I listened to droning on sermons about the Ministry and Jehovah and no end of bullshit. Thanks for reminding me about all the TV that I didn't get to see. Did you ever notice how they put all the shitty sitcoms on Friday nights? Fucking TGIF. Family Matters? Carl Winslow made me sick to my stomach with all his judgmental antics. Why exactly was Urkel never good enough for his daughter? He seemed like a nice enough kid. And here's fucking Father of the Year rolling his damn eyes acting all put upon by a nerdy kid. And his wife? Don't get me started on that one.

Here's the thing, I have a brother - my own flesh and blood that I grew up with and I don't even know where the fuck he is right now. Last I heard he lived in Florida but he could have moved by now and you know what? I don't care. It's not that I don't love him. I just don't care where he is all that much. So if I don't give a shit where my own brother is, why in the name of all that's holy would I give a damn about that stupid "How rude" moppet or the one that wore the hats?

Is This My Mind, or Yours?

2009-07-09T18:24:00.006-04:00

I'm sort of mad at this certain book. Or maybe afraid of it's guts. I'd rather somebody beat me to a bloody pulp with a Bible than read the contents of one to me. Although there are some very beautiful passages, such as The Song of Solomon, it's chock full of some pretty disturbing things. And say what you will about Jehovah's Witnesses but they don't sugar-coat the messages of the Bible. They study every scrimp of it, find a lesson in it all. Even that Mosaic law snoozefest in Deuteronomy. We studied that shit. How that applies to a Christian religion is beyond me. I'm not even sure how Christian it really is, considering most of what I remember studying was the Old Testament. I think that's because after Jesus comes on the scene in the Gospel, "Jehovah" or "YHWH", whatever his god damn name is, loses his steam.

That was so blasphemous and I don't even care.

Well, maybe a little bit.

There's a lot less blanket condemnation and merciless killing in the New Testament. You can't scare people with the Gospel. Well, you can. You just have to work harder at it.

I want to emasculate God a little bit. Take Him down a notch. Because I'm tired of having weirdness and underlying fears about him killing me for not believing in him anymore. Or questioning his existence, anyway. His fairness. His right to rule over people while never lifting a finger to help them. Who the hell does he think he is? See, right now I'm having a mild panic attack. I think all this fear is behind me but it's really still alive and less dormant every day. Monsters under the bed. Brainwashing runs very, very deep. And it's a severe source of shame for me. Which is kind of ridiculous, I realize. It's not my fault that my mother converted to a cult when I was 5 years old. It's not my fault it took me nearly two decades to extract myself from it's tenacious grasp. How do you not get brainwashed when this is what you are told to believe from a tender age? How do you not fall for it all when you are terrified into believing all sorts of fantastical bullshit that has no basis in reality by way of threats of death at Armageddon, birds plucking out your eyeballs, fire from heaven? My personality was formed on a steady diet of doomsday philosophy.

So much is riding on your faith in the veracity of the doctrine. It's more than your life. It's your family, your friends, your dignity. It's your mind - but it's not yours anymore. It never belonged to you in the first place. Even when you're only 7 or 10 or 12 years old, you are carrying the weight of the world on your little back. You are supposed to save these people, kids at school, the cashier at the deli, your grandma, your dad. You are responsible for their deaths. And if you shut your mouth, then when they fall into some crack in the earth at Armageddon never to be seen again, it will be all your fault. This is bloodguilt. You are so young and unformed but you have the special knowledge of imminent destruction of all humanity on your mind at all times. Try to imagine what that would be like.

I wasn't brave. I didn't try to save anyone because I was too busy trying to save myself. I didn't want to talk about my religion, my difference. I wanted to pretend it wasn't there, the thing that made me the weird girl sitting during the pledge of allegiance, or leaving when the birthday cupcakes came out, not going to the slumber party with the girls at school on Friday night, or not having anything to say after Christmas vacation. Everybody was wearing new clothes and having new toys. What did you get, Gwen? I got uncomfortable and then so did she. "Oh yeah...I forgot" She brought up the thing and it was there, suspended in the air as foreign and strange to her as a UFO. "Santa doesn't come to your house." She looked down. And I thought, "She thinks I'm bad but I'm not. She is an idiot because Santa Claus is a stupid lie. Christmas is like the devil coming as an angel of light but full of all kinds of vile things. Jehovah hates Christmas and so do I." Lies I told myself.

Truthfully, I was so brainwashed that I didn't even know I was afraid. Fear was the natural state of being. Fear of God is the beginning of life, the scriptures say.

Fuck the scriptures. I'm beginning to think that Trouble is right when she says my problem just might be a nasty little case of PTSD. The gnawing anxiety, the panic attacks, the nauseating despair, the wanting to die. I don't know. I didn't get robbed or fight a war, but I lived my entire childhood under a blanket of fear and guilt. That can't be good for the psychological well being of anyone.

I realize now after finally researching the power of cults over the human psyche, that I am recovering from the effects of mind control. Lifton mind control tactics that I think apply to my childhood/early adulthood:

Demand for Purity. The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection. The induction of guilt and/or shame is a powerful control device used here. (Yep. Any non-JW activity or person was deemed "worldly" and we were instructed to be careful about those things/people. Questioning the ideology, outside of initial "studying", was cause for expulsion from the group. I was never permitted to question the ideology. I would have been deemed unfaithful and possibly apostate, which in the religion is considered an unforgivable sin beyond any redemption).

Confession. Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group. There is no confidentiality; members' "sins", "attitudes", and "faults" are discussed and exploited by the leaders. (Confession was only required for major sins like fornication, drug use, smoking, drunkenness, homosexual activity, etc. Typically the "judicial meetings" were between 3 elders, church leaders (always men), and the person confessing the sin. Sometimes there would be public announcement that someone had been "reproved", which is basically a reprimand with loss of privileges in the congregation. Sometimes reproof would be private. If repentance was not displayed for the act or if the act itself was deemed serious and willful, then the person would be disfellowshipped (excommunicated). No JW's would be permitted to talk with this person, not even his/her own family members, not even to just say, "Hi).

Sacred Science. The group's doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute. Truth is not to be found outside the group. The leader, as the spokesperson for God or for all humanity, is likewise above criticism. (JW's refer to their religion as The Truth. They are not permitted to read literature that is anti-JW or any religious material other than what is published by the organization. The Governing Body, which is a group of 12 men, are the only ones allowed to make decisions regarding doctrine. Their word is akin to God's word. If you deny that they are God's mouthpiece, then you are said to be denying God).

Loading the Language. The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand. This jargon consists of thought-terminating clichés, which serve to alter members' thought processes to conform to the group's way of thinking (Yes. Absolutely. They even had a name for it sort of, The Pure Language. "The Society says"...was a thought terminating cliche. Or if somebody had a good question that highlighted that the doctrine was incorrect, this: "That's apostate reasoning". That shut people up real quick. Also we used words like Pioneer, Bible Study, Governing Body, The Society, The Faithful and Discreet Slave, Publisher...the list goes on and on. These words all mean something to JWs but not what it means to the outside world).

Dispensing of existence. The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious and they must be converted to the group's ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also. (Yep, times a million. JW's who left were not associated with at all. If they officially "disassociate" from the organization then they are treated as excommunicated and not even spoken to. If any JW speaks against the organization or even just professes a disbelief in it's doctrines, he or she is considered an apostate. Many people in the religion consider me to be so. I guess I'm doomed. Unforgivable. Beyond all redemption. Non JW's are considered walking corpses. Yes, I heard them described as such during a sermon once. Mind you, they would never put that in their literature. They don't tell Non JWs that this is their belief because it would disgust people and stop people from converting. But that is the message that is beat into your head from the platform. Sneaky bastards talking out of both sides of their mouths. While we were very interested in converting the masses, finding the sheep, and this was supposedly motivated by a great love for people, we had absolutely no problem praying for Armageddon to come quickly to relieve of us of the burdens of this world. Mind you, Armageddon's arrival would mean the everlasting destruction of billions of men, women and children. I'm sick to my stomach just thinking about what I wished for. Horrible things. So much shame).

I have a foot in each world. I don't belong completely to either. I spent more time in the other world, the place where I didn't have the right to do my own thinking. I feel like I was born the day that I stopped believing. I was 24. So how old does that make me now? 10. It's been 10 years since I started to use my own brain, think my own thoughts. I'm still trying to answer the questions: Who am I, really? What do I want?

I'm afraid that there aren't any answers. That I am completely empty - a black hole of endless nothingness. I have no base. My brain is all fractured. I spent 20 years devoted to something that probably doesn't exist. I might as well have been dead.

Fun With Fireworks

2009-07-08T23:05:00.005-04:00

It isn't a Jackson/Binder Family 4th of July celebration without some good old-fashioned pornographic goofing.

My soon to be brother-in-law has some really precious stones. Don't you agree?

And of course, I always enjoy getting a nice, warm golden shower courtesy of my, again, soon to be brother-in-law:

Yes I cropped myself out of the picture. I'd been drinking all day and looked like shit. What else is new?

Eve's Agony

2009-07-07T13:16:00.017-04:00

Reaching out
To touch a stranger
Electric eyes are everywhere
See that girl
She knows I'm watching
She likes the way I stare
If they say -Why, why, tell em that is human nature
Why, why, does he do me that way
If they say -Why, why, tell em that is human nature
Why, why, does he do me that way
I like livin this way
I like lovin this way -
Human Nature

I wrote this blog a while ago and as with so many other things I write, I opted not to post it. But it's one those pieces that stayed with me; there is a psychological importance to what I talk about here. Certainly to me and possibly to somebody else who grew up the way that I did, whose sexuality was forged in that terrible crucible of fundamental Christianity. I dare say not everyone grew up to be quite as fucked up a personality as me. I hope not. I heard Human Nature on the radio today, and I thought, "This is my nature." Maybe nobody cares about that or maybe they do. Either way, with my writing I seek to honor those things in me that twist and gnaw and hurt. I want to present myself not the way I wish I were, but as I actually am. That being said, here is me in all my despicable and strange glory. Do with that what you will.

"Here's your coffee, ma'am". She takes it from his hand and when she does, his fingers lightly, unintentionally brush her hand. And then it happens, because it has to happen these days. She feels the rush of arousal and the inevitable wetness that always follows it. This guy doesn't even know. He is all baseball capped and young and about to get off his shift at Starbucks and probably go meet his girlfriend at the movies. She'll be wearing something adorable, maybe a denim mini-skirt and a tank top, and she'll smile when he hands her a latte. "You're so sweet!" And he'll smile and bide his time until later when he can get her naked and panting and begging him to show her just how sweet he really isn't.

"Have a great day!" she sing songs and then walks away wondering if he could even tell the dirty thoughts pervading her mind. Pink excitement flushing her pale skin, quick, shallow breaths.

This is the way of it these days. Every moment is tinged with the color of fucking, sepia toned pornographic images, one after the other, on a perpetual loop. Distracting, invasive thoughts that make it difficult to live those mundane moments.

When she was fourteen, this was always a problem. She had her peculiar yearnings in bed at night. What was that about? She didn't know. Then it started to bleed into everywhere. In church, as the preacher stated his case for chastity from the stage, a sign containing some poignant scripture hung behind him, she sat, still as a statue. But she was a bad girl. So when he talked about fornicators and unclean behavior, it only served to make her excited. The rush, the wetness. Every muscle tensed, poised and ready, building, building, nobody knows. Then when it hits it is almost painful and unwelcome. Nobody knows. This is God's house and she is balling her fists at her sides having an orgasm. God knows.

She spent a long time at prayer. She spent a long time reading holy literature. "Deaden, therefore, your body members that are upon the earth as respects fornication, uncleanness, sexual appetite."¹ It was not good to feel so alive. It was better to cut off your hand than to allow it to do an unclean thing². Better to be dead than full of sin. Yet this arousal came unbidden and soiled her heart. It was going to get her killed eventually.

Unclean things - Romance novels stuffed under mattresses, hidden beneath piles of theocratic books and a heavy bible. She learned about carnal pleasures from the bible first. But those seedy books completed the education. Nightly, there were re-imaginings of those wicked scenarios. The push and pull of desire. "No, don't." "Yes. You will like it." "It hurts." "You have to." The heroines were always conflicted about their appetites. Good girls will never admit that they want it. They are afraid of their orgasms, of what they meant. She wonders - What does it say about me if I want that? She doesn't have to admit that she wants him hard inside her. "You have to." Her pleasure has a price. Her punishment is pain. Her pleasure is pain.

It's OK if somebody makes you.

When she was nineteen - in her boyfriend's car, intense kissing turns into unbuttoning pants, into hot whispers in her ear "just touch it, just a little bit." And she knew how to do it, too. But she said, "No. I can't. I shouldn't." His request intensified, "Do it, please?" She only wanted him to love her. No, that's a lie. She wanted to know how it felt to hold it in her hands. He pulled her hair tightly into his fist so it hurt and said firmly through gritted teeth, "Do it." So she did.

It's OK if somebody makes you.

Suddenly she was a metaphorical Eve. These are forbidden fruits indulged in. She insists, "God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree...nor shall you touch it, or you shall die." The serpent said, "You will not die for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad." Why does the serpent want you to do the bad thing? She doesn't care. She was fully clothed but her eyes were opened and she knew that she was naked. He tried to put his hands on her place and she pushes it away. He didn't insist. His orgasm was the only thing that mattered.

When she was alone, she cried. Wet and unsatisfied, she masturbated to orgasm, wallowing in her sinful, dirty nature. Wet with tears and her own arousal. She fell asleep an unclean thing. It was too heavy. She couldn't do it. She didn't want to be like God, knowing good and bad.

"I don't want to do it anymore. I feel...dirty." She wanted his love. She was desperate for it. She had risked her reputation, her relationship with God, the love of her family to satisfy him.

"Nobody knows."

"God knows." She was crying now. "God knows. We have to tell on ourselves."

She couldn't sit in church anymore pretending to be pristine, virginal. She was full of dirty things.
This is the part that she can't even think about. When you are unclean the only thing that will cleanse your soul is confession, submission to judgment. She made her confession to the older men in the congregation. The confession took place in a library, walls lined with biblical tomes. The room smelled like discipline and authority. She sat on a metal chair shivering internally and told three grown men about her first sexual experiences. They were wearing suits and holding bibles. It was all very official.

"Where did he touch you, sweetheart?" "Where did you touch him?" "Did he have a sexual climax?" "Did you?" "How many times did you touch him?" "How long did you touch him for?" "Did he ask you to?" "Did he take his pants off?" "Did you?"

She was nauseous in the pit of her stomach. Her eyes were opened and she knew that she was naked. All her dirty secrets laid bare before these men who barely knew her. It felt like a violation. She cried as they chastised her with scriptures. Pain is her punishment.

1 Cor. 6:18 - Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself.

2 Tim. 3:6 - For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

Rev. 2:22 - And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

Hebrews 12:11 - All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

She wanted to repent because she was exhausted from carrying the burden of this clean disguise. She wanted it to be real. And they said God will forgive you but only if you display works befitting repentance. She was disciplined with private reproof, spared the public shame of an announcement to the congregation. But everyone knew anyway. She lost every small privilege. She didn't have that many to begin with since she was only a woman. Study the bible, prayer, ministry, church. Stop practicing the unclean thing.

You can't sustain repentance when you have so much lust burning in your veins. She tried to starve it out of herself. Even that didn't kill it all the way. Finally she knew that God would never love her. She thinks, "I am dead anyway. I might as well feel good while I'm still alive."

But it was too late.

The Lord God said to [Eve], "What is this that you have done?"
Eve said, "The serpent tricked me and I ate."
God said, "I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall dominate you."³

That was the birth of her passion. It's OK if somebody makes you. To have pleasure, first pain. You will want your husband and he will rule over you.

She watches her husband undress for bed. She feels the rush and the wetness. She can't ask him to fuck her. He crawls in beside her, his body warm, his strong arms folding around her small body, his masculine scent filling her nose. She is breathing short, shallow breaths. She is aching for him to touch her. She can't ask. They fall asleep in this nurturing posture.

He wakes her in the night, mounting her urgently. He pins her arms the way she likes it. She pretends he is making her. She whispers one or all of the following, "Pull my hair, bite my neck, spank my ass, fuck me so hard that it hurts". Only then can she have it, the thing she's thought about all day. It grips her and she is momentarily afraid. It is an agony of pleasure. Passion and suffering. They are actually the same thing.

¹Colossians 3:5
² Matthew 18:8
³Gen 3:13, 16

More to Hate

2009-07-02T23:41:00.007-04:00

I don't know how to feel about that stupid new reality show "More to Love". Actually I do. It's a familiar feeling. Hatred. Like I could murder a TV executive with my bare hands and feel all justified. Dexter-style. I have a code.

Let's play a little game. Remember those Highlights for Kids magazines that used to be in every doctor's office when we were little? I always loved those pictures with normal landscapes or domestic scenes and I had to look closely to find everything that was wrong or nonsensical in the picture. This game is a little like that. Read the following description of the show, More to Love, that I found on Fox.com and try to find all the things in it that are terribly, terribly wrong:

LARGER-THAN-LIFE SINGLE MAN LOOKS FOR "MORE TO LOVE"
New Dating Series Executive-Produced by Reality Czar Mike Fleiss

FOX is setting out to prove that love comes in all shapes and sizes with the new inspirational dating competition series MORE TO LOVE. Executive-produced by Mike Fleiss ("The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette"), the unscripted series follows a single average guy with a big waist and an even bigger heart as he romances several confident and secure plus-size women. Each week, the husky hunk will wine and dine a group of curvy women to determine if they have more love to give or if they are truly more than he can handle. When the size of competition narrows, he will have to decide if one full-figured lady will become his true love.

"This is a dating show that sends the right message about embracing and loving yourself no matter your shape or size," said executive producer Mike Fleiss. "When you are comfortable with your own body, you can really allow yourself to be open to the possibility of finding the right person to love."

1. Weight puns. I counted six at least. We get it. The man is large and the women are large. Maybe there might be something else about these people worth mentioning?

2. Reality czar? Really? Does he really want to take dictatorial responsibility for the vat of excrement that is reality television?

3. Do we really need proof that love comes in all shapes and sizes? What kind of an asshole is skeptical about that? It's not a theory that all types of people need and deserve love. And I sure as hell do not need FOX to deliver this lesson to the masses. (Oh my god. That wasn't a pun. Or maybe it was. Maybe that shit is contagious like small pox).

4. "Inspirational dating competition." That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one. The only thing dating competitions inspire in me is nauseous disgust. In fact, I keep an episode of The Bachelor on my DVR just in case I ate something I shouldn't and I have a hard time throwing it up. It works like a charm. 20 desperate whores, an asshole, and contrived, romantic sexual encounters makes for "Bye Bye Ice Cream".

5. "More to Love"? What the fuck does that even mean? What if someone is overweight and a total bitch (like me?) Is that More to Hate? Don't answer that.

6. "An average guy." How is he average exactly? He has a "big waist and an even bigger heart". Wouldn't that make him not average?

7. "Romances several...women." Romances? I don't know how romantic it is to date 20 women at the same time. Where I'm from that's called...typical male behavior. Romantic is kind of a stretch. Oh...it's the roses he gives out to the women who kiss his ass enough (figuratively and no doubt literally) throughout the course of the episode. That makes it romantic.

8. "This is a dating show that sends the right message about embracing and loving yourself no matter your shape or size." I'm so happy that Mike Fleiss is sending "full-figured" men and women everywhere the message that it's OK to love their own bodies. How generous and fucking revolutionary of him!

9. Thanks Mike Fleiss for letting full figured women everywhere know that one day we can feel comfortable enough with our bodies to go on a reality TV show where we can degrade ourselves, fight over an "average" guy, and be mocked with ridiculous puns about our weight.

Well, there's nine terrible, terrible things that I could find off the top of my head. The whole concept of the show is disturbing to me. Have you seen the commercial? It's so fucking condescending. Like, "awwww. Heavy-set women looking for love. Isn't that cute?" The announcer's tone is so earnest and patronizing. He might as well be talking about contestants in The Special Olympics. Czar Mike Fleiss claims above that the plus-size women contestants are confident and secure. I'm not really getting that impression through all the tears. The women are actually lovely, don't get me wrong. But the fact that they would go on this show in the first place makes me think they no likey themselves all that much. I feel the same way about all these dating shows. Why would a woman degrade herself like that? You all know that I hate myself, that I have spit at my own face in the mirror, and subjected my body to countless tortures. And yet even I, a person who probably deserves that shit more than any of those women, wouldn't put myself through that kind of emotional agony.

I keep seeing the commercials for this show and every time one comes on TV I get a nauseous pit in my stomach and have to go throw up. I'm going to be so skinny by the time this show goes on the air. Oh no! If I get too skinny then maybe I won't be "REAL" anymore. Right? Isn't that what the commercial keeps telling me? This is what a "real" woman looks like? Full-figured, big ass, big boobs. All those skinny bitches just aren't real. Not according to Czar Mike Fleiss anyway. He gets to decide, you see. Czar Mike Fleiss deserves a fatal blow to the head with a blunt object, if you must know. It's in the code.

The Ass

2009-07-01T09:15:00.005-04:00

Punch You in The Facebook

2009-06-29T19:07:00.012-04:00

I know Facebook is supposed to be about bringing people together, reconnecting with old friends, staying close with members of the family that live far away, but lately it just makes me want to punch people in the face. Honestly, there are only a handful of status updates or comments I read on there that don't make my fist itch something awful.

It came to the forefront last week when Michael Jackson died and all this shit sort of went down. There was like this whole big ugly feud that lasted for centuries. One camp was saying he was a child molester and they were glad he was dead. The other was saying that if you think that you're an asshole. I fell on the side of the latter, though I opted to stay out of it entirely and refused to exchange verbal barbs. I have a hard enough time keeping from jumping off the Betsy Ross Bridge. Fighting about Michael Jackson is really low on the totem pole of my priorities.

What's really bothering me a lot is the ridiculous status updates. Check out this shit:

Life is not about what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.

What the fuck does that even mean? Why does every single person with a Facebook account suddenly become a philosophizer? You work at Macy's, stop trying to teach me the meaning of life. Half the shit these people post is just meaningless "inspirational" words strung together into some circular logic pattern. And what's worse is that everybody encourages it. I see all these comments like: Ain't that the truth. Hell yeah! That's a great quote! I usually just say: What do you mean? There is never a reply.

You know what else makes my blood boil? All these groups people start and join. Why the hell would I want to join a group called I Love Taco Bell? I've never eaten a food I liked enough to join a fucking club for it. What does one discuss in a Taco Bell group? Well, I did some investigating and here you go:

went crazy over TB when it first opened here in the philippines about 4 years ago. sadly, it still hasn't added all that many branches since then. i still dont have one close to my area. and takeout is out of the question coz i dont want my taco shells soggy!

love that taco bell.

taco bell rocks ;)it´s just tacobellicious whahaah XD

Had some last night

Riveting. I really want for these people to get a fucking life. Or die. Whichever comes first woul be fine with me. The truth is, if I think you have no life then you have a pretty serious problem as I spend half of my life sitting on a couch and the other half sleeping on one.

There are just so many fucking stupid groups. I remember when people were joining "Addicted to Facebook" groups. I'm joining a group about being addicted to Facebook...on Facebook! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...No.

Suddenly people were Fans of everything. Fans of cats. Fans of cars. Fans of loving their parents. It was ludicrous. I would get invites from friends to become a fan of hating cancer. Well, what if I love cancer? What about that? How can people be so insensitive?

The birthdays. Oh the fucking birthdays. There's a girl right now that is begging for me to beat her to a pulp.

UPDATE: 6 days until my SUPER birthday and only 5 days until my good friend Brian C*rr's birthday...never forget the FUN guy!

5 days until the day of my birth and only 4 days until Bri Bri the Fun guys - Booked our tickets for September - see you all soon!

The birthday festivities have begun FUN FUN FUN...even though my birthday isn't until Wednesday...sorry I am so special hahahahaha!

The only birthday present she can expect from me is a broken jaw and possible facial reconstruction. Is it just me or does this girl have a pathological excitement about her birthday? I could see if it was a person like me who never got to celebrate her birthday her entire childhood because of some weird religious cult her mother made her join, but she is a regular 30 something woman.

When I first joined Facebook I started getting a bunch of "martinis" and "coffees" and all kinds of shit. I thought, "Cool. Somebody sent me a present". Only it wasn't a present. It was a fucking tease. What the fuck am I supposed to do with a Bloody Mary I can't get drunk off of? What is the point of that nonsense? I know I sound ungrateful but... I am ungrateful. Don't send me meaningless shit. One of my friends actually sent me an STD. I think it was herpes. The fact that there is even an application on Facebook that allows something like that to be sent scares me but also intrigues me. What if I could actually send plagues out to people through my Facebook account? Would I? I'd reserve those punishments only for people who talk about how great they are on their status updates. I have a friend who commits heinous acts on Facebook everyday. She philosophizes meaninglessly. She talks non-stop about her amazing qualities. She is also the queen of saying things that a million people have already said. Here is a sampling:

...RIP Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett & Ed Mcmahon......why does it always come in three's?...

As my sister pointed out in a private email (we always make fun of people privately. It's just the right thing to do), what about David Carradine? People die every fucking day. It doesn't come in threes no matter how many times you want to say it does.

Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

No, there's enthusiasm alright. Wait til I show you just how much enthusiasm there is in my depression when I bash your skull into a million pieces.

says Happy Fathers Day to all you REAL dads out there....Since I'm both mom & dad to my boys, I'm claiming this day for myself too

Yeah, I get it. You're amazing.

misses the rain today (insert sarcasm here)...

Oh now you went and crossed a line (insert violent kick to your teeth here)

The only reason anyone would ever hate you is because they want to be JUST like you..."

No. Sometimes people just hate you because of the shit you write on Facebook.

The world ain't all sunshine & rainbows. It's a very mean place. It will beat you to your knees & keep you there permanently, if you let it. You, me or nobody is going to hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit & keep moving forward, how much you can take & keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!"

If you weren't my friend I'd murder you. At my trial, this quote would be exhibit A and I'd get off scot-free.

still hates men...but I'm not going to let them bring me down. I'll get mine in the end...

If you hate men then why do you want one? And is just me or is that last part a little bit on the creepy side? It makes me think she has a bunch of corpses buried under the shed in her backyard.

I'm being cruel. I know this. These people are sort of my friends but not really. It's like I knew them at some point in my life but I don't hang out with them anymore. I mean this girl gave me all those Julie Garwood romance novels that I used to masturbate to in high school. The problem is that she still reads Julie Garwood romance novels and I don't. Ok. I do. But not on purpose. Sometimes you find yourself in bed reading a Julie Garwood paperback novel and you have your hand down your underwear and you're like "How the hell did I get here and why am I having an orgasm?" It happens.

Facebook is reminding me why it is that I stopped being friends with people in the first place. I can't be trusted to have friends. I have a mean bone in my body. Lots of them. Of course I have a few loyal Facebook minions that make going back there worthwhile. Tina, who I only tried to kill once. Jodi, the only sister I have left. Alisha, the only sister-in-law I have left who doesn't make me feel like shit because I don't run marathons. I even founded a couple of groups on there - An ex-Jehovah's Witness group and a group for people to post their kid's ugly drawings. The only group I saw fit to join that wasn't started by me is Punching Stupid People in The Face. What do we talk about?

Stupidity should be painful

It used to be until they started putting warning labels on stuff.

These are my people.

Woe Is Me

2009-06-29T13:26:00.006-04:00

It's really exhausting being crazy in our modern age. It's one thing to actually live crazy, get through the drudgeries of daily life with troubling thoughts and feelings chained around my neck like an anchor. But on top of that I have to deal with the fucking quagmire that is the mental healthcare system in this country. Note to mental health professionals: Hi!...I'm insane. How many times do I have to tell you that I'm paralyzed with dread and self-loathing before you'll lift a finger to help me? Why are you making this so fucking hard for me? Does it feel good to fuck with the crazies? No wonder schizophrenic people fall through the cracks, so to speak, in our society. I'm lucid and marginally functional and I can't seem to get the help I need.

Yes, I'm seeing a therapist and that's all well and good. He had this bright idea that I needed to consult with a psychiatrist about possible medication as an adjunct therapy for what he initially thought was clinical depression and has since suggested may be some type of thought disorder. As you know, I have medical insurance through my husband's company. Medical insurance which he pays out a good deal of money for every month. That's fine with me. Our health is well-worth the investment. But it's infuriating to me that upon obtaining the list of in-network psychiatrists and proceeding to call all of them, not a single one of them would see me. Of course, my mind goes to the dark places and I start to have mild paranoid delusions that there is some way these people know that it's ME calling and I are like, "No way, Jose, am I seeing this worthless, poor excuse for a human being."

I let my therapist know about this "trouble" I was having getting anyone to consult with me on my pathetic issues. Despite his sympathetic remarks, I think he was really skeptical and believed that I actually had not called any of them due to fear, stubborness, low self-esteem or whatever. He offered, as he should, to call them for me and see if he couldn't get me an appointment using his figurative weight as a psychologist. Great.

Well, after two weeks of him calling these psychiatrists, he gets zero phone calls back from any of them. NONE. NADA. See? They just know that I'm the one begging like a little bitch for some relief from my incessant mental suffering. I said to him, "Now do you believe me when I tell you these things?" He just gives me that tight smile he always gives me when I say something that's absolutely right even though it should be absolutely crazy. That happens a lot. I know it's killing him that my paranoid delusions are turning out to be not so paranoid after all.

So my therapist gives me the phone number of a psychiatrist that doesn't take my insurance but would hopefully be willing to work something out with me from a financial perspective. So, I called this guy and guess what? His secretary was a total bitch. I explained my situation and she said, "Well his fee is $300 for the consultation and $2oo for any follow up half hour sessions." Three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars. I hate to be crass but I'm not paying anybody three hundred dollars to spend time with me unless I'm going to get several orgasms out of the deal. Maybe that's what I really need. Orgasm therapy. mmmm....doesn't that sound nice?

Anyway, back to fucking reality which pretty much sucks. I explained that I didn't exactly have $300 just right now. This bitch of a secretary is all "That's the fee and you have to pay it before I can even make you an appointment." That's it. Harsh reality of the world. Give me $300 and I'll talk to you and maybe prescribe a medication that will maybe help you to feel better. Fuck that. Fuck this bitch and her little prickly attitude towards a mental patient with suicidal feelings.

I'm sitting here just floored about the fact that I actually have health insurance and these are the kind of hoops I'm jumping through to try to feel like a normal person who smiles and actually means it. I'm just going to put this out there even though it's going to make me sound like a shitty person. Well a more shitty person. I know a guy who is on public assistance. He sees a psychiatrist every month for free. What is wrong with this picture? Oh yeah, it's me. I'm the thing that's wrong in the picture.

Truthfully, all of this uphill climbing is exhausting. I don't even know if I can do it anymore. I'm ready to give up on this nonsense of wanting to live and just accept that I don't want to live but I just fucking have to or everybody will hate my guts or the memory of them anyway. I would love so much if I could have a soul extraction and just be a type of robot programmed to do the steps of living and maybe some extra stuff also like flying and mind reading and sexual irresistibleness. Is that even a word? I don't care. And if I don't care about words, you know I'm having a fucking problem.

Apparently I Really Am a Monster

2009-06-28T12:17:00.004-04:00

***I have a bad habit of posting something, then taking it down right after because I worry about how it will be received. Also, I don't want to "beat a dead horse" with this issue, or for my readers to feel obligated to comment because I'm having a bit of a time with a person who may or may not be a troll. It's back up now, to stay.***

According to "Anonymous", anyway. I know I probably shouldn't indulge this person, but I feel compelled for some reason.

Ponder this gem of a comment left on my blog yesterday:

I would never, EVER, spank my child. I have to wonder if you and the other
mothers who hit their kids would mind if your husbands smacked you too if they
felt you were out of order. Why is it illegal to smack a spouse, but not a
child? And just because people used to do it in the past means nothing. Slavery
was once the norm too, but should we still be running around now shackling every negro we see? Some things should change. And if you can't control your child
without hitting them, you have very little imagination. I suppose for you and
the other moms on here it's a "do as I say, not as I do" approach as you're all
obviously the lazy and unintellectual lumpen (you may have to look that word
up), but it's completely, totally and utterly illogical and, frankly, now that I
know you spank your kids I will never read your blog again as you disgust me. A
pox upon your house and those of your moronic, hillbilly, white trash
friends

My reply:

Anonymous - Interesting perspective. Truth be told, I wouldn't want a person
who wishes a "pox upon [my] house]" to read my blog anyway. It makes me curious that you should condemn me for a brand of discipline (which I use very rarely), while you feel comfortable wishing a viral disease upon my family and friends. I think it's moronic to compare the enslavement of human beings to a mild smack upon the rear of a recalcitrant child. It seems quite a leap in logic there. I
am not a perfect parent, nor do I claim to be.

Now I'm a pretty open and reasonable individual. I do not mind being challenged or questioned on my belief systems or behaviors. I invite lively debate on important issues. I am very willing to work to change my belief systems and behaviors if I am convinced to do so by a compelling, logical argument. But it is very difficult for me to open my mind to the reasonings of an individual who:

1. Fails to identify him or herself but instead hides under the veil of "Anonymous"
2. Uses a word like "negro", that really has no place in our modern vernacular
3. Compares the actions of a loving (though admittedly imperfect) parent to the brutal enslavement of human beings
4. Creepily wishes a viral disease upon my home at the end of his/her argument.

The opening of the comment was fine and definitely food for thought. It makes no difference to me whether or not "Anonymous" would never, EVER, spank his/her child. I gather he/she feels quite pleased with him/herself about that. Of course, I would not accept a "smack" from my husband. [Well, I would just not in the context of discipline ; )] Using this as an argument against, again mild, corporal punishment of children is nonsensical. I wouldn't accept a time-out or denial of privileges from my husband either, but I would be perfectly comfortable imposing those sanctions on my child as consequences for her misbehavior. I am not a child. I am an adult woman. There are a lot of ways we handle and control children that we wouldn't other adults. There are many restrictions we impose on children that would be considered abuse to impose on other adults and rightly so. Children need loving external discipline and authority from their parents in order to learn how to impose internal discipline when they are grown. I believe Democracy to be the most superior form of government for adults. Is it cruel, then, that my home is not a democracy? Children do not have the same rights and privileges as adults because they are not fully developed and require special protection. A smack we deliver to another adult is not the same thing as a smack we deliver to a child. It means something entirely different.

If my child runs into the street despite my having told her not to, I will attempt to discipline her by way of explaining exactly why her behavior is dangerous. I will explain a consequence if she does it again. If she insists on doing it again, I will carry out the consequence. Some children do not always respond to time-outs. Some children do not always respond to loss of privileges. My daughter is one of those children. Maybe, the commenter is correct in saying I lack imagination. I guess I'm not as perfect and wonderful a parent as he/she is. That is regrettable. But my number 1 goal, at the end of the day, is to keep my child alive, to protect her from all of the things in the world that can hurt her. If the only thing that keeps my daughter from running into the street is a mild smack to her posterior, then I will do that. It is not about laziness. It is not malicious. It is not something I like to do. There are worse things in life than a temporary sting. I don't like to force my child to submit to the painful sting of a needle for her vaccinations, but I do it. The temporary sting of a needle could save her life one day.

I never claimed to be intellectual or imaginative. I am human, with all the weaknesses and failings that come of being so. It does make me cry to think that there is someone out there who thinks I am so contemptible, so "lumpen". Yes, I did have to look that up because I am that unintelligent as to not know the meaning of the word. Here is what it means:

Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified: lumpen intellectuals unable to find work in their fields.
Of or relating to the lumpenproletariat.
Vulgar or common; plebeian:

I suppose "Anonymous" is right on the money in referring to me as such. I am common, plebeian, dispossessed, and capable of vulgarities. I take offense, not for myself, but at the implication that my "friends" can, in any way, shape or form, be put into such a category, or called derogatory names like "white-trash, hillbilly, or moronic". You may judge me all you like only leave the people I love and respect out of the blanket condemnation.

I will lay my head upon the pillow tonight, and it will be a million pounds heavier, full of all the guilt and self-loathing that comes of realizing that I have failed my daughter in ways I can't understand. I only know that I love her, with every bone, breath, sinew, and muscle inside of me. I would lay my body on a bed of daggers, I would hurl myself into dark waters full of man-eating creatures, I would burn alive for all eternity fully conscious and writhing in agony, just to keep her her tiny chest rising and falling with living breaths, her fragile heart thudding rhythmically inside of her. Did you know that monsters were capable of loving like that?

Some Day My Non-Raping Ken Will Come

2009-06-23T11:27:00.006-04:00

I just typed an appraisal and the street name on the property was Firethorne. Firethorne. It just sounds like a place I would live. Like a place where only foliage with prickly things would grow. The foliage grows wild and thick and blocks out the sun completely. An insulated world where nothing beautiful could ever exist. But it's not a fairy tale because I'm too grown to imagine such things so don't worry.

My daughter is not too grown for such things and her fairy tales are of a different caliber. She wears her gaudy costumes with beaming pride, her plastic, "high-heeled" shoes, a shiny tiara on her head. She teeters over to me with a makeshift wand in her hand, shakes it and says, "Abracadabra. Make mommy a pretty princess." And I do that thing where you put your hand down and then bring it back up like I'm suddenly changed even though I'm not nor ever will be a princess or pretty in any way.

I wasn't much for the princesses when I was a little girl. I also don't think that the princess concept was shoved down our throats the way it seems to be with girls these days. I'm talking about advertisers and toymakers and the media. Princess, princess, princess. Lord, I was just a fucking little girl with hair that was always a mess and a dirty face and hands from digging in the dirt. Don't get me wrong. I don't think that there's anything wrong with princess dress up play. It's just not something I entirely understand. I just didn't consider myself to be pretty enough to even imagine in that way.

Mostly, I played outside. But I also really enjoyed playing with dolls. The Strawberry Shortcake dolls were my absolute favorite. I had the garden house with these cute red hammocks that never stayed up. I made little families based on the scents (citrus, berries, etc), which was hard because there was only one boy. There were a lot of fatherless children and widows in my collection. It was all very normal play, though. When I started to play with Barbies, well...it got really weird.

I was really confused about a lot of things I think, which should come as no surprise to anyone. What weird things did I do with Barbies? For one, I had a Ken Doll that had crazy long black hair and instead of using him for his original purpose, which was like Midge's boyfriend or something, he was the designated rapist. I'm not even fucking kidding. He'd go around terrorizing all my Barbies, raping them and beating them up. What the fuck was wrong with me? Sometimes I made the dolls have normal sex with each other or whatever I thought that was. Like undress them and just have them lay next to each other. I got the basics down right for never having witnessed any kind of sex. I only had two Ken dolls. One was raping women, the other was fucking them then dumping them right after for the next pretty thing. The Barbies would all fight over the non-raping Ken. I'd dress them all up and do their hair in elaborate styles just to entice non-raping Ken. All of the Barbies wanted to be the lucky girl he picked to fuck after the party. In my world view at the time, when I grew up men were either going to rape me or fuck me. It wasn't so much Some Day My Prince Will Come as it was Some Day My Non-Raping Ken Will Come. Was I entirely wrong? In any case, what the fuck was wrong with me?***

I did a lot of other weird Barbie shit as I got older, some of which involved dressing them up like hookers to go turn tricks. Yes, raping Ken turned into Pimp Ken. He could slap a bitch, I give him that. I was still playing with Barbies at, like, 12 years old. I mean not just me, but some of my friends did too. I think girls of that age now would think that was so childish. Which stands to reason, since I look at modern pre-teen girls and early teenage girls and think that a lot of them look like little girls playing dress up as slutty women. It's creepy, to be frank. I'm not talking about all of them, obviously. I'm talking about the ones I see at the mall, all dead-eyed and skanked up in mini-skirts and fuck me boots with make up glittering all over their baby faces. That's one way of knowing a girl is too young for make-up. If she thinks putting gobs of glitter on her eye lids is a good thing, she shouldn't be allowed to wear fucking make-up. I'm not going to say it's their parents fault. Maybe they left the house wearing khakis with fresh-scrubbed faces. It's certainly possible.

I worked as a counselor at a group home for teenage girls for a few years when I was in my mid-20's. It was basically a step down home for girls that had been in juvie or were unruly in the foster care system. I started working there at 24 and honestly these kids knew more about shit than I did. I had never done a drug or drank a beer. I had never even had sex, any kind, not even oral. I was, like, this total innocent. And I was trying to shepherd these girls who knew more about the ways of the world than I did. Some of them had already been drug addicts, some had been abused, some had been raped. They were all sexually active. These 14 year old girls would talk about having sex with guys like it was nothing. We'd play gin rummy in the living room and they'd tease each other about giving blow jobs, or talk about getting a letter from their 20 year old boyfriend who was in jail but he was going to get out soon and they were going to totally, like, fuck all night long. And I'd just be wide-eyed and tentative. "I don't know about that Dominique. He sounds dangerous." And she'd smile at me all "oh Gwen, you silly little counselor. Aren't you cute?"

Dominique scared the piss out of me. I hated checking her chores or getting a urine sample from her. I just never knew when the pat on the head would turn into a bash to the head, you know? And I wouldn't blame her, not really, because my very presence in her life must have been unsettling. She probably thought, "Fucking sheltered white girl who probably never suffered a day in her whole life is going to tell me what the fuck to do? Going to watch me pee in a cup? Tell me the kitchen floor needs to be redone because it's still dirty? Fuck her."

Sometimes I wanted to bring some Barbies in for them to play with. Weird, right? I mean they were playing all right, just with their own lives, their own self-worth. They were so young and stupid and these...these little girls who didn't even realize how they were being used and abused by all the stupid boys and men in their lives. I wanted to be like, "Here act out all these wicked scenarios, these obsessions with things you do not fully understand, these partial truths, these fears of the opposite gender. Only stop treating your body as if it were a useless piece of bendy plastic." Poor little girls.

***You may be wondering how somehow so young who wasn't even allowed to watch the movie Big because Tom Hanks touched somebody's boob in it, was so savvy regarding all things rape and sex and prostitution. Well, you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) how much rape and sex and prostitution occurs in that good book known as the Bible.

Onions are Assholes

2009-06-20T12:07:00.010-04:00

I'm so fucking sick of onions ruining food and people just letting them get away with it. Onions give me the creeps, they really do. Nasty tasting, foul smelling, ruining every day of my life. These fuckers are in everything. Everything. I'll order a salad sans onions. I'm very, very allergic to onions, I say. The waitress is skeptical, but fuck her. I'm all alone in the world against an unstoppable force that is inexplicably popular. When I get my salad it's covered, smothered, in circles of white tyranny. I know she did it on purpose, fucking bitch. I'm all alone in the world. So what happens next is I sigh loudly and my table mates say, "Just take them off."

Just take them off? Did you ever notice how even if you take an onion off your sandwich you can still taste it? How is that even normal? You know what other kinds of tastes linger long? Poison. Venom. Gasoline. Not to mention the stench an onion leaves on your fingers long after you touched it. I touched an onion once and my fingers still smelled like it a week later. I kept washing my hands, over and over and over. Nothing would get the disgusting aroma off my fingers. I fucking hate onions so, so much.

The only time it was convenient to hate onions was when I had anorexia. Since everything had onions in it, I had a ready-made excuse to not eat anything. "Oh wow. That chicken salad looks fabulous. It's a shame it has onions in it or I would totally devour a whole bowl of it. Honest." And I'd manage to look really disappointed about this. And then my mom got wise and started making me my own special portions of food. Like, I'd go over there and use my line and she'd say, "Oh Gwen, I made this one especially for you. There aren't any onions in it." Shit. Well played, mom, well played. You know how much pressure it puts on a girl when somebody makes food especially for her? Fresh out of excuses, I'd have to eat it and purge afterward. See how onions ruin lives?

You know what makes we want to just give up on existing? When I make something delicious, like macaroni and cheese, without onions and someone says, "You know what would have been great in this? Onions." I swear to Jesus, there has to have been some kind of Voo Doo brainwashing trickery going on when the taste buds of our human ancestors were forming. Why else would something that actually makes us cry be so fucking insidiously popular? That should throw up a red flag, when our automatic response to a "food" item is tears, don't you think? And how wicked is it that when we take a knife to these monsters, we're the ones that end up weeping? That's pure evil, my friends.

Onions have pulled the wool over everybody's eyes. For some reason, people love them. Chopped raw, fried, in rings, caramelized, bloomed into some kind of mutant flower. But people love a lot of things that I don't understand, that I find to be painful and/or repugnant. Dancing with The Stars. Twilight. Bumper Stickers. Miley Cyrus. Getting fucked in the ass. Spelling words wrong. Square Dancing. Crocs. Desperate Housewives. I'm getting used to hating things that everybody loves. In fact, sometimes I hate something just because everybody loves it. I stand alone. Anyway, onions are assholes. And deep down inside you know I'm right.

Image Credit: Cathlooi

Image Credit: Laura.Bell

Laughing at Lies

2009-06-19T20:14:00.002-04:00

"Lie to me, I'll believe. But please, don't leave..." - Sheryl Crowe

I married a wonderful liar. Todd lies so effortlessly and smoothly, it's like he was born to do it. I overhear him on the phone talking his double speak, lies rolling around on his tongue like colorful balls on a pool table. His lies are full of descriptive details that make it unlikely anybody listening will question the veracity of what they are hearing.

"We just got done sailing...yeah, it was great. The wind was just perfect." He said excitedly, without breaking, to his mother over the phone after we had just spent an hour pushing the rusty pedals of a paddle boat in a shallow lake the approximate size of a swimming hole. He continued, adding detail after detail to this fiction. After he hung up he looked over at me with this wacky grin.

"Why do you lie?" I asked him laughing.

"Because it's fun." He shrugged nonchalantly.

He lies so often and unnecessarily that I'm beginning to believe I'm dealing with some sort of pathology. Which is fine. He's entitled to a few neuroses. I wouldn't expect any man that falls in love with me to be normal. What's odd is that he is constantly (and jokingly) accusing me of lying. He has this idea that if I look up and to the left when processing an answer to a question, then I am attempting to access the creative centers of my brain and create a deceptive response. I'm sure he saw this on the Discovery channel once and now he's this total expert. I'm like, "Why don't you just shine a bright light in my eyes and interrogate me properly?" I wouldn't mind a little bad cop/resistant suspect role play here and there.

What happens when you realize your lover is a such a good liar, liar pants on fire? Well, for one you begin to doubt every word that's ever come out of his mouth. "You're pretty." "I'm playing golf." "We just played some black jack and went out for a few beers." "I love you." Really? Could that even be true?

I consider - "Well, he married me, didn't he?" Yes, yes he did. Bought an elegant one-carat solitaire diamond embedded in a platinum band a few days after I told him I was pregnant, got down on bended knee, and said, well, I don't even remember what words he spoke because I was stunned. And suffering from early pregnancy nausea. And, really, a lot stunned. There's a problem with getting knocked up before you're married. You just never know if he would have vowed lifelong commitment if it weren't for your delicate condition. When he asks, "Will you marry me?" he is also saying "I became a man pretty much the second you told me about a little pink plus sign on a stick you pissed on. This is me, manning up, taking responsibility for you and that there little life blooming in your belly." And that's a beautiful thing, it really is. But you just never know because you don't get to look down that other road. So that issue hovers over your relationship like a storm cloud that won't break, not after rain, or in the face of rainbows and rays of sunshine, or in the wake of migrating flocks of birds. I think that deep down underneath the vows and the civility and obligatory fucking he actually hates me. Now, that is something I can sink my teeth into. Hating me is something I can understand.

We're having lunch at Cosi one day last week and here's what goes down (not me, dirty minded people!).

"That girl is totally cute," Todd says, nodding towards the register.

"That one?" I pointed to a girl in her mid-twenties, frizzy hair and definitely not like the stick figures he normally ogles with hungry eyes.

"No, the one in front of her." And he nods towards a thinner, cuter girl.

"Oh. Ok. Is she about my size, would you say?" I knew I was turning down a dangerous road, but I went anyway. Emotional suicide.

"Nah, she's not your size. You're a lot bigger than she is." He says it so coolly with such conviction. He waited a beat for it to sink in and sting. And then he started laughing.

"Asshole." But I was laughing too, so it's OK.

"I know! I am an asshole to you a lot. I say so many mean things to you and I don't know why. You're just such an easy target."

"Well, I like when you're actually being honest..."

"But I'm not. I just said that to be mean, because I knew it would rile you up. You're way smaller than her, actually. I promise."

"I think maybe you hate me," I surmised, quietly over sandwiches.

"I think maybe you're right." He says this likes he's joking but I don't know. I don't fucking know. He leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. On the way home in the car, he said, "You look real pretty with your hair like that, baby."

"You're such a liar. You just feel bad. The compliment is pretty much lost on me at this point." Still laughing.

"Hey! I'm trying. I love you, you know that I do."

I don't know that I do. I'm not sure what love is or what lies are. I don't know where the truth begins or ends or if it's like one of those trick pictures where it can be two different things at the same time. What if he loves me and he hates me? What if he loves what I should be, what I could be and hates what I actually am, what I've become? What if the brokenness in me has led me to a barren place where nothing good can grow? Love can't live here anymore. Storm clouds blocking the sun. I can plant and plant rows of seeds and only deadness comes out of the soil for the harvest. That's what I get for only being sad and laughing at lies.

So, yeah, I'm a Monster

2009-06-19T12:16:00.004-04:00

Nobody despises that shrew known as Kate Gosselin more than I do. In fact, I pretty much hate her. But even I feel sorry for her about now. Since when does swatting your kid on the butt for being disobedient make you a child-abusing monster? I know I've covered this in my blog before but, frankly, I'm so confused. Did I miss something? Is spanking illegal in this country? If so, then I know a lot of people who break that law, including myself.

Here's the thing. There is a HUGE difference between spanking a child and beating a child. Just like there's a difference between denying a child a snack as punishment and denying a child nourishment for the entire day as punishment. So Kate smacked her kid. Big fucking deal. I'm more worried about the fact that she allows cameras in her home to film her children in their most vulnerable moments (potty training, etc) for cold, hard cash. But that's a blog for another day. Does anybody really like punishing their children? It is the suckiest part about being a parent. I'm terrible at discipline. But there are days when my daughter is practically begging for it and I must oblige her. Trust me when I say I try to use all methods in my arsenal, time-outs, take away toys, scolding. Sometimes a smack is the only thing that works.

Is it really that out of the realm of normal to swat a child? Is it just me and my friends that practice this form of punishment here and there? I'd really, really like to know that I, myself, am not some sort of child abusing monster for dispensing loving discipline to my daughter when she acts like a defiant brat. Well, maybe I am. Just one more thing for me to feel guilty about.

Def Leppard Saved My Life Today

2009-06-17T17:00:00.000-04:00

I was driving down the Turnpike and getting closer and closer to this concrete wall I've had my eye on for a few weeks now. I've been thinking specifically that ramming my car into it at speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour would most likely lead to sweet, sweet instant death. Eternal slumber. I love sleeping, when I can actually manage to do it, and lately I've been praying for the brand you don't wake up from. Obviously, "she died peacefully in her sleep of natural causes" is a way better obituary line than, say, "she bashed her car into a concrete wall and endured massive head trauma which killed her instantly". The former just sounds...like a poem. The latter gives you way too many nasty images with which to contend. God is stingy with dispensing peaceful deaths it seems. Sometimes, you just have to do the job yourself. And as with all do it yourself projects, death can get pretty messy.

So this wall is just, well, it's perfect for my suicidal purposes. And after laying my eyes upon this gem of a bumper sticker earlier today I was so ready to go not so gentle in that good night.

This world is just crawling with ignorant douchebags, isn't it? My rage had reached it's absolute apex after laying eyes upon this elitist, xenophobic bullshit. Do I like it when people speak English when talking to me? Sure. It's always preferable for me to understand what people are saying. But to put that sentiment on a fucking bumper sticker laden with an eagle and an American flag is something only a true asshole would do. Seriously, this guy is committed to being an asshole. It's, like, his job. What's particularly irksome is that he somehow connects this mind-blowingly narrow outlook to his patriotism, to being American. That's not American, fuckwad. It's the exact opposite of American.

I snapped the picture because I didn't think my words alone could capture the grossness of this...this thing. Plus, I got his license plate in the photo. So if any of my readers are truly devious (or awesome) and could "run the plate" and get an address for me, please do so. I would love to start sending this guy a bunch of crap in different languages. Nothing threatening or anything. I'd just write him letters in like gibberish and fuel his paranoia. It would seriously give me a reason to live. I'm so fucking pathetic.

So after seeing that shitty bumper sticker, my spirits reached a new low. And I thought of my special wall and even started getting a little speed in preparation for the collision. (I need to make it a good one if I don't want to end up in a wheelchair or some locked down psychiatric facility without the capacity or means to kill myself proper). And what should come on the radio but the opening chords of Pour Some Sugar on Me. I know it's totally corny, but I love that fucking song. I had, like, this really big decision to make. I could bash my car into the wall and put myself out of my misery or I could keep on speeding down the Turnpike and sing the shit out of that awesome song. So, sing I did.

Just like I did one hot day in August, 1988. I was a freshly minted teenager, awkward and barren of rebellion. My family was at some church picnic in a public park, which was totally corny but I wasn't even cool enough to know that. It was one of those rare days when my sister didn't find me parasitic and irritating. She let me tag along with her and her pretty friend Angel as they walked around the park with one of those big portable radios. Ok, yes, it was a boom box. Fucking horrible, how big shit used to be. Out of the speakers of the monstrous boom box poured the raucous music of Def Leppard, the Hysteria album on cassette. We thought we were cool. So, so cool. Or maybe rad. Nobody could have convinced us otherwise - not Maddona, not Tiffany, and not that snooty bitch Debbie Gibson. I must have been wearing a pair of Jams and a Hypercolor T-shirt and a god-awful banana clip in my hair. Let me correct that. I must have been wearing a pair of cotton pants I cut to mid-calf to look like Jams and a knock off hypercolor T-shirt from JC Penney and a godawful banana clip in my hair. My bangs were probably teased up so high and stiff that a bird could have perched up there and I wouldn't have even noticed. I had no idea I looked ridiculous. I mean, everybody did.

Nothing important really happened that day. It wasn't some coming of age moment or anything. It was just three teenage girls hanging out at the park, checking out boys, and blaring loud music under a hot sun. And it hits me, as I write this, like a gut punch, that out of the three of us I'm the only one that's still alive. Amy died of cancer. Angel died giving birth to twins a couple of years ago. It's strange to be the sole carrier of memories that used to be shared. I mean not just of that day but of so many other moments between my sister and I. And in some way I feel responsible for them and for her as if it were my job somehow to tell her story. And maybe that's it. That's all it takes to turn a sad girl off a suicidal mission, a cheesy song leading to a chain of thoughts leading to some deeper truth: that I am a memory bearer and story teller. The wall will have to wait.

Those Lips I've Kissed

2009-06-14T19:05:00.002-04:00

In lieu of ice cream after Liv's recital last weekend, we opted for over-priced lattes and ridiculously fattening bakery items from our friendly neighborhood Starbucks. I stood at the counter waiting patiently for our drink order while Todd and Liv stayed in the car. I nibbled disgustingly on my ridiculously fattening bakery item while I bided the time it took my barista to make our drinks. Of course, it is between a mouthful of fattening bakery item that I should lock eyes with an old lover placing his order at the register. Yeah, that one. There he stood with his smoldering hotness erupting like lava all over the cashier. I sympathized. After all, I'd been under the spell of his charms, I was so hypnotized by them that I spread my legs for him. And that was at a time when I spread my legs for no one.

After our eyes met, we both quickly looked away. Neither one of us was willing to commit to the moment, to acknowledge the presence of the other. There's nothing to say. Any dialogue exchanged would be so empty. The nature of our relationship was that he deflowered me one sordid night in January 2001. Sure we had somewhat of a friendship, but underneath that friendship, the only thing it was leading up to, was that beautiful fuck. I thought I loved him. But the truth is that I only made myself believe that because I thought I had to justify my wanton behavior.

Eventually he walked over to where I stood with a little bag of baked goods to wait for his own drink. I looked over at his hands for confirmation that it was him. He had the most distinct hands, rough and dry with oddly bent thumbs. I gasped softly when I saw those hands. Hands that had touched my body in the most intimate way. Hands attached to a man that had shared the most vulnerable moment of my life. He stood two feet away from me but he might as well have been standing on the moon. For a second I thought about saying hello, catching up. Maybe he had the same thoughts. Perhaps he was waiting for me to make the first move, break the ice, let him know it was OK. Or maybe he was glad I didn't try to engage him in conversation. I leaned nonchalantly against the counter and knocked over a little paper sign. I felt like an idiot. I looked like shit. I took my lattes, thanked the barista, took one last look at those lips I've kissed and walked away.

Have any of you had a strange encounter with an ex-boyfriend or lover?

Stabbing and Stones

2009-06-10T09:24:00.002-04:00

My husband has pulled ahead in the kidney stone contest. So basically the score is three to two. Pretty impressive work to form a 5mm stone in just 6 months time. Of course, this meant that I spent a good five hours in the ER yesterday morning. He's my husband. I love him dearly so I really don't mind sitting by his side while he squeezes my hand to keep from screaming at the ripping, nauseating agony of a jagged piece of gravel making it's leisurely way down his ureter. What I do mind is watching him receive delicious IV pain medication without receiving any of my own. That is real torture.

This chipper ER tech evaluated Todd in the Triage room. He was so chipper, in fact, that he whistled as he walked us to our sad, little ER room. I didn't recognize the song, but it was for sure a happy little ditty. Now there may be a time and a place for whistling, but I am pretty sure an ER is not one of those places. People are having a time, possibly the worst day of their miserable lives, with various tubes placed in orifices, perhaps bleeding to death or shitting themselves or going insane or recovering from a gun shut wound. This moron's whistling felt pretty disgusting. It reminded me of all my readers who commented about whistling people giving them the stabby feelings. And suddenly I started getting stabby feelings of my own towards this whistler. Fuck you, fucking whistler. Stop being so fucking happy in a terrible, terrible place.

What makes me feel more stabby is the fact that the stupid ER doctor prescribed my husband only twelve 5 mg percocet with which to continue this torture at home. Umm, 5mg percocet? Really, asshole? Those things are like fucking tic-tacs. While he's in the ER he's treated with the strongest narcotics to control his pain. Then when his pain is under control with the strongest narcotics they send him home with fucking tic-tacs? What the fuck kind of sense does that make?

So now Todd is trying to give birth to his third stone. God bless him. But I tell you what - There's no way I'm losing this contest. I'm working on my 3rd stone as we speak. It's going to be a good one.

Ballerina Girl

2009-06-05T12:28:00.003-04:00

Is it sick that I wish I could wear this?

Liv had her dress rehearsal last night. It took all the self-control in my body not to slap the shit out of some Jon Bonet looking mini-bitches. I had to wait two long hours backstage to watch my little flower sway on the stage and do a couple of pirouettes. It was worth the wait, let me assure you.

Was it Something I Said?

2009-06-04T13:48:00.003-04:00

So I noticed a few minutes ago that I went from 43 followers as of yesterday to 42 followers as of this morning. Ruh-roh. I can't figure out who it was that left the fold and it's going to bother me for the rest of my life. I know that's pathetic but it's true. Whoever you are, although you're probably not reading this because you now hate me for some reason, come back! We can work it out. Is it the whining? The cursing? The drug abuse? What is it? At least tell me what I did wrong. We can go to counseling. We can get a dog. We can finally take that trip to Italy you've always talked about. Oh, that was me? Sorry. Well we can go anywhere that you want to go. I'll write better blogs and you will read them and maybe comment here and there. Things can go back to the way they used to be. What do you say? Give a girl one more chance to get it right. I won't let you down.

Ugh. I hate myself for loving you. If you don't want me then I say good riddance. Your loss. Now excuse me while I go cry in my keyboard.

Quickening

2009-06-04T01:15:00.005-04:00

I watch you breathe, your chest rising and falling in perfect rhythym. Your cupie doll mouth slightly open as your sweet breath escapes and fills my air. I love observing your sleep when my own eludes me. I prop up on my elbow and allow the music of your candied breaths to bring the closest sensation of joy that is possible for me right now. Head to toe, you are a symphony, you are a carnival of laughter, you are a rare gemstone dug from a difficult quarry with my bare hands.

When I danced with your daddy on our wedding day, you were snug in my belly. All that day, I felt your quickening, tiny flutters like the flapping of a bumble bee's wings. During our dance, you kicked me hard. Our song played. I want to touch the earth. I want to break it in my hands. I want to grow something wild and unruly. I didn't know then what I know now. You are that something. My wild and unruly creature, nurtured in a garden of mischief and creative endeavors. Every word you say, even the angry ones, make me swell with pride. Even the bad words. Especially the bad words. Your art, which bleeds of rainbows and ghosts and sunny skies over skeletons playing soccer in an apple orchard, makes my eyes fill with proud mommy tears.

I don't know where this road is leading. I don't know if you will love me or hate me when you're grown. I'm not the mother you asked for when you came out into the world red-faced and screaming from my cut womb. I'm just the mother you got. And I've come to this party empty-handed. I have nothing to give you because I'm a black hole. There is a chasm so deep inside of me, it's bottomless and scary and full of dread. Sometimes the emptiness overwhelms me so I can't even smile or laugh. And then I remember the quickening, the way it felt to have you doing your acrobatics inside of me, filling up all those empty, gaping spaces that occupy my soul. You are this miracle and for 10 months you made me a miracle, too. We were miracles together, you and I.

God, I fucking love you. From the hair follicles on the top of your noggin, to the dry skin on the soles of your stinky feet. I love your boogie nose and your sweet, chubby legs. I love your hands that are always dirty. I love the crusties in your eyes. I love that you stand next to the potty so proud of your accomplishment. "Mom! Look what I did!" I love that you're not afraid to tell me that you're angry. I love that you know what songs you like on the radio, and what songs you hate. I love that you laugh at your own jokes. I love you so much that it's not even love anymore. The feeling I have about you more closely resembles pain. The heart that beats in your chest is my heart. It terrifies me to think that one day soon you will go places I can not go, that you will be out of my reach in so many moments of time. Some days I wish I could put you back into my womb, keep you safe and sound. I would do anything to feel that quickening always - tap, swoosh, tap - to know you are okay.

And now I want to curl up next to you. I want to feel your precious, perfect miracle of a body next to me. I want to soothe away bad dreams. I want to hear your sleep talk. I want to synchronize our breaths and heartbeats while I still can.

I Scream for Ice Cream

2009-06-03T08:50:00.005-04:00

"I gained 4 pounds just over the weekend."

"I really need to get back to the gym. I feel so guilty."

"It's those carbs...they'll put the weight on you."

These are snippets of a conversation I overheard yesterday between two grown men. And neither of the men were overweight. What the fuck is wrong with our culture where that's normal conversational fodder for two men? Or anyone really? I used to obsess over shit like 4 pounds, too. And I had to get psychiatric help because I had a fucking eating disorder. See, whenever I comment negatively about the state of the world in regards to food and dieting obsession, people will say, "Well you obsess about stuff like that, too." Yes, yes I do. But I acknowledge that it's fucked up behavior because I have a brain dysfunction. I'm starting to think there is a national epidemic of EDNOS.

I guess what is so frustrating about the national obsession with dieting for weight loss or maintenance, is that diets have been scientifically proven time and time again to not work. I think that's pretty obvious by the fact that our society is obsessed with dieting and yet more people are overweight than ever. (Although the current definition of what constitues "overweight" based on BMI is highly suspect). How the fuck does that happen? I really, really want to know. I also want to know how bread became the enemy. Haven't people been eating bread (and maintaining healthy weights) for thousands upon thousands of years? And pasta? And beef? And butter? How did these staples of the human diet become demonized in our modern culture? How did they become the culprit in the so-called obesity epidemic?

Why is it called "cheating" if I eat an ice cream cone? We cheat on tests, cheat on our taxes, cheat on our spouses. The word "cheating" has a connotation of betrayal. Who are we cheating on when we eat ice cream? Ourselves? So let me get this straight: I'm betraying myself when I nurture my body with something that tastes good? Got it. Pleasure + Nurturance = Betrayal. Everywhere I go, I see people behaving all fucking guilty about "indulging" in their natural instinct to feed their bodies. I hear people lamenting their lack of willpower. As if the ability to deny ourselves food is some kind of moral victory. Isn't that sick?

I'm so fucking tired of this bullshit. I feel like I'm swimming upstream every day of my life. I tried to talk with my boss about his "diet" yesterday (He is one of the men having that conversation above). I asked him why he was on a diet when he didn't have a weight problem. He insisted that he did have a weight problem. He weighs 175 pounds and he's about 5'11". And he is convinced he is overweight. He's never even weighed more than 190 pounds in his whole life, so it's not like he's ever had a weight problem. He weighs himself twice a day and compulsively keeps track of the foods he eats. If his weight goes up by 1 pound, he cuts back on his food. I think to myself, "This man has an eating disorder." But everyone in his orbit thinks his behavior is completely normal. I think that 30 years ago, his behavior would have been considered quirky, if not worrisome.

I'm a fan of eating intuitively. I am in awe of people who eat when they're hungry, and eat what they want. Sometimes it's a big green salad; Sometimes it's a big bowl of ice cream (full fat). Sometimes it's an apple. Sometimes it's a filet mignon with mashed potatoes and asparagus. I just have a feeling that if we all stopped trying to control our weight and just listened to our own internal cues, we'd be okay*. I think our bodies would reach a natural set point and we wouldn't have to spend so much of our lives worrying about a number on a scale, or the calories in our food. We wouldn't have to spend our whole lives being suspicious of an act as natural as eating. Wouldn't that be lovely?

*I'm referring here to people who are within a normal weight range. I realize that there are people who have legitimate and serious problems with weight. Obviously, these people need medical and possibly psychological interventions. In my opinion, people suffering from obesity should be treated with the same care, concern and compassion that a person suffering from anorexia nervosa normally receives.

Happy Fucking Birthday

2009-06-02T00:38:00.012-04:00

A good name is better than a good ointment, And the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth. - Ecclesiastes 7:1

I'm thirty four years old today. I want to scream. This birthday is exposing unhealed, fractured grief; I can't even write the words I want to say. Not right, anyway. Everything aches. There is something unnatural about being as old as your big sister. It's simply eerie and wrong. I feel monstrous. Too many years lived. Too many years to go. I don't want to breathe another minute. Using up better people's air.

All weekend long, I felt it coming. I've been like an animal sensing the earthquake, precognitive, ears twitching, the tastes of catastrophe on the wind and on my tongue. I felt like there were all these gaping holes inside me. I couldn't get enough to eat; I behaved like a starving person. It's unusual for me to binge but I didn't know what else to do. Eat. Eat. Vomit. I'm so gross. I'm 34 years old and this is what I am. I can't even look in the mirror without feeling like I need to be sick. I don't want to eat another bite of food. Using up better people's food. Taking up better people's space with this...pathetic, waste of a body.

God got it all wrong. I shouldn't be alive. I keep thinking someone is going to realize there was a mistake; tap, tap, tap at my door. "Excuse me, ma'am, but you're going to have to come with us now. We're terribly sorry to have to tell you this but you're dead. Amy is alive."

I'd tell whoever it was not to be terribly sorry. I'd say, "Finally. I don't have to go on living this lie." I'd gladly give up my spot in this world, that space I so pathetically and pointlessly occupy, so that Amy could have one more minute, one more day dispensing her precious gifts, her bright and numerous smiles, her sweet "hello theres" to passersby, her homemade whipped cream, her corny jokes that made me roll my eyes.

God, she was so fucking beautiful. Look at her.

The pretty sister. I knew that. It was a hard, bitter pill to swallow but I had finally gotten it down. She was beautiful and I was not and I was finally okay with the knowledge of that. And then she got cancer. And then she lost her hair, her long, thick auburn hair. Slowly, ever slowly, her beauty started to fade. And deep down inside me, in those dark and wicked places inside myself, I felt glad to be prettier. See what I am? Terrible.

Some things have a lovely way of dying. Roses come to mind. I have three dying roses hanging from the blinds in my kitchen. As they die, their colors deepen and their skins soften first and then turn crisp. Those roses look better when they're dying than when they were alive. Not people. I hate to think of Amy in those last days on hospice. Completely bald, a pallor of yellow. It felt like everything went yellow about her. Skin, eyes, teeth. And I thought of the way she loved yellow roses and it made me sad beyond what I can name with words. I tried to think of her like that, though: A yellow rose. My memories of her like dried rose petals in a ceramic dish on the coffee table.

A month before she died, Amy had picked out photos of herself for her funeral collage. The pictures were the way she wanted to be remembered. That last week, I must have looked through those pictures a thousand times. I must have showed them to every person who came through the door to say their goodbyes. I was really trying to tell them how to remember her: not as the bald, yellow shell of a person mumbling in the bed but as the vibrant, beautiful woman she was just a few years before. I even made the hospice nurse look at the pictures. I know she was rolling her eyes internally but I didn't care. I wanted her to know what Amy had been. I wanted her to know that she had been beautiful. I don't know why that mattered so much to me. After years of envying her beauty, of hating her for it, it was the suddenly the only thing I wanted people to know about her.

How must it have felt to pick out photos for your own funeral collage? How must it have felt to know that 34 years was all you were going to get? I know my sister wouldn't be looking at her life the way I do mine, with contempt and utter despair. I can read your mind. You are thinking I need to suck it up and get over my shit. I need to appreciate what I've been given and stop being a whiny little bitch about the things I've lost. I wish I could do that.

Since I was raised a Jehovah's Witness, we didn't celebrate birthdays when I was growing up. Your birthday came and it was just like any other day. We didn't have parties or presents or singing or blowing out candles on a cake. When other children celebrated their birthdays at school with cupcakes, I had to sit outside in the hallway until the festivities were over. I remember sitting out in the empty, lonely hallway listening to the sounds of all the kids laughing and eating their treats and enjoying being a part of something. They were a part of somebody's special day. And they knew that one day soon, it would be their turn to be special too. It was so painful for me to be excluded. I always felt like I was being punished for...being alive. I knew my special day would never come. I knew that there would only be more days of sitting alone in an empty hallway, my butt going numb on the hard floor, eavesdropping on other people's joy.

And that's still true for me, for my life. I can never really get in it, feel happy, feel special. It doesn't belong to me. It never has. Happy 34th Birthday to me. It feels hollow and weird. I'm afraid that it always will. I wish I knew how Amy managed to find joy in the life that was handed to her. If she was here, right now, I would ask her to tell me those secrets. I would ask her to give me those instructions on how to smile from ear to ear and actually mean it. I would ask her to tell me how to laugh with abandon from the deepest core of my soul. I would ask her how I will survive being 34 when she didn't. I would ask her if 34 years was enough.

I Laugh or else I'd Cry

2009-05-28T18:37:00.008-04:00

My daughter can be a total bitch. I'm not even saying that for effect or shock value or anything. She just can be. Sugar and spice and everything nice? Not this little girl.

Memorial Day was a scorcher and Todd and I really wanted to stay home in the air conditioning and just sink onto the couch in front of a movie. Instead, we took our darling daughter to the park because we know how much she loves being outdoors. We spent a few hours on the swings, skipping rocks into the lake, kicking the soccer ball around, and helping a lost child find her mother. We topped the day off by giving her a Dora the Explorer ice cream bar from the ice cream man. I don't know why I expected Liv to be grateful. I guess it's that stubborn part of my parental brain that only wants to see good in my child, that is resistant to the idea that my little girl has the demonstrable capacity to be an asshole.

"It's time to go now," Todd told Liv as we were walking back to the car. She was finishing up her little treat and her face was all covered in sticky, congealed ice cream residue.

"NOOOOO!" And this she screamed at a decibel most likely heard by the Expedition 20 crew at the International Space Station. Or maybe they weren't even there yet. In any case, somebody in outerspace heard her monstrous, defiant wail.

"Sweetheart, we had a fun day but we have to go home now." This I said in the kindest, calmest voice I could muster at that moment.

"You ruined my day, you...you...bad mommy, you...you stupid bitch." And suddenly all eyes are upon us. Every adult, teenager and child standing within earshot were just staring unabashedly at the lovely little domestic scene transpiring in front of them.

Here's the thing. There was nothing I could have done in that situation that would have been right. If I reacted sternly to my child for talking to me with such utter disrespect then I would have proved myself to be the mean mommy that Liv was accusing me of being. If I ignored her behavior, then I would be the mother who doesn't discipline her child. Truth be told, if I had ever said those words to my parents growing up I wouldn't be alive right now to tell the tale. Lord knows, I got beatings for a lot less than that. Or should I say "beatin's"? For some reason, when you add the "g" it sounds so much more severe.

So, you want to know how I did respond? I probably did the worse thing I could have done. I laughed. Because hearing Liv say, "You stupid bitch" in such a menacing way was one of the funniest things I had heard in a really long time. And sometimes you have to laugh, if only to keep from crying. Liv ended up throwing herself down onto the dirt and had herself a precious little temper tantrum. I think my laughter may have angered her even more. Todd had to carry her kicking and screaming to the car because she refused to come with "bad mommy" of her own accord. When he was carrying her she kept screaming at me to "go away" and not walk next to them. I think she even yelled something about not wanting to see my "stupid face". Of course, I talked to her later about it and explained why it's "not nice" to use bad words and how it's "disrespectful" to talk to mommy in that way. I'm pretty sure she rolled her eyes. She's three years old, people. Three. It's pretty safe to say I'm fucked. So what would you have done in that situation? I know you wouldn't have laughed. I never said I was good at this parenting shit.

Can I be tried as a juvenile?

2009-05-27T11:51:00.004-04:00

What is it about people cracking gum that makes we want to stab them? My boss' wife decided to grace me with her presence, for some reason, and there she sits fiddling with her email and cell phone all fucking cracking her stupid gum and humming. Did I mention that humming makes me murderous, too? One day, you are going to see me on the news or on Court TV after a bloody rampage. Everybody will wonder why, why?, did this girl commit such a heinous act? And I will only say, "People who crack gum and hum deserve to have their skulls crushed."

I know you are thinking I'm a terrible person. I am a terrible person. But I honestly want someone to put a bullet in my head right now and put me out of my misery from all this humming and cracking of gum. I am slowly losing the tiny will I had to live. My soul is withering to the sound of humming and cracking of gum. I feel like my senses are heightened and the noise is just pulsing right into the nerve centers of my brain. Maybe I have some kind of untapped superpower. Who the fuck knows.

And now the rage and hurricane of negative emotion has subsided. Because she is gone. Don't worry, I didn't kill her. It's like such a relieving feeling for the rage to leave my body. You know that feeling you get when you almost get in a car accident, but then you don't, and it's like your limbs feel all jello-like and tingly? Is that adrenaline? What is that chemically that makes a person feel that way? Anyway, I feel like that a lot in response to situations that aren't even technically life-threatening. It's as if my body is responding as though I were in a life-threatening situation and yet logically I acknowledge that I am not. I tried to explain this to my therapist yesterday, rather inelegantly. Lately, words weigh a ton, like thick bars of lead. They just don't come easy, whether spoken or written. Everything is a challenge. That's my excuse for this shit post.

I finally express to this shrink another odd thing that I am feeling, which is that there is some strange connection between my acceptance of my right to enjoy life, and my sister getting cancer. I know it's technically a coincidence that as soon as I stopped starving myself and torturing myself mercilessly, my sister got sick. But I have this sinking feeling that there is a connection. Or on a broader scale, that my level of happiness is inversely related somehow to the suffering of others. Maybe, "inversely" is the wrong word. It's been a while since I studied that statistical shit. Anyway, I feel like the more happy I am, the more others have to suffer because of it. Like there is payment to be made for it in some way. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

So he gets that puzzled look on his face or more accurately a look of concern which conveys: "This bitch is crazier than I thought."

I tried to explain, "I know that logically this can not be true. I'm not a stupid person. But I feel like it's true. I haven't been able to make the frightened feelings and the panic go away when I feel joy for any amount of logical thought."

And then he fucking says, sort of haltingly, "I have to tell you that a lot of your thought processes are very child-like."

When I take affront to that - because it's not my thoughts so much as my fucking feelings that are the problem - he says, "Well that's not necessarily a bad thing."

It's not? I'm almost 34 years old. What part of thinking like a child is not a bad thing? Anyway, he concludes thusly, "I'm not trained in psychoanalysis, but if I had to guess I would say that at some point in your early development something happened that got you stuck there." Fuck you, faux Freud. I don't really think it takes years of clinical training to figure out that my problems are rooted in childhood.

Part of me wants to go in next week and tell him I've been having sexual fantasies about him. Just to make him squirm. Let me clarify, I'm definitely not having sexual fantasies about him. He's just...like a high school English teacher or something. He's not unattractive or anything. Just his demeanor is so...god, I wish I had the words to describe it. But they're too heavy to lift out of my bruised psyche at the moment. But it would be kind of interesting to see how he reacted to that sordid information. See? I'm not child-like. At all.

The Five People You Fuck In Heaven

2009-05-22T19:06:00.022-04:00

By all popular accounts, heaven sounds like a snoozefest. Pure, celibate angels and fluffy white clouds? Come on people, we can do better than that! I'm not a true believer in an "afterlife". I want to believe it, since Amy is dead, and especially lately since I've started plotting my own murder. I'm trying to convince myself that heaven is, first of all, a real place and, second of all, a lot more ridiculously fun place than has ever been imagined. Maybe it's one big party where we're all sexy ghosts, getting drunk on the best beer and liquor God's omnipotence can buy and high on the purest, most mind blowing drugs. And also an orgy. I thought I'd make a list of the people I am going to fuck when I enter the proverbial pearly gates.

1. Kurt Cobain - I hope in heaven he keeps his angst, because truth be told it was the sexiest thing about him. I loved his greasy, devil may care hair, his frumpy flannels, the way he wore his heart on his sleeve. He was an amazing artist who spoke to my desperate teenage soul. He made me feel less alone in the world in 1993, like it was normal to be writing shitty poetry and cutting myself and in a salty mood all the time. I'd really like to pay him back with at least a blow job for that.

2. James Dean - If you've ever seen East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause then you know what I'm talking about. I'd want to role play. He would be Cal Trask and I'd be that cute girl who used to date his brother. Hot.

3. River Phoenix - I had the biggest crush on him since Stand by Me. I know he was really young then, but it's okay because so was I.

4. Anais Nin - I don't know. I might be bi. How does one know for sure? Anais was the first woman I ever fantasized about and could you really blame me? Her erotica is just stellar and dirty and everything erotica should be. I'd love to smoke some opium and let her teach me in the ways of Sapphic love. (Have you read Delta of Venus? It was the book I hid under my pillow and held countless fodder for many a masturbatory fantasy. Also, Henry and June. Was that a true story? Henry Miller could get it, too.)

5. Jesus - I know he hates me and all but that just makes the prospect of sex with him even hotter. I grew up on Jesus; I knew Jesus better than I knew myself. I'm not talking about the weak, skinny, bleeding Christ on a cross so regularly seen in Christian literature and the like. I'm talking about Jesus, the fucking man. I think my unabashed desire has a lot to do with the fact that I like beards. And also because this is the type of Jesus I was exposed to in my formative years:

Pretty hot, right? Angry Jesus. Mmmm. I found this picture in my old My Book of Bible Stories, which is what I was forced to study as a child. Here's just a few of the reasons why I'd fuck his Messianic brains out:

He's good with kids:

He can fly.

Jesus has got some game:

He can heal you of your every ill with his mad skills. Plus he makes wine out of water.

He isn't afraid of a little man on man love:

He throws a mean dinner party:

I'm a little touched in the head right now. Maybe always. I realize that I'm probably going to Hell now when I die. I mean, if there is one. That sucks but it's still better than here.

So, who are the five people you'd fuck in heaven?

Afterbath

2009-05-21T00:00:00.012-04:00

After Afterbath (of course):

Bumper Stickers Make Me Very, Very Angry

2009-05-20T10:21:00.005-04:00

This car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it that read: I'll keep my guns, liberty, and money, you can keep the change. I have only one response to that: Burn in Hell. Seriously, why are people always trying to "educate" me with their damn cars? Leave me alone. I'm just trying to get to work. I don't want to contemplate deep political shit this early in the morning. You know what else I don't want? To get to know you. I don't care where you go on vacation, I don't care where you went to college. I care even less about where your kids go to college. I don't want to know that you think I shouldn't have full control over my own body (pro-lifers) or that Jesus Loves Me. Guess what? Jesus hates me. He really, really does. And your saying that he loves me just twists the knife that much more, it is just rubbing salt into my gaping emotional wounds. Also? It's really sad that your kid has autism and all and that you're a cancer survivor and that you listen to Dave Mathews Band. But I have my own fucking problems. I don't want to hear about yours when I'm driving in my car. That's what therapists are for. I'm not your therapist. I'm not your friend. I have enough friends already. So in a nutshell, stop trying to advocate, educate, pontificate, and all the other 'cates from the bumper of your fucking car.

God, what the fuck is wrong with me? I know I'm over-reacting to that image that I saw with my eyes this morning. But I'm just overwhelmed with emotion as it is. And bumper stickers right now are just the tipping point, you know?

Lose Yourself

2009-05-19T11:10:00.003-04:00

So, obviously I'm struggling with depression right now. This information is like the opposite of a surprise or secret. There are some good things about being depressed that I don't think a lot of people realize. For one, I'm so anti-social and isolated and fucking lazy that I have lots of time to sit around and read shit on the internet and watch TV. Another thing that's great about being depressed is my lack of appetite. It's a beautiful thing, really, to put your jeans on and realize you need a belt to hold them up. I mean they are my big jeans, but still it's a nice little bonus. I'm going to guess - 5 pounds. Maybe. I realize it feels a little too good, and possibly the reason for my little upsurge in mood the past day or two. It's the teaser. It's like my subconscious (or not so subconscious) mind is saying, "Get super skinny again. And your depression will disappear." And it would, too.

It would be so easy to resort to my old coping patterns. Maladaptive as they were, they fucking worked. Anorexia is a strange little miracle worker that way. Also, a seductor. I punched him in his stupid mouth this morning by ordering a donut with my coffee. And I ate it, too. So, yeah, He's a little pissed at me for spurning him. But I don't give a shit. I mean that asshole tried to fucking kill me and now what? I'm supposed to take him back with all his dysfunctional mind games?

I hate that I don't hate it, though - the idea of going back to the abuser in my brain. I am baffled by the fact that I've kept my double zero jeans in my closet, my child size clothes. Sometimes I take them out and marvel at how small I used to be. I miss the way it felt to take up so little space in the world. Every time I hear talk of my "carbon footprint" or how we are all destroying the earth with our greed and consumption, I have the overwhelming urge to STOP consuming immediately. I get the impression that what they are really saying is that my very existence is impeding the survival of our planet, or something. Everywhere I turn, on my TV, in magazines, in conversations, there is just one big guilt trip after another.

It's difficult to find that balance and make sense of all the mixed messages coming from without and within. Everybody's always trying to lose more of themselves, like there's some magic in it. As if being smaller or fitting some mold equates to more happiness somehow. People love it when you lose weight. It's like suddenly you are this big star with a special secret. "You look great! How did you do it?" I see people on diets everywhere - people that don't even appear to have a weight problem. That has to mean something, right? There has to be some value in dieting for everyone to take to it in a religious fervor. But a diet is like a drug for me and I know that it is a dangerous endeavor for me to take on right now. Or maybe that's just the way I justify being and staying a glutton. Who can tell? I'm so confused. Maybe a fast would be a good thing for me right now. Restart my brain, purge myself of toxins. I'm kind of exhausted from trying to crawl out of my skin.

Oh, anorexia, you sneaky little bastard. Well played, my old friend, well played.

Magical Thinking

2009-05-18T12:17:00.010-04:00

I saw a mother goose and her three goslings trying to cross the Turnpike this morning on my way to work. Now I will worry about them all day. I've adopted all their woes in my mind. It will be my fault if one of them or all of them is squished by a passing truck because I failed to shepherd them to safety. I know that seems a small thing in the scheme of things, such a tiny dot on the landscape of life's horizon. But still I heap it on me, all of it, one event after another until I am suffocating beneath a mountain of guilt.

I read recently over on Jung at Heart, that perhaps some of us would rather be bad than weak. That some us would rather create a fiction in our own minds that we have some kind of omnipotence over all things, over the actions of other people. In this way, we can carry the delusion of power around with us and we don't have to admit that, in actuality, we are helpless. It is so much easier to point a finger at myself or others than to admit that there was nothing that could have been done. I see it everyday, not just in myself but in the world at large. This principle reenacted over and over and over again. When some catastrophe occurs the first thing I see is people trying to figure out why. Piecing all the facts of the case together, hoping the puzzle presents a clear picture of the reasons, what went wrong, who messed up, how can we stop it from happening again.

Somebody always has to pay. And maybe that's justice, I don't know. Of course, people mess up and need to own up to what they've done. But there are times when that shit just happened and it's nobody's fault. The world is fraught with dangers. We are never safe. As I write that, I feel the panic swell up inside me, in my chest. I need to breathe slow and deep. It's hard to admit that all our solid institutions are founded on chaos. It's hard to acknowledge that random events in a tempestuous universe brought us all here, to this place together. When I think too much about that, I start to feel an unreality, a disconnect with solid ground. Sanity, insanity. Order, chaos. Mind, body. Everything starts to blur together in a massive whirl. Who are we to say what's real for somebody else? Who are we to define someone else's reality for them?

Holding on to the guilt, the illusion of control over that which is inherently uncontrollable is easier than accepting that I am a seedling on the wind, that I am a seashell tossed about in an unfathomable ocean of things I can never understand. It's easier to be bad. It's easier to think I killed those geese, strangled their scrawny necks with my bare hands than to think I couldn't stop them from dying no matter what I did. I mean, even if if I pulled over my car, got out, pulled them to safety on the other side, something else will eventually kill them. Later today, tomorrow, next week. I can't stop it from happening no matter how hard I try. I'm tired, so very tired from carrying these countless burdens of guilt on my back like a pack animal, like a fucking beast of burden. But I need to learn another way of living, of negotiating the world, before I can release them. What terrible things will happen once I give up my super power? Will the world as I know it come crumbling down if I relinquished my unique ability to bear responsibility for every bad event that has happened or will happen?

I just realized that by posting these thoughts I have released them. I'm still alive. The world is still spinning quietly on its axis. Disaster has not ensued. The institutions around me are still standing as they always were. I am still able to assess reality with a sane mind. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Right before your very eyes. Does it ruin the magic a little to see how the trick works?

Do Not Leave Me in This Abyss

2009-05-17T22:50:00.006-04:00

A while ago, I was having too much red wine with an old friend. Drunk, we were or bordering on it. I love being intoxicated with a friend, just the two of us, alone. The buzz of alcohol dismantles the walls, opens everything up to the brutal truth. And also very juicy stories and secrets. There's nothing that intrigues me more than a weird sex story, an open window into private, primal moments.

"So we were doing it and all of a sudden he just...like...slapped me right across the face."

"Ok...what?" This is so good. I can't believe how good this is. I'm giggling with the juicy goodness of this confession."Let me get this straight...he was fucking you all normally and out of nowhere he just hit you in the face?"

"Yeah, it was insane. And I sort of stopped moving, like what the fuck, you know? and he was all, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry' and I was like don't apologize just give me a minute to...process this...figure out if I like it or not."

"So did you?...like it, I mean?"

She hesitates just a moment. Then she gets this funny little smile on her face, leans closer and whispers conspiratorially, "Yeah, it was really hot."

What is about sex that brings out the best and the worst in some of us? The act of sex renders us so vulnerable, so utterly and completely exposed. Tenderness and violence nest on a razor's edge in those carnal moments. I remember all those Wild Kingdom-esque shows I watched in childhood, the viciousness of the mating ritual, two animals in turmoil. The female resisting and surrendering, in equal measure. The male insistent, sinking his sharp teeth into her soft fur, a yelp, insertion, and something is finally made alive. I thought maybe it was just that way with animals. Surely human beings had evolved. Surely, human sex was pure pleasure and tenderness and moonlight and soft as velvet. I didn't understand until much later that sex could hurt in the good way. That it could be sand paper and sharp tools and shades of black and grey. I didn't know until much, much later that I wanted it that way. To be the truth, even if it made me cry.

We don't know about the sex maps in our brains in the proverbial morning of our sexual awakening. We don't know there's a map then, let alone a route, a way to go to get to orgasm, to touch god, achieve the paramount of pleasure. We start the trip innocent of it all, so unaware of the true destination. I remember knowing what I should want, what I should like. Most girls of thirteen had crushes on the cute boys, popular boys. The types of boys I couldn't have, who wouldn't notice me if I was standing stark naked in front of them. But I was a weird girl. Instead of longing for the living, breathing boys, I hung the whole of my heart on boys that never even existed. Protagonists of novels, characters swollen with mystery and outlined in dark, hazy edges. Characters like Jean Valjean, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Cal Trask. The darker the heart, the behavior, the more strange the arc of his story or redemption, the more I obsessed over him, let him penetrate my vulnerable brain. I recall lazy afternoons, on my belly in bed, propped up on elbows, devouring Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff was my favorite darkling of them all.

Reading that book...well, it changed me. I learned that I wasn't the only person all hunched in dark corners, trapped in strange, unbecoming places. That's what drew me to those books, those characters. They stirred me up, tickled those places inside me, excited me in embarrassing ways. So I'd visit with Heathcliff, long and often. My Heathcliff, brooding, wicked, sullen and accursed with potent passions. I pictured his luminous black eyes piercing my pale skin, his strong hand taking mine to roam the moors, his intensity of feeling impaling my pliable mind. I envisioned him standing beneath my window, wet with rain, screaming "Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!" I wanted his brutality and his tenderness. I wanted his masked goodness to seep out despite himself; I dreamed the real Heathcliff would emerge from beneath the cruel exterior drawn out by his great love for me. But certainly not before he ravished my naked body in numerous torrid fashions.

Obviously, I did not learn about sex from classical literature. No, that job fell to seedy romance novels my girlfriend lent to me, with the dirtiest pages marked with a creased corner. The mechanics of sex I had known, early on, whispers on the playground, "he puts his thing in you", nervous conversations with my mom, "he puts his thing in you". Nobody ever explained how it would feel to want that, how it would feel to actually have it. Nobody ever told me about that ache, that bottomless ache, about that painful longing to be filled. Nobody warned me that I would begin to feel that emptiness, especially at night, especially when I had free moments to contemplate those luscious, intimidating characters I encountered so regularly in books. And then it happened that the desire boiled to a level and bubbled over, and finally my hand would take its slow travel under covers towards the emptiest place on earth, fueled by fresh and enigmatic longing. When it was over, I was still just a girl lost in that immeasurable abyss.

An orgasm together is so much better than an orgasm alone. Hand to hand, mouth to mouth, pelvis to pelvis. Tender at times, rough at others. I'm not going to say if it's right or wrong, but sometimes dark things happen between lovers. A growl, a bite, a slap. Just animals navigating their personal twisty map. I'm going to venture to say that all of us are fucked up in our own beautiful ways. Flawed creatures trying to get off, trying to fill aching voids in our hearts and bodies. And when we are there experiencing that collision of power and surrender, sometimes we can't hide those nasty, primitive parts of ourselves. To this day, I must have sex with the lights turned off. It is the only way I feel safe in that intimate embrace: shadows and squeezed eyes. I take any form in the dark. Drive him mad. But in that abyss, he can always find me.

Gifts

2009-05-15T23:14:00.008-04:00

I am the gracious receiver of many gifts. Anytime I receive an email, a comment on my blog, a phone call, a visit, I accept it as a precious gift of time and effort. Beautiful gifts from beautiful people giving me hope that there's something in me that matters, possibly something worth saving. I'm trying to focus on those wonderful little things in life, small kindnesses, a smile from a stranger, my daughter insisting that My Little Pony is the Boss of Monsters (wouldn't it be awesome if she was right?). I know I've been blessed with amazing friends, both in the real world and on-line. I've been blessed with a loving and sexy husband, a gorgeous and interesting little girl, a family that knows how to laugh when it hurts. So many gifts, so many blessings. The trick is getting that message through to my heart so that I can open it to joy again, so that I can allow myself to experience the sensation of being happy.

A few months ago, I met a woman on Facebook, Shelby, who was about to undergo a prophylactic mastectomy, the same as a I did just a year ago. We began an email correspondence and soon discovered that we had a lot more in common than our BRCA2 mutation. I feel so blessed to have "met" her for she is a brave woman with a glorious soul. Shelby is also a generous and thoughtful person who reaches out to me during my darkest moments despite her own pain.

A couple of months ago she sent me this necklace in the mail. She said that it reminded her of me, the way you can find something beautiful inside of twisted things. I wrote her today, "I am wearing the necklace you bought me. I'm thinking about that beautiful stone in the midst of all that twistedness. That's what I'm seeking - the good stuff amid all of this horror." Thank you for the beautiful gifts, Shelby, the necklace, the friendship, the life rafts, the right words at the right time, and most of all for being you.

You want to know what else I like? That there are so many people who know me so well, not just well, but to my very disturbing core. There are people who have seen that I am capable of destroying, of raging, of hating and yet they love me anyway. It is a comfort to know that. My favorite aunt gave me an awesome gift a few months ago. And really, she couldn't have selected a more perfect object. This sign, I hang proudly in my messy kitchen:

You know you want one. Admit it. Thanks, Renee, for putting up with my bullshit and loving me anyway.

I did that 25 things about me meme about 5 months ago and in it I wrote about my nostalgic love for the scent of Playdough. I love the smell of it, the way it can bring me back to some creative moments in my childhood. Not long after I posted that blog, I was driving home from work and that Sade song came on the radio - By Your Side. God, it reminded me so much of Amy. I lost my mind. It hurt so bad to hear it and I cried the loneliest tears. I actually said out loud to myself, "You are so alone." But when I got out of my car and went to my front door, I found a thoughtful gift from my friend, Sharon:

It wasn't just the perfume that made me smile. It was the thought of a friend reading my blog and acting on some little detail, some tiny part of myself that I had shared. I love you, Sharon, for that and for all your amazing ways of being in the world.

On Mother's Day, my husband gave me the best gift of all:

An empty photo album is a promise of so many tomorrows. It's his way of saying, "I love you. Let's make happy memories together."

I have so many reasons to be grateful. I have been given so much undeserved kindness and love from so many people. I only hope that I can survive this god-awful depression, find my way out, emerge from the abyss a shiny, new person better at loving and giving to others. I only hope I can pay everyone back 10-fold for the things they've given me.

A Twig for Tears

2009-05-13T14:01:00.011-04:00

Yesterday, Liv and I spent a good hour playing in the field behind our home. It was nice to be outside for a little while since I've been hibernating and hiding from the world as of late. Watching my daughter play outdoors is quite a nostalgic experience. Liv just loves playing with natural things as did I when I was little. Little Gwen, maker of a mean mud pie, keeper of caterpillars, huntress of bees. My sister and I would pull onion grass from the ground, roots and all, to make some homemade "soup" for our "restaurant". We had blackberries that grew wild by the back fence. And, of course, the honeysuckle. I'd pull the thin strand of a hundred flowers for that tiny drop of nectar on the end of each one. There was just so much to discover in our small yard, so much opportunity for pretending. And that outside place became a refuge from the storms raging in the inside place.

Sometimes I'd sit on one of our swings, holding tight to the chains and dragging my feet in the dirt, praying for the screams to stop. Praying that God would forgive me for the fight I surely must have caused. Praying that no one could hear the violence in my home, the sound of anger echoing throughout the neighborhood like a mad locust's love song. It was all I could do: Pray and wait. Pray for forgiveness. Wait for the quiet and a chance to make it right. My father would have left by then, bewildered by the conflict. I'd hear his car pull out of the driveway and I'd make my move. Creep up the stairs clutching a bouquet of wildflowers, following the sounds of sobbing. And then, the tender, tentative whisper, "Mom? I picked you these flowers." Crying. "Are you alright?" Crying. Crawling beside her shaking, wailing body. "Every thing's alright, mommy. You're going to be alright." Tandem crying. Tears in her eyes and in mine.

I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I thought the problems of grown-ups were simple, something easily fixed with an apology and a bouquet of wildflowers. I honestly believed I could fix it if I only tried hard enough, behaved well enough, said the right words, was the right kind of child. I wanted so badly to heal the wounds, stop the hurt once and for all. I carried it around in my heart, heavy as the boulder embedded in the ground in our backyard. My mom didn't ask me to. I raised my hand for the assignment. I swallowed the heaviness whole, buckled under its weight all those years. It's no body's fault. It is what it is.

Yesterday afternoon I watched my daughter digging into the earth with her bare hands, a pile of collected rocks at her side. I thought in that moment that she was oblivious to everything but her seeking, her private mission. Until:

"Mom, why are you crying?" Shit. These days the tears come unbidden and unwelcome in the oddest moments. They well up and there I sit, leaky as a faucet.

"Don't worry about me, sweetie" I said, trying to collect myself, "Mommy's just a little bit sad."

"Why? Why are you sad?"

"Because I'm silly." I got up and chased her with my tickling hands. I grabbed her at the waist and we fell in tandem, laughing. My eyes were still wet with tears, but I willed myself to stop making them. Not here, not now. I laid on my back while Liv went back to her play.

A few minutes later, in the midst of the very heavy work of not crying, Liv ran back to me excited.

"Look what I found, Mom!" She was holding a small, curved twig in her hand.

"Wow! What is that?" I said, over-enthusiastically.

"It's a smile. A smile for you." And she took her little smile-shaped twig and pressed it against my mouth, willing me with all her precious heart to be happy.

"Now you won't be sad no more. Now you are happy!" My sweet Liv stood in front of me with a belly full of pain. My pain. She has swallowed that heaviness and it breaks my heart.

It is the hardest thing in the world to pretend that I am whole for my child when I am all fragments and loose parts. I ask myself the question over and over, "Is it better to have a crazy mother or no mother at all?" The jury's still out on that one.

Middle Age Suicide, Don't Do It

2009-05-12T00:33:00.004-04:00

"I mean, you haven't been thinking about, like, suicide or anything have you?" Todd asks as we talk about my depression and it takes me by surprise, his sudden insight into my psyche. His swift entrance into the dark place. Do I let him go there? Do I take him with me into that weird little world? Will he turn away in fear or disgust in the face of all that I really am?

There I envision myself laying in a field of wildflowers on a warm day, feeling the sun hot on my face for the last time. The blue sky hovers above me like a coffin lid. Birds chirp - a funeral hymn. It is all lovely the way a dying should be. I have a baggie full of blue pills in my left hand. It is hot with sweat because I have held it so tightly in my fist. They are sweet little harbingers of death, my escape. They are the jump over the wall. They are the tunnel away from feeling, terrible feeling. I take a pill out of the baggie. It is a pretty thing. Baby blue just like my last sky. Nothing is sacred anymore. And yet everything is.

Right before you die, I imagine the world suddenly looks changed, like an old friend you hadn't seen in years. You meet up, have a nostalgic moment. You remember when it mattered and it's glorious and you somehow make it so much better in your mind than it ever really was in actuality. Then the moment arrives when you have to admit that there is nothing left to be said. Your coffee is cold. Your mood is sour. There is nothing left to be done. That is the way it is when you die. Goodbye. The pills are hot. They bleed their blue on my fingers as I touch them. One by one. Not too slow. Not too fast. I find my rhythm. And then, sweetly, I die. It's like fading and twilight and in-between. Hazy brain. First you are laying in a field of wildflowers and then you are a field of wildflowers. That is my death. And it is forever. How do you like it?

"Ok...I've had some thoughts about killing myself lately. But, seriously, I'm not suicidal. There's a huge difference."

"Jesus, Gwen, if you're thinking about killing yourself then you are suicidal. Maybe you need to...go somewhere for a while. Like a loony bin or something."

"Jesus Christ, Todd, stop. Just stop..." I'm laughing at the discomfort of it all.

"What? Honestly, only seriously disturbed people think about that shit....people fucked in the head."

"Well then I'm fucked in the head. Your wife is fucking fucked in the fucking head."

I want him to punch me in the face. Or spit and curse at me. I want him to look at me with disgust and then turn away and hate me forever for saying the bad thing that nobody wants to ever hear. Because that's what it is: The Bad Thing. It is dark and it's all I know right now. It is all I can think about. I am, like, fucking obsessed with these scenarios. I can't help it. There is a loop in my brain. The end of me.

And it's selfish. God, it's fucking selfish. I am a despicable person to harbor these ideas, these morbid fantasies. I deserve to have the shit kicked out of me. I deserve to be called vicious names. I deserve to be laughed at until I cry. I deserve to be locked in a room and starved until my stomach bloats and my lips crack and my heart gives out. I deserve to have some sense shaken into me. I deserve to be told a monstrous lie. I deserve to be destitute and alone. I deserve any nastiness Todd is capable of sending my way. I expect it. I set up the blows and eagerly wait for them to fall.

But then something else happens.

"Please don't do that. I love you. Please don't ever do that." And he hugs me very tight. "I'm here for you no matter what. If you're sick, we'll deal with it. We'll make you better."

I know I don't deserve that love. I've done nothing to earn it. I've attempted to destroy it with my twisted thoughts and my raw, unravelling emotions. And yet...I have it. Unconditional, undeniable. Why can't I just be happy? Why can't I just be grateful for the beautiful life I've been handed, this beautiful man, this precious child? Something is awry in my cognition. Something is broken in here.

As we sit down to watch TV together, Todd jokes about his crazy wife. We laugh about the prospect of committing me. It is funny, too, when you really stop to think about it. All we've been through already. This is just a "drop of water in an endless sea."

I need to work out my thoughts on death. I think my obsession may have a lot to do with my fear of it, perhaps a deep-seated wish to control it. I want death to be my bitch, not my master. And what's weird is that this is exactly what I did with food years ago. I was so afraid of it, this innocent substance. I was so fearful of its mystical powers, its hidden agendas, how it could hurt me in a thousand ways. The only way I could quell my fears was to control the food, to become its master. And then it happened that the food started to control me, and I coudn't get out from under its terrible yoke. I hate food. I hate death. I hate me.

But somebody doesn't hate me. He is sleeping peacefully. I love to listen to his soft breathing in the long sleepless nights. I don't deserve an ounce of his love. But I have it anyway. I'm going to enjoy the moment. Fold into it the way I used to do back when I wasn't made wrong from top to bottom, when I wasn't all twisted up inside.

God, let me have it. Please let me have it.

Apples

2009-05-08T16:22:00.008-04:00

Comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

The Song of Solomon 2:5

I can't think of a more perfect object than an apple. They are beautiful orbs full of life-giving nutrients; Satisfyingly heavy purveyors of gravity; Aesthetically lovely in all forms in their various shades of monochromatic greens and reds; Blushed reds fading to greens; Deep reds mottled with green freckles. Shiny, clean, perfect globes. My mouth remembers the lucious sweetness of a Red Delicious, the powerful tartness of a Granny Smith, the candied goodness of a Honey Crisp. But of them all, my palate prefers the McIntosh. Eating a McIntosh apple is a flawless experience. I love the sound it makes when my teeth pierce its rough skin. A crisp sound. Like thunder condensed to fit in the palm of my hand. The crush, the violence of peel in teeth, the bittersweet flavor of apple meats tumbling against the tongue.

"You know, your grandfather loved McIntosh apples, too." My mom tells me this one day as I devour one.

"He did?"

"Oh yeah. In fact, when he died, they found apple cores lying all around his body. I guess he had a McIntosh apple feast before he passed away."

My mother's father. My grandfather. He was simply terrifying in his mystery. When I was a little girl there was nothing more foreign and intimidating to me than an older man, particularly my grandfather who I swear was a thousand feet tall. The tributaries of hard years were etched into his face and his skin was saturated with the scent of tobacco. I recall the mutual reluctance of our infrequent hugs. "Go give grandpa a hug, Gwen." He didn't want to and neither did I. It was a strange, scary embrace and I can still feel the way his rough, dark face would scratch mine. Sometimes, instead of giving me a hug he would press a wrapped candy into my little hand with his large one, a consolation prize.

Every summer, we would visit him at his upstate Pennsylvania mountain retreat. He lived in a small, beat up trailer in the center of 20 acres of untouched land. Like his land, he was reserved and quiet, mostly. When he did speak, his voice was deep and raspy, made raw from decades of cigarette smoking. It made me jump. I don't remember anything he ever said to me. I just remember the sound of what he said to me. I would look down at my shoes in embarrassment. There I stood and did the thing I always did the best. Close my eyes and wait for it to be over. I couldn't wait to get away, run outside of that claustrophobic space and go exploring his vast property, swimming in the crick, collecting crayfish and salamanders, and hiking in the thick woods.

He died when I was 10 years old. My dad came and picked Amy, LJ and me up from school in the middle of the day. It was a Thursday. He waited to tell us what was wrong until we got home.
"Well...here's the thing...umm...your grandpa died today." Dad said this tentatively, I think maybe because he was unsure of what we knew of death. I think he was worried about what else he might have to say or explain.

I knew he had been sick. Emphysema. I thought it was his fault. But nobody is supposed to die when you're ten. I started sobbing. It was the weirdest thing because I wasn't even sad. I wasn't sad even a little bit about grandpa dying. One second, I was perfectly normal and the next, I was falling into a puddle of tears. I remember how everybody just looked at me surprised at the severity of my reaction. It was grandpa. He was scary and he died and it was his fault, but I cried for a long time. Somebody held me, I think.

Many years later, I talked to my mom about grandpa. What is weird is that I never thought of him as her father, as her daddy, as the man who raised her until she began to tell the stories, until her brutal stories about their relationship started to unravel.

My mom grew up in the Appletree section of the suburban sprawl known as Levittown. Her dad was a war veteran like so many other 1960s dads. Maybe the war is what made him the way that he was: Stoic, unaffectionate, authoritarian. He supported his wife and five children. Made a home for them, provided the material things they needed to survive. I see pictures of the family at Christmas. A normal family surrounded by presents, an evergreen tree full of ornaments. A picture of my mom in her Easter dress with a little smile on her face. Grandpa with a girl on each knee. The proud, protective daddy. I hear stories of grandpa chasing my dad down the street with a shotgun in his hand and bullets out the mouth, "Stay away from my little girl if you know what's good for you!" He was a man full of sweet and sour. Shades of dark red fading to light green. A man full of lightness and darkness. He was just a man. But what a simple man does can hurt for a whole lifetime. It can haunt the mind of a woman and make it painful to live.

It is dark. I wake up to a warm, wet sensation underneath my body. Not again. Not this again. "Daddy, I wet the bed. I'm so sorry." I hear the water filling the bathtub. I hear his deep voice, rumbling. It is angry sounds but I am looking down at my feet, embarrassed. I am naked as I am thrown roughly into the freezing water. Not again. Not this again. I am shivering, crying, and ashamed. Daddy is angry. I am a dirty girl. I am a bad girl.

~

Sent to bed without supper again. I don't even know what I did wrong. I sulk in my room with an empty belly. My stomach grumbles loudly. My mom takes pity on me. She sneaks me a couple of apples from the tree in our backyard. "Here take these. Don't let your father catch you with those or he'll be angry with the both of us!" I am grateful as I taste the bittersweetness of the apple meats on my tongue. I fall asleep with hunger still, but with the juice of apples on my lips.

~

The family has gathered for dinner. Dad says, "How do you like it?" I say, "Oh, it's good." And then he laughs wickedly and says "Well, it's Hopper." I feel my stomach lurch. I run into the bathroom and vomit out my pet bunny. I can still hear Dad laughing in the kitchen as if he just told the greatest joke.

I think about grandpa's corpse sometimes. I have this image of him, laid out with only his creased face visible beneath a heap of apple cores and cigarette butts. A morbid blanket of the things he loved. A polarity of that which nurtures and that which destroys.

Grandpa loved McIntosh apples. And so do I. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. What else that was in him is also in me? How much of what is good in him did I inherit? How much of what is cruel? I know I have darkness in my veins, something twisted and uncomfortable pulsing through me at intervals. It feels inescapable like destiny, like roots implanted firmly in the soil. Some days, I wish I could pluck myself off of a tree like an apple. Take a bite. Swirl the taste of my own soul like apple meats on the taste buds of my tongue. Know once and for all, whether I am sweet. Or sour.

Pain, Pain Go Away

2009-05-07T16:01:00.007-04:00

I'm sorry for yanking this post earlier. Yes, it was a self-censure. I question the value of this post. While it is my accurate experience, it is definitely representative of what my reviewer deemed as me exorcising my pain. This type of blog post feels indulgent and therefore of little value. I get afraid of offending my readers and alienating them. But fuck it. I'll repost. I guess I need to have a little more faith that the readers of my blog can withstand these emotional temper tantrums

Ye Be Warned: This is Dark. And it's a total regression for me in "blog quality". Too long, unedited, self-indulgent, wah-wah-wah. And if you are not at all interested in my psychological assessment experience, that makes two of us. But I kind of have to get this shit off my chest or it will eat me alive. If you prefer to read something more lighthearted and possible funny, check this oldie out.

"There you are my sweet, sweet painkiller. Oh, how I've missed you...What's that? I just saw you this morning? Yeah, this is kind of hard to say...but...ummm...I'm kind of in love with you."

Fucking migraine headaches. I feel one coming on and I'm devastated. This is why I should never, ever cry. Every time I allow myself the luxury of what I like to call the "sobbing cries" I end up curled in a fetal position begging for somebody to shoot me in the head. No, really. I've actually asked for that. And if you ever had a migraine you are nodding your head right now saying, "I totally get that." Because migraines are much, much worse than death by bullet. I don't know anybody who owns a gun, though. So no one has ever granted my request. Lucky me.

I'm never going to cry again for the rest of my life. It's just not worth the hours of nauseating pain that inevitably follow. So what terrible event prompted my sobbing cries? If you don't want to hear the answer to that then go look at those pictures of what Pos describes as very disturbing kitty cats. Otherwise here is another excerpt from the chapter known as "Gwen's incessant bullshit".

I'll have to start you where I left off the other day which was on the threshold of some major psychological intervention. I couldn't even tell you the color of Dr. O's couch. I can only tell you that he did, indeed, have one. Dr. O himself is a pretty non-descript fellow. Mid-50's, average height, average build. The first 5 minutes of our session he told me that he was married, that he had a 15 year old son, where he lived, where he grew up, where he went to school, what degrees he had earned, what jobs he has had. I mean he told me even more stuff about himself but I was too stunned to even process it all. I have never had a therapist just give me that kind of information unprompted before. It was just bizarre and yet...I liked it. I liked peering behind what is typically this inpenetrable wall, that hard stone wall the therapist puts up lest you discover that he is, in fact, also a human. So, score one for Dr. O.

The session consisted of him asking me a bunch of uncomfortable questions, which I fully expected to be asked, and me answering them the best I possibly could, and mostly as honest as I could. I couldn't really lay all the crazy out on the table all at once. You have to work up to that. So, yeah, I told a few white lies. Sue me. I was honest about the really important stuff, the extreme vagaries of mood, tendency towards social withdrawal, and most importantly I confessed to the suicidal ideation. And, of course, as soon as you start talking about bridge jumping and shit you can just see the panic swell up in the therapist. It makes me feel bad because, really, handing a person your suicidal thoughts is equivalent to handing him a squirming handful of maggots. The doctor then started with the requisite, "Do you have plan?" Schtick.

Now, if I did have a plan (I do not) and really wanted to carry it out, I sure as fuck wouldn't tell a person who could stop me from doing so. Why in the name of all that's holy would I do that? I tried to explain to him that I am a very rational person, generally, who has been having disturbing thoughts come unbidden and unwelcome into my mind. That I am a person who has been plagued by intense emotional pain and bizarre thoughts my entire life, but recently it has all gotten progressively worse. I am to the point of breaking. "Things fall apart. The center will not hold."

He was freaked the fuck out by me, I could tell. When I jokingly said, "So, am I officially crazy?" He laughed nervously and then after a pause, a long drawn-out "Nooooo". He said, "But I am going to need you to see a psychiatrist for a consult."

"I'm not going to be taking any psychiatric medication. So, I don't really see the point of that."

"Well, given the...um...severity of your problems...I would just...uh...umm...feel better to have a second pair of clinical eyes evaluate you. It won't hurt to get...well...to get a second opinion."

This is humiliating to me. This request. But I tried to follow through on it, after arguing with my insurance company for an in-network list, which took several phone calls. The first couple of people I talked to told me that there weren't any in-network psychiatrists in my area. I had to call back several times before I got someone who I could coax out of her idiocy. After much annoyance, I had the list in hand. I called about 15 people on the list. And every one I called was either not taking new patients or couldn't see me for several months. One bitch sighed loudly when I told her the insurance I had (Blue Cross/Blue Shield). When I asked her what the problem was she said, "Well, we've been having problems with them paying. But that's not your fault." Of course, after she said that I started to feel like it was my fault, like I was this big fucking problem. I am big fucking hassle to everybody. Why would anybody want to help me? Of course, no one wants to help me. I'm just annoying everyone. Who the fuck do I think I am? Somebody that actually matters? See. This is how I unravel from one little comment. "It doesn't take much to rip us in to pieces."

I can't do this. I'm more stressed out and hopeless than I was before I began this process. I feel like shit about myself. I feel this tremendous weight of guilt for even embarking on this pointless endeavor. Of course, nobody wants to fucking help me. They can hear it in my voice that I am a fucking black hole, a bottomless, vile pit of need.

Dr. O. called me a few minutes ago. "Umm, hi Gwen. I think I gave you the wrong time for our appointment Monday. I can't see you at 2:45 after all. Could you come at 2:15 instead?"

This is the part where I realize that I am a piece of shit, worthless human being that is just inconveniencing everybody's fucking lives.

The Couch

2009-05-06T11:09:00.003-04:00

I have about 4 hours to go until I'm on the couch. I know it's probably going to be a normal couch, most likely beige, with a few pillows thrown about in non-garish colors. I would really prefer an old-fashioned pyscho-analyst couch. They're crisp and clean looking. Not soft, but comfortable. I'd like to lay down on one of those and close my eyes. I would not have to face this other human being while I humiliated myself. I wouldn't have to look in the eyes of the person who is privy to my rapidly unraveling psyche, my irrational opinions, my pathetic dead or dying dreams.

Therapy is like confession, only there's no privacy screen. I want that privacy screen. This whole process would just be so much easier if I didn't have to look directly at the doctor's face while I said, "I'm fucked up."

I'm worried about this encounter. I'm afraid that he will say, "You are beyond help or redemption. There is nothing to be done." I am worried about a strategically placed box of tissues sitting on the coffee table and the baby tears that its existence invites. I am worried about my ability to form a coherent thought. I am worried about boring him with my rambling. Because that's what I do. I fucking ramble when I'm nervous. I behave weirdly and girlish. I apologize constantly for stupid shit. Dealing with me, on any level, is just exhausting. This poor fucking guy. He has no idea what he's in for.

Olivia, Electra

2009-05-03T13:22:00.005-04:00

My Olivia has gone and got herself a nasty little Electra complex. On the way home from our anniversary celebration Thursday night, Liv piped up from the backseat and asked when it was her turn to have an anniversary.

"Well, you'll have an anniversary when you grow up and get married."

"When I grow up I'm going to marry my dad."

"Oh honey. Daddy is already my husband. You can't marry him because he's your daddy. You'll find a boy of your own to marry when you get big."

"NO! Daddy is my husband. Not yours. Daddy is my husband."

I don't even know how to respond to something like that. I know it's just a silly little whim on the part of my daughter. But it kind of freaks me out. I don't remember ever having these types of feelings about my father. I recall the first time I read about the Freudian/Jungian Oedipal theories and how I laughed dismissively. Penis envy? For real? Why in the hell would I want a piece of flesh dangling vulnerably between my legs? I like my tucked in, protected genitals just fine, thank you very much. I'm not so crazy about the aesthetic quality of the vagina, but the containment is just divine.

I don't claim to know more about the human psyche than Freud or any other great mind of human psychology. Obviously, based on my daughter's feelings and behavior, there is some truth to the theory that little girls have over-attachments to their fathers at some point in their early development. It's comforting to read that her feelings are completely normal and temporal.

"Liv, I have a feeling you might change your mind when you're grown."

"No, I won't."

Sigh. She's only 3 1/2. It won't be long before she's a teenager and hates her Dad and me with equal venom.

My 2 Cents

2009-05-02T08:30:00.003-04:00

I'm about to tell you a little story and by the end of it I will have exposed myself to be a fucking cheap-skate. I don't care. I've had it with these fuckers.

Every morning I buy a cup of coffee and a bottled water at Dunkin' Donuts. It comes to $2.98. Well, I hand the cashier $3.00, the cashier takes my money and puts it in the drawer and then closes the drawer. I stand there for a second or two and the cashier looks at me blankly until I walk away. For a while, I didn't even know what it was that was holding me in the spot. I'd walk away feeling like a moron. And then it occurred to me. These fuckers have decided that they don't need to give me my change. Yes, I'm aware that it's only 2 pennies. I'm aware that my annoyance at being denied 2 pennies in change qualifies me as a penny-pincher, and puts me in the same league as my grandmother, who still feels excited when she finds a discarded penny on the sidewalk.

I don't even know if the issue is even about the pennies themselves for me. Although, if you think about it, two pennies stolen, 5 days a week is a dime per week. At 52 weeks a year, that's $5.20. So Dunkin' Donuts is basically stealing $5 a year from me. How many more people are they ripping off on a daily basis? It's the principle of the thing. If you want to charge me $3.00, then charge me $3.00. Don't tell me it's $2.98 if you're going to charge me $3.00. Fucking fuckers. Give me my god damn pennies. It's bad enough they leave a little tip jar out begging for extra money. Like why in the name of fuck should I pay them a tip for pouring my coffee? I pay for coffee and now I'm supposed to give a tip to the cashier for actually pouring it and giving it to me? I don't get it.

The other day I had had enough. The cashier said, "That'll be $2.98." I handed her $3.00. She took my three dollars, put it in the drawer and closed it. I stood there with my hand out. She stood there staring at me blankly. She looked at my hand, then she looked at my face. She was confused. A fellow worker sidled up next to her and said something in a language I don't understand. The cashier sort of chuckled and finally, after about a minute of utter confusion, took a couple of pennies out of the tip jar and handed them to me. And she laughed while she did it, with such disdain and mockery. As in "this woman actually wants her own fucking money! Oh the nerve". I felt like shit for wanting my 2 cents.

Whatever. Maybe I'm cheap. But I shouldn't be made to feel like an asshole when I ask for my own change. In fact, I shouldn't have to ask for my own change. They should automatically and without mockery give me the change that is fucking owed to me. That is all.

Four Years of Hard Rain

2009-04-30T00:00:00.002-04:00

It rained on my wedding day. Internally I groaned because that was the wrong script. Like most girls, I'd dreamt about that day for a long time. In those dreams, I wore a gleaming white dress over-burdened with tulle and I posed magnificently with a throng of coquettish bridesmaids. There were tweeting birds, and possibly a harp, and definitely, most definitely, a bright yellow sun pasted delicately to a clear, cerulean sky. The groom in those dreams was always a blur, an afterthought. But whoever that man was he was supposed to be powerful enough to control the whims of the sky, or maybe that was God's job. I don't know.

When I woke up to the dreary greyness of that soul-tethering day, I held every hope in my heart that something golden would still arrive and rescue my little girl dreams, bring them back to me wrapped in rainbow paper on the beaks of tweeting birds. But the moment arrived when I realized that rain was going to keep right on at it's falling. So I did the only thing I could; I grew up and faced the rain.

Rassles wrote a great post last week about her passive, weak, piece of shit umbrella. I commented to her that I did away with umbrellas a while ago. That now, I just face the rain. Well, I think my wedding day was the day I learned that I could do that. I felt the rain. I felt for sure in my heart that I needed that rain the way I needed to feel the kicks of my baby girl 5 months new and strong in my womb. That rain was our baptism, symbolic of the tears of joy and sorrow we would be facing in the days ahead.

My bridal gown wasn't the one I envisioned in my dreams. I had to select a dress that would accomodate my ever-expanding belly. I had to accept the fact that I'd look like a marshmallow in all my photos. And when Todd saw me in my bridal gown before the wedding, it wasn't magic; It was real. I was holding my 9 month old niece in my arms as she wailed loudly in my ear. Todd walked in the room and said...something. And I said, "What?" So romantic. And then 5 months later, he held our crying newborn daughter in his arms and I cried too saying, "Lord, give me more drugs." And two years after that he held a sobbing me in his arms as I buried my sister. And 6 months after that he held me again as I cried over the loss of my breasts. Rain. Just so much rain in these four years.

I love our wedding photos with that grey backdrop. It's prettier than any sun or clear, blue sky. At my wedding and reception, as the rain fell outside, we said "I do" and we kissed and we laughed and we danced in a room made cozy and intimate by the fog against the windows that surrounded us. After the revelries of that night we fell exhausted into each other's arms, husband and wife. In the morning we woke up to a bright yellow sun and he said, "Shit, it's beautiful out, I'm going to play golf" and I said, "Fine, I'm going to brunch with my sisters and having a mimosa". That's so Gwen and Todd. Always will be. Happy Anniversary, Baby. I love you; especially when it rains.

Not OK

2009-04-28T22:34:00.010-04:00

Warning: This post is bleak and pointless

So from now on I'm going to include a disclaimer at the beginning of my bleak, hopeless, and shittily written posts. This is for the sake of all my readers who are sick of hearing that shit. So if you don't want to read something pointless and disturbing, check this out instead.

Pointless, yes. But definitely not disturbing.

I've come to the conclusion after much self-reflection and internal questioning that I am not OK. Not OK. Alisha was doing my hair on Saturday and as I sat trapped under one of those hair dryer things, a woman was sitting right across having the absolute audacity to crack her fucking gum obnoxiously in my presence. I came so close to murdering this woman for cracking her fucking gum. I was envisioning in my head stabbing her repeatedly with Alisha's sharp, hair-cutting scissors. I was pulled out of my murderous fantasy by a sharp pain in my hand and I looked down and noticed my fingernails were digging so deep into my hand that they practically broke the skin. Not OK.

I was driving home from said hair appointment and in the opposite lane came barreling down a semi going way too fast. I had this potent, overwhelming urge to drive my car into it's path. Like I pictured my hands turning the wheel really sharp. I heard the sounds of crashing in my head. I saw the pieces of metal and body parts and shit flying just everywhere. The body parts sort of pulled me out of my revelry. It's not my preferred way to go - bloody and dismembered. That would be so embarrassing. Also, I'm not the type to bring others down with me. Needless to say, I made the right choice to not drive into the path of an on-coming semi. Still: Not OK.

Yesterday, I looked at a sinkful of dirty dishes and I started crying. Like literal, wet, salty tears. Over dirty dishes. Not OK.

Today, I made myself some yummy split soup and ate it. And then afterward I was filled with such an overwhelming sensation of guilt and dread. Like just physically and emotionally sick with myself. I wound up heaving over the toilet. Bye bye soup, I barely knew ye. Not OK.

This morning when I went into work, I saw the same image hanging on the wall that I see every single day:
But today it was like I was seeing it for the very first time. I looked at it. And I looked at it. Then I think a little part of me died inside. Like withered, shriveled and died. What is the point of living in a world where people hang that kind of shit on walls as decoration? Not OK.

Now I'm not a mental health expert or anything, but I'm pretty sure these things don't happen to "normal" people. So I think it's that time again. Time to find a fucking therapist. The prospect of finding a therapist depresses me more than you know. The thought of it, like, exhausts me to no end. But I don't think I have much of a choice at this point. I'm so sick of being not OK. Have you ever been not OK? As much as I'd like to be the only person contending with crazy ass thoughts and feelings, it would be awful nice to know I'm not alone. Sometimes I look around at people and wonder how they all have their shit so together. Perfect hairstyles, cute outfits, expensive footwear, manicured fingernails, smiles on their faces, well-behaved children in their arms. I hate people that have their shit together. So jealous. Not OK.

I get to have another vaginal ultrasound tomorrow. Yippee! Nothing better than a dildo-ish wand in your vag and a search for cancer. At least, I'm coming down to the wire on the ovarian cyst/cancer issue. Just a couple more days until I know if I'm dying.

It's not all bleak and hopeless in my world, though, you'll be happy to know. My piss-ants are finally doing some cool shit. They're making tunnels and like building a little city. So there's something for me to put on my "Reasons to Live" list. Also on the list is Liv, who drew more pictures of people pooping today. And Thursday is my 4 year anniversary. We're going to DC this weekend to visit Todd's father's grave and go to the Holocaust Museum. So that ought to cheer me up.

A word to the people who know me in real life: I don't need an intervention. Don't even think about that shit. I'm not fucking kidding you. Obviously, I have the balls (or the stupidity) to remain open and honest about my feelings and experiences. And it actually makes me feel better. Just don't get all dramatic with the concern. It will only serve to piss me off and make me go anonymous on this blog and maybe in real life. And I know how sad you would be if I did that because you told me how sad you would be if I did that. Love!

Put Your Child To Work Day

2009-04-27T00:00:00.003-04:00

So we just had that Take Your Child to Work Day annual event this past Thursday. It's the one that started as Take Your Daughter to Work Day, the goal of which was to to "encourage employees...to invite a pre-pubescent-aged girl to spend the day with the employee at his or her workplace, with the aim of exposing girls to various career opportunities"(Wikipedia.org). Women have historically been limited in occupational opportunities, so this event was organized to improve self-esteem and encourage girls to pursue careers they might not have been aware of as options. Apparently, people got all up in arms about the fact that something that was designed to exclusively encourage young females (who are clearly in need of it), did not also include young males. God forbid we make little girls feel special in any way.

Is it just me, or does it now feel like the initial reason for and spirit of this annual event has been lost? When I worked at the hospital, I remember people bringing their kids to work along with toys, coloring books, and other "pass the time" items. They'd situate them at an empty desk and there they'd sit for the whole of the day playing with their stupid toys and making me uncomfortable with their creepy stares. And I thought, "Well, isn't the point of this exercise to inform children about the type of work you do? Shouldn't they be somehow involved your workday, in all its excitement and tedium?" I knew the day had lost all meaning when people I worked with started bringing their infants into work with them on that day. It irritated the shit out of me to have to hear a baby wailing while I slaved away at a job I hated so much to begin with. But I guess kids are never too young for us to begin exposing them to the grim realities of a lifetime of hard work. In fact, I propose a new annual event. Better yet, make it a daily one. Put Your Child To Work Day.

Child Labor Laws be damned. After all the crumbs I've vacuumed, toilets I've scrubbed, ass I've wiped, she fucking owes me.

Earning her keep.

Put a little muscle into it there, Toots.

I don't do windows. But she does.

And then she has the nerve to say, "Mom, when are you going to help me clean?"

Things I Might Have Said

2009-04-26T07:02:00.000-04:00

A long time ago, in a cafeteria far, far away.

"That's a lot of food for such a little girl."

Fuck you. No, really, fuck you. Because after you walk away and forget that you said that, I'm going to get up and dump this plate of food in the trash. And then, come Tuesday, I'm going to lie to my therapist about my goddamn food plan.

"I wish I had your willpower."

Fuck you, too. It doesn't take willpower to have a disease. In fact, I have the opposite of willpower because I don't have a modicum of control over my own impulses to destroy myself.

"Oh my god, you're eating chocolate?"

"...ummm...yeah." (looks down in shame and self-loathing)

"You don't look like you eat chocolate."

Go to hell. And while you're going there, I'll be going to the bathroom to puke up the chocolate I don't look like I eat.

"I'd love to be skinny like you. I wish I could have anorexia for a little while."

Yeah, I wish you could too. Then maybe you would know to never, ever, ever, ever, ever say that to a person who actually has anorexia. It's not a diet. It's not something you put on and take off with ease. It's a living fucking hell. It's the only way I know how to look in the mirror without spitting at my own face. It's the only way I know how to feel like I deserve to exist, to take up space, to breathe air. I had a chewable vitamin for lunch yesterday, you asshole, and I weighed myself 20 times. I threw up the chewable vitamin and I was afraid it didn't all come up. So I went to the gym and walked for 3 hours on the treadmill. Does that sound good to you? Is being this skinny really worth the price of admission?

Present day living room over a mocha and a really, really yummy pastry

Wow. That felt amazingly good. Better than any purge. People don't know what the fuck they're saying sometimes. I know it's not their fault. I've been reading old journals and just feeling sorry for the old me, for the things that were said to me when I was sick and then in recovery. It's so satisfying to see how far I've come, how different I am. Because this is what I would want to say to those clueless folks now:

"That's a lot of food for such a little girl."

Hell, yeah it is. I'm fucking hungry.

"I wish I had your willpower."

I don't have willpower. I try to listen to the voices of my body. I try to allow myself the pleasure of eating without punishing myself for it. I don't always succeed. I don't always succeed in eating every day. I don't always succeed in keeping the food in my belly. I don't always succeed in resisting the urge to lament, "I'm so fucking fat." But I usually do; and it's a thousand times better than that hell I called living before.

"Oh my God, you're eating chocolate!"

Yep. It's really good. Do you want some?

"I would love to be skinny like you. I wish I could have anorexia for a little while."

Well nobody would say that to me anymore because I'm a normal weight. But if they did I would have to just give them a blank stare and a number to a therapist.

And Now You've Seen it All

2009-04-25T14:56:00.005-04:00

Just when you thought I couldn't get any more personal, I offer you this, a picture of me wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and sporting a mullet-esque hairstyle.

And this, a picture of my baby sister being man-handled by Pinnochio (seriously, dude, let go of her head) and my brother doing his best impression of Don Johnson:

And this, me in 6th grade with very weirdly curled hair. I don't think a picture exists of me in all our family albums where my hair doesn't look like something went horribly wrong.

The Bridge

2009-04-24T12:04:00.002-04:00

I was debating whether to link my review or talk about it on here. That is because the review itself stung like Nutjobber’s proverbial “cluster of bees”. It’s what I asked for, what I deep down knew would happen. I was, like in so many other ways and choices I’ve made, drawn to the hurt of it.

So I let it sit there silently in the time-out chair of my brain. And, of course, at first I railed against it. “But you just don’t understand me”, “You don’t get me, or what I’m doing here.” After I got over the little girl tantrums I realized that a good writer should be able to transcend that divide between universes. A good writer should be able to build a long, sturdy bridge with her words so that a foreigner can make the trip safely and pleasurably into that private world. The things that are the most different than us could be the most interesting; we should want to go there and if that bridge is artfully constructed we don’t mind staying there for a little while in that place that is so different from our own. My bridge is in disrepair.

I’m not on a cross. Truly, I’m not. I’m just trying to work out what it is exactly that earned me 1 star out of a possible 4. I was the nerd in school who would get an A- on an essay and get all fucking worked up about it. That minus would, like, destroy me. So a 1 star feels like a D, which honestly would have had me swallowing a bottle of pills back in the day. So the result of the review is that now I am embarrassed by this body of work, by all that sloppy angst clogging up my archives. But it is what it is and this whole experience of blogging has been me learning and trying to reach different parts of me that were buried. And in the process, I’ve managed to eek out a lot of bleak and joyless blobs of words.

I realize that Nutjobber is right when he says, “Hopefully, she'll continue on her current path, resolutely elevating her writing to allow it to transcend her emotions, making them work for her instead of the other way around.” I let my emotions lead me around like a puppy on a leash and they are always the driving force behind what I put to paper.

The last thing I want is a reader to get a headache from my writing or to put his or her head in hands. And after hearing that my writing had that effect on someone, well my first reaction was, “What the fuck am I doing? Why am I doing it?” And then I wanted to take down my blog and start over somewhere new where I could reinvent myself and not be weighed down by previous failures. Stupid, stupid, I know. Then I read the comments, and I realized that I had readers, awesome readers, who do like my blog, my bleak, self-indulgent, bright red scream of a blog. So I’ll stick it out for a while and see if I can’t just be a big girl about this and actually use the criticism to morph into a better writer. Because I think I’m capable of better writing, at least I hope I am. I’m just not ready to give up just yet. This writing thing is in my bones and even if I stop blogging, I don’t think I’m capable of not writing, even if it is just for me.

So thanks Nutjobber for your honest and well-thought out opinion. It hurt to read it, but maybe I needed a kick in the ass to get me out of my rut and start writing like a grown-up instead of a little girl drowning in a pool of tears.

That's Why I Love it When you Tell me What to Do

2009-04-23T20:17:00.003-04:00

Men are God’s objects. I’m Eve, the reason we die. I shift under the weight of a million agonies resting upon my puny shoulders. I am 13 years old, in my room, doing my bible study. My hand is busy highlighting words that put me in my place. I have heard these words over and over and over already in countless hours of church, study, and life. But a girl can never learn this lesson enough.

"Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted to them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also said the law." - 1 Corinthians 14:34

I bite my tongue, hard. Silence. This is how I should sound. There is not a single thing in my head worth communicating. A man can’t learn anything from a woman. That is just the way it is with God.

"Likewise, you husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel" - 1 Peter 3:7

I look at my small hands, fingernails bitten down to raw nubs. These hands can’t hold the heaviness of life. I think of all the things I need to be protected from. It is just the way I am made, hollowed out like a ceramic doll. I am weak, delicate. So delicate, in fact, that everything inside of me is already broken.

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. - 1 Corinthians 11:3

This hierarchy is embedded in my living tissues; it is soaked into the ventricles of my heart. I have swallowed it whole. I have seen it, while I held my own silence in my clasped hands, fragile as an egg. When the men pray, the women say "Amen". When the men say, "This is where you are to go", the women go there. And it feels safe to be there, in that place where your only job is to nod your head and answer, “Yes, of course, whatever you say.” Whatever you say. You’re the boss. You decide. I don’t know. What should I do? What do you think? Can I go?

“You don’t need to ask my permission.” Todd is incredulous, exasperated. But what he doesn't say is that he likes it too.

I lay my head in the crook of his arm and breathe the sweat of his scent. I sigh heavily and then I cast out my line, "Why do you even love me?

"That's a really good question." And he sort of laughs in the way that men do when they really don't want to be having this conversation.

"I'm serious. I really want to know." I wrap a tendril of his chest hair around my finger and tug it slightly. I really want to know.

"Well...One of the reasons I fell in love with you is because you've always given me my space."

And it's weird because I don't look at his space as something that is mine to give. He owns what he owns and there is a wall around those privates places. And sometimes he will come home at 2 am, with that beer and cigarette smell I love so much saturating his clothes and his skin and his mind, and I don't ask. I don't even think to ask. He gets to have those spaces, separate from me. He is entitled to have those spaces in a way I could never feel entitled to have spaces of my own.

"I just love you, OK? Always will." He kisses the top of my head and that's the end of that. He says the prayer and I say, "Amen".

I don't need to ask permission. But what he doesn’t get is that I do. It’s like something inside of me won’t let go of the hierarchy. The way it always is with God. I learned my lessons early and they don't just go away when you're not looking at them anymore.

In bed at night, he sings a different song. There is nothing I can do but surrender. It is the most natural thing in the whole wide world. He tells me "This is where you are to go" and I go there. And the next day, when I remember pinned arms, firm commands, helpless sounds falling from my mouth, the insistence and ardor of something stronger than me, I feel a peace. Amen. It is always that way with me.

Bibles and Bones

2009-04-22T01:28:00.002-04:00

Your mouth tastes like Marlboros and Miller Lite. It shouldn't taste good, but it does. It's what I wanted for a long time - that taste. Your eager tongue is pressing into mine, your strong hips pushed up against my bony ones. I feel the sharp edges of my pelvic bones jutting out and for a split second I worry about them. Twenty-five years old and yet I am all girl. My breasts are so tiny you can barely cup them in your hand. I don't know what the hell I am doing with this dark groping in the night. It is 2 am. I am a girl playing at being a woman. I feel your hand tugging at the waistband of my underwear. I grab it.

"Wait."

You sigh because you don't want to. I feel the hotness of your breath, the drunk air it has created. My head is thick with a strange mix of desire and dread. No, I want to. I know about this and that it is going to happen.

I saw it in dreams and in girlish fantasies. It played out on the community college stage during our run of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", the push and pull of that dance. You were R.P. McMurphy in your mental patient scrubs. I was Nurse Flynn in my bleached white uniform, my hair clipped in a tight bun. I sat at my perch on the stage, a necessary backdrop. I was constantly on-stage, in character, in my little private box. I watched you at your craft. That is who you became: R. P. McMurphy. And I fell in love with him. And when you walked behind set and became Michael again - then I fell in love with you. I tried to stay in character while you mouthed words at me with that obscene mouth of yours, leaning against a wooden beam backstage, while the play went on in front of me.

"I'm going to fuck you."

"You are so hot."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was a sort of music. And for the first time in my life, something a man said to me made me wet. Whatever it was, it was new to me. I mean that kind of want, that kind of aching, maddening desire. I had never known it before, not with anyone. Not with my boyfriend who I dated for 5 long and chaste years. Our gropings in the front seat of his car after long days at Bible study were far from passionate. That wasn't about lust. That was me bucking up against religion. That was me flirting with fornication. That was me giving him a hand job and hoping he liked it. I wasn't even there. The invisible girl. And then what happens next is you actually try to become invisible. You fall away into your own body. Because you can only blame religion for so long. Eventually, you need a shiny new reason, something entirely new to hang your virginity on.

It was a perfect excuse. Because when you are anorexic all your work, all your energy, goes into keeping things out of your body. That is the focus of your life: Deflection. I mean if I couldn't open up my body to the experience of a cinnamon roll, I certainly couldn't open it for a man either.

Emerging from that abyss was painful but rewarding. I felt raw, newly hatched. Once I started in recovery, everything about the world changed, or at least my perception of it. And you were the first thing I saw. The charismatic, jock turned brilliant actor that people either exquisitely loved or exquisitely hated. You were the guy that was perpetually late and ever essential. Nothing worked without you; Not rehearsal, not beers afterward, not drunken closing night debauchery. You were the guy who knew every single word to Under the Sea and would sing it with abandon. You were the guy who read books like White Oleander and wrote poetry on the sly. You were the guy who insisted, with all seriousness, that Short Circuit 2 was the most critically overlooked movie of the 20th century. You were the guy that all the girls wanted to fuck and hated themselves for it.

I knew you would never belong to me. You loved Dana, the prima ballerina who wouldn't put out. But I closed the lid on the jewelry box and she was gone. It was someone else's turn to disappear. I knew that your hands were daggers. I knew that your arc was sharp and that everything about your game was a lie. I didn't care. I wanted that hurt. I didn't need my first time to be tender. I needed it to be wrong, dirty, harsh. I wanted you to corner me with lips, jagged and sexual. I wanted so desperately to undo the past 25 years of chastity with something wicked. Anything soft would have been too much to bear.

"Stop." My hand on your hand, poised at my hip. You don't want to stop, but you do anyway. There's a gross part of me that wants you to keep going despite my protests. The dirty parts of me hidden for years under bibles and bones are afraid of what's between your legs, of what's between my legs, of what has to happen here, now in my childhood twin bed. I feel like a child in this bed; 88 pounds of nothing, 25 years of nothing.

"Are you okay?" you whisper. Your voice is hoarse from a long night of cigarettes and beer. "You don't have to...do this. I mean, it's ok. If you don't want to..."

"I want to." I pull your face to mine. Marlboros and Miller Lite. The weight of you against the feather of my body.

"You are so tiny...so fucking tiny." You go into your own little world.

You like my bones. You play the piano of my ribcage, you gnaw at my collarbone, flip me on my stomach and run your rough finger down the divide of my back, hitting each ridge along the way. Maybe you are closing your eyes and pretending I am Dana, but I don't care. I am not invisible; not to myself. Not anymore. You put me on my back again. You are rough and strong. You aren't afraid of what you are, of what has to happen now.

I feel you push against me, hard as a boulder. I open to it. Finally.

"Please. Oh please."

And when it happens, it feels like forever. Like this moment of time is caught on a loop. I wince from the pain of breaking. Then, I change my mind.

"Stop. It hurts. I want to stop." I am embarrassed by my little girl tears.

But it's too late. You are already there. "Gwen, just breathe. I'll stop if you want, but just listen to me. Ok? You're ok. You're a woman. You can do this."

I nod my head in consent. It's time. I'm a woman. I'm a woman. I can do this. And I do.

Bratz-worst

2009-04-21T00:00:00.001-04:00

My home is the scene of a crime. A massacre, if you will. If you have a weak stomach, you might want to cover your eyes for this shit. It's fucking brutal:

Warning: Crime Scene Photographs to Follow

Evidence includes: 2 tiny golf clubs, 1 little hairbrush, several miniature shoes, a tiny snowboard, and a pair of mini-snow goggles.

Check out the Bratz doll with the missing feet. That's one thing that creeps me out about Bratz dolls (one of about a thousand things). You don't just take their shoes off. Their whole foot comes off along with their high-heeled hooker shoe. But I have to admit that this an improvement on the Barbie shoes of yore. They never fucking stayed on Barbie's foot. Plus, the design of the Bratz doll shoes are a great improvement on the bland old Barbie shoe. I love me some hooker boots. I have to also confess, I love their clothes. Yes, I said that shit. Tell me you wouldn't rock these jeans:

or these boots:

(Ignore the crumbs scattered beneath hooker boots and pack of cigarettes in upper right corner)

Now the blowfish lips, the make-up caked doe eyes, and the round head that is large enough to have its own moon - these are all things I could do without. But most of the clothes are just too fabulous to dismiss off hand.

I've noticed there's much hatred in the parenting community towards these dolls. They're "slutty", "trashy", and "over-sexualized". Apparently by allowing my daughter to play with them I am an irresponsible parent. If she keeps brushing their long, flowing hair, if she keeps dressing (and undressing) them in their risque outfits she will definitely become a prostitute or a stripper. Because all girls who wear mini-skirts and too much make-up are either a whore or a pole dancer. Except not really. Besides it's a fucking doll not a guidance counselor. I just really doubt that playing with a doll can make or break a child's future.

When people say that they hate the dolls and won't let their kids play with them because they're creepy, weird, strange, scare the living shit out of them, I can respect that. I get that. I just really hate when parents get this self-righteous gleam in their eyes and emphatically state: I wouldn't let my daughter play with those dolls. As if they're some kind of mother of the year or some shit and I'm absolutely not.

But let's be honest here. I think we all know by now that we, the parents of the Jackson family, are certainly not going to be winning any Parents of the Year awards in the near future. That's okay with me. I cuss like a trucker, Todd smokes like a chimney, and we both drink like fish. And speaking of fish, he won me a goldfish at the carnival on Saturday night. He tossed a little plastic ball into a cup and Voila! we had ourselves a cute, little fishy. I bought a small plastic tank and a plastic cup of fish food. I carried that precious fucker around the carnival for 2 hours, walking very gingerly all the way lest I jostle it too much. On the way home, we argued over a name for the newest member of the Jackson clan. Liv wanted "Olinta" and I wanted "Jaws". When we got home I dropped in the tank some flakes of food and we watched eagerly while he ignored them. "Not hungry little guy? Maybe tomorrow." I yelled at the kitty, "Leave that fishy alone. He is not your dinner!" The first thing Sunday morning, I run out into the kitchen with eager anticipation, with way more happiness and childish glee than I should have. And here's what I found:

RIP Jaws/Olinta - There was just never enough time to figure out what your fucking name was.

Gym-rats

2009-04-20T12:53:00.007-04:00

I got trapped behind a car the other day that had one of those stupid personalized license plates I love so very much. GYM-RAT. Yep, that's what it said. GYM-RAT. Like, why in the name of fuck would a person feel the need to advertise that? Am I supposed to admire you from where I sit in the driver's seat of my sedan? Does it make you feel better to know that I am now aware that you're a douchebag?

I can't think of a more appropriate moniker for these assholes that swarm to the gym in their every spare and pathetic moments of life than "gym-rat". Because like actual rats, these people give me a shiver of unease and an overwhelming feeling of skeeved-out dread whenever I even just think about them decked out in their stupid ass workout "gear" and those wrist contraptions that measure every fucking step their specialty sneakered foot takes. I went to buy sneakers once and I could not believe all the fucking kinds that were on the wall. There was running shoes, trail-running shoes, cross-training shoes, and even walking shoes. Like, what the fuck is the difference? They all looked the same. I just wanted a pair of fucking sneakers. Why does life have to be so hard? And if you're sitting there thinking, "Well Gwen, a cross-training shoe has a...." Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Seriously. Stop your brain from thinking for one second. I can't handle the energy that your brain is putting forth into the innocent universe about the attributes of a god-damned sneaker.

That's what is really gross about these people. The Energy. They're always like revved up about shit. They're always a-doing. It's like flit here, flit there. And they have their own diets. They eat weird things like energy drinks and protein bars and powdered shit they bought at GNC for like $100. Like why can't they eat normal food? And they're always talking about how "they have to get to the gym." They always say that shit out loud. Like they can't just keep it to themselves in their own brains. They have to let the world know that they are going to go to the gym. And I particularly hate it when they say, "Oh my God, I haven't been to the gym in two days! I'm so lazy." It's like, "Hey! Way to make the rest of us feel like shit about ourselves."

I'm not saying that running will automatically qualify you as an asshole. I run sometimes. But I can freely and readily admit that it sucks. The whole time I'm running there are three words going through my head. Goddamnit, Fuck, and Donuts. Seriously, I need to take a couple of painkillers before I can even think about going for a run. As I told Dirty Pirate Hooker on her blog last week, No Pain, No Gain - my ass. The only time pain is good for us is when it's followed by a cataclysmic, earth-shattering, mind-blowing orgasm. When was the last time you went for a run and had an orgasm after you were done? I'm going to guess never.

Rats are insidious creatures. They are sneaky, disease carrying rodents. Yet some people actually keep them as pets. I have a friend Brandy who swears they are cutest, most precious animals and that they make the snuggliest of pets. Well, Brandy used to live in the apartment next to my sister. Her snuggly little rats showed their gratitude towards her kind ownership by escaping through the walls and making a new nest in my sister's bed. Seriously, my sister woke up with a rat trying to snuggle up beside her. So she did what any sane, normal person would do. She went out immediately and bought some rat poison and fed it to those fuckers as a bed-time snack. By the time Brandy came around trying to find her precious rats it was already too late.

What's the moral of that story? I'm not entirely sure. I'm thinking that if you're married to a gym-rat keep a good eye on him and his whereabouts. Because somebody might just get fed up with his fucking antics and put some cyanide in his energy drink. I mean, not me, but somebody.

P.S. If you figured out that my lazy-ass is just largely jealous of this population, well then aren't you a psycho-analytical smarty-pants.

Madeline Spohr

2009-04-19T18:32:00.003-04:00

About now everybody's heard about the passing of Madeline Spohr. I didn't know this sweet, little angel and I don't know her parents. But I can't stop thinking about all of them. It's strange the way that certain things can have such a deep impact on my emotional state. I mean things that have nothing to do with me, really. Things that shouldn't distract me or make me sob heartily while I rock my Livy in the tightest of embraces.

"What's wrong Mom? Why are you crying?"

"I'm crying because a baby died, Liv. A baby was sick and then she died."

"Now she's in heaven with Aunt Amy?"

"Yep. That's where she is now. But her mom and dad will miss her."

And then she and I snuggled and watched the memorial tribute video together.

I can't stop talking about Maddie. I talk about her to anyone who will listen. It's so hard for me to accept that we live in a world where babies can die. I mean, logically I know that it happens more than it should. But emotionally I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the fragility of human life, with the injustice of a life cut unbearably short. I remember talking with Amy about her death and the one thing she always made a point to say was, "At least I've had a chance to grow and live. There are babies and kids who don't even get the chance to grow up." She knew that life didn't make sense whatsoever. She knew firsthand that life was one fucked up event after another with occasional bouts of joy sprinkled in.

My heart breaks for Maddie's parents and for any other parents who have had to say goodbye to their little ones. When I think about the pain of that, I get sick to my stomach. I can't even fathom the torturous, soul-destroying anguish of losing a child. I feel helpless in the face of it. I look at my little girl, napping soundly in the bed next to me, and I feel an odd guilt but also a gnawing fear. Life is so random. You just never know what is coming up around the corner.

I've noticed a change in me since I heard about Madeline's death. When Liv says, "Mom, come see what I made!" I don't say, "Not now, Liv, I'm busy." I go and see what she's made. I tell her that her block tower is an amazing achievement of architecture. When she sidles up next to me, book in hand, and says, "Please read me a story." I say, "Okay! Let's do it." I know that there are parents out there who would give anything, any fucking thing, to see their dead child's block tower, to read him or her just one more story book. I know that I am one of the lucky ones. So far.

It's my Potty and I'll Cry if I Want to

2009-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

So my kid is finally shitting and pissing in the proper place. It only took two years of intensive potty training for her to learn how. All the tears, the accidents, and the bribes of stickers, temporary tattoos, and cheap dollar store trinkets were all worth it just to see one single picture. Just when I think I can't love my daughter any more than I do, she draws this:

Piss ants

2009-04-16T17:35:00.013-04:00

Every year at this time we get a wee little infestation of ants. Now I consider myself a lover of all creatures great and small, but I really, really want to kill these motherfuckers. I'd prefer some extermination contraption that would make their deaths slow and painful that would also contain some kind of auditory component the sole purpose of which would be to magnify their screams. Such is my hate for these intruders. I bet they have hideous, smug faces, which I'd love to burn right off them with a magnifying glass and a ray of sunlight. They don't don't sell anything to kill ants that's, say, as deliciously sadistic as the mouse glue-trap. Those glue traps are fucking brutal. We put them out when we had a mouse problem when I was a little girl. So this baby mouse got caught in it and it was all shivering and helpless. I was fucking hysterical, screaming at my dad to take it out of the trap. Alas, once a mouse is caught in the glue, there's no coming out. Here is the entry from my diary about that shit:

May 18, 1986
Dear Diary,

Murderers, that's what we are. A thing that breathes lives feels just like me. gone forever. creatures, beasts, mice. cute little things. dead. I want them to live forever.

Gwen

I'm not even kidding. What a fucking nerd I was. Oh well, I was only 10. I had plenty of time to learn that murder can be a good thing. After 10 years as a vegetarian, I took that first bite of Alaskan crab and I realized: it can make you feel really, really good. It didn't matter that the only reason I broke my vow of self-righteous vegetarianism was to impress a guy I wanted to fuck. Which was pretty stupid, all things considered. I mean he was going to fuck me whether I ate the crab or not. I was so stupid to think, "Maybe he'll think I'm weird if I don't eat this crab leg and then he'll decide he doesn't want to have sex with me." I mean he was dangling that crab leg in front of my face like it was his own cock. And I fell for it like a moron. Regardless,

crablegs = yum

The Deadliest Catch = Bad-ass, fearless fisherman

Wholesale slaughter = bad feelings so I don't think about where all that filet mignon comes from.

Filet mignon = Love at first bite

Ants = Die, motherfuckers, die

Liv got one of those miniature ant farms in her Easter basket from Grandmom. The directions say to start 4 little tunnels with a stick in the gel (which provides all the nutrients and water they could ever need), collect 5-10 ants, put them in the ant farm and close the lid. I thought, "Cool. I have a ton of ants in my kitchen. I don't even need to go outside for this little mother/daughter project". I reasoned that the ants in my kitchen must be some kind of super-breed. Afterall, we do live on the second floor. They've figured out that the lady who lives on the second floor doesn't sweep her floor nearly as much as the lady on the first floor, therefore: more crumbs = more food. It's worth the extra effort to get to the Jackson kitchen. Babies drop a lot of shit on the floor when they eat.

I spent a good hour Friday night trying to find the best and the brightest of this mensa of ant colonies. I sought out the wily ones, the sneaky ones, the ones that were the hardest to catch. My ant farm was going to be the one that changed the course of antkind. These ants were lucky. Afterall, next chance I get I'm going to Home Depot for some weaponry and it's going to be a bloodbath. A ruthless genocide if you will. So this little box of gel I was trying to coax them into was their safe harbor, their Noah's ark of sorts. And those little fuckers haven't shown a hint of gratitude. They haven't started a super-colony. They haven't built little gel mountains. They haven't done any of the shit the pamphlet said they would do.

Instead, the 9 lucky ants have been huddling, climbing on the underside of the lid, playing dead, and I'm pretty sure, if their hands could be seen with the naked eye, flipping me off.

"Todd - the ants aren't doing anything."

"Well they're not really ants. I mean they're not ants ants. They're kitchen ants."

"Spoiled rotten, lazy ass fucking kitchen ants."

Good Fences Make Bad Writers

2009-04-15T12:50:00.003-04:00

Recently I was told that I was sitting on a tall, wide fence. Of course, it was in the context of comments I made on the website over at AAYSR. I seriously didn't get it at the time. Me? A fucking fence sitter? I sat with the idea of it for a while. I let it simmer, and bubble, and boil. And then I realized: I am sitting on the fence and I have a fence post uncomfortably wedged in my ass.

I don't know what is wrong with me lately. Well, actually I do. It's just really hard to admit you're a pussy. It's really hard to admit that you're writing is stale and empty and devoid of personality. I'm trying to figure out if I have the figurative balls to be the kind of writer that I need to be. Am I brave enough to put down the shit that is really in my head? Can I get down off the fence and explore the fucked up shit that festers in my skull, the questions, the bitter and broken dreams. The truth. Does anybody really tell the truth anymore?

Fuck it all. I'm a black hole. Maybe there's nothing left to say. And even if there was, is it even worth the risk of exposing myself even more than I already have? I think about the nude pictures of me possibly floating around somewhere on the internet. Pictures I sent to some guy back when I was a damn fool, but hotter than I realized. Do I worry about them? Not as much as I should. Like I said, I was hot. Who cares if some guy is jacking off to them in some skeevy apartment? Ok. I do a little bit. But why does it matter? I'm not that girl anymore. Or am I? Isn't what I do here the same thing but without the titty show?

I'm sick of not committing to this work. And you can laugh at that and mock it and say, "Girl, you're not even getting paid to do this shit." And I'll still say it's work because it's hard and it takes its toll and it wakes me up to jot something down on paper and it stays in my head - the words, the language. How I craft it and manipulate it and mold it. If that isn't work than I don't know what is. I want to get back to that place where I hit, "Publish Post" and gasp, "Should I really have posted that?" That would be me exiting the proverbial fence and finally telling the stories I need to tell, the real ones that might hurt me to talk about, that might confound others or offend them. I can't create anything beautiful if I lie. And sad as it sounds, I don't have anything else to offer but my stories, raw and unfiltered.

MADD (Mothers Against Damn Disney)

2009-04-10T12:14:00.004-04:00

Some rants are a long time in the making. My anger about this particular issue has been brewing for, oh, about 20 years now. It's now reached boiling point and is bubbling over my cauldron like the foam that comes out of a boiling pot of spaghetti noodles when you leave it on the stove too long. What the fuck does Disney have against mothers? What is it Disney? What did we ever do to you? Because Fairy tale princess land is a dangerous fucking place for mothers.

Let's do a quick run down, shall we?

Snow White's Mom - Dead
Cinderella's Mom - Dead
Jasmine's Mom - Dead
Ariel's Mom - Dead
Belle's Mom - Dead
Pocahontas' Mom - Dead

I haven't seen Sleeping Beauty but I'm pretty sure her mom is dead, too. Would it kill them to show a human mother having some sort of positive impact on her daughter's life? Apparently it would. If there were actual, living mothers actively involved in these dumb ass princesses lives, they wouldn't have turned out to be such doe-eyed, naive, boy crazy, empty-headed imbeciles.

Now I love The Little Mermaid. When ~~I watch it~~ my daughter watches it, I sing the shit out of those songs. "What do they got? A lot of sand! We got a hot crustacean band!" I mean, is there any better lyric in the history of all lyrics than that? You know that scene where Triton uses his sceptre to destroy the statue of Prince Eric? Well, I guess we're supposed to feel all sorry for Ariel. Like her dad is so mean or something. And I used to feel that way, too. But now when I watch it, I think "Go Dad!" If I found Olivia had a life sized statue of some boy she liked in her bedroom, I'd smash that thing to little tiny pieces too. And then I'd take her to have some psychological counseling pronto. See, this is where Daddy Triton drops the damn ball.

Mommy Triton would have been ALL OVER a sixteen-year old girl who kept putting herself in constant danger to attract a man she's never even met before. Mommy Triton would have been all "Oh, HELL no, girl" and grounded her ass for going to the surface. Then guess what? No Ursula blackmailing a susceptible love-sick teenager. No threat to the whole way of life of all the undersea folk when her little plan goes awry. No marriage of a SIXTEEN YEAR OLD girl to man she barely knows at the end of the story. Instead, Ariel starts focusing on her academics and her natural musical talent. She graduates from high school with high honors, goes to college, becomes a successful musician. Now that's a happy ending.

Baby's Named A Bad, Bad Thing

2009-04-06T22:44:00.006-04:00

"LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Former "Bachelorette" Trista Sutter and husband Ryan are proud parents to a baby girl, People reported.

According to the mag, Blakesley Grace was born on Friday, weighing in at 6 lbs., 2 oz and is 19 inches long."

What the fuck kind of a name is Blakesley? That has to be one of the most horrible, nauseatingly ridiculous names I've heard in a long time. And people, there are tons of terrible names being saddled on babies every day. Happy Birthday! Here's a stupid, "uneekly" spelled moniker you'll have to explain and excuse for the rest of your life!

I knew I wasn't alone in my hatred of atrocious baby naming trends the day I found this wonderful blog called Baby's Named A Bad, Bad Thing. It helps to know I'm not the only one who cringes when reading the birth announcements in the paper, or hearing the new name of a co-worker's granddaughter. It's an unnatural, fuming distress I feel when someone tells me that they named their daughter Ryan or Owen. I have to stifle the urge to say, "Umm, why? That's a boy's name." I could maybe understand if there were some sort of shortage of beautiful female names. There is not. In fact, there are thousands upon thousands of rarely used girl names.

You know what else? I want to tear out my eyeballs with my bare hands when I see beautiful, traditional names butchered with weird spellings. Here's how I imagine the naming process goes.

"What about Ashley?"

"Well, that's a cute name. But it's too...I don't know, normal. I want my little girl to be different and unique. Let's spell it: Aashleigh."

"Wow. That's so edgy."

Except it's not edgy. It's stupid. It's still Ashley only it's spelled completely wrong. It makes me seethe. I've seen shit like this: Alyvya. Myshell. Tyffyny. I'm not kidding. I've seen that shit with my own eyes. There is a "Y" disease going around. Young mothers are especially vulnerable. There currently is no cure.

I'm not saying that we need to go back to the days when everyone was named John and Mary. A name doesn't have to be boring or uninteresting. I just wish people would stop making up names by pushing together random cutesy syllables, or rearranging great, traditional names into atrocious mockeries of the originals, or selecting surnames/occupation names for their children that have no linkage to their own family heritage. We're talking about a name. We're talking about a thing that someone will be carrying around with them for the whole of his or her childhood and teenage years, possibly his or her entire life. It's not about our vanity as parent. It's not a time to flex our creative muscle and get "crazy" and "artistic". Our names do not define us, but I can't help but think they could hurt us. Tyfyny just might not get the call for the job interview, while Katherine would. It is isn't fair. But that's life.

So you can add "name snob" to the growing list of my terrible qualities. I own it along with all the rest of them. I don't expect you to give a fuck about my opinion on modern trends in human nomenclature. But for the love of God, Buddha, the sun, or whatever else it is you're worshipping, please don't name your next child Neveah. I hate that name with the burning hot magma of a million trillion volcanoes, with the force of at least 10 atomic bombs, and possibly with the force of the big bang. That's a whole lot. The name Neveah needs to die a quick, painless death and all the children that have been saddled with it need to be released from their bondage and given sweet, sensible names like Eve or Lily or Sarah. Together we can rid the earth of this plague of "Neveah is heaven spelled backwards!1!!! Isn't it the kewlest name eva?" It's not even heaven spelled backwards. It's haeven spelled backwards. And isn't a backwards heaven more like hell? Anyway, I hate it. HATE.

For the very few that do give a fuck about my opinion, here are a few of my pretentious and arrogant naming rules.

1. You can't go wrong with a traditional name when it is assigned to the correct gender and, this is most important, spelled correctly.
2. Unusual names are fine if they are actual names and not just words (Bird, Apple, Chair, Moon) or made up with your ridiculous imagination. There are tons of amazing, beautiful names from various cultures and languages to choose from.
3. If you must name your child something weird or weirdly spelled, then at least have the decency to make this your child's middle name. Or, better yet just use the name for your pet. But not a cat. Cat's have low tolerance for bullshit names. Try naming your cat Apple and see how quickly it starts pissing all over your carpet.
4. If you MUST use a surname as a first name, could you at least try to use a family name? And please don't burden your daughter with a surname for a first name. There's really no need for a girl to be named Walker or Jackson. That's just wrong.

This is all the bitch I have left in me. Seriously, I've been so preoccupied with living that I haven't had much time for bitching and moaning and acting like my opinions actually matter in the scheme of things. And that's a damn shame.

Morphine Sweet Morphine

2009-04-03T23:43:00.003-04:00

mmmmm. Morphine. My pain management doctor has put me back on the stuff. I have to admit that there is something so surreal about it. I've always equated morphine with icky things, like hospice care or open heart surgery. As much as I wax poetic about painkillers, I've always felt strange about morphine. So today when my doctor suggested I try it again to help get my nerve pain under control, I was reluctant. She assured me it was a low-dose and then she said, "It's much better to go on the continuous morphine then to increase your percocet. The Tylenol in the percocet is what you need to be careful about. Opiates are not as harmful to the body."

Who would have known? I mean, I feel like people are always talking about the dangers of drugs, and particularly opiates. Isn't it insane to think that Tylenol is actually more dangerous? And yet, I can purchase Tylenol over the counter along with a soda and a pack of gum. We live in a weird society.

I was talking with my mom a while ago about pharmaceuticals. Her and I both have problems with severe anxiety. And her and I both have difficulty getting adequate treatment for that anxiety. After my sister passed away, obviously, my mom was having a really hard time dealing with that loss. She asked her doctor for some Xanax and he acted like she was some drug-seeking fiend. My mom was grieving the death of her daughter and that asshole decided to make her feel like shit for asking for some relief. He offered some bullshit anti-depressant instead, which, of course, didn't do anything to help her. That's what my primary doctor has always offered to me for my severe anxiety and panic attacks in the past, some bullshit anti-depressant. I'd be like, "I'm not depressed. I'm anxious." And he'd say, "Well try this anyway." And then I'd try it and I'd end up eating like a fucking pig, gain weight, and then become depressed. So the anti-depressants always made me feel depressed and I'd still be anxious and unable to sleep at night with uncalled for fears swirling in my brain. Why are doctors so afraid to give people real relief from their problems? Sometimes I think the fear of addiction has caused doctors to not prescribe medications when they are very desperately needed.

And can somebody please tell me what the difference is between needing to take a Xanax every day to control your anxiety and needing to take a Zoloft every day to control your depression? My point is that the former is usually considered an "addiction" and the latter is usually considerd a "treatment of a psychological disorder". Why is one thing slapped with a bad label and the other not? I really don't get the difference at all.

Anyway, I'm very lucky to have found an amazing doctor who takes my physical pain seriously and gives me the medications I need to live a full and productive life. My nerve pain from the mastectomy has been excruciating lately, seriously kicking my ass. And to be honest, I can't help but think it is somehow related to, you guessed it, my anxiety. I've been fretting about this ovarian cyst for weeks now and I have to wait four more weeks for any definitive resolution on the cancer question. (My CA-125 levels were very low, which is pointing in a non-malignant direction. Thank God.) Anyway, maybe if I got on some Xanax I wouldn't be so tense and bitchy all of the time and my body wouldn't react by stabbing me incessantly in the chest. Wouldn't that be lovely?

And now my Morphine is tiring me the fuck out. Have sweet dreams, lads and ladies. You know I will.

Crossroads

2009-04-01T10:47:00.007-04:00

When I was a little girl, my grandmother had a statue of the Virgin Mary on her coffee table. Of course, I didn't know it was that Mary at the time. I thought, "Look at the old fashioned lady holding the pretty necklace." Hung on her delicate ceramic hands was a beaded necklace holding a cross. While the grown-ups talked and my brother and sister played, I picked up that necklace and slid it over my neck. I was a princess. I was an old-fashioned lady wearing a pretty necklace. Suddenly, my mom grabbed me by the arm, pulling me out of my fantastical reverie.

"What are you doing? Take that thing off. NOW!" She was in a state of panic.

I had no idea what I had done wrong. I had no idea why this necklace had put my mother into such an angry frenzy. My grandmother said, "She can wear it. It's no big deal."

"It is a big deal. It's a rosary. Don't tell me what my daughter can and can't do..."

I stopped listening after that. I heard the sounds of fighting but I was beyond understanding the words. Grown-ups were fighting about me putting on a necklace. I was so confused. After the rosary was put back in the Virgin Mary's hands, we left. I never touched the necklace again. But I often looked at it, trying to understand its mysterious power. Trying to understand why my mother was so afraid of it.

I still don't completely understand why this happened 25 years later. My mother doesn't even remember the incident. I do know that Jehovah's Witness doctrine teaches that the cross is a idolatrous symbol of false religion. They believe that Jesus died on a stake, not a crucifix. Seems a small matter to me. But to Jehovah's Witnesses the difference is huge. And to have a cross in your church or home, or worn around your neck is a sinful act of idolatry and disrespect.

I bought a cross the other day for the first time in my life. I'm not entirely sure why I did that. I saw a pretty one at the jewelry counter and I had to have it. I feel like a rebel with this thing around my neck. I may be the only person alive who thinks that wearing a cross makes me a bad-ass. It's a lovely thing, all sparkly, fake diamonds across the face of a torture device hung sprightly on a sterling silver chain. It's not slathered with guts, excrement, urine, and bloody tears the way the real thing would have been.

Death on a crucifix must have sucked big-time. Thousands upon thousands of people were punished that horrific way in the past and, unlike our pal Jesus, they didn't have super-power daddy in the sky to raise them up from the dead to a glorious place in heaven a million times better than the world they left behind (i.e. a place where people don't run the risk of having their arms nailed to a wooden beam before being subjected to a slow, excruciatingly painful death) Therein lies the problem I have with God's big sacrifice, his redemption of all sinful, imperfect men. How much of a sacrifice is it really when you get to have the thing you sacrificed back in, like, 3 days?

I'm not trying to be subversive, offensive, or disrespectful. I just remember sitting at church as a teenager listening to a sermon on "God's Ransom Sacrifice". I remember hearing about how much I should feel grateful to God for what he did for me, for little old, undeserving me.

"He gave his only begotten son so that you might have everlasting life."

I was supposed to feel unprecedented, weighty gratitude. I wanted to feel that heaviness in my heart, I wanted to will my eyes to manufacturer tears at God's grief and loss. Grief and loss that he endured for my benefit because I'm such a disgusting, sin-infested human. But I just couldn't feel it. Not really. I would look at all the old people sitting in the front row straining to hear these tidbits of spiritual truth, some of them suffering from illnesses like cancer. And I'd think, "What good has it really done? Is this what redemption looks like?" It made me really angry.

I was indignant at the fact that we were all supposed to feel indebted to God for his great sacrifice to redeem us all, when in reality he had lost nothing at all. There was actual loss all around me. Tangible loss. Real suffering. Unmitigated anguish. And there was God living up in some heavenly palace with Jesus, the very person he had supposedly sacrificed.

I've been thinking a lot lately about God. More specifically about whether or not I can believe in the existence of a higher power in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Damnit, I know God is dead. But you know what? I'm tired of being at sea without a compass. I'm tired of walking an endless road. There has to be something more than what I can see, or touch, or taste. There has to be another plane of existence, another level of being. Right? Or is my grief deluding my sense of reality?

Remember how the show The X-files had that little saying that flashed on the screen at the end of the opening credits? I Want To Believe. That's what's going on in my brain right now. Except with 100% less spaceships and alien abductions.

Feel free to call me a hypocrite for displaying my crucifix around my neck after all the shit talking I've done about God and his boy wonder Jesus. Actually, I have no problem with Christ. My problem is with the one who created this twisted mess and then tried to lay a guilt trip on humankind as part of the solution.

The cross is more of a symbol of hope to me than anything having to do with faith. It's also a triumph over past superstitions and traumas. It's my way of connecting to something greater than myself, and holding on to the dream that my sister's soul is gone to God waiting for reunion.

P.S. I'm also happy to finally have a vampire repelling object at the ready. I fucking hate vampires.

Fucked up Guys I Want to Fuck

2009-03-24T13:45:00.017-04:00

I think we can all agree that I'm a pretty fucked up individual. That undeniable truth, combined with the obscenely close relationship I enjoy with my television set, has prompted me to compile a list of the fucked up fictional guys I want to fuck. It was super fun making this list and it got my mind off of the cancer shit I've been dealing with lately.

Some of these guys you know,

some you may not.

They all have tales of woe

They all are really hot.

10. Walter White (Breaking Bad) - yeah, I mean Bryan Cranston. Yeah, that's Malcom's dad from Malcolm in the Middle. He's a whole new brand of awesome on an absolutely amazing TV show. He's a chemistry teacher dying of cancer and cooking up pure batches of crystal meth. And when he's not doing that he's coming up with hare-brained schemes (hair brained? Whatever) to outwit druglords. Oh and sometimes he kills them. What's not to love?

9. Wes Krulik (Damages) - Oh my god - this guy is so fucking hot. He's so hot that I don't even care that he's a shady spy who may or may not eventually murder that skinny ass Ellen Parsons. He could murder me any day of the week, as long as he fucked me before he shot me in the head.

8. Chuck Bass (Gossip Girl) - Physically, he's not really much to look at. And his outfits are too often closer to "clown gear" than "society gear" for my liking. And he's kind of sort of a sociopath. But damn if his voice doesn't make my panties wet. Yeah, yeah, I know he's supposed to be a teenager and all. But it's a fictional reality where teenagers go to bars and drink dirty martinis. This isn't really a high school show and you know it. P.S. Nate Archibald's a very close second for my Gossip Girl lust.

7. Michael Scofield (Prison Break) - They call hims "The pretty" in certain circles. "The blue steel" in others. He's just a smoking hot engineer who seems to get dumber and dumber the longer the show stays on the air. But I'd still fuck the blue right out of his eyes.

6. La Bambi (Capadocia) - Okay, not a guy. But a really bad-ass prison lesbian with these cutesy braids in her hair. When she's not fucking The Columbian, she's kicking ass all over Capadocia. It turns me right on, it does.

5. Patrick Jane (The Mentalist) - Former faux psychic turned criminal investigator Patrick Jane is the most wounded character to hit my TV screen in a long time. He taunted a serial killer who responded by slaughtering his wife and daughter. Ouchie. Despite his blatant emotional wounds, he's super sexy with his quiet manner and intense way of staring the clothes right off a girl. He can take one look at a woman and know every thing about her, no doubt down to her kinky predilections in bed. I have a lot of those. Patrick Jane, clad in his 3 piece suit, can tie me up, spank my ass, fuck me hard any day of the week. Preferably every day.

4. Charles Brandon (The Tudors) - This character is actually based on the real life 16th century Duke of Suffolk. His best friend is King Henry VIII, so he's pretty much a misogynistic elitist asshole. But you will honestly never lay eyes upon a more perfect specimen of a man.

3. Gregory House (House) - He's a gimp, a drug addict, and an asshole. Also, hot. Don't ask me to explain it because I can't. Some desires defy explanation.

2. Jimmy McNulty (The Wire) - I know it isn't even technically on the air anymore but I recently discovered this gem of a show and its majorly hot star. He's an alcoholic, a cheater, and an asshole. Just my type, apparently.

1. Don Draper aka Dick Whitman (Mad Men) - Mysterious, wounded, intelligent, creative, womanizing, lying, and unbelievably hot. My favorite asshole of all the assholes.

Mongolian Girl Rocks My World

2009-03-23T19:59:00.003-04:00

I answered Mongolian Girl's call to "Finish My Post". Take a minute to check out my guest blog over at The Cusp and while you're there take a long peek at Mongolian Girl's amazing blog. She talks a lot about horse vagina and it's totally awesome. I fucking love her and you will too.