A rant about "regular" women--don't expect anything coherent

Look.  Here's the thing about women. 

We know that models are still bone-thin.  We know they're still six feet tall.  We know that there is still pressure to have a boyfriend and get married or else be considered pitiable (basically an old maid, just without the term "old maid").

But here's the other thing.  Or maybe it's the same thing, people just for some reason don't seem to be getting it:

WE KNOW ALL OF THIS.  NOW QUIT WRITING/TALKING ABOUT IT LIKE IT'S A NEW CONCEPT. 

I'm not saying you can't bitch about.  Whatever, go ahead if that's what you want to do.  But please recognize that you're not brilliant or innovative or a new, snarky, sassy voice that for the first time truly represents women.  I mean, come on, how many times does some chick have to write this same article or book or whatever before people stop saying, "At last, someone to speak for us regular women!" and they finally realize--THIS CHICK IS JUST JUMPING ON THE DAMN BANDWAGON that everyone somehow forgets is there every freaking time.  Apparently the latest voice of the regular women is always just floating along, preaching down from a perch on an invisible wagon AND flicking the reigns over an invisible horse.  I don't blame the horse and wagon at all, though.  If I were pulling and carting this clueless crap I'd want to disappear, too.

But I digress. And am probably being incoherent, as promised. ::slapping myself in the face::  Invisible horses and wagons . . . :)

Anyway--there's another element to this I'd like to discuss.  I absolutely hate the weird solutions the "voices" of "regular" women come up with.  And, oh yeah, they're always the same, too--it's called "let's discriminate against certain characteristics of women so as to end the discrimination of other characteristics."  For example, let's say you're a female who's outspoken, bold, and academic.  Cool.  Good for you.  Let's say you're kind of a girly girl who likes pink and thinks about finding love.  I say that's cool, too.  Another "good for you" is in order.  But apparently if we are defending the first kind of woman, that means we have to condemn the second kind.  What?  Is anyone out there suddenly confused?  If you're not, you should be.  Because, honestly, why on earth would you want to promote freedom to be who you are by making another person feel like it's taboo to be the way SHE is?  And WHY on EARTH can't a woman be outspoken, bold, academic, girly, pink-loving, and soulmate-searching all at the same time?

Love is supposedly weak now, that's why.  And there always has to be something to conform to.  I find it all to be ridiculous.  If you want a boyfriend or a husband because you think that will make you look better in the eyes of society--well, that's one thing.  But if you want to connect with someone or have some type of physical intimacy with another human being because you're like every other person on the face of this earth (men included) and actually WANT these things for yourself--well, that's quite a different thing.  I really think that people need to face the facts: Most books, TV shows, and movies are not about love because society shoves it in our faces.  They're about love because this is an eternal human quest, for women and for men.  Believe it or not, there are these kinds of things about men searching for love, too.  It's just that no one thinks anything about them because we're not tied up in being horrified over men wanting relationships.  And believe it or not, people start to "wonder" about men who aren't married past a certain age as well.  Is it right?  No. Not in the least.  But again, that's something entirely different. 

We should not need to feel pressure from society to date or get married.  But if we want to?  Just plain want to?  As women or men?  Go for it.  Write a sitcom about it.  Write a 500-page novel about it.  Do it.  I don't really care.  I don't feel threatened because I'm single or because I'm not married.  I'm really still okay with all of it. 

Oh--did I not mention that I'm single and not married?  Didn't think I needed to, I guess.  Didn't think anyone would care.

Silly me.

Eperu and Apsu

For the young adult book I'm working on, The City of Doubles.  The people have their own religion, so I felt I needed to write down what that was.  This is just their creation story, probably not finished, not all that honed.  (Line formatting with this thing sucks in some places too.)  But here it is. :)

"Eperu and Apsu"

Long ago, before there was Time,
there was Eperu—the earth—and Apsu—the deep. 
There was nothing but the two of them in the vast blankness of the world,
and they were both asleep. 
Calm, peaceful, innocent, they slept,
longer and deeper than can ever possibly be imagined,
because Time was not there to hurry them along
and Sound was not there to disturb them. 
They slept like infants, worlds unto themselves.

Then, Eperu woke. 
She awakened very slowly, because she had not done it before
and it was new to her.  But while she was waking
she was aware of one thing,
a coolness next to her, just touching her,
a thing separate from herself that she had never dreamt existed. 

When at last her eyes had fully opened
(and they did not look or function like flesh and blood eyes,
so they could see through the deepest dark of this early world),
the first thing she did was look for the cool thing she had felt. 
She beheld Apsu,
blue and smooth and vast,
and she loved him without question, and completely.

But Apsu was still asleep

and she would not wake him.  Eperu waited patiently,
through what Time would have called eons or eternities,
until at last Apsu, too, began to wake.
Eperu watched him, his blue waters rising and falling,
and she thought she had never beheld anything
more beautiful than he was. 
Then Apsu’s eyes were at last fully opened,
and the first thing he saw and felt was Eperu,
brown and rocky and warm.
And he loved her without question, and completely.

Through great yawning lifetimes

Eperu and Apsu remained awake, loving one another. 
They came closer,
they went under and over and around each another,
and their love created a world that had light,
that sprouted green, that glittered under stars. 
It was a spinning world of mountains and oceans and rivers and plains,
and it was indeed beautiful.

But at last, Eperu and Apsu began to long once more

for sleep, for the quiet, blissful dark
that had enveloped them before Time and light had sprung up all around them. 
They were together now; they were one. 
They would slumber together, and only together, forever,
warm and wet and primeval.

But still they were loathe to leave their new world

unattended and uncared for.  It seemed vulnerable,
and worth more than they were willing to stay awake
to give it.  So before they began their long, sinking journey into sleep
(because everything they did was still slow and monumental),
Eperu and Apsu gave to their world three daughters,
whom they would leave behind to care for it. 
The daughters sprung from Eperu,
in the muddy clay just beside the river,
where Apsu washed over them and gave them life. 
Three tall white reeds,
they grew, straight up at first
and then rounding, spiraling outward. 
As Eperu and Apsu watched, three goddesses stepped out from the reeds,
in the shape of women.  They were the Zikia,
or the Triple Goddess,
and they immediately bowed before their parents.

Ummum, Abu, they addressed them,
Mother and Father, we thank you for giving us life. 
We sisters are here to serve you,
as we have been created to do.

You are good daughters, and we are proud of you,

Eperu and Apsu answered.  But to serve us is not necessary. 
To you we are entrusting this world that we have created,
this world that is made of us and yet is separate. 
We have decided to leave it forever so that we may slumber together through eternity,
and now it is yours.  Populate it. 
Create new life. 
And govern it as you feel best.

We will do what you ask of us, oh mighty parents,

said the Sisters. We will do our best, as your creation
and your children.

But Eperu and Apsu were already beginning their slow fall into sleep,

and did not hear them.

Then the Sisters looked around them

and began to mold the first people out of the soft clay
at their feet, the very clay they themselves
had sprouted from.  And in this way they created new life
and populated the world.

Yadonu.  Protect us.

Eperu and Apsu.

Oil

We are like paintings, with all our layers.  What starts out as a patch of sky gets eclipsed by tree.  Green strokes through water, and blue is no longer just blue.

If I had a portrait of myself, a Dorian Grey of my own, I'd hope it forever remained wet.  How does oil feel?  If I had a portrait of myself before me now, I would run my fingers through the paint and wipe them clean against my skin . . . my face, my neck, my clavicles.  Perhaps I would paint myself into a wall, a floor, a stained glass Mary smiling down at Jesus.  I would become that glass.  I would become the smile.

But--even though I so often want to hide, I know I cannot always.  Not really.  The need to do it isn't ever in me--completely.

I think my greatest wish, my real wish, is to blend the clashes--just within my own shape.  Not all of them.  Some lines can stay unfinished, can dry into nowhere, and some blobs of paint can crack upward, hard, jagged, sharp.  But other parts--perhaps someday they can flow like rivers, blue and green and purple, and the black shadow of a tree--into the line of my neck, the damp skin of my eyelids.

Perhaps.  Someday.  Or maybe, after all is said and done, I'll just get to learn the meaning of oil--and rest.

I'm Not Really Sure This Post Means Anything At All

Part of me thinks there is more to life than this.  And another part of me thinks, no there isn’t, I’m just some damn character in a novel—probably by Virginia Woolf or Franz Kafka or someone like that—who’s always thought there was more to life and is rudely awakened at some depressing point. Or—and this is even worse—who goes on believing there’s more to life until the day she dies but never gets anything more. Then the literary question is all, “Well, should we despair for her, because she never got what she wanted, or should be envy her and rejoice for her because she believed in the chance up until the very end?”

Let me tell ya. Don’t rejoice. Don’t. It’ll piss me off.

It’s like the people who see poetry in tragedy. Seriously. Shut the hell up. Tragedy is never poetic unless you’re the person to whom something tragic is not happening, or this is years down the line and you don’t feel tragic anymore and you feel like saying something profound like, “You know, I think that had to happen to me, in order for me to grow.” Well, I’m sick of growth. If I wanted to see more growth I’d get a damn Chia pet, and I’ve always thought those things were hideously ugly. (By the way, have you seen that there’s an Obama Chia pet now? Seriously? That’s how we honor our presidents?)

Anyway—I’m in one of those moods tonight, so maybe we should all just disregard this pointless blather. But I do want to say that I don’t really feel like being Mrs. Dalloway or, say, that girl from “The Glass Menagerie” whose name I can’t remember right now (see?).

Let’s put on a comedy, Shakespeare.

How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin (And More)

I was thinking (as I often do when I’m washing my face and looking at myself in the mirror—don’t ask) about a “short story,” or fable, really, that I wrote for my book. Frayne (a dragon) tells it to Susan (a little girl), and it’s about a tiny mosquito that overcomes a bully of a dragon by biting him all over. And as I was thinking, I wondered what people would say about the little story, because, at the end, the dragon has learned his lesson and the mosquito gives him some very effective salve for his bites. All is happy, the end.

I could just hear them:

“Oh, come on. What a sickly sweet way to end a story. Everybody wins? The bad guy doesn’t get punished? Everyone is friends?”

And maybe it’s true, maybe it’s a little too optimistic, or maybe it’s too Mary Poppins/Pollyanna. But I had to end it that way, and here’s why.

Because, when I was little, my grandparents had an old book of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories,” and I read the story about the rude rhinoceros who leaves his skin on the riverbank. And a man, to punish the rhino for eating his cake, puts the leftover crumbs and some burned currants in the skin, so that when the rhino puts it back on, he itches until his smooth skin wrinkles all over—and he itches forever. Forever.

When I read that as a little girl, it made me sick. I hated that man who made the rhinoceros itch, no matter what the reason. I hated him because—because—he didn’t just cause the rhinoceros pain. No. There is dignity in pain, in bearing it, even in being dealt it, somehow, in martyrdom, but there is no dignity in itching. It even makes a sentence sound absurd. The rhino—he didn’t go out with a bang, he wasn’t put on the rack, he didn’t get his head chopped off, he was made to itch—forever. It’s painful, it’s horrifying, and it’s ridiculous.

Another thing that happened to me a lot when I was little was that my brother would scratch me when we were fighting. And sometimes scratches, besides hurting, will puff up a bit and itch monstrously. The pain of those scratches didn’t bother me. But the itching—that would bring tears to my eyes. I’d scratch my hand or my arm or whatever body part it was and think, “He must really hate me. To want to cause me shame like this.”

Or, well, maybe those weren’t the exact words that went through my head. But they were the essence of my feelings. And those feelings, if people ever accuse me of being sentimental or sickly sweet or too nice, are why I can’t let dragons itch forever, or even for very long. It’s because the rhinoceros did. And because I never want to be the cause of someone or something’s suffering like that, not even in a story.

The end.

Haiku

So, par for the course, while drinking lattes and eating cheesecake at B&N with my mom and brother, my brother brought a couple of books into the cafe to look at.  One was a book of haiku we'd looked at a couple of other times and really enjoyed, and  it made me remember a haiku I'd thought of but forgotten to write down the other day about an apple tree.  Luckily, my mom had a notepad in her purse, and she and I both had pens, so before long we were all three writing haiku.

Here is my apple haiku:

Shiny round apples
hanging from the tree branches
sway gently, still small.

And the other haiku I came up with:

The still silverfish
on the floor believes itself
completely hidden.

My small, fuzzy dog
first eats kibbles and then claims
the comfiest chair.

The chipotle sauce,
even when sniffed just a bit,
goes up my nose—ouch.

Yeah, as you can tell--they were just for fun. :)

Read an Article on Infanticide for Class, and Then . . .

So it's occurred to me that, since this is a blog about my writing, I can basically write about anything I want and still have it apply.  Because, you know, I'm writing it.

That said, I'll jump right in.  I was reading an article by Steven Pinker called "Why They Kill Their Newborns" for the composition class I teach tomorrow night, and it just annoyed me so much that I had to jot down my response to it.  Not a scholarly response, mind you--I have no intention of doing any research here or anything like that.  (It's an argument class I teach, and I have that kind of stuff on the brain.)  But I have to say something about the article, and I figure this blog is the best place to do it.

Steven Pinker is an intelligent person--that much is obvious.  Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and all that.  And he makes an interesting claim: that mothers who kill their newborn babies do it not because they're monsters or because they're insane, but because they're genetically predisposed to do so when found in their particular unfavorable circumstances.  Pinker says that "[in] most societies documented by anthropologists, including those of hunter-gatherers (our best glimpse into our ancestors' way of life), a woman lets a newborn die when its prospects for survival to adulthood are poor.  The forecast might be based on abnormal signs in the infant, or on bad circumstances for successful motherhood at the time."

Okay.  I get that.  And if he'd said, "This is why a young, single, homeless woman killed her infant," I'd get that. too.  I'd say, "Yeah, man, I think you're on to something."

But Pinker is talking about Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, "18-year-old college sweethearts [who] delivered their baby in a motel room and, according to prosecutors, killed him and left his body in a dumpster" and "another 18-year-old, Melissa Drexler, [who] arrived at her high school prom, locked herself in a bathroom stall, gave birth to a boy and left him dead in a garbage can."

Yeahhhhhh . . . that was biology?

To his credit, Pinker tries to address the possible skepticism himself:  "And yet the recent neonaticides will seem puzzling.  These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girl's parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples.  But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history.  Being young and single are two bad omens for successful motherhood, and the girl who conceals her pregnancy and procrastinates over its consequences will soon be disquieted by a third omen.  She will give birth in circumstances that are particularly unpromising for a human mother: alone."

All right.  Yes.  I get it--being young and single and alone might kick this biological impulse to kill one's child into gear.  That's what a prehistoric hunter-gatherer (or maybe just gatherer) woman would have done.  But would that prehistoric woman have brought about any of these unfavorable circumstances herself?  Would she have hid her pregnancy under, I don't know, her bearskin garment and gone off by herself to deliver her baby?  I doubt it, unless she were some kind of social outcast or something.  And that's what I think it all comes down to anyway--society.

I'm sorry, but I think that Pinker's idea that middle-class girls kill their babies because of genetic programming is ridiculous.  Like I said, maybe this would happen to a girl on the streets, or in a destitute family, who would have nowhere to turn.  Middle-class girls do have somewhere to turn, but they know that society will ridicule them if they do.  It's not that young, single women can't be good mothers today or raise their children in good environments--it's that society will look down on them for it, and the girls know this and can't bear the thought.  So they hide their pregnancies, shut their minds and emotions off to anything connected to their babies, and, in desperation, kill those babies or allow them to die because they think they have to to avoid the raised eyebrows and head shaking.  I'm not saying I don't pity this--I do--I just don't think it has anything to do with what Pinker is proposing.

Also, his idea that we have sympathy for those who kill their newborns but not for those who kill, say, their three-year-old children, because we don't see newborns as "complete" people yet seems rather out there to me, too.  I think that, if it's true we feel this way, it's about us, the adults and our psychological responses and attachments, not the growth of a baby into a "real" or "complete" person.  I know this is a really crude and simple example, but, well--I'm a doll collector.  And when I want to buy a particular doll, it kind of sucks to realize I don't have enough money for it and have to walk away from the shelf empty-handed.  But when I actually pick up that package and carry it around the store, believing that I'm going to buy it before talking myself out of it at the last minute, I have a lot harder time putting it back.  And I think about how much I wish it were a part of my collection a lot more after I leave the store than I would have if I had just looked at it wistfully for a few seconds.  And half the time I end up going back the next day to buy it after all.

Here's maybe a better example (and I don't have kids, so I'm going to talk about the next best thing): I saw a puppy the other day at a flea market that was adorable.  Absolutely adorable.  And I wanted it and had to leave rather sadly when I realized (once again) that I couldn't afford it.  Now, if I found out the next day that that puppy had died, I'd be genuinely sad.  I might even be depressed for a few hours or at random points during the next few days.  But it would be NOTHING compared to how I'd feel if my three-year-old dog, Dax, died.  I would be beside myself.  I doubt I'd eat.  Maybe I'd sleep--since that's my way of escaping pain.  And you'd better bet that I'd be depressed indefinitely.

And why?  Because of the difference in my emotional investments in the two dogs, over time.  Yes, I love Dax more, because she's been with me for three years, because I've learned all her little moods, because she's a part of so many of my memories.  That's why I'd be more upset if she died.  Not because she's older, but because I've spent more time with her, and thus bonded more with her (and allowed myself to bond more with her, because she's mine, and I know she's going to remain mine, unlike that other little puppy).

So I think this is what people are unconsciously thinking when they express more horror at the thought of killing a three-year-old, as opposed to a newborn.  They know how bonds strengthen over time (no matter how powerful that initial bond it), and they can't imagine the monstrosity of murdering something that should be so dear to you.  Not that a newborn wouldn't be dear--it usually is.  But I can imagine a scared, desperate woman cutting herself off from any love for her newborn, distancing herself from it, even imagining it isn't hers or that it isn't real.  Not because either of those things is true--but because the mind can be a very powerful thing, and we're very good at convincing ourselves of any number of lies.  Could she convince herself that a child she's thought of as hers for three years isn't anymore--or isn't even real?  I doubt it, unless she really is insane.

I feel bad for mothers who are so desperate not to be "found out" that they kill their children, and I feel sick about the dead babies.  It makes me sick that society makes people feel as though they have no options.  But I really don't think it's Pinker's version of biology at work here, no matter how good he makes his idea sound.

And now--whew, now I'm really glad I wrote this.  I don't feel annoyed anymore, and I think I can go to sleep.