DRAG, the Series: Gender

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...

We're all born naked, and the rest is drag.
--RuPaul Charles

Cis
Genderqueer
Nonbinary

PINK LABELING

CODED presentation and what that means: masculine marketing - cuck - shaming - feminized restriction

"Feminine" and "masculine" codes and symbology are taught and learned, not genetically determined.

HOW "natural" is binary sexuality ... third gender (only three?) ... why do we punish gender variance and respond to it so viscerally? Why do people care how someone else loves, or uses their body? Why are other bodies' behaviors important to our minds? Why do we refer to nonbinary pronouns, people, behavior as gender TRANSGRESSIVE?

Clearly, the underlying conceptualization of gender implied by these taxonomies is at variance with the idea that physical sex is fixed, marked by genitalia, and binary.

It's hard not to assume, growing up with a given set of assumptions, that these reflect the way the world "is" in some immutable way. But each of us, throughout the millennia of history and prehistory, grew up in a finite time and place - and the slightest observance of the world beyond our lives reveals that even in one given time there is a multiplicity of assumptions, even closer than we often like to imagine. Multiply this multiplicity across time and distance, and the variety of human culture is impossible not to acknowledge. Only the presumption of rock-solid correctness is bewildering, when you really look at humanity.

And so the challenge to heteronormative sexuality and gender should hardly be as surprising as it seems to be, for many people. But our emotional attachment to what we think we know means we cling to it with the strength of fear, or morality; all the things that reassure us deep inside.

My mom, who knows I love drag, and who even helped me to shop for the baby drag queen I used to sell to on eBay a few years back, still recoils at the whole thing. She's of a certain age and background, she's Southern Baptist, she's conservative. She never has had the vitriol for gay men so many like her harbor, but she does prefer not to think about it. Just recently, she was talking about watching Project Runway, and a man was in heels but his outfit was more athletic than stereotypically feminine. I told her, drag these days is less and less about synthesizing the "feminine" than it is about questioning what is stereotypically masculine. Heels aren't meant to evoke a paradigmatic "woman" - they are just to certain men's taste, or they are a question mark of a kind. Challenge.

Drag is no longer all about "female impersonation" if it ever was. Given the recency and locality of strictly heterosexual and binary sexuality and gender notions - given cultures who accept "third" genders and familial relations based on paradigms other than the modern Western nuclear family - heck, even given just the two-generation definition we've narrowed that down to, where even a household of three generations, or offspring living with parents past certain threshholds of adulthood, are looked askance, the het/cis/binary is a correspondingly narrowed view of roles. At a point where many are questioning the validity of 4-person nuclear households, questioning het/cis/binary roles is as natural as living outside them is.

Going along with all this fee-lossy-fizing is the point that "drag" as such is not even strictly a description of a specific form of entertainment. Not all drag is a staged performance. Like any persona in anyone's day-to-day life, drag is for many just their life - see the quote at the top of this post. Just as not all drag queens are cis or gay men, not all drag takes place on a stage, and not all drag is specifically a portrayal of women.



Controversy about RuPaul's statements on trans women.

My own baby queen ... ?


Fat, Femme, and Asian   Feminizing and exoticizing race ... glorification and elevation of the marginalized - even within subcultural/marginalized terms.


Clothing in terms of menswear, women's wear ...



History of female impersonation, passing,
We know that Joane of Arc didn't go in for dresses, but we also know that her practical, spiritual, individual mode of dress and behavior met not only her needs but answered to something much larger than one young woman. It still answers, for many, even centuries after the wars she fought have been, as far as this can be said, resolved. What she was and what she did continues to be meaningful even though she, her armies, and her Dauphin, are all dust. Her transgressions speak to us.

There have always been as many practical reasons to blur, to cross, or to sneak behind constructed boundaries as there are deep-seated objections to conformity.

DRAG, the Series: Challenge

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...


The thing about most offputting entertainments and art forms throughout history is this: they *mean* to be offputting. To a certain audience. Ugliness, cacophany, discomfort in art are a direct challenge, always, to prevailing assumptions. And right now, for a western-centric culture out to homogenize the world, a culture which has dressed men the same for upward of 200 years, there can be little wonder that one of the most popular challenges is the industrial-scale insurgency of drag

I’m not doing drag to give you makeup tips. This has always been a political statement.
RuPaul Charles

Nancy Pelosi ... YOUTUBE CLIP OF HER FROM RDR



There is no one way to be gay ... or drag, or masculine, or feminine, or a particular age, or republican, or spiritual. More specifically: there is no wrong way to be any of these things, or any others.

I do Goth wrong. In my life, the very essence of nonconformity has been ... showing up at a tattoo convention and having a triple piercing removed. "You went to a tattoo festival and got yourself UN-maimed," my brother said, and it was a revelation to me. Or wearing sky blue and glitter lipgloss to a Type O Negative show, or putting together a 40s-vintage ensemble, but wearing forest green lipstick amongst otherwise "authentic" hair and clothing and period-perfect makeup.

We. All. Contain. Multitudes.



People have been weird since we've been people: truly, independently, fiercely weird. We have also been "people" for more than three hundred thousand years - not merely hairy little tool-users who put the dead away systematically or even ritually - but engaging in trade, and even processing pigment from stone.

Using pigment to permanently mark ourselves.

Pigment is at the heart not only of art, but of self-decoration. And even self-decoration performs double-duty - many people are aware that eyeliner dates back thousands of years, but fewer realize its practical application, in reducing visual glare in a very sunny region. The principal of dark patches on the face to improve bright-light vision survives today, quite prominently.



Our attachment to our tools and our expressions is the basis for the very concept of sin.



Fishy aesthetic versus Acid Betty, Dirt Woman, Divine (both glamorous and un-"pretty", using symbols of the former and co-opting the latter to invent something new)...

Perhaps especially during the 1970s and 1980s, punk and drag had a lot in common, and RuPaul's early days show a grungy, harder-edged New Wave image.



This post "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" and I'll publish it anyway ... this post is a challenge. Ooh, how meta.

DRAG, the Series: Beauty

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...

The only thing I didn't like was the makeup.

On its opening weekend, I went to see A Wrinkle in Time with a group of people, most of them new to me, and one of the most interesting counterpoints to the diversity and inclusion celebrated by the film was the quote above. Stated by someone I suspect would consider their liberal cred to be beyond reproach, the idea was that The Mrs. Ws' fantastical appearances set a bad example for little girls by way of cosmetics.

This was said to me at a time I had my hair jacked up to Jesus, was wearing all metallics, and my eyeshadow was silver and not at all subtle. Also, I have blue hair for pete's sakes.

The lady opining did not join us after the movie, but I have been stuck with her restrictive liberal ideals in the same way I've been struck and confounded by prescriptivist liberality before. The way I really hate.

If feminism is about choice, what feminist is to say it is INVALID right on its face (and do pardon the pun, please) for a woman to wear makeup? Or a man? And if makeup is an evil tool of the conformity-enforcing Evil Beauty Industry, out to subjugate women into narrow beauty ideals ... where is it bedazzled eyebrows and green glitter eyeshadow fit in to this narrow, cis, white ideal?

As I have said before. Sometimes, makeup is not about remediation. It's special effects. And nobody - man, woman, or anyone else - gets to prescribe for me what is limiting, or to limit me by "setting me free" from it either.



silhouette - of period clothing, of presumed gender-conforming bodies, of nonconforming bodies

corsetry jewelry

cleavage, highlight/shadow ("The champagne glass") - controlling light itself, synthesizing it for illusion

erasing the face to repaint stereotypical femininity, or owning one's own features to challenge the binary (bald queens, eyebrows) ... Kevyn Aucoin's erasure art, queens who emphasize their own - amplification versus obliteration ... the BEAT face



Self-decoration predates anatomically modern humanity itself. We have been decorating ourselves since before "we" WERE "ourselves" - ochre and seashell jewelry, religion, trade, and art reach as far back as our current understanding takes us. Pre-human, prehistoric. Cro magnon and Neanderthal man created beauty as well as tools, and the tools of beauty and art date back over 160,000 years.



Advent of "I can draw what I want" marketing and autonomy over rigid fashion - STYLE over fashion ... still an industry, but emphasis affected by people's needs. How much can commercial interests still command people reshaping themselves? How much has the narrow beauty standard *really* changed? Really at the point where individuals are using the beauty industry, or still beholden to beauty standards?



As with most things, the alterations we perform to create beauty can pass into The Uncanny Valley, where synthesizing the suppleness of youth with plumpers and tightening becomes ghastly. Pop culture obsesses, at times, on hatred of this tendency - making fun of everyone from always-a-target Jocelyn Wildenstein to the Jenners/Kardashians for "overdoing it" ... and this both happens in drag, and is played-with in drag. Not a few queens proudly name their alterations, and it's difficult not to suspect that many who do it do so less for ideals of beauty than for the exaggeration of those ideals - for intentional effect. Special effects.

Drag USES the Uncanny Valley, gooses it - can transform it from challenge into a new definition of beauty.

THAT House on the Block

The yard is badly in need of mowing right now - not only has spring finally arrived, but we've had a great deal of rain, so (where Penelope hasn't worn it out running along the fence - which will save me some weed-eating!) it's a bit thick.  I won't say "lush", because what's really thick right now is the early-spring growth of rubbery purple weed flowers, which tend to be clumpy and fail to live up to the suburban ideal of pure green grass.  My neighbors' homes have a lovely growth of Easter grass right now, but my place is not the beauty of the block.

It wouldn't take much work, nor much time - but since Wednesday I've had a fairly severe case of instant allergies, and mowing the grass, no matter how community-minded it may be, just is not on my list, even though in actuality I'd kind of like the time outside in a wonderful breeze, and the exercise.  Note to intrepid suburban kids anywhere:  if you showed up at my door right now, I'd gladly pay you to take care of this for me, providing gas and mower personally.  Just sayin' - if you want a buck, the scruffy house on the block might be for you.

Today is the first day I've had open windows, and I did start the meds on Wednesday night.  I think it's helped, at least as far as beginning to fight the overarching symptoms of seasonal allergies - itchy eyes, SNEEZING - but the more immediate symptoms - sore throat, congestion, laryngitis - are tenacious.  They spawn further symptoms of their own - mouth-breathing, for instance, which then leads to chapped lips and feeling dehydrated, which leads to constant water-drinking, which leads to feeling bloated.  I'm almost fascinated at the daisy-chain of cause, effect, and annoyance - but, honestly, I don't actually feel as rotten as, for instance, I sounded this morning at nearly ELEVEN a.m. when my mom called and I was still half-zonked on nighttime cold/allergy pills.  Oops.

A bit of high-cacao chocolate being my preferred caffeine delivery method, I induced Godiva therapy after talking with her, and have done a lot at least upstairs.  On the main floor, I need to shove enough furniture out of the way to remove The Winter Rug - yes, it's a stupid idea; dusty and heavy-breathing-inducing (and if I can't mow the grass, how can I move a 200-pound rug?), but it's my idea and I'm all into it.

And here we have the point of this post.  I've written here many times about what it's like living alone, but the underlying issue is almost cultural.  The nuclear family ideal, and its analogue, Living Independently, make "going out on your own" sound like the way we're all supposed to structure our lives.  Living Independently, of course - that thing where we're expected to leave the nest at eighteen and live on our own until we create our own nuclear family with McMansion, starter-spouse, 2.38 children, and 2.38 cars - is the shaming device we use against such adults as have to go home to mom and dad for one reason or another.  I internalized Living Independently really early, and am not ready to give it up (the idea of living with my mom if, G-d forbid, she were ever widowed again, for instance, is beyond my ability to tolerate).  But it comes with its price.  And its fears.

It's not just the daily inconveniences, when I have to do EVERY last thing in the world that needs to be done, and perpetually fall short, by the estimation of an awful lot of people who see fit to have ideas about what needs to be done in my house, personal life, etc.  My finances, far from being my own as an Independent Woman, are the subject of MANY people's speculation and advice - and not just people I consider to be close family or friends.  "You should buy a such-and-such car" is the easy expectation of people I hardly know with whom I casually mention I have been looking.  Of course, mentioning such a thing is guaranteed to bring that on, but I don't even have a wife I can hide behind to demur on the more insistent suggestions of people who apparently know my needs better than I do ...

So it's an odd thing.  The more independent we are in the society I happen to have grown up in, the LESS autonomy people ascribe to my way of living.  People give advice to any and all, of course, but it *feels* like the advice to a single woman has a special insistence.

We've created a world in which "failing" to live independently is shamed and unnatural (natural as multi-generational living was for thousands of years before the 20th century), but doing so carries not only its own judgments, but also the fears and perils that go with ageing with no partner, no family, nobody in the home.  It's not a minor price to pay for the pride and accomplishment of living on our own terms, and it's something I wrestle with all the time.  The responsibility is both a matter of pride and chagrin - and, while I think I may be unable ever to be the person who'd blend again with my mom, or a geriatric roommate situation a'la The Golden Girls, I'm hardly gratified by the prospect of the next twenty or forty years of what it *really* means to be on my own.

Pride wins, with me (... apparently ...), but it's not because I never think about whether I could be wrong.  I've fulfilled some of the expectations of my upbringing, and it's beyond me to honestly imagine anything I'd change.  But that doesn't mean I think I've done everything just right.  Life *shouldn't* feel like it's gone exactly right, I think in a way.  If we felt completely righteous and satisfied - what would there be to work on in ourselves, or for others?

And who's going to do the dusting, with me here blogging?  A good question.  And I'm off ...

Literalism versus Favoritism

Growing up in my family, it didn't do to be reductive.  Superlatives and absolutes tended to be greeted with deconstructive comments (not un-constructive, but rather debunkingly analytical), and so I learned early to avoid stating many extremes.

Well, I didn't learn not to state them.  But I did learn that if I took anything to a descriptive limit, there would always be someone standing by that boundary to prove it was far more distant than anything I could quantify, or that the very boundary itself was imaginary.

So I began at a young age to take the concept of "favorite", for instance, to its illogical conclusion, and to avoid the idea assiduously.  I can actually recall taking my idea, that green was my favorite color, and lying in the backseat of my parents' very green indeed Plymouth Fury station wagon, peering at the physical greenness of my surroundings, and imagining green as the ONLY color I could ever have, and being disappointed.

It's one of the million ways we affect one another as humans, this sort of tiny influencing commentary of a family, which becomes a very silly part of someone's being, far far beyond any real intention or even expectation.  My parents and brother might have wanted me to become a critical thinker, but to provide me a mild neurosis about favorite things could hardly have been their point.  It means (per my blog's very headline) that I contain multitudes, but it also means I make a rotten interview, because I snark on about how reductive questions are instead of answering them.

And so I am aware that people are capable of feeling that one color is best, or one food is peerless, but the idea of choosing gives me the distantest echo of Sophie's dilemma, in that I despise to pick one superlative because everything apart from "the best" still creates the richness and variety and context that makes anything truly shine.  Intellectually, I can know that loving one thing most doesn't doom all else to destruction - and yet, the only context in this world in which I can honestly say I have a favorite is in Mr. X, who is my most favorite person in the world with whom I don't share DNA.  I peek around from time to time, just to be sure, but at almost eleven years knowing him, it seems reasonable to state he really did ruin me for all the other boys.

It can be bewildering, though, to run across other people's favorite things, because there can be hard lines in this world it's trickier to negotiate if you don't draw your own.  Other people can put you on a path or hem you in with their ability to hold absolutes - in religion and politics, of course, this can get dangerous.  And, at times, it can be more comfortable to be persuasable ("where do you want to eat?"), but of course there are those who see a certain type of flexibility as waffling.

I have my convictions, but I keep them pretty close and refuse to hand them out to anyone I am not pretty intimate with.  Most of my own hard lines took me decades to draw - and, as I have grown older, I have discarded some of those things I thought were non-negotiable when I was a younger person.  Few of my deepest ... expectations (beliefs can be a different thing) ... have ever actually changed - and yet, I have seen my methods of managing their presence adapt in amazing ways over my lifetime.

This calendar year has seen some of the profoundest philosophical changes in me - without compromise, and yet without radical outward alterations.  It is at the deepest level I've let go of certain boundaries, and in the quietest solitude of my soul I have found liberty it astonishes me to have given myself and my heart.

Relinquishing certain expectations has only solidified the power of what drives and matters to me most.  Letting go of certain ideas of practical living, of faith, and even love, has only deepened these things by providing clarity.  There is great peace in the understanding this can give, and such emotional power, and all over again I find myself grateful with the blessings that seem to provide themselves to me, all undeserving.  Paths are easier to follow, fears are fewer.

I don't know a lot of people who can claim the assurance I feel, simply by letting go of certain ideas about conviction, by questioning those things which are supposed to be "given" for us as human beings.


Question something you hate, or love, or fear.  Really let yourself be wrong ... or, more terrifyingly, right.  There's almost no liberty like it.  Almost no power at all.  It is joyous.

"Because I Couldn't Help Her Then"

I Miss Him

It frustrates me they call it "a lump in the throat" because that is not what it feels like.  A single deep curve.  A brass-colored, metallic flat tongue, weaving an ugly tang down through the depth of the esophagus.  Yellow, fetid and bitter.  The very essense of resistance, a physical response, almost a movement - it isn't a lump.  It's the body's expression:  frustration.

This isn't something I express to my family, who cannot like him, nor my friends, who have heard it now for years.  It isn't new, it is the result of my choice, it simply is - what it is.

I miss him.

Mr. X is the one man who's ever known everything one person could know about another, and still wanted to know more.  He's the one person with whom complete openness is possible - and with whom that could not exhaust our interest.  There has always been, between us, something new to talk about, some new question either to share or ask one another.

Whatever it is in X that has brought me to where I am, challenges me - it isn't his doing nor volition.  There are times the responsibility he feels toward me is outright damaging between us.  Four thousand miles don't make a relationship easy.

Still, they cannot seem to kill it.  I look.  I do.  I'm open, to varying degrees, to the idea of finding someone else.

Nobody else has ever made me look twice.


***


Tonight, I wanted to go out.  I thought about what to wear, I painted my nails.

Going out - getting dressed up for a Saturday night - these are things so indelibly associated, now, with X, that sometimes it happens I try to start, and in the middle of a bath or when I sit down to my beautiful antique vanity to primp, something flags, I go limp, and just can't finish and do it.  I have a closet full of clothes I know he would, or does, like - some bought and literally un-worn.

I've never admitted that before.

The idea of going out still appeals to me.  But the absence of the man I have the most fun with compromises it.

I get frustrated.

That metallic quirk, that physical resistance, that curving thing that is a powerful spring, a recoil - not a lump, not anything so inert nor still - sits in the back of my throat, and I all but weep.

Though not alone in the sense of having no love, I am alone in a way profound enough the prospect of anyone else I know enduring this state makes me physically ill.


I can do alone.  I've done it about half my life now - after living at home, before I got married, and after.  Even just counting that last, it's nineteen years now I have been the Strong, Smart Woman making it on my own.

Strong is easy.  I've gone over that before.

The things that compromise you, though, go right by strength.  The moment you are alone with a sprained back, or ankle, and ... *anything* needs to be done.  The instant's shift, when you are excited to go out and see friends, be surrounded by loud music, laughter, and dancing - and then, suddenly, can desire nothing so much as sitting alone on the couch, clean and baby-powder scented in ugly pants and clean socks.  When a storm goes by, and once again you have to love it, and watch it, by yourself.

When you realize you never watch comedy, because laughter is a team sport.

When the storm comes, and you bless it as an *excuse* to give up.  Again.

I miss him.  If he were here, we would go play.  If he were here, Siddy's would not be the only other heartbeat in this house.  If he were here - life would have twists and turns, be unpredictable.  It would be so much harder.

It would be so much more interesting.

A Riddle or A Bet

There's a genre of philosophical posers, such as "What if ... we're all tiny tiny creatures, living on a speck of dust, inside someone else's freshman dorm room ... ?" and "Would you rather marry a woman you knew to be faithful, but all the world thought she was a whore - or marry a woman everyone honors as virtuous, though you know she is not true to you?"

For the most part, I can't really engage with stuff like this.

But sometimes ... I do chuckle rather dryly to myself (aridly ... positively sere) and think I live in my own answer to such a riddle.  "Would you rather be without a love more perfect for you than you would ever have dared ask ... ?"

Or.

Yeah, that's where I start the dry laugh.  Or be *with* - what?  Meh.  No way.

Erick has enough guilt over the distance between us he's wished in the past he could erase himself from my experience.  Even apart from the hideous usurpation of autonomy that represents to me philosophically - it's flawed remediation at its base.  He wonders whether I could have had a "better" life without him.

He simply can't believe that my life is more joyous that I could have ever prayed, since meeting him.  Yeah, I'm deprived of things it's not as if I don't complain about.  But what I would have been deprived of otherwise ...

No bet in the world, no stake, could ever make me take that wager.  There is no "better" than The Best.

Stifled

I've had a surprising emotional confrontation lately, with myself, and X has been helping me to figure some things out.  Basically, something I have thought for sixteen years was a non-issue has cropped up recently, causing me a lot more angst than a non-issue should, and I've been grappling with (a) why it should be making a nuisance of itself so unexpectedly, and (b) how to deal with it at all.  After something like a week and a half of staring at this thing almost like I've been staring helpless at my novel, feeling dumb as to what I am supposed to do, X reminded me of a couple of things the problem is NOT.  He got me bonking my head on a particular piece of brick wall, and lo and behold a few thoughts came out.

There've been a few thoughts of my own, to be sure.  Some of the feminist posting this weekend was born of the mindset all this has put me into, and I have had a couple of random conversations which have me thinking, too, about the nature of openmindedness and personal autonomy.

Personal autonomy appears to be lying, rather quietly coiled, at the bottom of this thing with me lately.


It has been, for some years now, a matter of policy for me to minimize the dramatics of my life.  This grew centrally out of a marriage in which I was utterly immature, completely self-centered, and frankly just mean in a way so obvious even I could see what a nasty piece of work I was becoming.  Perhaps ironically, and almost certainly cruelly, it seemed to me necessary to dissolve the marriage in order to put myself in the position to grow - and I think that has been the right choice for me, but it was still a bit of a presumption upon the life of my ex-spouse.  An act of selfishness, to overcome selfishness.

To some degree, I've been able to compose a story about some level of growth, out of all this, and as far as I am able, I do work to live up to the narrative I like to believe (and tell) about myself.  Certainly, I'm not the flailing wreck I was back then.  Still, like everyone, there's always room for improvement.


One of the major focal points of the past fifteen years or so has been to discount the premium I place upon myself.  It requires a certain amount of honesty, a certain amount of simple self-denial, and I've taken perhaps inordinate secret pride in my ability to put things first, other than myself.

Women are raised, indeed, to do this.  Some internalize a service ethic so extreme they forget they exist at all, and live lives of generated-generosity which it is possible to view as either admirably altruistic, or extreme and martyred.  I maintain a healthy dubiousness regarding motivations for what is often defined as generosity, and am pretty strict in my judgment regarding anything I may do which could be seen as being "giving".  I know my motives, and I know what lies at the core of those things people tell me are so great, that I do.  I am grateful not to be the wench I used to be, but minimize the illusion I'm exceptionally nice, too.

But there's another thing women do, and that is wink at certain things.  We don't make a big deal about being heard, all the time.  Sometimes, we don't make a big deal about being misunderstood.  We're conditioned into competition with each other.  We're trained in passive aggression.  And victimhood is a part of the curriculum, for every little girl in our society, in our culture.

For a certain segment, the mindset of victimhood is strongly adopted - leading to either the martyrdom I was mentioning above, or to a sense of entitlement accompanied by the soundtrack of drama.  For others, the requirement to repel victimhood is so strong THAT becomes a raison d'etre, and we become so *above* those things we consider remotely victim-ish there can be gratitude for deliverance, and even, sometimes, a tendency to become a bit "above" anyone who "allows" herself to be a victim.  Even pity can express this assumed superiority.

And I think there's an extent to which ... this is my problem.

I have been so loath to "claim" victimhood - "there are so many people who have had it so much worse than I" - that I've shut my eyes, I think, to certain injustices in my life.

This isn't new.  All this thinking, of late, about these things has led to a positive assault of memories, dating back to pretty early youth, I know are worse than I "let" them be.

It's not that I feel some sudden need to sing a song of sorrow, and transform myself from the confident semi grownup I have become.  But I want to give voice, now, to those things I never peeped about before.

To every much-older-than-I-was man who told me as a very young girl that I "needed to smile" - as if my emotional state were nothing more than window-dressing to more attractively decorate his life.  This started at age ten or so.

To the older boys at the party at my cousin's house, who knew I was very young, and who knew my cousin was passed out drunk, who beat on her bedroom door for hours, expecting ... satisfaction.  From an utterly terrified little girl.  And an unconscious one.

To that one frat boy.

To all the other frat boys, who once said of me (a sexual innocent at the time), "Oh, dude, you were alone with Diane, and you didn't nail her?"

To the one who took advantage.

Even to the other one who gained advantage, but whose "fault" I swore from the moment it happened, it was not.

To the ones who scream "whore" at any woman who WON'T service them simply because they shouted out a car window.

To the ones shouting "I need some P****" all night long, the night before graduation.  And gave my mother an all-too-explicit understanding of why I had NOT dated the college boys she'd always been a bit disappointed I spurned, in favor of the townie she in fact came to like very much, when I married him.

To the one who ... left notes on my car.

To that guy in commuter traffic between Dayton and Columbus, in 1991, with the porn magazine prominently held high up, on his steering wheel, so people would be sure to be able to see it.

To the guy who slipped something in my drink - and still failed to make time with me.

To the one who approached me IN MY OFFICE (that night a bit over a year ago, when he thought we were alone in the cube farm), gave me a CHERRY STEM, and said, "NO HANDS" - and I did not instantly go get the guy terminated.  Who, I know, has disconcerted other women too, including a building employee I've seen shudder visibly in his presence.

*Sigh*  And, yeah - the (female) manager, who dismissed that behavior.

To the one who came at me in the hallway with, "I have to say something" and I failed to respond, "No.  You really do not."  (And who then thought that apparently my non-married status meant I surely I must be obligated to date him.)


***


I have always had a facility for adapting, for making the best of situations.  In my professional life, this makes me an asset, but did also lead me into two years with a company which had no use for me, and a job I despised more than I could stand to admit.  In my personal life, certainly there are those who think I 'settle' too easily.

We'll leave that assessment aside (I do still give myself pretty outsized credit for being smarter than my loved ones like to think).


I am not known for my silence.

My ex used to call me a dainty, demure flower as a joke.  The personality on me is as pungent as it comes.  It's fairly bizarre for me to discover the array and breadth of times I have muzzled myself, sometimes perhaps even dangerously.  I've had cognitive dissonance for a week now, coming to terms with this.

I haven't come to terms with this.  (Thank goodness for X, though - at least I have been able to talk it through, to this point, where at least I have some comprehension of it.)

At least I've reached the point where I can at least express some coherent frustration.  It may be whinging to the world.  But it's progress, for me.

Salic Lawdy

The recent hard-hitting news regarding the laws of succesion in Britain offer me the excuse to expound a little on one of the more substantial choices made by Clovis I.

Clovis was the guy who laid down the law a millenium and a half ago.  The codes resulting were a formal recording of traditions both ancient and diverse:  Clovis ruled a domain comprised both of his own people, the Franks, and Gallo Romans - those people in Gaul who were a part of the imperial legacy, then beginning to wane (Clovis' first battle, in The Ax and the Vase, is fought in alliance with Odovakar, who deposed the last Roman emperor), but boasting still a significant local population in what became France.

There was a vogue in any case, at that time, for codification.  The Visigoths had done it, Alaric II having laid down a breviary, and certainly Roman influence had its power.  For Clovis, too, the stipulation of legal terms served to this advantage:  to unite in common policy a disparate set of peoples.  Under Salic Law, the Franks and Gallo Romans were treated as one - both using the ancient northern traditions of his people as a template, and by innovating within those practices.


Salic Law has become a synonym, over time, for male primogeniture, and has been cited for centuries both with fervency and with loathing as the cause to withhold estate from women.  The Plantagenets were born after The Anarchy, a long and bloody war which arose for the sole reason that a woman was given to inherit.  Henry VIII's incomprehension of even the idea of a female HEIR rewrote Clovis' own Catholic legacy in western history.  There's rather a long and delicious post about the irony in that, come to think  of it.

But to my point.  Clovis's code, or the central tenet as contenporary history now sees the phrase as centering upon, is about to be rewritten in Britain.

Maybe.

Of course, it will take the many commonwealths and pieces (again ironic) of a definitely-waned empire to ratify this.  But female primogeniture may at last be legitimized.  Assuming natal legitimacy itself, of course.


***


I think about the generations and centuries since St. Clotilde swayed a husband ... and I think about the life I live, one and a half thousand years later, and sometimes I see similarities.  Yet the power I own (greater by far than any woman who EVER could have sat on England's throne, or indeed ever has) is unimaginably distant from hers.

More terrifyingly - the autonomy I claim is scarcely a hair's-breadth from the chattel-leine.  From the queen subject to a husband by divine right - and from every one of his thousands upon thousands of feminine subjects, unable to inherit, bereft of personal agency.  From the factory working mother, or daughter, chained up within the Industrial Revolution.  From my grandmother in her own factory.  From the secretary of sixty years ago.  From my mother, who with her coworkers colluded never to let one of their number be alone with the boss in the bank vault.  From even myself - a secretary because, even when I was coming out, there was still a degree to which typing was the way to make money.

My fingers fly now - and I am recognized - and I love what I do.  I no longer apologize for my occupation.

But I know that the impulse is there precisely because its obsolete echo is "this is what a woman can do."  Just because I can write a novel now:  doesn't mean I didn't get this skill as a backup to that interest in theater my parents were nervous about.  I didn't want to be a teacher.  I became a clerical worker.

There are millions of women my age who did "better" - but that is because what I do was anathema.  Terrifying.  I am that same hair's-breadth distant from being a nurse, a housewife, a mother, a whore.  I wonder whether others who entered fields as traditional as secretarying is harbor the same awareness of the conflict of "tradition" in this context.  There ARE still women who become teachers not out of vocation, but because that is the acceptable way for a woman to make enough money for her family to live - because it looks good at church - because mama and daddy said - because they feared to reach for "more" ...

... who feel guilty for not getting a "better" job, because, after all, they are so darn bright.

Who couldn't THINK of anything else to do even in the milieu of college.  Distracted by theater nerds, English classes, and the repulsiveness of business and marketing degrees.  Intimidated by science.  Unable to find the right entry point in history.


I am so much closer to the thousands of years, hundreds of generations of women who make up the history of the world - and whom Salic Law (and those ancient traditions so like it, replicated the world over) prevented inheriting.  Prevented power - by money.  I'm part of the nineteenth-century dust, the primeval red clay, the centuries-old winds of my old-fashioned hometown - my old-fashioned family - my anachronistic (in both directions) self.


***


And yet.

I have come into ownership.  I am laden with gratitude - and larded with blessings.  Power my mom even marvels at a bit.

The memory of the first time my granny ever visited my house - walking around the lot with her, going around the front yard - when she asked me, "How many husbands do you mean to marry, to keep a house like this?" - and did NOT mean, how will I get myself supported:  but how much of a harem of men would I have, in my beautiful estate.  I remember her glee, and her beautiful nervousness.

Granma had the most luminescent nervousness.  And nothing quite cowed her like accomplishment.  You could see the wonder in her, sometimes - at the extensive family she and my granddaddy amassed, generation on generation.  I remember sitting with her at her 90th.  "Look what you did grandma."  Her amazing smile.  When she was most excited, she was a little bit afraid.  "How many husbands will you have?"

Not a one, Granny.  But not for lack of loving.

I'm soclose to powerlessness.  I'm still just a secretary.  I'm an underachiever at heart.

But ... in action ... I am something so much greater.  Somewhere along the line, that hair's breadth came into existence.  I may not be far from the long history of women in subjection.  But I am not a part of it.  The hair's breadth isn't a wide barrier.

But it lies between me, my mom, my granny.  It lies between me and Clotilde.  Between me and every English queen - regnant, or not.

My grandmother used to exclaim, "Oh my lands!" and it meant something different.

But I have my own land.  I have paid it off, alone, and own a significant swath of a beautiful, enviable lot, a good patch of a cheering, lovely home.  Oh MY lands.

And women will inherit from me.  Only women - my nieces, when they are grown - a fantasy of perfect joy, imagining the women THEY will be.

And they are salish dwellers, themselves.  Like Saint Clotilde.  We all make a circle.

And now  we can own what we all encompass.  It's only a hair's breadth.

It is enough.  In my case - in the end - a bounty.

Take the Con II

This holiday weekend has been just the concluding part of what has actually been a vacation; I took off on Thursday and Friday too, so am in the midst of five days off and enjoying it very much.  The highlight, of course, has been JRW's conference.

The marquee guest this year, Kitty Kelly, was unable to attend, as her husband was recently hospitalized, which is more than an understandable reason for a change in plans.  One of the agents, too, had a very late-breaking reversal; after already being on his way to come to Richmond, Jason Allen Ashlock learned of a death in his family and had to turn around.  Apparently, he has committed to reach out to each one of us he had been scheduled to meet with at the Conference, to set up a Skype or phone call or some rain-check meeting.  I call that a pretty incredibly generous gesture, especially given the circumstances, and am duly impressed by commitment like that.  It's unlikely I'm alone in wishing peace and sympathy for his family.

And so I started the conference "off the hook" in a way.  My agent meeting was off, one of the other best agents there I've already queried, and the publishing pros there have nothing to do with historical fiction.  In a way, the years the Conference don't offer me any direct prospects are freeing, because they provide all the benefits of the education, support, and enjoyment the Conference always does, and skip some of the stress.  It's always fun to set a meeting, of course, but with as much work as I've been putting in lately - and with the fact that I am working on some revisions for an agent interested enough to put me to work on them (this is me, totally not squeeing and being 100% insufferable that I am working on revisions for an agent, by the way ...) - it was nice to embark on the event without pressure to perform.


I have to say, thanks to a couple of the Sarcastic Broads, to JRW's excellent Administrative Director, to all the volunteers, and of course to the guests, it was a great conference this year, not missing a beat even if it was missing a planned speaker and agent.  It was relaxed and rich, and went off without a hitch.  Smooth as silk - and fun, to boot.

Perhaps the unique feature of JRW's conference is the accessibility of the participants.  Guests who come for this event are asked to stay for all of it, to eat lunch with everyone, to be available in the halls and between their panels:  you don't necessarily need to have an appointment with an agent to have access to them.  Last year when I talked to Michelle Brower and she asked me to query her, it was not in a formal pitch 5-minute meeting, but just a chat about a colleague of hers after a panel.

I've learned that sitting out the panels, too, can be relaxing.  If one of the ones I am thinking about is overcrowded, or in the dark room with the uncomfortable chairs, or if I have just taken SO many notes at the last one and want to decompress (or, on years I am having a meeting, if I don't want to disrupt a discussion by coming-and-going from it), it can be rewarding to stay out in the lobby and chat with people as they're about to meet with an agent, or - amazingly - actually work on my writing!  The venue is a very nice one, and this year the weather was extraordinarily beautiful, so sitting out a period was a bit of a zen relief.

This year, sitting one out, I met Kevin Hanrahan, whose name I advise everyone to remember.  His novel is one I can't wait to read, and suspect an awful lot of us will embrace.  On top of being a likely success as an author, he's also an active service member, a very nice and generous guy (he agreed to read my battle scene!), and a family man.  It'd be impossible not to wish the guy excesses of success, and with the idea he's pitching, he promises to find it.

I also got to chat with Mike Albo, who, on top of being funny, turns out to be ANOTHER one of those friendly, supportive, enthusiastic, and infectious people the Conference is simply riddled with.  Likewise Joe  Williams, who did not have my dad as a professor (hee), and yet somehow managed to turn out to be a dazzlingly smart and also very nice guy nonetheless.

It's almost a bewildering abundance, the talent and charm JRW seems to attract.

The exception to this statement is notable, actually.  There was one guest this year who put on a show such as I've never seen before at any JRW event.  At one of the largest panels I attended, we were treated to a guest literally positioning herself with her back to the moderator, rolling her eyes at said mod, evincing obvious and 100% unnecessary antipathy quite publicly, and making an immense show of both boredom (whenever she was not speaking) and overdramatic snobbery.  It was pretty amazing, and devastatingly ugly.  The moderator largely on the receiving end of this Mean Girls snottiness evinced zero awareness of it, either because she couldn't see the show (this person's back being firmly to her) or because she is, you know, a GROWNUP and not feeling the need to engage pubescent antics.  I always liked this moderator, but am now firmly On Their Side now, and entirely disgusted by a guest I would hardly have guessed to be a petty, clique-ish little wench.  And, yes - I'm aware this succumbs to the clique dynamic.  But she started it!

I wasn't alone in noting her rather stagey antipathy, nor in being throughly put off by the show.  It was the single most revolting piece of behavior I've ever seen at any JRW event - and it was, in fact, the single piece of revolting behavior I've really ever seen at all.  (Poorly socialized people with unfortunate interpersonal skills really do not hold a candle, though certainly there've been a couple of those.)


***


The closing event of the weekend was Pitchapalooza - an event not ideal for the faint of heart or weak of knee.  Like the First Pages Critiques, this challenge asks writers to bare their works.  Unlike first pages - Pitchapalooza is not anonymous ... not done for you by readers onstage ... and is utterly direct.

Also unlike first pages ... it turns out that the likelihood of finding your name drawn out of the box, to present your pitch live in front of everybody, aren't so small.  With First Pages, which take a little while to read, and a little while to discuss, if they get to read as many as ten of them, it's a bumper crop.

With Pitchapalooza, there's a one minute limit on each author.

So there is time for a whole lot of people to read.

So the odds go way UP, that you will get chosen.


All of this is irrelevant to me.  Because the odds of being chosen FIRST out of the box ...

Turned out to be 100%, for me.


Leila tells me the look on my face when they read my name FIRST was worth a million dollars.

I can say this:  being chosen first was pretty painful!  But David Henry Sterry and Arielle Eckstut were remarkably generous - they clearly know what this is like for writers - and asked for a round of applause for me before I even began, and were pretty kind (and VERY HELPFUL!) in providing first-feedback.

I'm glad I didn't have to follow Kevin Hanrahan.

I'm sorry I didn't get to hear some of the repeat comments they gave to most participants, so I could edit briefly and address some obviously typical issues with pitches.

I'm interested by the fact that some of what my work overall needs done on it is common to what they observed about the pitch itself!  (It's well written and *rather* engaging, but needs "lusciousness" and really has to grab its audience harder by the lapels.)

I'm embarrassed that I was a bit disheveled at the time we got started, and didn't have time to acclimate to the event and prepare myself for it, and so stood there looking wildly, NAKEDLY nervous, my hair a bit of a mess, and my entire body shaking while everybody watched and at least two cameras TAPED ... heh.

But I was gratified by the kindness of several folks afterward (see also - the comment on my post below, from my Frank-ophilic friend Jeff Sypeck [this is as distinct from francophilic, fella babies]), which included Mike Albo saying the book sounds cool, and a girl named Cathy who said she missed my actual pitch but heard the feedback and wanted to know about the book, and Joe Williams, to whom I said I liked his pitch better and he said he liked mine (... UM ... and can I just say, the White House correspondent for POLITICO liked my pitch better than his - this, a guy so insanely calm and poised I was wishing I'd taken some sort of drug just so I could have appeared less of a trembling wreck and wondering how he did that).

I mean, I stood in front of Karl Marlentes and gave this speech.  I stood in front of Michelle Brower (ON the judging panel, by the way), who's already (so generously!) rejected my query.  I stood in front of all my Broads, and EVERYONE there (including that one Mean Girl) and shook, and faltered, and had trouble breathing, and managed to get through it.

FIRST.

And took ten minutes to come down.  Hee.  My handwritten notes on what they had to say are hilariously quavering, the pen half-digging through the page in physical translation of the mental pressure!


I have to say - Pitchapalooza?  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.  Woot!

Joe Williams said this, and I will close with it (as we Broads both opened and closed Pitchapalooza itself):  "They say you have to do one thing every day that scares you.  I think we've gotten a month's worth of scare in, doing those pitches."

WORD, Joe.  And a hug and a high five.

Tonight

Today is my mother's birthday, and I have hardly gotten to say hello to her.  Tomorrow is the day we (begin to ... ?) find out whether my friend is dying of pulmonary fibrosis.

My grandmother died of PF.

My dad did.

It is simply, literally beyond my comprehension that a friend I have known since I was a twelve year old girl ... could die.  I love her so very much.  She has been a friend like none of my others; winsome and silly and all the things we naturally love - but her heart is unnatural.  It is wide and kind and utterly loyal.  She has for a husband a man with one just like it.  Her friendship is a gift I have been thankful for, has spanned across thirty-one years now.  We were little girls when we met.

We still are.

She is a woman of a depth of generosity I have always admired; she is brash, and wonderfully crass, and has a mean streak just as wide as mine.  She is pragmatic - and romantic.  But for her friends - and I am one of the oldest - she is the deepest well.  She was there for me when dad died.  I can hardly bear the thought of being there for her when she does.  Of being there for her husband, who is also, so truly, so deeply, my friend.

Please pray for peace.

Pray for my beautiful, bitchy, batty, and beloved friend.

Kicked Out ... and Soldiering On

I should have gone to church this morning; not because it's an imperative unto itself, but because I needed it and felt and knew that - but I was feeling small and dirty and mean, and turned over in bed and would not go. It takes a bit to kick the church out of me. Having adopted the habit late (as a volunteer), it has an urgency youth's exposure had never made it. But I clung to a nasty temper, and laziness, and stuck out my lip and wouldn't do it. There is a certain stubborn influence, which is the cause of the worst of my temper, which feeds this petty arrogance. I couldn't meet this stubbornness without indulging in my own. And meeting it with conciliation hasn't been a working prospect.


***


I started off my day on Thursday, decided that challenges were what I needed. I dug in and I met them - "Bring it on," I actually said out loud to people - and beat them down ... and still watched the day explode. Friday was worse, but that was personal. And so I start this week, this stubborn week, which refuses to not come - inexorable - with heels dug in and jaw set, insistent on asserting myself. This week will not get the best of me. Neither will its pettiness and meanness. You hear? You will not get the best of me. I *am* The Best. Indivisible.

Family

One of my family happens to be a Japanese woman, and she has sent an email to let people know how her family are doing. She puts it so simply - that human self-monitoring and compassionate behavior are making so much of a difference. Though they are not in the north, her parents and other relations have stories, and there are so many they know who have been less fortunate, and who have not yet been contacted.

She makes an interesting point about the news - that Japanese media do not want to scare people, so their focus is on providing information. That deliberate clarity I was finding so important on NHK. There is much to be said for a journalist who is bearing up and holding on along with everyone else.

My prayers remain in Japan, as so many of us have been. My support needs to go in other, more concrete - and organized - ways, too. Time to go to the Red Cross, I think.

For Give-ness

Two years ago, people thought I was forgiving. I suppose I must have, though I never felt there was a "thing" to forgive.

Still, I refuse to forget. What makes me I fight to keep.

And in any case: denial and pretense seem to me antithetical to the power of forgiveness. If one fakes something away, it takes no courage nor care to accept its void. Living with life, with no substitutions to compromise what must be done with it, is the real power. Denying it is submission.

I don't like the stories in my in which where I am so defeated.

...

One of the things about age is the inevitability of giving things up. What encroaches on us isn't gain. Oh, there are new things, new additions all the time - increases, accelerations ... But most of what we get isn't gain. Only mentally, only emotionally can we control what everywhere else becomes erosion.

"I am made of hope," I have been known to say.

Apparently, over time, one comes to be made of sadder stuff.

I resent this loss.

And - even so - I content myself with it.



Ah, content. Cold comfort for those of us without satisfaction.

Private

I have two recent feedbacks on my eBay rating, which have the item I bought marked as PRIVATE. This kind of cracks me up, because of course most auctions are viewable, so it looks like I've bought some sort of deep, dark, secret thing.

I bought a pair of like eighteen and twelve dollar dresses from a seller. One was silver, to be sure, but even that is knee length, and certainly more disco than (morally) scandalous.

I can hear you sniggering, big brother. Shesh, you. I meant it's modest.

Heh.

Anyway - the thing is, the seller actually sells a lot of dresses to, as they term them, "CD gals". Cross dressers (and a variety of other nonchromosomally girlie girls).

If I can sell to my endearing "Pansy", I can buy where she might buy too.

I'm one of the lucky gals. It's no secret from anyone the chromosomes and hormones I'm sporting.



And, typing this post, I finally did what I've been meaning to do for a little while now, and looked up her eBay ID to see if she'd gone dormant. I was worried about her.

Still eBaying her little heart out. So a tiny cheer for my buddy Pansy. You GO girl!

Dream Job - Literally?

The offer letter didn't come on Friday; the staffing manager was off for vacation (she actually called me from home, kids in the background, to give me the offer) - so I should not be worried, I'm sure. But until the thing is in front of me; until I have signed and returned it, I'm going to keep feeling this whole thing is just a cruel hallucination.

I feel like I am holding my breath. And if you've read much, that is not a positive sensation for me.

*On tenterhooks until Tuesday morning*

And the Sky Burst Forth

And it is raining. A wonderful, windy, stormy, pelty grey rain, dizzying and slanting, welcome and beautifully dark. Twenty minutes ago, it was sunny. I hope it won't be so once again as quickly as that - the drought is too much. And we need this too much.

As the sky opened up, I was sending my very last query from the list in Writers Market. It is the 24th query I've done, the last of the electronics (from this source). Now will begin the real work, of course - of researching MORE agencies and agents who handle my genre; information beyond the book, not handed over with deets and an easy list.

As for those hard copies still pending ... well. Still pending, until I get a good capacity printer!

This day doesn't necessarily feel portentious, but I would be happy to take the sky wetting us down at last as a good sign. The interview change this morning. The last query being a particularly interesting one.

I can close my big fat book for a while (until getting a printer!), and embark on new work.

Maybe even work I can get paid for.

May today be a good day. Full of signs and hopeful changes.

Jaw. Set.

This is how good I am. I am responding to this setback not with the tears and flapdoodle I'd really like to indulge, but with at least *some* action. I asked that new reference if he'd go permanent (his response - "carve me in stone" - thank you ...), and what he was doing for lunch early next week.

It may not be much, but it's NETWORKING and it's PROACTIVE, and it's certainly not the reaction of a poor loser.

Not even the reaction of a loser, no matter how this feels.

As Cake so nicely puts it, "I'm a driver, I'm a winner ... Things're going to change, I can FEEL it" ...



Okay, well, maybe not quite that. But better than "waaaahhh - woe is MEEEEEEEEEE" anyway.