the modernity ward

Don't Eat Those, They're Maggots

Well fuck me running, I was SURE I'd saved the last thing I was working on. That'll teach me to look up from the internet at my actual human friend who has entered my house demanding Fresca. 

(You guys are welcome to do that, by the way. I like it.)

So this friend, Angel (and you better believe that name is fitting), asked me, well, what do you think it should feel like, the practice of making things? Not the actual finished product but the process? Do you expect it to feel good? Because it doesn't. It feels horrible. That's how it feels.

Angel makes the most wonderful things, some of which I'm lucky enough to have in my house. It came as a shock to me, that the process of creating is, for her, riddled with worry and the discomfort of working a bit of yourself into the wool with a felting needle. 

Which, I mean, damn. I was hoping I was special! Uniquely tortured! Doomed to serve as a living coffin for my Substantial Gifts that would, I don't know, upon my death spill from my corpse like candy from a pinata? 

No, don't eat those, they're maggots. My metaphor is crawling with larvae. Because it's been dead for a while. 

But you know what I mean? Maybe I got some issues or whatever, but maybe I can choose not to be self-indulgent about them. Maybe I can do shit even if it really really hurts.

I was running this morning. I had 30 minutes, figured I could do 3 miles, right? 10-minute miles? I ran ten of those in a row back in November! 

But I barely made it. 32 minutes and just under 3 miles. And every fucking step of it sucked. No Fun Run, this: my legs burned, my cardiovascular system protested. Ever since I started meds, I can't run as fast or as easily; my muscles tend to cramp and stay sore for more than a couple of days after even small workouts. I fight the ugly voices in my head; I make my body go when it wants to stop. I sweat and chafe and ache and want to barf, sometimes. But I run anyway. Even though it sucks. Because I trust that having run will be worth it.

Oh and this one time I had a couple babies, not at the same time or anything, but I did the whole damn thing twice over, and you know how much of it was fun, each time? The first contraction. That was it. That's the last clank of the roller coaster as it reaches the pinnacle of that first hill; after that, it's all momentum and shit is about to get CRAYCRAY. 

Childbirth was not a spiritual, ecstatic experience for me. I was pretty darn well prepped, and it was still crushingly painful at times, terrifying, exhausting -- but yeah, worth it. Not because of the baby. Hell, you can get a baby anywhere. Just for the experience itself. I get to keep coming back to that one, what I figured out about myself and where I fit into the world, what I don't get to choose, what I do. Having done it was worth it.

Birth isn't that for everyone, and you sure don't have to birth a baby to have an experience like that. Besides, the creating-as-giving-birth metaphor is so awful and hackneyed that I'm going to stop right there. For me, though, running and birth are two times that mind and body are engaged equally -- or rather, there's no division between the two.

Whatever well of instinct drives those two improbable activities is the same thing that makes me need to talk to other people, with words and things. That creative urge is as overwhelming and earthy and yucky as the urge to take a giant shit.

None of those things feel good. They aren't nice. They're pretty nasty, actually, with sweat and blood and oh god did I poop? Please tell me I didn't poop! and terror and drudgery and WORK. 

But hey! There is always triumph at the end. It might not look how you expect, or how you want it to. It might not be recognizable. Sometimes my only triumph after a terrible run is that two days later, I run again.

So, hell. The obstacle is the path.

That's Zen for "Quit being such a fucking baby and get going, asshole." But don't mistake the bluntness for cruelty. 

Now I'm glad I lost the first thing. I like this one better. Triumph, right? 

SLUT

I self-identify as a slut.

And it doesn't matter what I'm doing (or not doing) with my vagina, or my hands, or my mouth right now, or this year, or the past two decades: I am a slut at heart. Because I get to do with my cunt and my hands and my mouth whatever the hell I want. And nobody else gets to say dick about it.

I decide. No one else. And I own my decisions and I am completely okay with every last one of them. 

And if Rush Limbaugh wants to call me a slut, that's fine, because for once in his stupid, stupid life, he'd be right.

Except being a slut doesn't make me any less worthy of things like medical care. And good manners. And basic human dignity. 

I know that the men of the Republican Party would largely disagree with that, but I don't care. The only way to rob that insult of its power is to say, yeah, you know what? I am a respectable married mother of two, a homeowner, a taxpayer, a voter, a regular visitor to an Abrahamic house of worship -- and I am a slut, down deep in my soul.

And you will take me seriously.

 

 

So Here's the Plan

I? am gonna sit on my ass and let my sick child watch television and wait around until it's time to eat. 

That's as far as it goes. 

I'm getting that airy floaty feeling that signals the beginning of A Sick. I don't think I'd've caught it had I not busted up in those Thin Mints -- the sugar, it'll leave your immune system bullet-riddled on the curb! -- but here we are. The cookies, they are gone, and so is my resolve to unstick these bits of tin foil and broken crayon from the bottom of my feet.

At least when I am exemplifying the stereotype of the Stay-at-Home Mommy Who Just Gave Up I can enjoy it with some kind of ironic distance. Abandon myself to it and yet maintain a detached awareness of how my house, it looks like a movie set if you were trying to get across to a bunch of single twentysomethings just how comically terrible things get when you have little kids. The only thing missing is a a wailing sweet-potato-besmeared infant in a high chair. And that's only because you're too late. Come back thirty-two months ago, we'll see what we can fix up.

 

 

 

The Big Homage

To start: Martin Scorsese, The Big Shave. 1967

I have this plan to purchase and consume an entire box of Thin Mints all by my lonesome. Happily I am having my period right now (AND HOW! Oh my GOD!) and the Girl Scout Cookies come in tomorow so this plan is really working for me.

And I had this idea to record myself eating this box of Thin Mints, because it's just funny for some reason, in a 64-slices-of-American-cheese kind of way, to do a thing like that. I mean, you are ALL going to do it. I know you are. You are going to buy those cookies and you are going to eat them all, and we will collectively pretend we are sooo disgusted by ourselves and this completely unanticipated behavior has taken us entirely by surprise and we just looked down and found two empty plastic sleeves on the table in front of us and who could have foreseen such a thing?

But we knew all along, didn't we?

So we have this pristine white bathroom, now. White vintagey sink, white floor tiles.

Wouldn't it be great to film myself eating those cookies in front of the bathroom mirror? Standing over the pure white sink? Sean remarked upon the superficial similarity to Scorsese's The Big Shave and damned if some shit didn't fall right into place.

Here's what I would do, were I so inclined:

Stand there in a white towel, contemplating myself in the bathroom mirror. Set the Thin Mints box on the sink. Open the box.

Take out a sleeve and open it up. Watching myself in the mirror, eat the first cookie. Second, third, so on. Okay.

Fish out the second sleeve of cookies. Open it.

Cut to the white tile floor between my feet. SPLAT. Blood.

Trickling down my leg. More blood.

Up to the mirror. More cookies. Cookies cookies cookies.

Floor. Blood blood blood. Running down my legs. Splattering everywhere. (At this point I don't even think I'd need special effects.)

But how to end it exactly? I'm not sure. I am sure, however, that this film needs never to exist except in our collective imaginations, so I promise not to actually make it. What would it be talking about? The tyranny of hormonally driven eating as it intersects with Big Agriculture's refined grain and sugar combination and the futility of resisting it? How we pretend to lie to ourselves about our intentions regarding that box of non-nutritive foodstuff? How fucking awesome it is to make things that look like other, well-known things?

All I know is that it made Sean almost throw up. So mission accomplished, is what I'm saying. That dude has been sharing my bathroom and headspace for twelve years, and I can still gross him out. 

Episodes

I think we talked about this before, right? How some of us get huge waves of energy and creativity, and you have to learn to ride it because count on it, sister, it is gonna recede?

It's exhausting to be all rolled up in one. But I'm getting so much done. I only have five months. After which point I am either in school or it's The Nothing. You know, that roiling cloud in the Neverending Story that eats everything. So one or the other but it's a deadline, either way. I think, what, two books and a finished house? Ducks in a row. Freezer full of enchiladas. A place for everything. Everything in its place.

I have to get a piano. Next week. A good old one with a voice of its own.

Would I be more productive if I didn't have children? Maybe not. There would be no urgency. Nothing kicking me in the back, literally and figuratively. This morning I woke up to Daphne's tiny fingers on my neck, her babyish face whispering a reassurance directly into my mouth: "Mama, I will never leave you again."

Yeah. I don't know either. But okay, sweetie. See that you don't.

 

 

Need to Know

I just want everybody to know some things. 

First, Sean referred to today's look as "sexy '90s dockworker" and I think he was DEAD ON, man.

I feel like it's important to have at least one day a week where people look at me and think lady, you are a GROWN-ASS WOMAN! What in the damn hell is the matter with you. 

Also it turns out that camouflage pants are a very handy thing to have at certain times and if only they had been the right color family I might not even have noticed the Diva Cup fail that occurred whilst I took a phone call from some admissions office dude. Who with a sentence managed to reduce me to barely suppressed SHRIEKING PANIC.

 

Second is that if I don't get into nursing school I am going to be a TOTAL DICK about it for like a whole month. That is my life plan. After that I will have to come up with something else, which will involve hourly wages in amount sufficient to cover child care for Daphne. 

Third is that the sketchbook got short shrift, last couple days, so having completed my date with DeWalt (the cordless drill! Who is responsible for our now having a toilet paper holder in our bathroom!) I am off to scribble some sweet nothings on its pages. So goodnight. But remember! TOTAL DICK! That's the plan. 

 

How to Raise Girls Right

Baby: Pop a garter with a bow on it around her malleable little cranium. Or people might think she's a boy. She doesn't even have any hair, for god's sake. Make sure she doesn't wear a blue shirt ever. Unless it also has flowers on it. But the flowers have to be pink.

Toddler: Maybe the Cars-themed pull-ups were on sale but if you ever let her piss in anything that doesn't have a princess or a unicorn on it she's gonna grow up lesbo.* Everybody knows that.

Preschool: Don't let her get dirty. Oh, that pretty white dress, you can't go in the sandbox, you'll ruin it! Here, you sit in the car while your brother digs.**

School-age: Tell her to gang up with the other little girls! Chase the boys! Girls chase boys! But make sure she also understands that ew, boys are gross.*** She should probably still rassle 'em a little bit though. Just always let them win in the end. That will serve her well in years to come.

Extra credit if you can teach her how to exclude and manipulate other little girls. The best way to do this is by example.

Puberty: The day she gets her period, sit her down a the kitchen table. Hoist your old tape player up on the table and pop in The Nails' "88 Lines about 44 Women." Listen to the whole thing together. Tell her she has to pick one and be it from now on. Support her in her choice.

High school: Give her a 35-year-old book about sex written from a religious perspective. Get really drunk one night and wax rhapsodic about the "essential communion of souls" that sex is. When you sober up, scream at her about how she's going to get a disease. 

If she gets a urinary tract infection, bark at her, "Well, next time tell him to do it RIGHT!" Do not attempt to elaborate on this. If she's such an adult she thinks she can do...whatever it was...that she did with that boy, she can damn well figure out what he did wrong.

After: Pester her for grandchildren. Reminisce fondly about the days of having small children underfoot. Tell her not to get pregnant, because it will ruin her life. 

 

*Do people still actually say this?

**I totally saw this go down in Philadelphia once. Rich white lady and kids, for demographic sampling purposes.

***I mean, they really kind of are.

Seriously

First let me state that as I write this I am having the most batshit insane excuse for a snack: a pile of cacao nibs and a single prune. It's like opening a cigarette and eating what falls out. And a prune.

I'm eating it by leaning over the bowl and sticking the nibs to my tongue anteater-style.

This is all just to set the stage.

I made some things once. Some of them were poems. Some of those poems were very good, at least some Real Actual Poets thought so. I also made some art, and some of that was okay, although my printmaking professor was of the opinion that art that looked like things was not in fact art, no matter the effort that went into making that copper drypoint. Whatever. The important thing is that at one point I made things, a lot of things, just for the pleasure and necessity of making things. Then I stopped making things.

It wasn't that I didn't want to make things; it's that I didn't think the things I made were worth the making. I couldn't take myself seriously. Why, that would be TOTALLY DOUCHEY OF ME. 

Why that should be so, I was never able to adequately explain to myself. 

I decided to make other things. Little human things. When those things didn't come along, I started writing about that, which is a kind of making things. It was terrifying at first but I had no choice: if I didn't make this thing, and show it all around to other people, I was going to die. Or at least become completely unrecognizable to myself. Which is arguably the same thing. It was hard to be new at it, but I kept going, and for once, a thing I made attracted some positive attention. For which I thank you.

Fast forward.

* * * * *

I eventually succeeded in making some little human things. And periodically would be stricken by the urge to make other things, non-living things, but it is difficult to bring something new into being when you are being shat on by your existing creations, or they are howling at you, or waking you up every forty-five minutes. You may buy time in fifteen-minute increments with small cookies but eventually you are going to have to deal with the seven pounds of ground-up cookies that are lodged under your sofa cushions and in your carpet fibers. Because you will be very tired, and you will want to sit down somewhere. 

Besides, what was the point? Who would care about the things I might make? They wouldn't be any good. There wouldn't be any reason for them to exist. It was better not to make them. Easier. Where I wanted to be, in the field of making things, was so far away from where I actually was. Frustrating.

* * * * *

That same impulse of unknown origin that drives me to make things one day pushed me into running shoes and down the street at a humiliatingly slow clip. I just had to, and damned if I could tell you why even to this day. It was a new thing for me: running, yes, but starting something. Doing something that I wasn't already sure I could be good at. 

I admit it was an unprecedented cliff dive. How silly, what a minor thing, but I had spent my entire life to that point avoiding precisely that sort of thing. It was my first time at being a novice, and not using that as an excuse to quit entirely.

I kept going. Slowly. And then faster, and more, until I was a decent runner, though still a novice, but at least comfortable with my newness -- but I never believed I was a real runner until I ran so much I hurt something and had to stop running. Then had to restructure my whole life around getting back to real running.

But the running. I never thought I could do it -- I said terrible things about myself all the while -- I doubted my ability to progress even as I got faster and stronger. Until suddenly the only way I could hang onto it was to take myself seriously enough to form a plan to get back. 

* * * * *

I need to make things. And now, having made two very demanding and increasingly large things who are right now watching Wild Kratts because before I turned the TV on I was rousted from my chair literally every 45 seconds, I am stuck with the fact that the only way to make things is to take myself seriously as a maker of things. There are new challenges, of course. There is no waiting for the muse to strike, and as it turns out you can't sit around wishing you could draw better and magically have those lines organize themselves on the paper. There is only practice, practice, practice, in the hour you steal a minute at a time from everything else that wants you. 

It's the pen and paper equivalent of logging road miles, of abrading the rubber off the soles of your shoes one molecule at a time, this draining a Sakura Micron dry of ink. I might tell myself I can't do it at the beginning of each run but my body puts the lie to that every time. It's harder with a pen and paper. For that to work, the editor in my head must die. Or at least take a long and complete sabbatical. For that to work I have to promise myself and mean it, that I will fill this entire sketchbook with garbage and not argue each line out of existence before it even hits the page. Let the body do the work behind the back of the mind. It means a pared-down practice of art, black and white, three pencils, two pens, one Mars plastic eraser. And a vow to use that eraser only to refine, and never to second-guess. 

This is terrifying. And exhilarating. It took me thirty-five years to take myself seriously enough to buy a pen without being told which pen to buy.

Sean has been telling me for twelve years that he likes the things I make. That he thinks they're interesting. Worth looking at. And that that is reason enough to make them. I finally heard him yesterday. Was ready to hear him. 

So here's to a sketchbook inked to the edges with crap. 

 

This is All So I Can Shit in Peace

I cannot stop with the fucking Diet Mountain Dew. It's like an embarrassing old boyfriend or something, you know, spend a little time apart, get to remembering the good stuff and wanting a taste again, and then you pound one and twenty minutes later you're sitting in a minivan taking deep breaths through your mouth and trying not to lacquer your steering wheel in electric yellow glop. And someone asks if you're okay and all you can say is "...hlk."

Just like that.

So I've had people -- contractor, plumber, electrician, a handful of police officers who probably did NOT need to come in with guns unholstered -- in my house for about two weeks now. The upshot of this Parade of Men is that we will soon have an awesome new bathroom two feet from my side of the bed, bonus points for being the only room in the house I'd trust not to collapse in a stiff breeze, so as in the case of late pregnancy it will ALL BE WORTH IT IN THE END when I can enjoy my morning alone time with the newspaper and no children dangling in the doorway whining about hooooow looooong is it gonna beeeee when they could very well go to the perfectly operational toilet upstairs but in the meantime I am having to parent in front of other people all day and shower just one paltry layer of drywall away from strangers and not that this changes anything, my slack-ass Blue's Clues-allowing ways and creative swearing, but I do feel weird having to elbow men out of the way just to dig my underpants out of the drawer. 

There's no way to hide what you're doing there. Hey, fellas, don't mind me. What do you think today, purple? The purple ones? With this bra? Okay. High five. 

It's harshing my mellow, is what I'm saying. I don't know if a man who spends his days elbow-deep in sewage has the wherewithal to notice the Costco-size bottle of lube nobody ever remembers to put away or judge my habit of just leaving the play-doh on the floor until it's dry enough to sweep up, but I'm thinking about it. Not hard enough to pick up the play-doh ahead of schedule, of course. You don't fuck with a successful routine.

 

 

I Need...Something

Look, we all know astrology is utter bullshit, but let me direct your attention to the ridiculosity that is Mercury Retrograde. Allow me to reiterate: I don't believe in it ONE BIT and yet during that time every gas line in our house started to go ffffffffssssssss and the gas company had to come out FOUR TIMES and none of the checks we were waiting on showed up and everyone ignored my Craigslist postings and every email I sent ended up in somebody's junk folder and home repairs turned into multi-thousand-dollar extravaganzas that we just simply couldn't do...

...and then...

...a switch flipped and finally the gas is back to where it should be and we've figured out an alternate (and much cheaper) plan to address the house issues and a month-old Craigslist posting turned up a buyer who didn't even bargain me down and a whole lot of checks arrived in the mail.  And I managed to score a lot of thrift furniture that was priced way lower than it should have been even in a Salvation Army and got an armload of the oddly specific clothing I was looking for at Goodwill.

I'm just saying.

I saved up four months' worth of BlogHer ad revenues (in case you were wondering what that sidebar ad gets me, it is about $25 a month and less each time) and bought these. Partly because I know that someday I will be somebody's punk rock grandma on a Carnival cruise and I might as well start dressing the part, and partly because they'll go with everything -- you know, black and brown -- so I don't need another pair of shoes. Yes, that's right: I have exactly one other pair of closed-toe shoes that I can wear without significant foot pain (the foot that hasn't been operated on yet), and they are some old-school MBTs that Frankenstein's monster didn't want because they were too clunky.

So I'll wear leopard-print mary janes to any funerals, proms, or b'nai mitzvot that happen to come up in the next six months. It's still ninety-five goddamn degrees here though. For at least the next week. Which means you will continue to see me around town in a pathetic Target t-shirt and unflattering denim shorts. Enjoy that.

But there's something missing. Something...awesome. And I don't know what it is! Maybe i need to make a circle skirt out of clearance fabric, or henna my hair burgundy. I tried making very early Halloween decorations with Sophia, and now we have a spooky front window, but that didn't quite do it. It needs to cost $10 or less, whatever it is.

What should I do next? What do you do?