Nina Simone is an American and So Am I (the final installment)

Chicago reintroduced me to Nina Simone the summer of 2013. When I found a best of album (The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl 1967-1972), I discovered Nina's contribution to the civil rights movement and, subsequently, her slow disappearance into what I would later learn was bipolar disorder.

I waited tables that first year in the Windy City, and I would come home in the middle of the night, put in my headphones, and take Linus for long walks while I listened to music on Spotify.

I introduced myself to lots of artists that year because I had access, like I was getting away with something. To name a few, I explored the likes of Tupac, revisited the 90s, and stumbled upon Nina Simone's To Be Young Gifted and Black.I was growing up older, colder, and so was she.

I recall one evening hearing Mississippi Goddam for the first time.

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

In the documentary, What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), there is footage of Simone asking Dr. Martin Luther King what to do with all her feelings of rage. He, of course, encouraged her to focus energy on the nonviolent protests that would later go down in history as true democracy in action. 

But they killed him. 

So she sang this song, raging in a glorious, vulnerable masterpiece that the time for silent protest was over. That it's taking too long. Moving too slow. 

And they ran her out of the country. She was destroyed politically and publicly. The beautiful black woman with the incredible voice was not singing the songs that everyone wanted to hear. 
She wasn't smiling or trying to be nice.

Today there are so many voices scrambling and screeching to be heard and so many lives lost to alcohol, pills, guns, and violence, corporate violence, that America is not what they told us it would be. Yet, "they," whoever they are, are still trying to tell us that we need to hold on...for freedom? For what America......was?

America enslaved, tortured, raped, and murdered, countless human beings. Take a day and listen to the words to songs like "Strange Fruit," and "Mississippi Goddam." Take a month....take a month that is longer than February, take two months, and listen to the voices of those that have been trying to play by a set of rules that offers them very little.

Just like rage that gets stuffed down for far too long, the urgency of the song builds:

You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!" But that's just the trouble...

"Do it slow,"
Desegregation
"Do it slow"
Mass participation
"Do it slow"
Reunification
"Do it slow"
Do things gradually
"Do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"Do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know"

The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is impossible in a nation controlled by large corporations.

The lies about black crime told to make white girls afraid. The false masculinity of the disillusioned men who rape and take what they have literally been taught is "rightfully" theirs by design. The white boys and girls that scream "all lives matter" who have been told the lie that the Black Lives Matter movement is a personal attack. It is not.

And the churchgoers that voted for our current president and still try to talk to me about love that surpasses all understanding.

We have all been lied to. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it?

Nina Simone's family found her years later, drowning in depression. It's hard to see the world for what it is as an artist, as a lover of what human beings can create through expression, and keep going.

When you see the lost, the unloved, the broken, and the hated, all marginalized and demonized so that one group of people can say they are better or stronger, so that someone can claim ultimate power and final say, it's hard not to drown in hopelessness because what's the point?

And that is what is happening to this country. It is ignoring the rage that it is due. Because we have all been lied to, been distracted, been in love. The Bible teaches that only the Truth will set you free.

So we are all in prison. Quietly, comfortably, wasting away in a prison that we don't have to accept.

You cannot live a lie. You can try. You can surely try. But it will eat you up, destroy you from the inside out. You can dress it up, buy all the best treatments for gaping wounds, but it will kill you in the end.

It's too slow. The admitting of our sins. It's time to admit them.

How long can we live in the safe notion that if we keep quiet and pray about it, it will work itself out? We are the answer to our prayers. We are the present and the future. What we do...not say....not pray....but what we DO is the only thing that matters.

It's not time to let go and let God. It's time to stand up, and be counted. And it's time to start paying attention. Those who are living are suffering...including you.

I am a terrible vessel.

History is full of prophets that we've chased away because they did what we were terrified to do: be completely vulnerable. Like Nina Simone.

America wanted Nina Simone to pay for her "sins," while it continued to ignore the sins that would bring it...bring all of us....to this point in history.

Maybe an angry black woman isn't the problem.

"Oh but this whole country is full of lies. You're all going to die and die like flies."

She said in an older interview, used in What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), that her biggest regret is not getting to play classical piano at Carnegie Hall. The interviewer was astonished. Nina Simone had played Carnegie Hall...but not classical piano. That means something to a musician, the dream of creating something beyond words in a space made for that very creation.

Instead, at Carnegie, she played what audiences wanted a black woman who could play and sing to play, and when they didn't like what she sang, they threw her in the fire, to burn.

And burn she did.

Before the truth can set you free, you need to know what it means to be free, but, more than that, you have to try to imagine what it means not to be.

Creation

Thank You SO Much For Reading This part II

Welcome back. Thanks for stopping by.

Ahem.

This is from a good article in the Times. 

Margaret Fuller was not the best writer in the brat-pack of transcendentalists that came out of New England in the mid nineteenth century, but she knew the truth that history and literature books have yet to admit: that transcendentalism was, at its core, a movement for women, and she chose to use it as the guiding light in her life, which, of course, was not easy.

Despite the fact that she spent a great deal of time with prominent male authors of the period (who all loved and hated her in equal measure), she remained a single woman. She was like them: brilliant, quick-witted, philosophical and probing. (I omitted my first oxford comma. I’m trying it out.) Emerson longed for her company. Nathaniel Hawthorne was obsessed with her and kept killing her in his stories. What else can one do who has found a woman with an intellect as strong, if not stronger, than his own? He couldn’t marry her. That would be ridiculous.

She had been raised by her father as if she had been a son. He taught her classical history, languages, sciences, art, law….friggin law. By the time she was old enough to go to school, she had already received quite an education. Thus, her parents decided to send her to finishing school instead….how to be a girl school, which she naturally hated. Imagine being a kid with so much knowledge and drive, passion and gumption, and being told that you would be better off never using it and trying to be some other person entirely. If I were to be physically ripped in half, I think that pain would probably come close to representing what it feels like.  By the time she was old enough, she started experiencing what she described in her writing as “headaches,” but what was more than likely depression.

I read on a poster at my psychiatrist’s office that women are more likely to suffer from depression than men. Some of it is attributed to hormonal changes, and that is certainly a harsh reality of being a woman. Hormones make a monster of me, when I let them. There was a time in history when women did not understand their bodies (menstrual cycle) because it was illegal to teach them. It wasn’t too long ago in the early TWENTIETH CENTURY. Sometimes the only thing that keeps me going is being able to understand and monitor the rise and fall of my own terrifying hormonal changes. Knowledge is power, after all, if not also a curse.

Yes, much of the depression suffered by women is definitely caused by nature, but there is another aspect of it that the poster did address very briefly: social stressors are much heavier amongst women. We are hard on each other. Like I said before, patriarchy is not about men subjugating women. It’s a state of mind, a world view, to which we all fall victim.

Somehow, we all continue to hold each other to the same standards that the media, which is to say, the most marketable mirror of society, sets out for us, the life path that “civilized” human beings have deemed acceptable for women. Margaret Fuller saw it well over a century ago, and she wrote about it in her astonishingly (but also understandingly) underrated answer to Emerson’s Nature: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

I only suggest reading this if you like rereading because you aren’t going to follow it the first or even the second time. It’s a mish-mash of ideas that Fuller wrestled with her entire life. It’s a conglomeration of possibilities that women in America still haven’t fully realized. It’s hard. Is what I’m saying.

In 1843, She published a short version of her ideas in a literary journal that she edited with Emerson and other transcendentalists: The Dial. She called it “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men: Woman versus Women.” It was just a few pages. Her second draft, filling about 100 pages in my Norton Critical Edition, she published in 1844. I could drown you in brilliant thoughts that I’ve gleaned from the (seemingly) bajillions of times I’ve read it, but I’ll try to focus on my point.

Fuller answered her dear friend Emerson’s call to all American men to return to nature with her uniquely feminine philosophy: the true nature of humanity is both masculine and feminine. She called it a radical dualism and believed that all human beings share equally in the same traits, and that these traits are constantly passing in and out of each other. The problem, she stated, was not that man was disunited with nature, but that man was disunited with his nature. (That’s basically straight from my own thesis, with a little bloggy talk spin on it, which I won’t cite unless you think you might be dropping by the library at the University of Memphis sometime soon to check it out. PM me.)

How do we solve the problem? Well, that’s the hardest part. Here’s the proposition, in sexy block quote form: 

It is for that which is the birthright of every being capable to receive it, --the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe, to use its means; to learn its secret as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and their judge. Ye cannot believe it, men; but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you (not farting out loud -me), is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves. Were they free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of woman; they would never wish to be men, or man-like...Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break. (36)

The quote sits on the only page I chose to dog-ear in my copy. Simply put, women behave the way they do because they are not allowed to discover any other way to behave. If women were given the freedom to explore their own passions and desires outside the confines of social structure and expectation, they might discover a spirit greater than could ever be imagined.

The same is true for men. We are, all of us, too often at the mercy of our own world-view, but there are steps we can take to stretch our minds further, to defend ourselves from stagnation and ruination. We can continue to explore, with open minds and hearts, the only thing that matters: truth. To discover what it means to be alive outside the lines, and to venture further.

I would like to hear Neil Degrasse Tyson say that out loud.

Margaret Fuller went on to become a front page columnist for The New York Tribune, to be renowned as a journalist, thinker, and critic. When she left the country at age 36 to cover the inevitable revolution in Italy, she became the first female foreign correspondent. She met her husband and had a child while in Italy all of whom tragically drowned in the wreck of the ship aboard which she was returning home, the Elizabeth.

In 2006, she cracked my brain open and left it up to me sew up my skin to protect my bigger brain by creating a skin like cover. That’s all still in the works.

Now I say, “Okay Fuller, I’m going to stop resisting living. I’m going to do the hard things. I’m going to find out what it means to be me...to be a woman.”

As I go, I want to share it with other people, partially because my narcissism demands it, but also because I want to help other people crack open their own brains. Then maybe, together, we can sew this weird skin-like cover to protect our new bigger brains.

Too far? Did I lose you with the skin-like protectant brain cover metaphor? Are you wondering why you’re still reading?

Consider the coming posts my exploration, my changing of the channels on the radio in search of something familiar. I’d like to explore the voices of women through my own voice. Margaret Fuller was the first woman’s voice that I recognized calling me to action. I may never hear it or meet her, but according to Edgar Allan Poe, “her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from one as from the other,” (quoted in my thesis). Her editor at The New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, said of her process, “she never asked how this would sound, nor whether that would do...but simply ‘Is it truth? Is it such as the public should know?’ and if her judgement answered, ‘yes,’ she uttered it” (also in my thesis).

I don’t 100% trust my judgement for whether things are such as the public should know, but I also don’t 100% trust my ability to trust myself. I’m working on that.

Until then, join me in my quest to find the voices of women so that I might, in turn, hopefully, find and trust my own voice.

My thesis is entitled: The Sovereign Self: Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century. I actually don't have a copy that I can find digitally saved or online. I'm in the process of typing it out, but it's been almost ten years, and I keep finding mistakes that need correcting....so I'm rewriting it, in essence.

If you need a list of my sources, I'm happy to send it over to you...meanie.

Oh....and this: 

Thank You SO Much for Reading This part I

Now let's talk about America.

I took a class in graduate school at the University of Memphis (AF) on Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first day our professor explained that we would almost exclusively be talking about reading the works of Emerson with a little bit of Thoreau and a touch of Whitman along the way, and if that sounded like a death rattle to anyone, they had a whole week to drop the class. Then we were dismissed. I think maybe one person dropped, but the rest of us, obsessed with excavating and gluttons for punishment, arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to the next meeting.

If you consider yourself to be an explorer, bitten by the bug of wanderlust, I encourage you to read Emerson’s Nature. It’s difficult and sweeping, but it will change the way you see yourself within the context of patriotism. It will make you love America again. Emerson wrote the American philosophy. He said he was going to do it, and then he did it, and he was revered for it. When he was too old to even speak, crowds would gather at universities, and he would be rolled out in a wheelchair so that the people could just look at him.

I fell in love with Emerson for the first time in tenth grade after reading only brief snippets of his essay “Self Reliance” and a few poems. I scribbled “To be great is to be misunderstood,” and “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” on bathroom walls at rock and roll shows. I watched Dead Poets Society a million times, and a million times I cried whenever I heard someone say “Oh captain, my captain.” Emerson encouraged me to be me, ridiculous and rude, gentle and gigantic, beautiful and terrible, because that was also the story of America.

Studying Emerson in graduate school was inspiring and illuminating. He too grew old and callous, and he too had many shortcomings. Learning everything about a hero is like learning everything about your father. He could make everything okay, pick you up and make you fly like Superman when you were a little girl, but he was also a human being, and, just as you would in your twenties...and thirties, he made a few bad decisions.

Nevertheless, Emerson inspired Americans, young and old, and continues to inspire. He inspired me to begin to dig deeper. He kept talking about all these things that men should be doing in America. He envisioned a new nation whose art and literature were not inspired by the past, rather, they were inspired by the future of a country free of British rule. He told men to go out into the woods, of which there was an abundance at the time, to reconnect with this land that we now inhabited, and to draw from it the language of a new way of living. By philosophizing the problem, “the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken in heaps, is because [this is a terrible grammatical error, but that’s how he said it, i.e. sic] man is disunited with himself.” He said that in his ground breaking essay Nature, which was, in turn, his solutionizing.

I was in love. He was so right, and I’d always known it. I immediately imagined him alive today, and we totally made out. Then, later, as is often the case, I started to wonder if maybe I had jumped the gun by throwing myself at him right away. I mean, he was saying all this stuff about going off into the woods to regain a concept of what it means to be...a man.

It was 1830s or 40s-ish U.S.A., and men had ample opportunities to explore and engage with the new continent, but women couldn’t connect on a visceral level with Emerson’s ideas because they were not free to strike out on their own. How could half the population of a burgeoning nation transcend if they lived at the behest of the other half. They lived to serve men. Is what I’m saying. It was legal to lock your wife in your room and beat her for being disobedient (for another hundred years). If a woman never married, she lived on the good graces of family members that did marry, as she could have nothing of her own. Thanks, Emerson. Thanks for getting me all excited about stuff you did not even mean for me.

Luckily (or unluckily) my prof told me to read me some Margaret Fuller. The rest, my friends, is history.

Okay. Please come back tomorrow, and I will post part II. Until then:

THANK YOU!

Try to Follow Along

Just Yes. 

I feel like I had a pretty eclectic musical upbringing. I started out being heavily influenced by the founders of Rock n Roll and Pop Rock (AKA the oldies station my parents liked). Then, the 80s digitized my fancy into the age of electronica, and the 90s, while destroying Rock N Roll forever, will always have a special place in my heart. Never mind the fact that I just listened to the oldies, The Monkees, and EVERYTHING NKOTB up until about eighth grade when I heard Rubber Soul for the first time.

I used my allowance a few months earlier to buy The Cranberries Everybody Else is Doing it So Why Can’t We? on tape, received The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Pearl Jam’s Ten for Christmas on tape as well, but Rubber Soul was the first compact disc that I bought. Many more Beatles CDs would drain me of my allowance, including my all time favorite: Revolver that I originally had on tape from my parent’s collection along with the glorious White Album. Ugh, and that epic roundup of songs at the end of Abbey Road, the last album The Beatles every recorded (not released, look it up), makes me feel everything I've ever felt (The Beatles became available on Spotify for Christmas, and it's the only thing I'll ever need).

Much Better. 

An ocean of music would touch my life between then and now, but one thing always remained the same. I was always searching for a connection to a part of myself that wasn't always easy to find on the radio.

I am not a music critic. I am not a professional musician. I studied the piano a harsh total of two years and quit because I never played a recital. I kept fighting with my parents about practicing because I failed to see the point. Then, I played the flute from the seventh grade through my senior year in high school because I was considerably good at it and able to prove it on occasion. I continued lessons a few years beyond in college, where I also took voice lessons. Then, I played flute with a couple of garage bands in Memphis in the early 2000s, helped found and direct a musical improvisation team in Atlanta around 2010, and now I play mostly guitar for myself while I occasionally bust out the flute. And I sing Karaoke. I love Karaoke.

Yeah. That's me down there. 

I am an enjoyer of music. I appreciate music, not only for the color it brings to my life but also for the skill and effort that it requires to create. I am struck repeatedly with the quality of the effort The Beatles as a unit produced in the 60s. Just as Shakespeare is always relevant because of his appeal to the larger part of humanity, The Beatles have made a place for themselves in the annals of music history by blending effort with ingenuity to create something that connects everyone (I first spelled "annals" as "anals" which was clearly wrong but fun to write).

It takes a great deal out of a person to connect on a universal level. Art that speaks to everyone reflects the heart of humanity. Music expresses that which cannot be expressed entirely through words. Don’t take any part of that for granted. Music is the language we all understand (you can’t say math is that because I don’t understand a damn thing about math), even if...especially if we cannot find words to fully express how much it affects us. 

As I continued my search (and as Pandora and Spotify became a thing that made music more accessible), I began to be struck with the music I would find, and the way it would affect me. I was looking for, you probably guessed it, women's voices.

Damn right. 

One might argue that women’s voices do not represent the whole of humanity, and I would rebuttal that jerk in the face with the back of my hand. I wouldn’t do that. I try not to be violent. I would, however, remind him or her (him) that the same is true of men’s voices. Yet, look through history and you will find more male voices than female voices. Why? I’ll be honest. Probably because of the patriarchy and how men, especially white european men (sorry dad) have used it to subjugate anyone they deemed “other.”

I bet I know what you’re thinking. It sounds like I hate men. I don't, entirely. Not every man is voluntarily a soldier for patriarchy because a majority of men are not even aware of its effect on the way they see the world. Neither is every woman a soldier of feminism. Many women are unwittingly...and some very wittingly...patriarchal in their own views of the rest of humanity.

Weren’t we talking about music….and The Beatles? Yes, we were, but I want to travel back to the magical world of “I am paying for this Master’s degree, and I intend to use it.” I’ll begin with a question.

Case in point. 

What does it mean to be a man? Yes, that is a loaded question. The answer is much more than I could fit into the pages of a book. Literature and art have done a decent job of asking and answering. Patriarchy has been the guiding philosophy for millennia. There are countless books, poems, paintings, plays, films, and historical accounts to witness to the experience of man.

Ever heard of a little work called “Hamlet?” Shakespeare, like a resounding symbol, casts the most repeated question that has ever been posed, “What a piece of work is a man!” Then, he kills everyone. I think it speaks for itself.  

The world of art and literature could have stopped there, but it continued to pose and attempt to answer the same age-old query. Despite this, there are still many men who feel as though they don’t fit into the stratification of their own gender. It’s important to remember that Patriarchy is not about specifically male domination. In the words of Buffy Summers as “the first” in the epic feminist final season of the cult classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “It’s about power,” and I don’t think every man in America is obsessed with power. The Patriarchy works in mysterious ways.

Feminism, on the other hand, is about equality. Don’t be afraid of the term because it shares with the word “feminine.” Equality cannot exist until the scales are balanced, and that feat can only be accomplished if and when women (and men, to be honest) are allowed to discover for themselves what femininity (and masculinity) truly means outside of the confines of the patriarchal world view. You know what I mean........Vern?

#destroythepatriarchy

At the moment, what we know of the female experience is limited to what our society will allow, and our society is still very much under the guise of the patriarchy. Things are changing. That is clear. Women of different shapes, sizes, ethnicities, economic backgrounds, and abilities are beginning to speak loud enough to be heard over the din of popular culture. Their voices represent a larger picture of humanity that has rarely been allowed to make it to the surface.

Patriarchy promotes the subjugation of those who do not fall in line with the reigning power structure and are, therefore, considered to be the weaker parties. Feminism, on the other hand, champions diversity. Equality demands diversity, and in our diverse world, democracy cannot exist without equality.

So, yeah, let’s talk about America...but Next time.

I'm struggling with my sad brain this week, folks, but this post makes me happy, and the next one will too, I hope.

Good Grief

Let's move through the narrative of this point of view piece backwards, the way it occurred to me. I received an article about the Isla Vista killings, with the comment that some of the attitudes expressed by the shooter matched the male attitudes I addressed in my blog about sexting. Remember that one? I was talking about a (couple of) guy(s) that inappropriately propositioned me to respond positively to his  (their) genitalia pictures that he (they) sent to me via text message, or SMS if you're reading this in England or just Europe in general (yes, more than one guy did that to me).

My objective in said blog was to point out that trying to define "rape" as this specific thing was moot because people can cause mental sexual distress to other people without even touching them. There is this underlying idea behind trying to define rape as only sexual encounters that end in intercourse and ejaculation, perhaps because it is only within the last hundred years or so that it even occurred to anyone that it wasn't okay ever to force a woman to have sex with you, even if she was your wife. That specifically has probably only become unacceptable in the last sixty years. SERIOUSLY. It was okay to beat your wife at the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf talks about it in her shockingly hard while simultaneously easy to follow, stream of consciousness A Room of One's Own. Drink some coffee while you absorb that one.

And now this kid went and shot people because he couldn't get laid? Because he felt like women owed him?

There are a few arguments here, but the one with which I would like to spend the most time is the misogyny part.

It's easy to hate this guy, to look at him, as a feminist, and say, "this is why I am a feminist." He was a self-proclaimed hater of those darn feminazis.

Here we have a tragic case of a simple misunderstanding in which, the victim, said shooter, has completely misunderstood that which he hates. In his world and the world of so many misinformed men and women, Feminism preaches that women should hate men, that men are the enemy, trying to keep us down, to grind us down (illegitimi non carborundum). Except it isn't. Not actual feminism, at least.

Sometimes it's hard to define a movement of thought with just one word. There are layers to the theory, an idealism that seeks to permeate the wall that the patriarchy has built until feminism no longer requires a set of symbols (letters) to define it.

This is what has happened with the patriarchy. For ages, there was no word for this idea. It was simply...reality...at least in western white cultures. Women were simply "other," lower on the food chain, the weaker sex.

Ah, but now, now we have defined it with a word, signifiers have been organized in such a fashion as to represent this idea that has guided our thoughts for centuries. Now that we have defined it, given it a name, we take ownership of it. We become aware of it, and we are able to let it go, to see the poison it is, and to flush it out of our system.

The tragedy of being able to understand the patriarchy a bit better is what happens to the humans it still affects. We become detached, disenfranchised from reality, lost in a prison created for us by our own society...by ourselves.

The idea that women are separate from that which we, as members of the patriarchy define as truly human...with typical human experiences and responses...is what fuels the fires the fanatics light. It seems to me that this kid thought the women that rejected him, and there were apparently a lot, were doing it to him...because of him. The reality of most situations is that a man's world is not the focal point of any woman's world. The focal point of her world...is she, her. And she doesn't have it easy, even today.

I've had multiple male friends (and lovers) laughingly tell me that I could have anyone I wanted. That I have nothing to worry about when approaching a guy because no guy is going to turn down a chance with me. And I believed them for a while.

And then I started dating. I've been "dating" for over four years now, and let me tell you, it is not easy...and it is rarely pretty. NO. I cannot have anyone I want. In fact, I can rarely have anyone I want...at least these days. I have been rejected more times than I ever thought possible, but I'm still working hard, and while I wouldn't mind giving the entire male population a kick in the nuts, I certainly don't think they owe me anything (aside from everything for keeping my sisters down for so many years, dammit)...but I do worry that I owe them something...

And that's how the patriarchy affects me. I give so many men such a hard time, and I get so defensive and so angry with honest and good men because I'm worried that if I don't give them what they want, I'll be alone forever, a failure at basic human relationships. I project misogyny onto them, when it probably wasn't even there in the first place.

The truth is, rejection is just a part of putting myself out there. If I were successful 100% of the time, I'd be bored...and success wouldn't feel so sweet. I wouldn't have any reason to challenge myself, or to take things back to the drawing board, to expand on my beliefs and ideals, to care. I don't want to date every guy that falls for me, and not every guy I fall for wants to date me (ever!!!! WHY?????!!!). Life is exactly as it should be.

If I could talk to this kid, if he hadn't offed himself leaving us with no outlet for retribution or...reason to forgive, I would tell him it isn't about what you think you're owed. None of that is real. Being able to get laid whenever you want to/need to get laid isn't success.

Real success is contentment, empathy, compassion.

These are the things that make life bearable, and life seems unbearable pretty often. Falling for someone, realizing that you can trust someone, being able to accept the love someone tries to give you, those are the things that make life worth living...and none of those things actually require sex. Sex is the cherry on top...and also the whipped cream...and, if you've ever added marshmallow to your banana split...it's also that...plus chocolate.

Sex is not a right. Sex is an honor, be it attached or unattached. Respect is what makes it best. Mutual respect.

The only way to get to that is to run as fast as we can in the opposite direction of misogyny, and then get ready to fuck it up a bunch before we get it right...if we ever do.

It's hard to change, even a little bit. We feel it in the pains of those who crumble under the pressure. I'm not saying this kid did the right thing or that the deaths he caused should be written off as a simple growing pain.

I'm saying: it's time to start talking openly about what it's like to be alive. Now we come to the part of the story that I discovered at the end of my journey: the story of the grieving father.

The moment this man began to cry at the same time that he unleashed his raw feelings of rage, I began to cry...as a human being. I understood it. I have no children. I'm half the man's age...and, oh yeah, I'm a woman.

But my empathy took over, and I wept with him. Because we are both on the same road.

The patriarchy (not feminism) paints a picture of fatherhood, of leadership, as being devoid of that kind of out of control, wailing emotion. That is reserved for women, the weaker (too emotional) sex.

But it isn't devoid of any emotion, or it shouldn't be.

The only way to survive change, is to stay open and to lean on each other. We have to feel empathy and, subsequently, compassion for each other. There isn't a single one of us that doesn't struggle down the same road of life. If you meet anyone that says they don't, they're lying.

It's time to stop pretending that life isn't hard, that we know all the answers, and that we completely understand and have achieved happiness. Believing otherwise is believing in a mirage.

It's time for it to be okay for anyone to be enraged and broken hearted, vulnerable. It's time to admit that's how we all feel a majority of the time.

More Like Farts and Crafts

Look. I'm a girl. I can do things. I can do a lot of things. I can cook, clean (I am ABLE), train a dog, grow vegetables, fold clothes, write, edit, wax academic, be sexy, be casual, bathe myself, eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's in one sitting, binge watch television on Netflix (or any channel offering an America's Next Top Model marathon), read, snore, swallow more than one pill at a time, exercise, cycle, drive a stick shift, gossip, give advice, tell jokes, do shots, do my hair, pack a bowl, read a newspaper, teach a class, follow instructions...I could go on forever. I can do anything really, except CRAFT.

It's not that I CAN'T craft, and it's not that I don't like crafting...no...it is that I don't like it. I don't want to do it. If you're thinking about inviting me to a crafting extravaganza, you might want to think again. And no, adding wine as an incentive will NOT make me somehow want to come to your craft party. I can drink wine any time I want. I'm an adult. I don't need the excuse of a party to drink wine. I have a dog, a couch, a library of books, a television set, AND a box full of cheap wine glasses. I can drink wine on my own and not feel an OUNCE of guilt. There's no magic in taking a handful of buttons and some Mod Podge that will somehow make me feel like drinking wine is suddenly OKAY. I already think drinking wine is okay. There are no superlatives to the word "okay."

I have listened to friends that I LOVE, that I think are the coolest people, BEG me to come to their crafting parties, and I didn't argue. I just laughed. I just laughed. You think I can't talk girl talk with you unless I'm gluing lace to a pillow? Look, I wear makeup. I know the art of seduction. I don't need to prove it by crafting a birthday party for my boyfriend (Okay. I don't have a boyfriend, but if I did, I wouldn't make decorations for his birthday party. I would invite his friends and buy booze. What more could he want?).

And don't think I haven't tried it. I've tried crafting parties. I usually just sit there watching everyone dive into these incredibly intricate and thoughtful projects while I finish off a whole bottle of wine. The only thing I get out of a craft party is purple lips and teeth. Sometimes I cover my fingers in glue and peel it off...cuz that's fun, but I rarely get into the spirit of creativity.

And I KNOW....OMG, I KNOW that it might make Christmas shopping easier. I could just make some crappy hand made cards for people and drop them in the mail and BOOM...Christmas is done, and I feel no guilt for how broke I am. I made pretty things for you. Except that was more okay when I was a kid and making macaroni collages.

You know what. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make macaroni collages for ALL OF YOU. Macaroni, Elmer's glue all, washable markers, and maybe my handprint. And you HAVE to love it...because I DIY-ed it. I freaking do-it-yourselfed that shit.

Finally, in protest of the most harmless of all of the activities (because, honestly, ladies, more power to you), I'm going to have a girl party where we just drink wine, listen to music, and fart (which means I'll be inviting you to a regular day in my life at my apartment). Who's in?

I have no pictures for this blog.....yet.