Live for Love

I want to posit something to all the boys and girls, women and men out there. I want you to consider that perhaps existence has been presented to you in one particular way, and because of this, your subconscious and conscious life's goal has been to meet a manufactured set of criteria. But you already knew that. You just forgot. I forgot too.

I can't say for sure, but I can guess that I started to forget after I reached the age of being capable of baring a child. I was fifteen and playing the coveted role of Zaneeta Shinn in my school's production of the classic The Music Man. My dance partner and I, the featured "cute couple" in the show, spent night after night learning the most menial of steps, flirting but not flirting. 

He was popular, handsome, and ended up with his face on the hall wall for eternity after being named our equivalent to "Prom King," but since Prom was sin, we had to make it seem more prestigious. I knew where I stood and how he felt about me as soon as we took hands at our first dance rehearsal, and he told me my hands felt like grandma hands. 

We are animals after all. 

If I'd realized what was happening (had I been like five years younger) I'd have laughed it off as a "this guy," moment, but I was fifteen. I didn't want to have grandma hands because no one would love me. No one would love me if I had grandma hands! 

I felt that way too when my friends treated me like a freak for things like...eating tuna salad for lunch. Who will love me if I don't exclusively eat chicken fingers!?!?! When they laughed at me in fourth grade because I started getting boobs. WHO WILL LOVE ME IF I HAVE BOOBS?!?!?!?!

Shame. It's a shame. How terrified I was of not being loved, lovable. For what else was I supposed to live? But for love?

This is the message we get every day. That love is this thing to which we should aspire, that it is shiny, and plastic, and precious, and pretty. Just like America.

Except America isn't pretty. America is violence and horror, greed and rape. Her beauty is in her age, the monuments to her natural history. We the people package beauty and sell it like the ancient forests we decimate for parking lots without a second thought. 

So too is life. It isn't romance and happily ever after. It isn't good and bad. It's mostly ugly.

There can never be joy without pain. There can never be love without loss. There can never be life without death.

It isn't a game. And it isn't for sale. And you are unique out of every single person in the world. Shiny and pretty and perfect doesn't exist.

But you do. And imagine, just for a moment, that the love you seek is inside of you. All of it. The love you ache for at night. It's inside of you. And it is a well.

Live for that love.

"and you will have the suffrage of the world." Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Finger Wag

I'm currently overloaded with political nonsense. I can't escape the constant buzz of tension that comes from waiting to see what's going to happen next, nor can I escape the deafening silence of knowing that none of it matters. Because none of it really matters. I suppose.

Except, it does. It matters to me.

In 1988, I was in third grade (and it took me way too long to remember that). I turned 9 that year. I played way more pretend then, hand-copied the parts of the encyclopedia about space in preparation for graduate school, and was totally voting for Dukakis.

I don't even remember this. 

I also didn't have boobs, so the rest of the girls had no reason to be jealous of me. We told each other everything, how we felt, what we thought about things, no questions, judgements, just camaraderie.

Thus, it was perfectly natural for one of the girls in my class that came from one of them well-to-do families with a mansion and a heated pool in the back yard, to share her thoughts on the evils of the democratic party as such: "My brother and I saw some homeless people with Dukakis signs, and we asked our parents if we could spit on them, and they said yes, so we spit on them and yelled 'Bush Quayle!'"

As I reminisce, I feel a little bit of anger at the simple fact that I had to hear someone say that about other human beings at such a young age, which means they had to hear it from other human beings even before I heard it.

I don't remember a damn thing about Michael Dukakis, except that he was a democrat, and we were democrats, and we were always going to be on the losing side, especially in the south....and that some people think it's okay to spit on other human beings for showing support for a candidate that was promising to provide them with relief. They knew nothing but the black and white of it and that mom and dad said it was okay.

That girl, those girls went on to bully me through 4th and 5th grade, send me home crying to my powerless parents, "I don't know why they don't like me! I don't know why they do this to me!" I can't figure out why my mom and dad never told me the truth: Boobs. Instead, they told me my forehead was so big (it's a five-head) because my brain was so big....which is gross.

I've been going back there lately, exploring the upside down place of my childhood past, especially since the campaigns kicked off.

I keep getting frustrated and angry at the constant sprawl of negative media options. My politics haven't changed, although I find them to be a bit more middle of the road in a place like Chicago. There's a reason this city owns the state of Illinois when it comes to national elections. It's an opportunity to see the other side of the political spectrum.

I see random posts on Facebook from old friends that I've forgotten to hide about how voting for Trump is probably harmless and voting for Hillary would be like unlocking the gates of hell, and I see posts from new friends in Chi, talking about how voting for Hillary would be just as bad, if not worse than voting for Trump.

I hear and see the nightmarishly garish things Trump says about Hillary and the nasty things people say about Melania.

I hear the rage when an adult says in front of a child "I'll never vote for that bitch," or, "Hideous woman," or "no wonder her husband cheated on her," and the classic, "I just hate her."

Every time it happens, I think of that nine year old who won the giant bucket of candy hearts on valentine's day for guessing how many were in it, and I think of the things she heard from the mouths of other babes (with smaller bubes), and how those people treated her, and I'm sad all over again. For me, for other people that can probably relate, and for all the little girls and boys right now that get to hear and see the disgusting way women are being treated in this election.

Think how you want to think, and vote how you'll vote, but pay attention to the messages you're sending to each other. We need each other.

We can treat people better. We can do it better than anyone else can. Who else is going to do it, anyway? Politicians? Let's let them do their jobs and focus on what's right in front of us. This awesome blog. Read it again.

Bush Quayle!