Unfinished fictions

Truth be told, I have probably spent enough money to constitute a life savings on coffee at my local coffee shop. I don’t feel bad though, when I fork over two dollars every half hour for a cup of hot, black House Blend. The coffee is organic and fair trade, which I guess makes it taste a whole lot better than the Folgers that my roommate insists on buying and the girls who work at the counter are usually cute and young. And if its not one of the cute and young ones, it’s at least one who is nice and doesn’t comment on how I wore that shirt yesterday or something. I can respect that. Flea wasn’t the cute and young kind. She was young, probably out of the woods in terms of college-aged, but not firmly in the adult years of her life and certainly not cute. She opened on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then the other days of the week, she would show up for a couple of hours and would immediately change the music to Bob Dylan. I hate Bob Dylan. He’s a pretentious, washed-out, Born-Again Christian hippy with bad taste in hats. She loved him, down to the way she cut her hair. I remarked that once.

“Your hair looks like Bob Dylan’s,” I said, awkwardly enough one morning. It was before my first cup of coffee.

“I know,” she said. “House blend, right?”

“Yeah. But why Bob Dylan?”

“I like him. I wish I were him.”

I wasn’t trying to come onto her. I don’t think either of us was attracted to the other person. And that was what we had in common: a complete sense of detachment. I didn’t say that I liked Bob Dylan, or his haircut, or hers for that matter. It was a matter of respect, or not even. The truth was deeper than that, or maybe not even at all. Maybe we were just two people who happened to live in the same big city who happened to find our physical selves in the same place at the same time relatively frequently and decided to base our friendship on a simple coincidence of placement, like sodium and chlorine.

A few weeks and several hundred cups of house blend later, I was back at the coffee shop towards the end of her opening shift. It was a Tuesday and she didn’t even ask to sit down at my table covered in sections from the New York Times; which was stupid because I only ever really looked at the crossword.

“Are you one of those pretentious fucks who buys the Times every day but only does the crossword and only finishes it on Mondays anyways?” Her coffee cup was leaving a ring on the Style section.

“And Tuesdays, and sometimes Wednesdays if there’s nothing good on TV and I have a particularly fruitful night on Wikipedia.”

“I could tell. At least you don’t order lattes. I hate people who order lattes.” I decided that this conversation wasn’t about me at all. It was about her and for some reason I didn’t despise her for this. “Lattes are for people who have never drank a glass of soymilk in their entire life, but for some god-awful reason think that getting soy in their coffee makes them special.”

The more Flea and I talked, the more I learned how many people she hated. Yuppies, corporate types, animal rights enthusiasts, tourists, food snobs, coffee snobs, vegans, elitists, indie rock musicians, people who never went to camp and evangelicals, to name a few. I think more than a few came from a series of broken relationships and the fact that she worked in the service industry. I fell into a few of those categories. I’d never been to camp, for one. This was a fact that was covered extensively one afternoon. Flea was under the distinct impression that most kids needed to be sent away from the comfort of their own home to a place where horny teenagers primarily try to attract each other and only glancingly deal with young children who are sent to the wilderness. I was under the distinct impression that my parents actually loved me and therefore didn’t need to send me to a place that clearly sounded like a complex social hell.

“Plus,” she said one day, slamming down an empty espresso mug, “camp was where I got my first kiss. It was where I lost my virginity; it was like ten years of therapy rolled up into a few weeks in upstate New York.” And for the first time since Flea and I started talking, I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. I bought a few minutes by needing another cup of coffee as well as needing to get rid of a previous cup and stood in the bathroom staring at my reflection in the mirror. Could my life really have been changed if my mother was the kind of person to pack up my things and put me in the care of strange and irresponsible older children? And then suddenly, I found myself back at the table with Flea and a new cup of coffee.

“I need a cigarette. Are you busy? Want to go like get a hotdog or something?” Flea opened up a pouch of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette. I knew Flea smoked because she’d already told me why she liked unfiltered. The tobacco got in her mouth; a quality that had plagued smokers for years and for some reason reminded her of sex because they felt like pubic hairs on her tongue. “Like licking Dame Cancer?” I asked, but I didn’t want an answer. Flea didn’t like to hear that kind of stuff. In addition to being a nymphomaniac in our conversations, hating entire swaths of the human race and playing the saxophone, Flea was a classic case of germ-phobia. She claimed to have come by it honestly, being raised by a Jewish epidemiologist. Legitimate, in my book, but I didn’t understand why she opened bathroom doors with a piece of paper towel even when it was in her own apartment.

She was terrified of getting a cold or the flu but for some reason the other health consequences of her actions like having sex in a cabin at summer camp or smoking cigarettes one after another was inconsequential.

The more I got to know Flea, the more I thought that her existence was contrary. She delighted at handing the cashier her ID when they said, “Can I see some ID for the alcohol, sir?” if only to watch their face.

“What’s your real name, Flea? Your parents couldn’t have hated you enough to actually name you Flea?” I asked one morning after I ordered my coffee.

“Fiona.” The hatred of the name was palpable in her voice. “Luckily, my parents were decent enough to notice early on that I wasn’t exactly the princess type. You know, I kissed girls on the playground when I was in preschool. For a whole year I pretended I was a boy.”

“And so they started calling you by the name of a small parasite. Makes sense. I love your parents.” I started to feign disinterest because it annoyed her and it seemed like the more she was annoyed, the more she said, the more she tolerated my presence.

“They started calling me Flea because I would try to run away.” It was a simple sentence, but filled with an obvious emotional impact. “When I was five, I ran away for ten hours and then I realized I couldn’t ask my mom for money to get food at the 7/11, so I just went to the park and hid in the tube for awhile.

“How did they find you?”

“I wasn’t much of an escape artist and the park was a block from my house. My mom didn’t call the police luckily, but she did decide to scare me into coming home by sending the teenage son of a neighbor to come ask if I wanted a ride downtown.”

“Like kidnap you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the kind of shit you see on that one TV show, Intervention, where the people are addicted and its always explained by some shitty thing that happened to them when they were kids. They were in the special class or they were molested or they saw their dog die or something.”

“I love that show. Makes me feel like I have my shit together,” she said without a hint of irony.

Been a long time, baby.

It's been a long time in every sense of that word.  I've been writing, though. In notebooks instead of on a computer.  In notebooks, on real paper, my handwriting fills up the space differently than it does on a browser and I like that.  I also like that I can write before I go to bed under the soft light of an ancient snake lamp that happened to be in the room to which I've been relegated.

Friends have graduated from college. Friends that aren't that much older than me. Damn. I guess I don't have much to say about it other than that I can't imagine going back to school without all these people.  I'll still be happy to go already.

I feel so different at home than I do at school.  At school I'm more confident and I have some sort of future. I swagger. I wear sunglasses when I go outside to make sure I don't have to worry about recognizing people. I wear whatever I want and I don't worry that my hair sticks up in the morning. Here I'm a different kind of person because I have a past here. I'm the less athletic, the more artsy, the sweet Gretel, even if I'm a little odd, I'm the epitomized girl-next-door. 

And I hate it.

Now with 50% less metal

In February of last year, I got a microdermal piercing on my sternum. I loved it. Body modification, for me, is kind of a way that I can control my body. I've written about the war I've waged on my body since I went through puberty and for some reason, controlling the way my body looked by sticking some metal into it really helped. I would look down and there would be this little piece of metal, peeking at me from between my breasts, which were already contentious to me. Were they too big, too small? Do the pock marks from the heat rash I get every summer ruin them? But there was this little piece of titanium that made them beautiful accessories.

It made me a little more confident. People I didn't even known would stop and ask me what that was on my chest, and, no matter what the reaction was, I still loved it.
It started to reject over summer break when I was pulling on my swimsuits every morning, then layering a PDF over it for teaching canoeing. By the time I got back to school it was ok, but a little pronounced and over the past 6 months, it has turned purple with scar tissue as my body pushed the little metal feet up to the top layers of skin. It needed to go. I'm working at the same camp this summer, doing the same thing, and I can't imagine what it would be like to have it reject while I'm basically living in a glorified lean-to on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan.

It's been through a lot with me. A mental illness, my last horrible relationship, many hook-ups and a summer back at camp. It's been through coming-out and fights but it has always been there, maybe even lymphing for a day or two or pressing into my sternum when I gave a particularly tight hug to remind me that it was still there.

And now it's not and all I have is a little purple scar and a weird brown scab to remind me of my titanium friend. I guess now carrying my bags across my chest won't be as painful or dangerous and I won't have to explain why I have metal sticking out of my chest. I'll just have to make up a story for how I got this scar.

I am not doing my work so instead I did this

I <3 you, Zack.

Looking forward

About this time in the semester i get existential.
What do I have to look forward to? More school. Always. More school. More papers that I don't want to write, that will get read once and discarded. More stress and stomachaches and tears. More feelings of the deepest inadequacy. And then I slog home for the summer or for winter break and I drag myself back here to do it again.
I guess now I can see the end of the tunnel to break the cycle. One more year. 365 days from now I will be finishing up my last papers and graduating. I know I can do it, graduating from college is no big feat.
But I do get sick of having nothing but small things to keep me afloat. A dinner out at a chinese restaurant, an afternoon of beer and gossip with some friends is all I hold onto. Summer is desolate, and then back to school, where I will have to deal with the fact that all of my friends have graduated and I'm alone.
And thinking about the future brings an insane amount of anxiety. I'll be a real person one day I guess, with bills to pay and a job (hopefully) to go to. I'll have real furniture that is mine and might not even be made in a prison. I'll have a real girlfriend and a kitchen where we can make breakfast burritos the next morning. I will have friends too, but I want to still talk to the ones I have now because I have finally fallen where I am supposed to be.
In my real life, as opposed to the life I've been living for the past 20 years, my refrigerator will always have a beer or two for company, my cupboards always some kind of exciting cookies and a wooden chest of teas. In my real life, my apartment will be fashionably cluttered with the remnants of this other life which I have lived: pictures from summer camp, posters, mismatched plates, mugs, cups, utensils, furniture, appliances and an ever-present animal. I will always have an afghan to drape around me while I work, I will always have the heat a little too low in the wintertime so that I can snuggle myself under blankets at night. I will have too many books, or perhaps just the right number, because I do not believe that bookshelves should be used for anything but books.
I will live in an old apartment building that has its peculiarities, and I will like them. The third stair might squeak and the front door might stick in the summer heat, but it all just makes the experience of living there one I will remember. I will have a sunroom where I keep my plants, where my dog will like to sleep and where I will sleep in the summer so that I can get up with the sun.
In reality, in one year I will probably be in the same boat that I am in now where my life is nothing more than a few hundred words on a silly blog.

I am way too much of a stereotype for my own good

From the Jezebel site and inspired by a conversation I had last night. Things I have done/worn are in red. Clarifications are in brackets and in purple.

Dress Code (Unless The Lesbian Is The Femme)

• Appropriate footwear: Birkenstocks, Airwalks, chucks, Doc Martens or sports sandals. Socks are never optional [I actually abhore wearing socks, and do so only because my feet get really gross in the summer. That said, the only time I have ever worn socks with my Chacos was when I was pretending to be Super Awkward. That said, I have worn wool socks with Birkenstock sandals].
• Make-up: not allowed.
• Undergarments: Bras are frowned upon.
• Appropriate tops: flannel, more flannel [I actually wish I owned more flannel, but I am working on a quilt made out of flannel], folksy prints and Polar fleece.
• Appropriate bottoms: jeans, cords, jean shorts or walking shorts.
• "Hygiene": Shaving of armpits or legs is frowned upon [I have, and will continue to shave religiously because I don't want to look like the missing link like my brother].
• Accessories may include: Nalgene bottles [Actually, now its a Sigg bottle since my Nalgene got stolen]; carabiners; keys at your belt; fanny packs [it's a lumbar pack]; femme lesbians who only dress girly for the attention or to get a real man [Not a femme fan].

Score: 14/23

Lifestyle Attributes

• Appropriate automobiles: Saabs, pickup trucks, Subaru Outbacks, Jeep Wranglers, Xterras, Mini Coopers and Volvos [Booyah! I ride a bike! Hmm, maybe that's not the least dykey mode of transportation. Nor is my last car, a Toyota Corolla].
• Pop cultural influences: Melissa Etheridge; Ani DiFranco; Indigo Girls; and The L Word. No exceptions.
• Pets: At least one cat, and preferably more [I hate cats. Why aren't there dogs on this?].
• Food: Vegetarians preferred [Been there, done that. I will only be an omnivore from now on]
  
• Colleges/alma maters: Smith; Bryn Mawr; Mount Holyoke; and Wellesley.
• Partner choices: Recruiting straight women preferred.
• Career choices: P.E. teacher; basketball player; softball player; and professional golfer.

Score: 2/22 I feel this one is a little rigged though because you can't own all those cars at once. Plus, lesbians are poor. This one is.

Psychology

• History: Must have been abused.
• Oedipal Complex: Hatred of fathers, except when they over-identify with them.
• Childhood Obsessions: Monkeys as pets.
• Adult Obsessions: Hating men.
• Penis Envy: Yes.
• Child lust: No.

Score: 5 /7. To be fair, the Penis envy is only because I make penis jokes approximately 30 times per day, and child lust is wrong so even if I did have that why would I admit it. And any interesting girl had a dream of owning a monkey for a pet.

Sex & Relationships

• Onset of lesbianism: College — until graduation, in some cases.
• Conversion: Lesbians can be converted with one internal application of human penis.
• Madonna/Whore Complex: Many are technically virgins, because they've never gotten down with a dude.
• Roles: Every lesbian relationship has a butch and a femme.
• Timing: Lesbians move in together on the second date.
• Sex: Once two lesbians move in together, they will never have sex again.
• Break Ups: Bunny boiling provides the maximum drama all lesbians require.

Score: 2/8. To be fair, the Conversion was obviously proven wrong, and I've never really had the chance to move in with someone. Bunny boiling drama on the break-up front though. Christ almighty.

Total: 25/60
Less than half lesbian stereotype!

Taking Women Seriously

This is a continuation of a conversation that I had on Friday with a friend. We discussed a group of common acquaintances who were all female and frequently kissed each other while drunk while asserting that it meant nothing.

I'm guilty of doing this. Once. I kissed my friend for the sexual gratification of a college guy who thought we were both attractive and wanted us to kiss. And I did because I was tipsy and at that point was doing anything I could for attention from guys. I almost immediately regretted it, but wrote it off because it was just making out with a girl. Whatever.

Whether it is a social construction or not, it is widely accepted that most womens' sexuality is more fluid than mens'. Women are deemed, because of this, more likely to, say, "randomly" make out with someone regardless of 1) whether they find a person of that gender representation attractive and 2) whether that person finds them attractive. I saw, and have seen, a lot of women kissing very openly gay men and I personally find this just as reprehensible as the two girls who make out with each other in front of a man in order to get attention from him. You see, kissing a gay man, who obviously has no attraction to a woman, is just dishonest. Because the girls that are kissing these men are straight. So, if the situation was changed and a straight man decided to kiss a gay man because he couldn't make it with the ladies that particular night, would it be an ok thing to do? The answer is probably not. Yes, there are straight men who are comfortable enough with their masculinity to throw a liplock on a dude, but very few who would go so far as to passionately kiss them.

As for women kissing women, I think it has less to do with cheap sexual gratification and more to do with a safe-place that exists between women that they can express some sexuality. As an armchair psychologist, this is probably bullshit. But it seems to me like women, in an attempt to be sexual without the danger/possibility of having to do more than they are comfortable with or willing to do in a particular night out, make out with each other because it is safe.

After I came out, I kind of noticed when my female friends (and I have a lot of them), who are pretty much across the board straight, would dance with me at a party. Was I being misrepresentative if I didn't dance with girls, or was my sexuality at all threatening to them? Did they feel like I was dancing in a group with them because I wanted to feel breasts, butts, thighs, etc. on me? It put me in a really hard spot and although I still dance with my friends, I'm not going to be party to the homoerotic stuff that goes down between a lot of straight women. I guess I'm worried that makes me a little homophobic. Am I not so comfortable with who I find attractive that I can't dance with women that I don't find attractive or say that I find their touch, while not erotic, at the very least, quite comforting?

I don't know. Until I can figure that out, I will dance by myself unless I can find someone who takes my sexuality as seriously as me.

Reply from Eric Palmer

Gretel,

Thank you for your thoughtful email. I have received numerous comments
both pro and con on the Court's decision. Based on contacts, my district
is evenly split on the issue. I have encouraged everyone I've spoken to,
to read the Court's decision.
(http://www.judicial.state.ia.us/wfData/files/Varnum/07-1499.pdf) I have
also encouraged people to review the State and Federal Constitutions. I
believe the only way we can have a meaningful dialogue on the issue is
to review these materials.

After my own review of the Court's decision, I have to agree with them
that the statute was unconstitutional because it failed to provide all
citizens with equal protection under the law. Based on this analysis, I
do not plan to introduce or vote for an amendment to the Constitution.
This is an extremely emotional issue, but I do not believe that
fundamental civil rights can be put up to a vote of the people.

Regards,
Eric

PS - I'm glad you're planning to stay in Iowa.

The Letter

Over the course of my nearly three years at Grinnell, I've gotten a lot of angry letters from my parents. Letters are the sign that something is Wrong. Capital double-u, Wrong.

Today was the absolute worst.

At first it was funny. I try to find ignorance funny because it takes away from the hurt that it's supposed to cause. But then I read a few more times and the bad grammar and incomprehensible subjects faded away to leave a greasy, grimy trail of ignorance and fear.

I never really "came out" to my parents. I let little things slip in and out of conversation over Spring break while I was home with them. The week before when I had my first girl break-up and I cried for twelve hours straight, I had called my dad at 2 or 3 in the morning because I was so lonely. After talking to me for a few minutes, he realized that I was getting over the break-up of a relationship with a woman and just kind of dropped the conversation.

My parents aren't by any means religious, something that they cite in their letter as a possible reason for why I am the way I am. My mother has several lesbian friends, whom she finds flakey and a little ridiculous, but nothing indicates that their personality has anything to do with their sexual preference. My father has never made comments to me or anyone else concerning a fear of homosexuality.

On the other hand, this is not completely out of the blue. My mother, upon learning my first year that I wanted to go on birth control, told me that no man would ever love me if I weren't a virgin and guys in college would think I was easy. Her words, not mine. That's why I didn't want to come out to my parents. I thought we were getting along pretty well over Spring break. I helped my mom in the kitchen and she bought me jelly beans for doing the grocery shopping. Frankly, I don't see my relationship with my parents as having hit "rock bottom" as she says it has.

I'm a good little gay girl, and I sent my parents the book Straight Parents, Gay Children and e-mailed them saying that I got the letter and I didn't want them to contact me until they have both read the book and talked to a family counselor. I feel horrendously guilty.

I keep telling people I'm ok, but I'm really, really not at all. I have a long and shitty history of my parents just not getting it. A few weeks ago while I was at home, my mother brought up how lesbian and gay couples shouldn't have children because the children will just suffer at the hands of bullies. At the time, I thought I talked about the issue calmly with her, arguing that change doesn't happen because people are comfortable all the time and that a lot of lesbian and gay families think about where they live in relation to how well-established support for their children is. She interpreted my having an opinion as somehow insulting to her obviously well-researched conclusions. I will never be successful or smart or skinny or good enough for my parents. Last year, I was diagnosed with a fairly severe mental illness which I have been, for the most part, taking care of in the past year completely by myself. Other than a few doctor's visits that went on my family's insurance, I paid for my medications and used the county mental health services available, despite my parents threatening to take me out of school and keep me at home since I couldn't deal with the "real world".

My life is far from horrible. I live in a warm dorm room. I have wonderful friends that give me love and support when I need it. I go to a good school and I do something that I really love on the side. I'm not an alcoholic or a drug addict. I don't have a child that I didn't intend to have and I'm not in jail. I don't live in a country where I am considered sexual property. I'm not starving or homeless. But this sucks. I guess that for once, I wish my parents would see my point of view before writing something so convoluted and angry at me for something I can't control. I wish that for once they would understand that my life has a lot of stressful elements in it and that having to deal with their bigotry suddenly cranks up the stress on my life. I wish they would understand that they do not exist in a vaccuum and that the things that they say are profoundly hurtful and ignorant.

Draggin' my tail

Yes, that is in a dorm.
Yes, this is one grody t-shirt away from what I wear every day.
Yes, I couldn't wait to get out of three t-shirts and two heavy-duty bras.
No, this was not just for fun.
Yes, that's a bad-ass cigarette behind my ear.

Letter to Rep. Eric Palmer

Representative Palmer;

I am a twenty-year old student at Grinnell College. I'm also a lesbian.
I am originally from Michigan, but ever since my first RAGBRAI almost
six years ago, I've been in love with Iowa. True, every February I curse
my decision to live in what has, at times, felt like an arctic tundra,
but every time spring rolls around I remember why I decided to come
here. This spring has been especially memorable. Last Friday, the Iowa
Supreme Court recognized that a ban on same-sex marriages in the state
of Iowa was unconstitutional. While it should be no surprise that Iowa
is recognizing human rights, we were the first state outside of the
eastern coast to lift this ban and allow people of the same sex in a
committed relationship to receive the same benefits as heterosexual couples.
I know that as a college student, I am under scrutiny for trying to sway
the democratic process in your district. But, unlike many other
students, I plan on living in Iowa as long as I can manage it. By voting
against a ban on gay marriage, you will encourage me and other educated,
productive, liberal-minded students to stay in Iowa long after we have
received our education.
Last Friday, I drove over an hour to attend the rally in Iowa City. To
date, it was the happiest day of my life. While I was there, I saw many
more well-adjusted, beautiful families than I have in a long time.
Unlike the hateful speech that seems to populate the ideas of the
religious right, the speakers talked about hope and Iowa's long-standing
legacy of pioneering in civil rights. While some people might see us as
freaks and perverse, the facts are that same-sex families are
beautifully boring and raise children that are just as likely to be gay
as children of straight parents.
I urge you to vote against a ban on gay marriage if not from your own
convictions of what is right or wrong but at least out of compassion and
understanding for the thousands of gay and lesbian individuals across
the state whose boring, everyday lives are filled with joy from simply
the knowledge that they will be treated fairly in the state of Iowa.

Gretel Carlson
Grinnell College

THIS INTERNET PICTURE IS HOW I FEEL

LIFE.

Every Gay Girl Loves Rachel Maddow

It's true!

Search for "Rachel Maddow" and you're bound to get a bunch of lesbians talking about how dreamy she is. Searching my (admitting really girl-gay) Google Reader by itself turns up over 160 results.

But what really gets in me in a good way is the love affair of Rachel Maddow by lesbian media hogs After Ellen. I like After Ellen going beyond the gay pride parades and L-Word end-of-series anger and onto the news!

But the best thing that comes out of their latest post is the praise of Iowa by lovely, midwestern girls. And I love midwestern girls almost as much as I love the jewish girls.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Weather of note

I am disgusted. It is snowing.

That is all.

Suck a turd, Iowa.

And then you know what it feels like to really be alive

I live in hyperbole:
"I hate everything about that professor"
"This is the hardest paper in the world"
"I love grilled cheese more than anything or anyone"
"That is my favorite movie ever"

But today was one of the best days of my life. I went into work and got some work done, I didn't have a particularly remarkable shower. But the Iowa Supreme Court decided that a constitutional amendment against gay marriage was unconstitutional and struck it down, legalizing gay marriage in the state of Iowa.

MY state, for now. Maybe for longer.

Grinnell is a liberal campus. There are problems, we do not live in a liberal utopia free of oppression and institutionalized racism, sexism, ageism, this and thatism, but we were damn happy to get the news this morning. There was a spontaneous outbreak of cheering in the dining hall, people from the Stonewall Resource Center running around with rainbow flags.

I swung on the swingset in the sunset, got a little motion-sick, talked about having babies with other women and how they would turn into our favorite dinosaurs when they were 21 and we could ride them around town*.

Went home and opened a window, finished barbeque kettle potato chips and an IAPA and reeled in the fact that gay marriage is legal in Iowa.

Drove to Iowa City in a car with a stick (YAY!), got a little lost, didn't die or get stabbed to death or hit a deer or lose our car keys, went to a rally and then went to the Mountain Goats show. Bam. Seven hours in a sentence.

I'm not good at talking about feelings but I will try. I will try really hard.

Legalizing gay marriage is really not the battle that needs to be fought. The real battle is against hate and for equality and equal rights. But this is fundamental. Not only did the court vote on it unanimously, it also said that there was no real difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. That's fuckin' nice, man. The right is all blah-blah-blah babies this and that, but fuck that. Love.

Legalizing gay marriage doesn't win everything for every queer person ever, even though it felt like it today. I wanted to make out with every dyke-y looking girl I saw, especially the one in the bow tie and glasses at the concert.

I recognize that I am what I consider to be annoyingly out. The short hair, the faux-hawk**, the eyebrows***, the jeans and t-shirts and hoodies and bad-ass, I'd-kick-your-ass-if-I-weren't-5'3" attitude. The dyke jokes, the comments. I know and I'm sorry I'm a pain in the ass, but I spent so much time being not out and believe it or not, living in a place where it's really ok to be gay and not be out is hard. And you should not at all feel sorry for me because it was one-hundred and two percent my own damn fault. If I liked enough boys, tried really hard I wouldn't have to face the fact that my first sex dream was about The Little Mermaid**** and that I spent my entire middle school existence knowing that there was something so terribly wrong with me. I am conventionally attractive, slender to athletic body, big blue eyes that, unintentionally but necessarily because I'm so short, end up looking up at most men in this disgusting, manipulative, puppy-dog gaze. I've got pull with men because something in the back of their brainstem says "move for her, because then she will fuck you" and I have a really hard time turning that off and realizing that maybe people will do things for me not because they think that I will have sex with them, but that they are genuinely nice people.

Fuck. This is not a discussion of gender. This is a monologue about how gay marriage makes me feel like a more legit lesbian. I might not have a girlfriend, but when I do, we can get married like real people and despite being straight for 20 years and having that option (I guess), Iowa's legalization and people's recognition of it made me feel really alive.

So we're at the concert and John Darnielle makes a comment about how this song, which is about two people telling each other how much they love each other in their own fucked-up ways, was played on Weeds while three people fucked each other and then that made him think of homosexuality (because they have a lot of sex) and how progressive Iowa really is and that Iowa legalized gay marriage while California had the balls to take that right away from people and forcefully de-legitimize marriages. The house went wild, it was beautiful. But most importantly, to me, between sets, I was showing Eleanor my tattoo and the kid in front of me turned around and was interested in it, and he says, "you know, I think you are probably the most interesting person in this room. I love your hair. You just make me think of my sister" and I awkwardly made a joke about my hair and being gay from the roots down and he said, "but that's not just ok, that's really special and you should be really proud." And I would like to act tough about that, but that meant a whole lot to me, personally. And the court ruling meant a lot to me personally, as did the rallies across the state and the tens of blog-postings that I've read today from all over the world. And no one should ever feel this selfishly and personally touched by something that must mean a lot more to couples who have been together for decades and raised children without being married.

And all that leads up to my being completely happy to be alive. I've contemplated my own demise a few times and I'm in good hands but all the stuff that overwhelmed me and buried me in this pile of steaming sorrow was inconsequential when compared to the day that everything went right and even when it didn't it made me happy to be alive.

*I feel like this degrades my (our) intelligence. I have this fear that telling other people who don't go to Grinnell that I have lengthy and scientifically curious conversations about this kind of stuff will make everyone think we are a bunch of simpletons. I say that we are all functioning at a pretty high level almost all of the time, even outside of class that discussions like this simply need to happen.

**The faux-hawk is a spontaneous act of nature, guys. I promise. I don't use wax or gel or mousse or anything. I just get out of the shower and unless I comb it down or something, it just does that.

***Not intentional. I plan on waxing them eventually again. Just, so much effort.

****I'm sorry. That's actually true.

To women

To all the women that I have ever known, past and present.

To Sarah down the street who had a cap gun.
To Nathan and Jeremy's mother who fed me spaghetti-o's despite my mom's directions not to.
To Erin, who lived on the other side of town and to my mother who drove me there for playdates. To Erin, with bobbed black hair and big brown eyes. We played house in your garden with the a tent your mom let you set up in the back yard.

To all the girls in elementary school who made fun of my short hair and called me a boy.
To all the girls in middle school who made fun of my short hair and called me a lesbian.
To all the girls in high school who were scared that I made them uncomfortable with themselves.
To all the young women I met in all those years that didn't make me feel like a freak.
To the ones who've done my make-up before parties, the ones who have told me when I don't match, the ones who think that putting a pair of sambas with a skirt is a completely ok fashion choice.
To the ones I've been in love with from afar and the ones I've been in love with up close.
To all the women who have come before and let me be the one that I am.

To Allie who adopted me when I went to camp. To Alexa and Creal and all the leaders I had that recognized I was a hell of a lot stronger than I thought I could be.
To the girl in my math class who I never stood up for when Alicia said something mean, and to Alicia who died 2 years after that.

To the women I will meet, to the ones I will love.
To the women who make me laugh so hard I cry.

Y'all are fucking great.

Post the First

The war I declared on my body has lasted longer than the infamous war in Iraq. Thinking about that really puts it into perspective for me. I'll remember forever the day I got my first period, when I "became a woman", to use a phrase my grandmother surely loves. It was traumatizing but because I didn't expect it, but because it was a point of no return.

I'll start out with my own gender perception. I don't really feel comfortable, even at 20 years old, being called a woman. Woman is sexualized, and despite my feelings against the word "womyn", it suggests "man". I like being a girl. Not girly. A girl. I don't even mind being a boy, or boyish. I love it. The words "girl" and "boy" aren't sexualized. They're more equal.
That's not to say I'm not a sexual being. Because I am, very much so; I just don't feel comfortable having that on the forefront. I'm sure at a point in my life, maybe not even in the distant future, I'll grow out of being a girl and into being a woman. But maybe not.

Back to this body war of mine. My hips started getting think, breasts began to bud and my hair. Oh, my hair. It got think and curly and dark, and that was just the stuff on my head. I want to think this war has reached some sort of new period in coming out. I don't have to worry about how my intelligence "scares away boys" (and in doing so, future husbands) or fear being perceived as a lesbian. I like the way I look right now, when my hair sticks up in the front. I like the way my face looks framed by fuzzy hair and how it gets wind-burnt and pink in Iowa winters. I miss being able to go outside on a cold day without a hat on, but come summer, this hair will do better for me. After all, I'm a short hair kind of girl.

I think my dissertation on butch should come later. When I, myself, have formed that identity. I'm still convincing myself that what I am is ok. And being happy with myself without a girlfriend by my side. When I realized I was ready to admit to myself that I was attracted to women and then pursue that attraction, I did it alone. I can do this alone. Single lesbian first, one half of a lesbian couple later.