Women

The subject of this post may not surprise you, but its contents may.

Or maybe nothing I do surprises. I'm a human being, after all, so I'm predicable, and predictably so.

Maybe.

So: women. God, I love women. I love to bitch about them, I love to cuddle with them, I love to check them out, I love to check them ... in (over and over and over again), I love to ...

`phfina: mind the PG rating of your entries!

Yes'm.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be unpredictable, right? Not predicable, you horn-doggie!

Yes'm.

Anyway. A while back I wrote about toxic psycho bitches, remember? How could you forget ... unless you thought that post wasn't about you, that is, and then you instantly forgot about it and went on with your life full of giving and charitable good works.

You know, I was being sarcastic, just then, but I actually do know people like that. And I actually have real examples of women who lives are foils to the toxic psycho bitch archetype.

And that's what's this post is about.

It's about women, the many and various ones I know and the many and various ones that I don't. And the ones you know, too. Stop and think about them with me.

Clothes interlude

Okay, but seriously: why do people wear clothes?

Have you ever thought that thought? No, you haven't. You get up every morning, and I'm willing to lay bad money on the table that you do not think: oh, should I wear clothes today?

No, you don't think that thought, ever! What you think is, "What should I wear today?" "I don't have a thing to wear!" you lament as you look into your overstuffed-to-the-gills closet. And then you choose jeans (C'mon, cut me some slack, maybe some of you are like me and Bella Swan!) or you choose a skirt, knee length? just covering the knees? just above the knees? a leather micro-mini? A demin ankle-length one? And then your blouse over your undergarments (don't make me go there, the list and variety is too long, and then it turns my thoughts prurient as I envision what I will do to those undergarments ... to get to what is under those garments ... and then I'll have to excuse myself and this post will never get finished ... so, yeah).

So you never even think: "Should I wear clothes today?" No, you just wear them, and your thoughts are along the lines of what to wear; what statement you are making with them. And you know why you never think that thought?

Because you were born on the planet Earth.

I thought that thought. Two days ago, it was blisteringly hot, and everybody was just so beautiful, wearing their clothes, and I was like: why?

And then I realized what I was doing. I realized, I'm thinking a thought nobody else in the world would think.

And I know why I do that. I've been told. I'm not of this world. I don't belong in it nor do I belong to it. I am a selkie.

And I felt so alone then, again.

Alice

You know Alice visited me, when I was working at the sbux. I had to clean the little girls' room, and she came in and ...

... well, that was after Rosalie had just cum in ... me.

Yeah.

It gets really crowded wherever I am.

Well, anyway, Alice had come in and helped me clean up the splatter poo that some little girl had left and some mommy was perhaps a bit too squeamish to clean up after, but do people ever think 'the help' might be a bit turned off, cleaning up their explosive poo? No.

Anyway, Alice got to talking to me, you know: a voice of reason and reasonableness ...

... not that I need it; I'm just fine thanks. And as we were talking, I realized some things about her; about Alice.

She's not of this world, either. She always has to keep away from the crowd and the throng, but unlike me, that's exactly where she wants to be, right in the middle of the party and excitement, but she can't go there: she's just too alien, and would draw attention, yes, but the wrong kind of attention that leads to fear, to panic, and to the mob.

So fun-loving Alice has to stay aloof. And at home? With staid Jasper? Sneering Edward? (let's face it:) Bitch-queen Rosalie?

The Cullen family: they are a fun-loving party-hardy group, aren't they?

So that's Alice's world. She revels in the excitement, but all she can do is stand off and observe it from a distance.

Rebecca

There's this woman in group; her name's Rebecca. When she walks into a room, she owns it. Full-length red dress, conservative, tasteful heels, purse worth more than my ... well, name anything of mine, a crown of golden flowing blond hair, commanding, flashing blue eyes, patrician features. Rosalie? No, not at all. Company CEO? You bet. In fact, she goes into companies and cleans house. With a broom.

And she's in group.

So we were talking one day about her family, her hippy husband and her lay-about kids and just how frustrating it is that she has to be the one all the time to make sure everything's right and if it's not who gets blamed for not bringing the kids' swimming goggles?

Is she type A, you wonder? You needn't.

So in our conversation about this ... (we have 'conversations' in group) she realized something:

"I'm being a bitch to my family, aren't I?"

I said not just a bitch.

"I'm being a fucking bitch?"

I smiled at that.

And then she broke into this huge smile and said, "Wow!"

And she saw herself in her family and what impact she had on them.

I don't know anybody who could say 'I'm being a fucking bitch' and get so empowered by that statement that their whole life changes in that one moment ... that is, until I was sitting across from Rebecca, being there with her.

Beki

Then there's my sister Beki ...

there's actually every woman in my family.

You see, the men in the family are just so powerful creatures that everything around them is just blown away, and the women?

The men are strong, but the women are strength. Every one of them, mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins. Maybe it's a New England thing, but there's this unshakable strength in them, this sense of purpose that is, ... well, for me, frankly terrifying.

Beki was sitting with my niece Elena, and Elena was recounting one of her art projects where she had 'spilled paint all over the floor.' Beki queried this, 'all over the floor? so the entire floor was blue?' and Elena said, 'Well, ...' and was backed into a corner of admitting that she just spilled a drop or two which she cleaned.

But I watched this, watched my sister crush my niece, and hers, with her precision and ...

And I just wanted to go up to my sister and scream in her face. She was crushing the will and joy of a child, and for what purpose? to be right? to be correct?

Why?

And all I have to do is look into the mirror, and see what I do to everybody around me, and for what purpose? to be right?

I remember watching a movie where a palm reader was at a party and she told the hostess, so frustrated that everything at the party was not going according to plan or by the schedule and the seer said, 'well, you can either be right or be happy ...'

The woman didn't hear a word, of course, ... the soufflé had to come out of the oven just then, you see.

As the party came to a close, the hostess asked for her fortune be told to her, too.

The seer said: 'Oh, I thought I already gave you your fortune,' and left with a cryptic smile.

Beki, me, Lynda, Aunt Ronalee, Aunt Rolene, Aunt Roberta, Mom, Nana ... we can either be right, or we can be happy.

But ... well, we do have it hard. So hard. Pepe killed himself, and my uncles, two of them dying before Nana ... Nana watching her children die in front of her, and that killed her. And, well, the men are hard men, having to be right, no matter the cost, having to be happy, no matter the cost to the people around them; wanting both, getting neither.

And so Beki ... me ... we have to be so, so strong, her by being right, me, too, and me by running from anything and everyone that I ran away from my family, even ... putting hundreds of miles between them and me.

But you can't leave home; home is always there, waiting, and is always here in your heart. Even if you don't want it there.

We cling to something: strength, or rightness, just to be able to hold on, and it comes out on you or on a little girl telling a story, or our spouses or girl friends.

Toxic psycho bitches? I don't have to look far to find one.

And that's why a connection to you is such a life line, because you reach out, even when you are sick or tired or sick and tired, and you send me a note to ask me how I am doing.

And everybody is capable of charity, sometimes you have to look to see it, though.

Like, for example:

Traci

Boy, did I get some hate mail when I wrote why I left sbux and it was all directed toward Traci and what you were going to do to her if the two of you ever met.

I don't feel that way. I mean, let's look at what she did dispassionately. And maybe you're angry because you recognize yourself in her?

After all: you find out something so incredible about somebody you know, don't you just run to your confidants and blab?

"Hey, you know that thin sickly looking girl who works at the sbux? She's like this really sicko lezzy writer or something, omg! Check out her blog, isn't she like totally the psycho?"

No, you say, you would never do that?

Oh, really? You want to see your PMs to me where you blab about everybody around you, your coworkers, your patients, your girl friends, your siblings and parents, I mean anybody in your life you dump every vicious feeling you have about them not even thinking for one second what life must be like for them.

So let's take one second and think what life actually is for Traci in that moment.

What did she actually do?

I got shit-faced drunk, for which she treated me, and she took the keys from my hand, and drove me home, and put me into bed and didn't take advantage of me, even though I was, like actively, desperately, soliciting she do just that.

Would you have done that for me, a date that snapped? Or would you have excused yourself to the bathroom to make a quick and clean getaway? And let the chips fall where they may, that is: have the police pick me up and charge me and have me cool off in the tank and require me to post bail?

On the other hand, would you have said, 'She's so drunk, she's won't know tomorrow what I'm going to be doing with her tonight ... besides, she's begging, practically forcing herself on me, so I may as well ...'

What did Traci do that was reprehensible? She saw something, found out about it, just like Bella Swan did, then confronted me with it, and, okay, I freaked, but how could she expect that from me when you couldn't get a 'boo' out of me for ... how long we've been working together? Months? More than a year?

I argue that hero of that story actually is Traci. Oh, ... everybody hated Rosalie in the Twilight books, until somebody (bb) asked: 'What did she actually do? Is what she's saying accurate? prudent?' And then everybody's like, 'oh, yeah, everything she said was right, and nobody listened to her.' Traci is no Rosalie, because she's Traci, but I don't think she rates the death sentence for driving an out-of-it girl home and putting her to bed.

Emily

Dickinson, that is.

Here's what she wrote:

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

She wrote that for her little brother, who wasn't little any more, but imagine if she wrote that for you ... for me, the little honey bee, flitting about her garden, suckling the nectar from her rose bushes.

Um ... I have to ... um, take care of something.

Did Emily have beaux? She was a 'recluse' whose poetry is now carved into stones in parks, and whose house is enshrined. She built high walls and if a visitor came, she would literally run and hide somewhere.

Sounds familiar, `phfina?

But her poetry shaped the literature of a nascent nation that the Old World viewed as a savage land populated by a barbarous race.

(Go ahead, it's okay to admit to yourself that you view that statement as accurate now)

Emily Dickinson ... have you seen a photograph of her? I have. I almost fainted when I saw my scared, timid eyes looking back at me.

And out of the flighty hands came words that every school child must read, and because why? because she's a school marm?

No. Go back and read her poetry ... because she dared to look into herself and write and expose her heart to the whole world.

But I am not Emily Dickinson.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Daphne

Why do you follow me?—
Any moment I can be
Nothing but a laurel-tree.

Any moment of the chase
I can leave you in my place
A pink bough for your embrace.

Yet if over hill and hollow
Still it is your will to follow,
I am off;—to heel, Apollo!

Vincent ... she, okay, she lived her life like she was some Norse Goddess and life was the horn holding that elixir of sweet nectar.

And then ...

Well, and she wrote poetry, and she didn't just write poetry, she wrote poetry that earned her the Pulitzer prize: the first one ever awarded to a woman. She wrote poetry so honest, so unvarnished, so bald, so bold that she made the equivalent of $300,000 each year of her life off of it.

Um, what?

For that kind of money, ... well, maybe I could ...

Nah ... you know what my poetry looks like, but if I were to follow form, all I could come up with always starts with:

"There once as a girl from Nantucket ..."

And then the next line, I always get stuck ('stuck-it'?) on one word the rhymes, but do you write poems with that word in it? No. And then I never get to the dénoument, either ...

That's me, stuck-it, fuck-it `phfina.

Some poetess I would make.

Besides which, I read Vincent's ("Ballad of the Harp-Weaver"? Please! How could I write something like that?) and 'Uncle Emily' and Sappho and ... okay, no. Just no.

Well, Vincent's life took a turn for the worse, she lived her life to its fullest and then she was used, spent. She died, soon after her husband had, drunk, despairing, falling down some steps.

I look at steps, looking at them, as they eye me, hungrily, and wonder if their teeth will be gentle as they chew me up (or actually: down), and I wonder if I will taste sweet to them.

Jo March/Louisa May Alcott

So Jo wrote not stories about vampires and fairies and monsters.

No: she wrote p.r.0.n. for women's magazines. And then her professor husband asked, 'Ist das zhe best dat you gott?'

And it wasn't. Little Women was. So she said she would try.

So she tried.

Is this the best that I've got?

I'm no Jo March. I'm no Vincent, nor Uncle Emily, nor Rebecca, nor Beki, nor Traci, nor you.

Nor anybody.

I'm just me.

I don't even belong to this world. I don't even belong in it.

And I wonder sometimes, ... what if that was the best that I got? What if my best came and went, and all you can do is read what I've written, because when you ask: "Is that all you got?" so fiercely, daring me to step up my game, and deliver that next chapter you know, you hope will impress you this time, or again, ...

... and all I can answer is, weakly: 'Yes, that was all I had.'

"There once was a girl from Nantucket,
Who looked at her writing; said: 'fuck it!'
She flew down some stairs
With the wind in her hair
Her end: bloody bits in a bucket."