shortening the process with emails and labels

Last night and this morning I sent out a flurry of emails, and I’m waiting for replies very impatiently. Last night it was a mass email to a bunch of friends whose snail-mail addresses I don’t have. Save the Date cards are going out in the next couple of weeks, and addresses need to be gathered. I got messages back from most of the friends last night, but there are still 3 lazybones who haven’t gotten back to me, one of them being BF’s brother.

This morning I sent two emails that are anxious-making: one to my cousin, whose mother I adore and secretly wish was my grandmother instead of my great-aunt, and one to an old friend of my mother’s. I need the cousin’s and great-aunt’s postal addresses, so that’s why I emailed him, but it may be the first that they learn that I’m getting married. They might have a conversation with my father, which might spread ripples all through that side of the family. I don’t know what’s going to happen with it, maybe nothing, but maybe something.

The old friend of my mother’s is a bit different. She and my mother were best friends for many years, from my childhood on up, because they went to grad school together. A few years ago, the friend – let’s call her Beth - broke off the friendship. She apparently told my mother that she had gotten too boring for her, and that she didn’t feel any friendship for her anymore. This may sound like a shitty thing to do, but I can understand where Beth was coming from, and although it was painful for her, my mother is not hurting for women friends. In any case, Beth has always been someone I have looked up to. She’s a bit of a hippie, very artistic and ethereal, with terrific taste and knowledge about all kinds of things you’d never have heard of otherwise. She got me into the Moomintrolls and essential oils and flowing decorative scarves, when all these things were interesting and romantic and new, when I was younger. She was lovely to me.

She is also childless. She and her husband (still, as far as I know) live happily together with no children. For years, she was literally the only adult I knew who had decided not to have children. It was a quirk when I was a kid – because it’s not easy for a kid to meet adults who don’t also have kids – but as I grew older, it became something I remembered in comfort. Beth never had kids. I would remember her uniqueness and sweet manner, and think of this sentence, whenever anyone told me that I’d change my mind, dearie. It gave me the strength to truly make up my mind, without worrying that I wasn’t normal, because Beth was perfectly normal (in fact, she was awesome).

I feel grateful to her for being such a good example for me, especially now that I’m getting married. If I hadn’t known her at a young age and known that she was happily childless, I think I would have been more conflicted about entering into a marriage I knew would not be fruitful. What was the point? Shouldn’t I feel guilty? I don’t have any of that, because of Beth.

So I emailed her, at the address on her college’s website (she is a teacher), to explain this, and to thank her at this transitional time for being such a help to me. I am nervous that this email will not be accepted well, so I’m refreshing my inbox over and over and hoping she writes back in friendship.

Also, this weekend I’m going to have to make my case for printed labels rather than hand-writing addresses on the cards and invitations. I shudder at the waste of time it will be to write out all those addresses, and my handwriting is not the best, so I just don’t see the point in doing it when I can print out labels in an attractive font in about 90 seconds. I mentioned this to MM and she said she would be happy to help me address them, or to pay a calligrapher to address them. I’m sorry, but no. Labels are the way I want to go. (If it’s going to cause a giant rift, fine, I’ll address them, whatever, but I seriously do not see the point.) MP are taking me out to dinner for my birthday tomorrow (it was the first time we were all free), so I’m going to have to deal with it then. Boooo.

I ordered the Save the Date cards and the custom postage last night. I am pretty excited about them. (The proofs are coming via email, so that’s something else I’m waiting for to pop into my inbox.) This meant I looked over my guest list last night to figure out how many to order, and I’m sort of shocked at how small it is. If the +1s invited don’t show up, I will only have about 40 people there. I’m kind of concerned it’s going to be a weak little party, with so few people. Frankly, the smaller the better when it comes to BF and me, but I think MP are going to be disappointed if it’s not a Major Partay.

Also, a lament I have repeated numerous times to no avail (and likely to BF’s growing annoyance): I wish my dress would come.

bridentity

A couple of weeks ago, I browsed Amazon for books about weddings. I definitely wasn’t looking for any tips on matching china sets, or “Plan Your Dream Wedding for $899!” kinds of things, but rather on the psychological and cultural issues around weddings. I did find a book for BF, which was part of my intent (I got this one, and so far it seems to be good, and it has frigging awesome illustrations), but I also purchased this book and this one. (Amazon Prime + used books + fulfillment by Amazon = COMPLETELY WORTH $79 per year.) The Conscious Bride has been pretty interesting (I am nearly finished with it), but I’m sort of concerned about how little of it has seemed to apply to me. It discusses the pain of separation that a lot of brides feel: from their families (even if they moved out long ago), from their girlfriends, from their identities as single women. It talks about how you have to move away from the old identities and priorities and move towards your identity as wife, and the fact that you’ll put your new family first, before your old family or your other priorities.

I agree that this is probably a problem a lot of brides have – particularly the not-so-self-aware ones – but I am just not seeing it in myself so far. It makes me feel kind of arrogant to say so, because it’s as if I’m inviting the universe to smack me. But I feel that my identity as BF’s companion has already been formed, through a few years now of exploration, of trial and error, and of emotional work. My identity as an individual is one that has already been blended with my identity as his partner, and although I identify myself as an independent personality, a major and important aspect of my identity is that I am with him. He has been my first priority for years now, and I have learned over time to see the world from the perspective of part of a pair with him. I am sure that it’ll feel different to be his wife (and I don’t presume to know how), but I don’t think that the identity work is work I haven’t done yet.

As for separating from my family, I have felt as if I’m on my own, no home to go to, since I began college. A lot of brides expressed in this book these strange feelings of wanting to return to the family home and live there with her parents (or just her mom), and I haven’t felt that way since I was about 20. Even brides who had weird or bad relationships with their parents felt the pain of separation, of moving away from the old family and into a new one. I am not getting that at all. At all. In fact I have been wondering lately if there’s a way I could feasibly tape my mother’s mouth shut for about three months, up to and including the date of the wedding.

Although, the sections about what the father of the bride might be feeling have been downright illuminating. I am starting to wonder if the entire episode with my father this year is because he has inner anxiety about me being married. BF said that he has never seemed like a particularly sentimental father, never seemed to see me as his little girl, and that feeling separation anxiety about me being married seemed unlikely. There’s a way in which he’s right, but I believe Dad has a very muddy perspective of me, memories of me as I grew up mixed in with memories of my mother. My mother has cast a very long shadow over how he perceives me, I think, and if I add up all the time he has spent with me in my adult form, from the time I graduated from college, I come up with a few months shy of a year – four months when I lived with him in London immediately after college, when I was all of 21 and sort of an idiot, and almost five months when I moved in with him after the New England debacle, when I was at the lowest point in my life. All the growth and development between age 21 and age 29 is largely lost on him. His clearest memories of me are probably from high school, because that was the longest span of time when we were living in the same house and he was not on deployment every six months. (Who wants to be remembered by their parents as the person they were during high school? Show of hands?)

So if I see his behavior as a strong and unconscious reaction to his feelings of being replaced as the man in my life, to the final emotional separation between him and me, to the fact that I. Have. Sex. With. A Man. and he can no longer deny it, it all suddenly makes a good deal of sense. I haven’t quite made up my mind whether this potential motivation affects my reaction and perspective on what he did. I don’t think it does. Too much bad blood came before this incident, and he had plenty of time to think through what he was going to write before he wrote it.

Father issues aside, the point remains: I just have a hard time with the whole premise of changing identities as you approach your wedding. Unless you’re going from your father’s house to your husband’s house, it implies that you have failed to form an adult identity away from your family, and that you have failed to form an identity as a couple with the person you have chosen as your mate. (These are hard things to do, and I’m not dissing people who haven’t managed them.) I feel that I have already done both of these things. So I’m not sure I need to be any more of a conscious bride than I already am.

I haven’t started The Meaning of Wife yet. Ironically, I’ve been too busy knitting. It is printed with much smaller font, and appears to have research and such. Hopefully it’ll be useful or interesting anyhow.

vegetables 40 hours per week

Seeeuuooooooooo.

Things are not going very well for me at work. This is rather like saying that things were not going very well for the passengers of the Titanic ’round about 1:45 AM on April 15th, 1912. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but really and truly, I am not a happy camper.

I don’t want to complain about it. I told BF the other day that I feel a lot like a ten-year-old sitting at a table where there’s a huge variety of vegetables for dinner, beets and broccoli and string beans and kale, and my mother is reminding me that there are starving children in Africa, but dear God do those vegetables look unappetizing. BF said that the vegetables were not what I wanted for dinner. I agreed, but protested about the starving children. He gently repeated that the meal was not what I wanted.

No, right now, it’s decidedly not. But while I still have to feed myself, it’s what’s in front of me.

Bikram again last night. It was fantastic. The teacher reeled off everything rather quickly for my taste, and we got done about 15 minutes early, but I was very hungry by the time it was over so it worked out. I felt wonderful when I was finished. If nothing else, it puts all the rest of the stuff I’m thinking about out of my head for 90 minutes. I’m going again tomorrow, probably.

I’m also working hard on my Tequila Sunrise Hat. That’s what I did, in front of TNG, when I got home last night. I’m worried that I’m running out of yarn, but I’m keeping on with it until it won’t keep on no more. I will post pictures when I’m done.

There isn’t much else going on for me to talk about. The two big topics that my mind is running into the ground are work and Bikram, work and Bikram. I can’t go on about those eternally, so I’m just going to let go (lightly) until something else to talk about crops up.

at OT-1

One of my teachers told me once that she liked going to classes where she could be anonymous. I didn’t understand this then, because I have always been proud of what abilities I have and happy to demonstrate or explain for other students if I’m asked to as a student. It’s something I understood better after I’d been teaching for a while. Sometimes you don’t want to give the pose 100%, which you always, always do if students are watching you as an example. Sometimes you just want to be in the room, practicing, with no other considerations than what’s on your mat.

Getting attached to a new form of yoga, and returning to being a student in regular classes again, means adjustment. Part of the adjustment is this good thing of getting to be purely a student again, no consideration to anybody else (aside from not kicking them in the face, you know, just the general consideration I give to fellow humans). Another part of the adjustment, though, is not being remotely special in any given class. My form in Bikram is squarely average, neither terrific nor terrible, and I have such an inflexible neck that there’s some of it I can’t do at all. This feels pretty different from being the teacher, I have to say.

Also, it’s a little harder to chalk up the standoffishness of everybody around me. I’m used to yoga being warm and fuzzy when I’m the student, and in Bikram (at least at the two studios I’ve gone to), everybody is a little remote, just slightly on this side of hostile. I don’t know what’s up with that. Maybe they find everyone’s sweat gross but their own.

As the teacher, I find that my students fall into two camps: the avoid camp and the cozy camp. The avoid camp is composed of people who go out of their way not to talk to me, not to make eye contact with me, to get in and out of the studio interacting with me as little as possible. The cozy camp are on the opposite end: they want to chat with me before and after class, know things about me, and get friendly with me, more so with me than with the other students. There are some few who are in the middle, who are cordial without being pushy, and funnily enough these are usually my most regular of regulars. I try to smile at my students and be friendly to them, making myself open to them and anything they want to ask or tell me, but that’s pretty much where it ends for me; for various complex social reasons, it’s hard for me to look at my students and see them as potential friends. I have no problem being friendly, though – if I don’t make it a welcoming environment, why should my students keep coming back?

But the Bikram teachers are even less friendly than the students. They don’t want to chat with me, they don’t want to smile at me. They want to take my money and hand me a class and that is it. They definitely chat with each other; after my last class there was sort of a loft atmosphere going on, with Rihanna coming out of the computer on the desk and a few teachers who had just taken class lounging around on the floor drinking coconut water. But they only seemed to be interested in interacting with each other, not with any of us.

During Saturday’s class, I had to leave the room to pee, or I was going to pee on my mat, and I left during the rest before the first set of camel. I came back in the middle of camel, so in guilt I did an additional camel in between the other two. During the third one, I did one of the deepest backbends I’ve ever experienced, with one hand flying in the air behind me. It felt like if I had another minute or two to stay in the pose, my head could probably have touched the backs of my legs. The teacher asked me – using my name, which I haven’t a clue how she remembered, because she had seen me in a class only once before and didn’t ask my name then - if I was competing. I said no, with laughter, because OH MY GOD NO. But it was a nice compliment. I said during this interaction that I was a vinyasa teacher, and she said “Ahh,” and kept walking.

Were I teaching, this would be a topic I’d've picked up with my student after class, when she was at the desk paying for her 10-class card. But this teacher did not take the opportunity. She just kept one eye on me writing my check and one eye on her teacher buddies on the floor nearby. I don’t know if it’s like Scientology, and I have to pay for a certain number of classes or drink a certain number of $3 coconut waters before I can move up from the dirty dirty ground to the bottom unit on the totem pole. Maybe it is. Maybe I’ve just stumbled upon a particularly unwelcoming set of teachers and studios. I just feel kind of weird, like I’m paying for admission to a club, but there’s actually an inner club within the club, with glass walls, which we can all see from our outer circle but no one is allowed in.

10/25

Well, the first draft of the hat didn’t work out. When I was a few inches into the pattern, and I tried the thing on my head and found that it was waaaaay too big, you know what I did? Rrrrrrrip. I undid everything, re-balled the yarn, and dug through my stash again for a yarn that would work better. I am proud of myself for being mature and starting over, instead of being stubborn and keeping going on a project that would have sucked if completed as it was going.

I have so much trouble with yarn weights, because worsted and DK seem to blend into each other, and sometimes I find yarns labeled super bulky that are thinner than yarns labeled bulky by another company. The only way to really do it is to knit the test swatch and figure out whether it’s right for the project, full stop, that’s it, it’s the only way. But I just can’t do it. I loathe test swatches. They take up valuable knitting time which could be used for knitting on an actual project.

So what I did with this one, which calls for DK weight, is I found a ball of DK weight cotton in my stash, compared it with a pretty Patons Soy Wool Stripes yarn (that incidentally looks like a delicious tequila sunrise when knitted), found that even though the Patons yarn was labeled as worsted it was exactly the same thickness as the DK, and cast on. I am knitting with size 4, which makes for teeny-tiny stitches (I am an incorrigibly tight knitter), but I like the yarn and it’s going well enough so far.

I had such a long Saturday, so full of events, that it felt like a workday. I taught, which went okay; BF and I had a dance lesson, which also went okay (we were somewhat tired and cranky); I went to therapy and BF went to work; and I went to Bikram. When I got home, I was hot and soaked and smelly and starving and felt terrific, and I got cleaned up and took a book and my reading glasses to Panera, where I ate dinner and read my book by myself. I wanted to be out of the house, and I really wanted their macaroni & cheese.

It only dawned on me when I got home that the reason I wanted to be out of the house, an urge I get about once every three years, is that the house has been accumulating more and more mess and clutter over the last couple of weeks, and being at home, seeing the mess and clutter, is overwhelming me.

So, on Sunday morning, after I dragged my ass out of bed and taught 5 people, 3 of whom were new to me, I came back home and I cleaned, from about 10:30 to about 1:30, with a half-hour break for lunch. I broke down boxes and put them in the garage, I sorted piles of papers (but did not succeed in smallening the piles), I hole-punched and organized recipes that had been lying around, I folded clothes and put them away, I cleaned BF’s side of the bathroom sink, I took out the trash, I cleaned out the fridge and took out the trash again, I cleaned the counters and the stove, and I killed about a dozen spiders in the living room. I felt a whole lot better when I was finished, and I was really pleased with how much better everything looked.

(I know these are pretty basic chores. I am a bad housekeeper, and don’t do these chores until it’s really, really necessary. I didn’t even bother to vaccuum or mop or any of that, because that’s shit I just don’t get around to doing until it’s long past time.)

I still have the problem of having too much stuff. My closet is full of clothes that I don’t wear, and don’t even necessarily like, but I keep them around for occasions where I’m worried I won’t have anything else to wear. My drawers are full of old, partially-worn-out clothes that I don’t want to get rid of, because it means I’ll have to replace them, and that costs money. There are so many books, man, so many books. And the piles of papers, gah.

I want to go in with a ruthless eye (or perhaps with my eyes shut) and just get rid of it all. Stop worrying about the occasions when I might not have the right thing to wear, presume that I’ll be able to shop for what I need (and what I’ll actually like) at that future occasion, and just get rid of it. But every time I’ve tried this, I’ve still ended up with a full closet. I suck at this. The rule of if-you-haven’t-worn-it-in-a-year-get-rid-of-it is one that I find impossible to follow, because what about the outfit I bought that is perfect for a wedding, but I haven’t been invited to a wedding in over a year? I’m not getting rid of that, it’s perfect for weddings. If I’m going to bend the rule, I can’t hold to it when it comes to sentimental clothes, clothes that don’t fit anymore but that I might be able to lose enough weight for someday, clothes that go with clothes I rarely wear, etc etc.

I’m kind of tired of making these excuses to myself, when what I want, what I really want, is to slim down on my clothes. And all my other stuff, too. Send a big box out into the world and awaaaaay from me, look around and see space. Maybe I’ll make an effort this weekend.

I’m going to try and make it to Bikram a couple of times a week for the foreseeable future, or until it stops feeling good to me. I bought a 10-class card this weekend so as to save myself $40 over the next month. It was a hassle to get there on Saturday, but it was totally and utterly worth it afterward. I think that the sensations I get from Bikram are connected to my desire to clear out the clutter at home, but I don’t know which inspired the other.

knit-wit

I’ve noticed that Fridays are generally pretty light blog days for all the blogs I read. They also are usually very light workdays for me, to the point where around 2:45 I’m staring intently at my computer screen, pleading for someone to send me an email or write a new post for me to read or something. So even though I have little of import to say today, I’m writing anyhow, so as to entertain others like me who are sitting at their computers and thinking oh my GOD, give me something to do.

I have never been a big hat person, but I decided recently that the time has come to give a try to the slouch beret. (Rooney Mara looked really great in one in The Social Network.) Naturally, I decided to knit one instead of buying one, and I spent a good hour or so last night browsing the net for the right pattern and then digging through my stash for yarn that would work.

I discovered that I haven’t knitted in a very long time.

I found a gorgeous, partially completed project with gray-blue mohair, beautifully knitted, and I have almost no memory of what it was going to be. I think it was going to be a long vest, and I think I designed it myself using a lace pattern I found in a book, but I have no real way of knowing that, and I have no idea whether I’ll be able to pick up where I left off without fucking it up. I found numerous skeins of yarn that will likely turn out to be useless, because there are not enough of them to make anything. I can always make squares with them to add to my crazy-afghan, but the crazy-afghan is kind of a lifetime project and I haven’t had any interest in working on it for years now, while the stash continues to sit there unknitted. I found a ton of skeins of cotton chenille, which I can use to make hand-knitted flower-shaped washcloths as gifts, if I so choose. (This was my plan a few Christmases ago, but it turned out to be too much work.)

Finally I found a yarn that, sort of kind of, will do for this project – it’s a little heavy, but I went down a needle size and am going to hope for the best – but there’s only one ball of it. The hat pattern does not actually specify the yardage needed, although even if it did I don’t know how much yardage there is in this ball. Once again, I’m going to start off the project half-assedly and hope for the best, and know that I can always buy a similar-weight yarn and turn the hat stripey.

I always do this, plunge into a project without doing things like knitting a gauge swatch or getting the most appropriate yarn, and hence my projects usually come out not-at-all-perfect. I don’t generally knit for others, so I wind up with a bunch of somewhat crummy hand-knitted items sitting in drawers and closets, not wanting to unravel them (because I knitted for MONTHS), not wanting to wear them in public. I’m always optimistic at the start of a project (“this time it’ll come out okay…because…it will”), and I’m usually disappointed at the end. I should probably just do it right, knit the swatches, buy more appropriate yarn, etc. But finding the right yarn for a project is so dicey and expensive. I like using the yarn I find when I’m not looking for anything in particular.

Also, someday I’ll knit a sweater. That I can wear. Someday. Until then, I will hope that this hat ends up wearable. Wish me luck.

sweat it all out

Last night I went to Bikram again. I feel much better after a class; I feel the same way I feel after crying hard for 20 minutes, as if I’m emptied out and released, filled with relief and ready for the next thing. Last night I didn’t skip a single set of a single pose; I did the entire 90 minutes. It didn’t actually feel that hot (maybe I was just cold going in), and the teacher was Julie, who was the one who convinced me that not all Bikram teachers are evil Nazis after my first class.

I have grave doubts about many aspects of the practice, too much so to go into here. It does not generally feel like yoga to me, and there’s something slippery about the way the dialogue is written: it insinuates competitive and unhealthy behavior without coming out and saying it, but if you asked a teacher “should I be competing with my fellow students, or against some ideal?” the teacher would say no, it’s all about you, it’s your eyes and your form you should be staring at in the mirror. But natural human behavior totally contradicts this notion, and Bikram, who designed everything in his classes down to the very last detail, is no fool about human behavior.

I am also 100% not cool with “beyond your flexibility” and “your hip should hurt”. Yoga should never hurt. Pushing beyond your edge is never a good idea.

All that said, I’m going to keep going back to the torture chamber. I don’t know why Bikram has appeared to me as a solution at this time in my life, but I’m going to go with it. It feels right, right now. It is working for me. I don’t know if I’m working something out, if I’m trying to shed something, if it simply seems like the best way to lose some weight before the wedding, what the deal is. I feel psychologically better after class than I do all day, is all I know, and my body feels better too.

The studio owner was practicing in last night’s class. She is exceptionally flexible, especially in the spine; last night she demonstrated this (except with her feet on the floor in front of her head), just incidentally, before class. I felt extremely jealous of her ability, and that feeling with all its negative clanking cans dragging behind followed me around throughout class and after. I reminded myself that her backbends will never be the same as my backbends, no matter how advanced they may be, and that she may have had physical advantages like gymnastics or dance early in her life that I didn’t have, and that I am still young and still early on in the journey, and (meanly) that too much contortionism will blow out your spine before you’re 45. None of it helped. I feel like a jerk for being openly jealous of her, without being able to detach from it with any competency, but it is what it is.

This morning I learned that she placed in the top five in the national Bikram competition this year. So being jealous of her, as BF reminded me at one point about something similar, is kind of like being jealous that an Olympic athlete can run faster than you. This helps, a little.

Incidentally, I know that I have several Bikram practitioners reading here. Please do not tell me all the ways that Bikram is awesome and meditative and superior. I appreciate the effort, but it’s not a practice that I believe in wholeheartedly, and never will be. I’m just borrowing it for a while.

Plus, that coconut water is amazing. I’m willing to forgive all kinds of doubts for a few more boxes of that stuff.

10/20

This was one of those mornings where I had about 30 things to remember to take with me, and all of them were upstairs, and I only remembered them one by one. Lots of charging up and down the stairs calling myself stupid.

All the stuff on my mind this morning is either mundane or mathematical: thinking about all the stuff I have to get done before the end of October, or thinking about my budget. I have mega anxiety about whether I should go to the Renaissance Festival again before it’s over (and it’s over next weekend), and my brain is worrying over it like fingers at the edge of an afghan. It’s making me a little nuts, especially since it’s a question so not worth this level of anxiety.

Here would go a paragraph where I whine about my job. Let’s consider it read.

I’ve been reading a book called The Conscious Bride, which is about the emotional and psychological components of an impending wedding. Its intent is to make brides who are not 100% happy and glowing feel relief, because they read about other women who felt grief or anger along with joy, and they feel much more normal. But I am not feeling a lot of the bad reactions that the book describes, and it’s actually making me a little anxious; completely the opposite reaction that the book intends. I wrote a good long post exploring these reactions, but in reading over it this morning, I felt uninterested in my own words. I might post it anyway, but likely not today.

My friend M predicted that after our giant shopping trip at Sephora, I would start to get interested in makeup the way she is. Her prediction hasn’t quite come true, and the biggest reason is just that it’s not worth it to me to get up another 15 minutes early to put the warpaint on in the morning. But I have found myself more interested, in a girly kind of way, in what’s out there.

I forgot to bring my magic-bullet undereye coverup with me on the trip to Chautauqua last weekend, and we were going to take pictures with the photographer, so we had to find a drugstore so I could shop for a suitable replacement. I had also forgotten lip color, and while lipstick is my least favorite element of the makeup-industrial complex, I thought I’d look weird with no color at all. (Sidebar: One part of the reason I’ve always disliked lipstick is that I have such pale skin that I think all colored lipstick looks too dramatic, like I’m a little girl playing make-up or an adult way overdoing it. Pinks look simply awful with my coloring. When I went to Sephora, the demonstration lady tried orange tints on me for the first time, and I suddenly discovered that lipcolor didn’t have to look so freaky on me! It was a great moment.)

So I bought a replacement undereye coverup (which wasn’t nearly as effective as the $40 one I got from Sephora, but did okay), and I bought some lip gloss while I was at it. This is the part where I finally come to the point: this is the first lip gloss I’ve ever tried that genuinely does stay on for hours and hours and hours. It doesn’t give you that shiny wet look for that long, but the color stays visible, and it doesn’t feel greasy like lipstick, nor does it come off on your kissable beau. It’s Revlon ColorStay Ultimate, and I’m going to go back and buy some more colors when I have the opportunity (and the budget – it ain’t Wet ‘n’ Wild).

I had a bad evening health-wise: I had pretty severe heartburn, dizziness and weakness, and the only thing that helped was pure couch time, broken only to go out and get dinner (which revved up all the symptoms again). No chores got done, unhappily. I was worried that the chest pain was…chest pain, but it felt like heartburn, and eased greatly when I took some Pepto, so I think I just ate exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. I know I was eating all the wrong things while we were in Chautauqua, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I’m going to Bikram tonight and I am having the feeling that it’s just what I need.

home again, home again

I’m back from Chautauqua, and…so unhappy to be sitting in this chair that I can’t think up a good metaphor for it.

The trip was all right: major lows (MP’s house up there is unheated, so we were leaping from space-heatered room to space-heatered room), and major highs (three straight days in BF’s company, with only minutes-long breaks for the bathroom separating us). The planning aspects went extremely well. The DJ, while disappointing in a certain way, is one that I have faith in to do exactly what we need him to do; the florist, while she was late for our meeting and didn’t prepare to the extent I’d hoped she would, is right on the money in all other ways (although I don’t have a price quote from her yet, eek); and the photographer is my favorite vendor of all, with a great sense of humor and an ideal perspective on shooting our wedding. Although we’re spending the most on him, I feel the least resentful about writing him a check.

We had a wonderful moment with our officiant, who is a dear friend of MP’s and has a master’s in divinity from Harvard (so she is no fool). She has agreed to read what BF and I wrote word for word, and we sat in her living room as she read it to us, just as a try-out (surely not with the thundering meaningfulness she will bring to it on the occasion). It felt very special to be listening to her reading my (our) words. [I wrote the first draft of the vows on my own and BF and I edited them together to something we both like, but we agree (hopefully without resentment) that they are mostly my words.] BF even teared up as he was listening, something he rarely does. It was pretty wonderful.

She is also going to officiate for free, which is a nice present and a $400 relief. (She says it is an honor.) I am going to knit her a scarf as a gift.

The best part of the trip was that BF and I got to spend all that time together. While it wasn’t the ideal romantic weekend, it was romantic. Long walks through fall leaves, etc. The thing I keep coming back to instead of the romance was the chance we got to renew our friendship. We had the chance to chat about nothing things, about times gone by, about our opinions about trees and brick roads and cars. It was so good to be with my best friend without feeling like I have to remember 8 things to tell him before he collapses into bed after another 13-hour workday.

Although I slept better in our own bed last night than I have in weeks, and certainly a lot better than I slept in what seemed like a miniature board up in Chautauqua, I am downright mournful that I have to be back here in Maryland and at work. BF is under far more pressure so I’m sure he’s more miserable than I this morning, but being bored and feeling a pressing lack of respect is not a very fun work environment either.

How was your weekend?

gender (in)equality

When I saw Starship Troopers, I was surprised at the scene when all the infantry grunts were showering together, male and female alike. It seemed so unlikely to me, that we would ever get to the point where both genders could shower together so casually, as if there was no hint of lust, embarrassment, fear, any of that. Yet the longer I live in this world, the more I think that it’s possible – and not only possible, but desirable – for a situation like that to be the norm, not just in the military, but elsewhere.

But I think that the way in to a world where men and women are not segregated to separate bathrooms and separate showers is not to try and slather a vision of equality on top of the gender divide, but to acknowledge the differences between men and women, grant legitimacy to all these differences, remove from them the stain of superiority and inferiority, and move forward from there.

In G.I. Jane (a difficult movie to take seriously on the whole), the attitude of the Master Chief betrays this kind of thinking. I believe that it appears to be sexist thinking, but I also believe that the filmmakers were trying to make a point that was more subtle, one that was post-sexist. When he tested the trainees by cutting off Jordan’s pants, looking like he was actually going to rape her (until she broke his nose), he was not being a dickhead chauvinist: he was trying to prepare them (and Jordan as well) for the possibility that, with women in combat, this would happen. His belief, as I read it, was that women are too weak in the upper body for what’s required of them in combat and in the SEALs, and that men are too weak mentally to the concept of women being gravely hurt, for a women-in-combat initiative to succeed.

I’m going to leave the second point aside; it is too challenging, and requires a foray into men’s psychology over the centuries that I cannot manage in this space. I’d also argue that some of that psychology is evolving right under our noses, as the 21st century continues to wax. But in the first point, the Master Chief is simply correct. Exceptions exist, but on the whole women are not built with the upper body strength that men are. Women can become that strong, with seriously hard training and/or chemical help, but for men it is simply built in, like a closet.

I think that the Master Chief was arguing that women are not suited for combat because they are not strong enough, not that they are not suited for combat because they are inferior to men. That’s what I’d argue too (if I cared to make this argument in a world where strength doesn’t necessarily mean squat in modern combat): it’s not a matter of women being too sucky for combat, it’s a matter of them not being able to do the same things that men can in criteria that women cannot do much to change, because this is how all of us are born.

The thing is, this isn’t bad. It simply is. Women have other things built in; we can survive in the cold longer, because we have a higher body fat percentage. But we can’t lift heavy things as effectively. So what? Our differences don’t make one gender better than the other – they simply point out to us that we are different, as different facial features help humans to distinguish each other from the mass.

In most ways, the Master Chief didn’t treat Jordan any differently than the other recruits. He beat her up, he yelled at her, he undermined her, but he did the same thing to all the other dudes. The rape incident happened to illustrate something to the dudes, not to show her that he wanted to humiliate her for being female. (I doubt that he would have actually raped her if she hadn’t broken his nose, but it’s not something I’ll ever know, and it’s fiction anyway.) There are little hairs of difference in the intent, here, but they’re pretty important. I think he saw her as a soldier, no more or less, but he thought that her disadvantages due to her gender made her unfit to serve in the SEALs. And I just can’t argue against him with any conviction. Women probably aren’t fit to serve in the SEALs. Not because they’re less psychologically capable, not because they’re less intelligent, not because they are otherwise inferior – but because their inherent physical anatomy does not suit them to what the SEALs are required to do. We’re talking DNA, not prejudice.

To shift gears away from G.I. Jane (thank God), it has taken me years to get over the automatic training I received at the hands of my mother and the women’s college I attended, to think outside the auto-feminist box, and to stop insisting that women are just the same as men. They aren’t. It does both genders a disservice to try and frame them as such. I believe that women and men have the capability for equal intelligence, equal emotional insight, and equal acheivements in the arenas of careers, parenting, and the like. But I also believe that women are more capable of emotional strength in the face of great adversity, that men have a protective instinct towards their mates that is bottomless and wholly separate from women’s mama-bear instinct, that women are hugely skilled at social warfare and men bond with each other wordlessly in a way women don’t comprehend. Men can lift things; women can give birth.

We have different talents, we two genders, and recognizing the genders as different, blessing those differences for making us diverse and filling in the spaces we don’t have the capacity for – this is how we will move forward. This is how we get to a genderless military: we accept that women and men have different talents, and although men might be better SEALs, women might be better in hostage situations. I have no argument with trying women out in the SEALs, or the Citadel, or any other place in the military where women are traditionally not allowed, but if they don’t have the capacity to manage, whether due to the natural limitations of their gender or for any other reason, it’s just not the place for them, and no one should presume that it makes them somehow less not to be able to do that job. It means they have different talents; that is all.

Maybe this is easy for me to understand because I never wanted to be a SEAL, and because I value the things I have that men don’t and even appreciate the things I don’t have that men do. I’ve never seriously wished that I was born a boy instead. I don’t begrudge myself my lack of upper body strength, because not being strong has never put me at a disadvantage in anything I’ve tried to do. I appreciate that BF can lift the other half of the couch more easily than I can, but that’s sort of the end of it for me. I don’t see myself as less because I can’t or him as more because he can.

And I can’t believe that people who do believe this, that less and more enter into the equation of gender differences, are going to be the majority in another 50 years. I think that the way the feminists look at it, the “I can do anything a man can do, full stop” are robbing themselves of appreciating what’s feminine about them. They are not comprehending that differences between the genders frankly are, and to try and subvert them is not only impossible but ill-intentioned.

Why would you want to give up the difference between men and women? It’s what makes, for instance, Fred and Ginger so magical: if he wasn’t stronger, and if he didn’t dip her, my heart wouldn’t stop the way it does every time in Top Hat. I don’t think he’s displaying dominance over her, cutting her down because of her gender; I think he’s making a romantic gesture, one that I instinctively understand. It’s so clear to me, just watching them dance, that men and women are very different: women softer, men stronger, both graceful.

Why not celebrate? We are who we are, by hook or by crook. Insisting that differences don’t exist will only make them stand out more. The way to acceptance is appreciation of our differences, not tamping them down, pretending they don’t exist, or ranking them in some arbitrary order of importance. We live in a world now where the talents of both genders can shine equally, because no longer do the strongest and the fastest get to keep their lives while the others fall behind and die. Let’s evolve from “equal” to “equitable” – we’re not capable of exactly the same things, but we are all equally capable.