I have three not-so-tawdry secrets:
- I love hip-hop. Good hip hop, bad hip hop, hip hop that used to be called rap, highbrow, lowbrow, gangsta, spoken word, hip hop appropriated by suburban white boys with chips on their shoulders (shout out to Beastie Boys and Eminem, and I swear you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the BareNaked Ladies perform NWA’s Fight the Power), inspirational, political, even the stuff that is hand-wringingly misogynist (hi fiddy) – all of it. Almost. Apparently not everyone knows this. I told my gentleman caller this, recently, and he was surprised. He said “That’s something I didn’t know about you.” Really? The gratuitous Tupac references and dogged defense of Kanye’s jackassery didn’t give it away? Don’t even get me started on Jay Z or Missy Elliot and the force and methods with which I love them (obscenely, preferably naked). And Common? Mos Def? Desdamona? The Roots? I die. D.I.E.
- I paint. My gentleman caller did not know this, either. Really? My paintings are EVERYWHERE in my house. How could you miss it? He said “I think it was because I was looking at your ass.” That makes sense. All is forgiven.
- I like money. I’m not terribly materialistic, except that I am.
I admit it. I like money. This is a bit of a surprise to me. I like to think that I don’t like money.
For example, I am a bit of a minimalist. I have four dinner plates because if I have any more, they will end up dirty, in the sink, even though I have a dishwasher. It is probably full. Don’t judge.
All I really need is four dinner plates. If more people come over for dinner, they will have to not come over for dinner. This is okay, even optimal, because I don’t do parties.
Yet somehow it has transpired that I am hosting a party in two weeks and someone has been assigned martini-making duties, and this is a problem. I own but two Martini glasses, mostly because that is as many as I can hold in my hands (I have two) at any given time. This means I do not have enough martini glasses for my martini-making, martini-drinking guests, especially if they want to use both hands. I think we will have to take turns drinking martinis. What would Leo Babauta do?
(I’m going to have a bracelet made to reference whenever I have a minimalist dilemma like this: “What would Leo Babauta do?”)
(I just posed the question to him via three-part tweet. If our guru sends word down the mountain/Guam, I will keep you informed.)
Back to my point. I don’t like to have lots of crap in my house. It makes my head explode. Sometimes I even take down all my paintings just to gaze upon uninterrupted swaths of wall. It gives me peace.
This minimalist philosophy coincides nicely with not having a lot of disposable income. I don’t want to buy a lot of stuff, which is great, because I don’t have a lot of money to buy a lot of stuff.
(I like what just happened there – it is all very theoretically and practically cohesive. No cognitive dissonance there, at all. This is rare, for me, so let’s take a moment to observe/celebrate.)
Thank you. Onward.
Yesterday I had an epiphany about money.
Two, actually.
Last night, driving home from work, I heard a song by K-Naan, who is a Canadian, sometimes hip-hop but mostly pop artist I really like. I’ve been following him FOREVA and he’s just starting to get some serious commercial traction.
(See what I did there: I just established a lil’ artistic snobbery/authenticity. I don’t like K-Naan just ‘cuz they’re playing him on The Beat. Noooooo, I liked him when he was unknown, unpopular, and starving! I can pick talent even before it is mass-sanctioned! I must know about music! But let’s be honest: I know nothing about music. I am a music mutt. Listen to it all. Like most of it. Indiscriminate. Will hump anyone’s leg. Are we still talking about music?)
The song is called Wavin’ Flag and the chorus landed with me:
When I get older
I will be stronger
They’ll call me Freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag
Those simple lyrics ear-wormed me and made me remember my hypothetical baby.
I once had a boyfriend (I know, you’re SHOCKED). We talked about getting married and having a baby. We would name our imaginary baby Justice.
Justice would probably be a girl, but she could be a boy, if she wants to be because Justice is a profound, beautiful, aspirational and gender-indeterminate name.
And then people started naming their kids Apple and Moses and Blanket and I decided that Arthur and Gertrude were the way to go.
(My children are so lucky they have a father who talked me out of that. Also, note to my father: Arthur is a beautiful, bad-ass name worn by only the chosen.)
And that boyfriend and I broke up, babyless, anyway. He is married now and has a new baby named Prince Magic My Dad is Hot but Not Very Nice To Women Zuma.
Back to my epiphany.
For the last 1-3 years, I have been trying, mightily, to make peace with a dream. I have been trying, more than mightily, to let that dream go. To breathe it into a balloon and release it into the sky. To let that dream fly away.
That dream is a baby.
Recently, a psychic friend (a real, in-person, unpaid psychic friend, not the 1-800 kind) told me that I have two unborn babies waiting for me. One is a dark-skinned, dark eyed, short little boy who is very energetic and mischievious. The other is a light-skinned, tall, skinny, quiet, shy girl.
Tears rushed my eyes and tracked my cheeks.
Here are my deets: I have two actual kids and one is only school age by minutes. If I had a third child, and, after a reasonable amount of maternity/parental leave
[We Interrupt This Sentence for a Digressive, Sarcastic Political Rant]
In Canada, maternity/parental leave is paid at 55% of your income for ONE YEAR. I love Canada, but not as much as Sweden, where it is 80% for sixteen months. In the US, I believe, maternity leave is 5 minutes and six seconds at 0% of your income – I could be wrong – and then, after you leap out of the delivery room to rush back to your job, you can get fired for expressing milk in the bathroom on an unauthorized break. But oh, don’t forget, breast is best, you bad working fired mommy you.
[We Now Return to Your Regularly Scheduled Sentence]
returned to work (because I have to AND I choose to), after paying for daycare for three kids (two real and one imaginary) and our house, I would have negative five million dollars left for food and other discretionary expenses like heat and electricity.
So – setting aside all ethical dilemmas about being a single mama, raising a kid without a father, and having kids when you don’t intend to raise them because daycare is the devil but school, which is just institutionalized, government-funded daycare, is just fine – it is just not financially possible for me to have another baby. Dream or no dream.
Heart’s desire and soul’s yearning, please shuttie.
Doesn’t that suck? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all make our dearest, secret dreams come true?
I imagine this is a decision-point faced by many. It is not only me. I imagine lots of women and families confront the finances/dream dilemma.
So I’m trying to let it go. It is pressingly urgent that I let it go, because I’m thirty-sex. I mean thirty-six. If I don’t let it go, then I have to do something about it (like, say, find someone who loves me and wants to be a family with me and lure him into impregnating me, and I think my gentleman caller just un-called) pretty quick. Like in the next five minutes to three years quick.
So I was listening to K-naan and hearing how they call him Freedom, much like my imaginary baby would be called Justice, and thinking, for the millionth time, that it is really important for my sanity and my bank account and my career plans that I let that dream go.
Because it hangs me up.
- It makes me worry about things not in my immediate control.
- It is simply not up to me, only, if I find an appropriate partner and fall in love and get married and landscape imaginary back yards and structure my life to be conducive to pregnancy and babies and so on.
- It forces me to date and be date-able.
- It distracts me from the the things I can actually work at and have a “energy/talent in = success out” formula. Like writing. Like my career. Like vacuuming.
And then I was thinking: I should write about this. I should write my way through this. I should publicly let my third-baby-dream go.
Then I talked about it with my gentleman caller. I was thinking out loud. I was working my way to letting it go. I was claiming to let it go.
And as I was doing that, epiphany!
I am not letting it go.
I am holding on to this dream. The partner and the infrastructure may not be there. The finances certainly aren’t. But it is my dream and my imaginary baby and I am going to cradle it a little longer.
I betcha Madonna didn’t have this issue. She’s got loads of cash so she can just go around adopting un-0rphans willy nilly at any old age.
And as I thought this, epipany #2!
I am a good mama. My kids are happy and well-loved. I want to have another baby and that baby would be lucky to have me, and us. I simply need to have, and make, more money.
So I will.
Which is why I hereby admit I like money and want a whole lot more of it.
Because, let’s be honest, the point of money is ecstatic, meaningful survival and dream-realizing. The point of having lots of money isn’t so you can have loads of dinner plates or martini glasses.
Leo Babauta knows that intimately, personally, deeply, which is why Zen Habits is so popular, and, in a related development, Leo Babauta has SIX MILLION kids. I mean six.
The joy of money is that it allows you to live, happily, sufficiently, and well with the family of your heart and your choosing. That’s the gift of money.
And I’m going to go get some.
Justice, I’m coming.
Srinivas Rao is a most unlikely surfer.
He has – in his words – zero athletic ability and comes from a high-achieving, academically-oriented family. His sister is in medical school. He just graduated with an MBA and for the last six months he’s been struggling to find a job and to find himself.
So what did he do?
Three things. He started surfing, volunteering and he started a blog.
That’s my kind of summer. Srini might be my kind of guy.
So when he asked me if he could interview me for his podcast series on up-and-coming bloggers, I said sure. I mean, I’m awkward and I am not sure I meet the base criteria for ‘up and coming’ but I can talk paint off the wall. How hard could it be?
You’ll find out. Srini interviewed me last week when my girls had H1N1 but I was denying that I had it too. Because that’s mature. Magical thinking ALWAYS staves off viruses. Illness is only a metaphor.
Gawd, it is like I don’t even read my own polemics.
So Srini interviewed me and I coughed and hacked and sneezed and snuffled all the way through the interview.
Really, I shouldn’t even promote the damn thing because I won’t be listening to it for if I do I will DIE of mortification which, for your information - speaking of diseases and metaphors - is an actual disease, according to my swiss-cheese ego.
After loudly dying of tuberculosis, mid-sentence for six thousand years during the interview, I whimpered “I’m really sick” (I’m so professional like that).
Srini replied, as though he hadn’t noticed that I had coughed through my answers,
“Oh, that’s right, you have swine flu.”
To which I responded, in outraged, deluded horror:
“No I don’t! My kids have swine flu! I just have a cold.”
I told you I was deluded. Also, that is not a direct quote. I told you I CANNOT listen to the podcast because my pride will not allow it. In my own version of events, I was charming and witty and seductive and coughed so quietly and discreetly that it was almost charming and witty and seductive.
I’m sure we all know how it really went down.
Or, if you don’t but you simply MUST know, go take a listen. It is at Skool of Life.
While you’re there, check out my guest post on the F-word and children.
Please note that any coughing you hear during your reading of that piece is coming from you and I take no responsiblity for it at all because despite what you’ve heard – that H1N1 is transmitted telepathically and through telephone wires and only the good folks at Purell can save you - you cannot catch H1N1 from text.
Also, it is not Ebola, people*.
*Lindsey at A Design So Vast coined this phrase and I bandy it about shamelessly and often. I often pretend it is my own, too.
I was going to write a piece about the hidden benefits of the hysteria around H1N1:
- that people are freaked enough to do the right thing, which is stay home
- that people are calling their doctors or health hotlines as soon as they notice symptoms to get advice
- that people are doing research about flu shots and H1N1 shots and making educated decisions for themselves
- that people are paying attention to health alerts
- that companies – like the one I work for – are distributing health alerts, scheduling flu shot clinics, encouraging good handwashing practices and handing out antiseptic handwash and making it easily available in common areas
- that companies are telling workers to stay home if they are sick
- that companies are hiring hazmat teams disinfect the offices of people who are sick with H1N1, making them feel like they have ebola, not the flu.
Okay, maybe not the last one. But true story.
I was thinking that there is an upside to the H1N1 hysteria: that our employers are being proactive and making sure that people know it is better to stay home. That, somehow, companies were taking the health of workers seriously. That people know they have ‘permission’ to do the right thing. (I wish that non-salaried workers were getting paid to take time off because otherwise, even if they want to stay home, they often can’t because they need to pay the bills. I don’t know how to fix this problem.)
That we are taking our health seriously.
So, yay, H1N1 hysteria!
But then I was up all night, sandwiched in my bed between two snoring, hacking, wheezing, whining, feverish agents of infection.
My kids.
This is what you’re supposed to do when someone in your family has H1N1:
- Keep your child away from others to stop the spread of infection.
- At home, keep your child away from other people in the house.
- DO NOT share eating utensils, drinking glasses, washcloths, towels, beds, pillows, etc. until everyone in the household has been free of symptoms for five days
This is what I did:
Brought both of my sobbing, hysterical, coughing, infected children into bed with me and held a sweaty baby in each arm all night.
As I laid awake between my two fire/virus-breathing baby dragons, imagining every wheeze and cough spraying infection into the air and into me – I had some great imaginary symptoms by 4 am – I connected with the ancestors.
This is a parent’s dilemma throughout the ages. The plague. Measles. Various contagious fevers. Deciding how to handle viruses and infections and diseases that are highly contagious through contact and, back in the day and still in lots of parts of this world today, have a very strong chance of killing you and your entire family.
What do you do? Do you stay away, or do you hold your suffering, contagious baby?
I held my feverish, infectious babies.
And thanked the gods and goddesses of all religions and all places that it is only the flu.
“In her own way, Jane was trying to help me. When I was at NYU, [playwright and film director] David Mamet told me that I should be “an artist,” “speak the text,” not sell out to “commercial horseshit,” etc. “Jane” told me that in order to break into acting, I had to be likable, fuckable, have straight, blow-dried hair, and pert nipples. On a certain level she was more brilliant than Mamet, because she actually had solutions.” - Nancy Balbirer, on former friend, “Jane” aka Jennifer Aniston
“You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.” - Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker (xo to Lindsey at A Design So Vast for this quote)
I have mixed feelings about Penelope Trunk and her advice blog located at the ‘intersection of work and life.’
That’s a hot crosswalk and a great place to be. I like intersections and borders and the lines between and cracks in the sidewalk and all the interesting, passionate, generative stuff therein. In my imaginary world, daisies and/or global peace grow there.
So sometimes I think Penelope Trunk is funny. Sometimes I think she’s real. Sometimes I think she’s Doing The Right Thing like when she writes about Asperger’s and work and explains in mundane, scintillating, illustrative detail how she compensates for social deficits on a daily and minute-by-minute basis.
Sometimes I think Penelope Trunk is Liz Fucking Phair without the melody and the beat: her voice gets bare, flat, and disassociative when she writes about emotional, controversial, personal stuff. Hemingway does the same thing. It’s a neat trick.
Sometimes Penelope Trunk infuriates me. Still, she is successfully hopskotching through all the right squares, because she’s trying to assess and live in the real world. Like when she writes that being attractive is important to your career and then goes to great investigative lengths to document this shocking information with statistics and studies.
Newsflash: this is not news. It is a pretty interesting story – HOT PEOPLE always makes for an interesting read – but if this is true, which it is, what do you do about it? Penelope Trunk works out and looks hot and seems to be (maybe, one day) contemplating cosmetic surgery. That’s fine but I’m not sure that’s advice.
And what about ugly people? Should ugly people just go home and get over the whole career thing? How will they pay the rent? What will they eat? Maybe, implicitly, Penelope Trunk is a Darwinist and thinks/hopes/anticipates that ugly people will just un-profit and un-breed themselves out of existence.
Maybe Penelope Trunk doesn’t watch daytime TV, either.
So I read her blog and it stirs up wildly conflicting lovehatey kinds of emotions which is great because at least I feel something when I read it (unlike a lot of other blogs, ahem). Right now, however, I have an entirely new feeling for Penelope Trunk: respect.
Sometimes Penelope Trunk seems like the Empress Dowager High Dictator of women who benefit from feminism but sneer at their privileges. She writes that women should not report sexual harassment (and in fact leverage it), that the gender wage gap is a myth, and oh yeah if you want to succeed, get hot (we may have covered this, already).
And then, with a single tweet, she breaks my feminist heart wide and lovingly open with her off-hand, raw bravery:
I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.
And then, if I wasn’t already loveshocked into admiring her willingness to tell the truth – that every day, women are whiteknuckling it through board meetings or nursing or teaching or hamburger-flipping or taking the bus or rushing to soccer games while our fertility (or lack thereof) grows or ungrows decisions and futures – Penelope Trunk writes this:
Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working. Most miscarriages run their course over weeks. Even if you are someone who wanted the baby and are devastated by the loss, you’re not going to sit in bed for weeks. You are going to pick up your life and get back to it, which includes going back to work.
This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day. That we don’t acknowledge this is absurd. That it is such a common occurrence and no one thinks it’s okay to talk about is terrible for women.
Throughout history, the way women have gained control of the female experience is to talk about what is happening, and what it’s like. We see that women’s lives are more enjoyable, more full, and women are more able to summon resilience when women talk openly about their lives.
Yes.
I once went to work Monday morning after spending Sunday at the hospital presumably having a miscarriage. Then I promptly went home because I was unwell and sad and had to explain to The Powers That Be why I was leaving.
When I came back the next day, the sympathetic stares and averted eyes made me feel like a fecund, failing, un-professional woman.
So yes, we should be able to talk about it.
I have two children. One pregnancy was courted and encouraged and passionately welcomed. The other was poorly-timed and unplanned and I made sacrifices for it. I turned down a dream project that would have paid twice what I have ever made in a year, because I wouldn’t be able to see it through.
And I was depressed. Not ‘blue’, but existentially, clinically, depressed. I had to see a psychologist. Medication was prescribed. I just did not want to be what I was: pregnant.
Two things pulled me out of it.
- I already had a child, who was love embodied. So I knew with cellular certainty that while I did not want to be pregnant, when this new life arrived, I would fall in love all over again.
- I felt connected to the women who came before me. All the women, throughout all the ages, who have been pregnant when they don’t want to be. It feels like a trap, like yes, your body has betrayed you even though it is doing what it is biologically programmed to do. I suddenly understood – again, on a cellular, biological, blood-coursing-through-my veins level – why a woman’s ability to control fertility is the essence of her freedom.
I joined the sisterhood, cosmically speaking.
And so the title of Penelope Trunk’s piece gets it just about right: You can’t manage your work life [or anything really] if you can’t talk about it.
If you look at pictures of ‘career’ women in the 70s and 80s, when white middle class women were discovering the workplace (everyone else was already there) you’ll see a lot of buttoned up, mannish suits. Being in the workplace, it seems to me, meant erasing visible traces of femininity. Maybe women had to be caricatures of men to succeed.
And that is why I have new respect for Penelope Trunk. Because she thinks – and acts! and writes! – from the base assumption that women should not, at any time or in any way, have to camoflage the physical realities of their lives and their bodies in order to be acceptable in the workplace.
Sing it, sister. You’re braver than me.
P.S. I promise not to hate (much) if you get Botox.
one. of many reasons why. a work in progress.
I’m ending a relationship because I’m fat.
We have passionate, easy, hours-long conversations, warmth, affection, respect, and outrageous sex. OUTRAGEOUS. Friendship, respect and hot sex: a pretty great foundation, right? What more can I ask for?
Everything.
Neither of us have butterflies. We were intensely comfortable with each other, right away. We’re both romantics, so naturally this worries us. Where is the infatuation? What does the lack of infatuation mean? Where can this go if it doesn’t start with addiction-like chemical highs?
I asked around. Lots of people seem to think this is no big deal, maybe even healthy. Mature. Real.
But I have a gut instinct about The Issue and it is this: I am everything he wants except thin.
I think this way a lot. I’m pretty sure that if I was thin, men would be lining up even further around the corner to date me. I am pretty, have a pretty good career, possess a dazzling personality if I do say so myself, am smart, talented, funny, artistic, warm, magic with clothes and makeup and ridiculously high shoes, and a sexual GENIUS. If I was thin, any man I chose would think he hit the fucking jackpot.
This is not (just) insecurity. This is cold-eyed social reality. Our culture trains people to see fat as a problem, as a shorthand for all sorts of moral failings. We don’t associate fat with attractive. And what, a good feminist might ask (ahem), is the point of a woman if she’s not attractive?
My friend keeps saying that he is attracted to my mind. Well, that’s wonderful, but you can’t fuck my mind. You can’t hold hands with my mind at an office party. You’re not walking down the street with my mind. You’re not introducing my mind to your mother. This mind comes in a fat body with all the social messaging and meaning that swirls around that presence and that word.
He has not said anything directly but I feel it. He is hedging about what we are to each other. I know what that means and it means I have to be strong. I have to believe in myself enough to stay out of a dynamic that will make me feel like I am not beautiful enough or thin enough or good enough. Because I am enough.
He’s not weak because he can’t accept me as I am. We all have physical preferences and attraction is not a choice. You feel what you feel for who you feel it and that’s the end (or the beginning) of it.
So that’s it. This is the choice I’m making: to walk away from an amazing friendship and even more amazing sex to preserve my self-respect and my faith that I am lovable just as I am.
I am. But the journey to that love is an uphill and tedious climb. The dating odds are stacked against fat girls. It would be easier to just conform, to diet and endure the mental and physical deprivation necessary for losing weight, and then choose from the queue that would form for access to my thin self. I may do that, not out of self-hatred, but out of sheer practicality: I want love. And, I can tell you from direct personal experience, fat can be a barrier to romance.
Despite what the fat-haters say about the dangers of Fat Acceptance, no one sets out to become a body outlaw. The rewards are vastly smaller and sparser than the risks and the social penalties. It would be easier to just conform. And I may do that. Because although I deserve love just as I am, and am lovable just as I am, and won’t accept anything less just as I am, just as I am is just not getting me what I want.
I shouldn’t have to alter myself to find love, but that might be the reality of this little social construct called the world. I don’t live in a world all by myself where I make the rules by myself and life unfolds according to the principles and whims I decree all by myself. Sadly. Happily. Really.
___________________________
Sadly, happily, really, and almost.
This is an update. I wrote this post to fight-club my way to a decision and course of action that would not require a throw-down with cognitive dissonance every damn day.
Blogging is that process for me. I write to unwind my wooly thoughts, instincts and fears and arrive at a decision. Hopefully a good decision. A self-respecting decision. And I did. I chose not to join a relationship in which I would have to accept a ‘not good enough’ feeling. I chose not to trade my confidence for companionship. I decided to end things before they even got started. It felt honest, brave, and necessary. It felt fucking awful.
Even mixed with a triumph of the soul, the consequences of this decision were going to suck. Really suck.
The hard, unpleasant, unwelcome prospect of being without someone I like and respect forced me to do something even more honest, brave and necessary than walking away from him. I talked to him.
I checked to see if my ‘instinct’ was an intuition rooted in subtle signals (his, maybe) or fear and insecurity (mine, surely). I asked him about his feelings about weight and women and attractiveness and me.
We had an awkward, painful, inspiring and invigorating conversation. Turns out we’re good. Game on.
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