May 26, 2011

The South Central Prophecies


When you’re a SuperHero, you live life a little differently than regular, everyday mortals.

Now this isn’t an elitist statement—I’m just trying to point out that it’s a different world than most people are used to. You know, most people’s days consist of the daily commute and paying bills and cleaning the house and mowing the lawn and taking kids to play dates and deciding which restaurant has the best pad thai. People spend time comparison shopping for dishwashers and re-caulking the bathtub and watching reality tv shows.


Not so for the SuperHero. While sure, maintaining the mild-mannered alter-ego requires engaging with some parts of everyday reality—I have to commute to my day job, for example, and I do have to pay the bills—that everyday reality makes up only maybe 10% of life, the 10% needed to maintain the façade of normalcy. The other 90%, however, is filled with the extraordinary. Obviously, there’s the SuperPowers and sidekicks and heroes and villains, but the extraordinary goes beyond that. There are strange, mythological creatures. There are enchanted Gingerbread Cottages and magical healing cocoons. There are fortune tellers and prophets and mystics. There are rituals and signs from the universe and epic journeys that involve impossible tests of courage and bravery. It’s like living in a Greek myth. Or a Grimm’s fairy tale. That’s just what life is like.


You get used to it after a while.

Somehow I forgot about this a couple of weeks ago when I got in the car and headed back towards South Central. Let me say this first: I know, I know, I know. Hell froze over, pigs flew, blah, blah, cliché blah, because I know I swore never to set foot in South Central again. But I was explicitly invited to the Greater South Central Area, and my desire to visit somehow outweighed my intense anxiety surrounding South Central. The thing is, I was, as the kids today say, broke-ass broke. I mean, completely, entirely, not-a-dollar-to-my-name broke-ass broke. But being insanely stubborn and moderately resourceful, I somehow remembered my savings account.

May 21, 2011

Hot Damn


So, I got condemned to hell last Sunday.

This is not the first time that has happened to me, so I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise.  But it was.

Here's the background:  I had never been to church before.  By which I mean I had never been to a regular Sunday church service.  But before I give anyone the wrong impression, let me say upfront that I've had plenty of religion.  I was baptized Catholic and raised Culturally Catholic.  And the rest of my religious upbringing depended on whoever, you know, was in charge of me at the time.  Caregivers sent me to a fundamentalist Baptist summer camp for years, starting when I was just a tiny little baby girl, then later drove me to a Church of Christ summer school every day.  I was placed in the Christian equivalent of the Girl Scouts and memorized bible passages each week.  When I lived with my grandmother when I was an adolescent, she exposed me to the kinder, gentler side of Christianity by sending me to a Methodist Sunday school--although all I really remember from it was that 1.) the teachers were always really pleased that I was there, and 2.) I was the only child ever in attendance.  (It was a really rough neighborhood.)

And of course, with this combination of exposures, I spent my childhood entirely terrified of hell.  Probably until I was around 10 years old, I consistently had nightmares about hell, and when I wasn't sleeping, each waking hour found me positive that every imperfection--spiritual or no--was sending me directly there.  I broke a glass, so clearly I'm going to hell.  My parents are mad at me, so I'm definitely going to hell.  My first grade report card says that I talk too much in class, and obviously girls who talk to much get sent directly to hell.  It was a constant fear of the fiery tortures that awaited me in the afterlife.

Oddly enough, though, I was pretty scared of Jesus, too--what with the Holy Ghost business which is, after all, still a ghost and ghosts are scary to a child.  And also because I kept getting told that Jesus is the one who is going to send me to hell, so it created an atmosphere that was, you know, pretty lose-lose for a child.  In Option A, you're in a place of eternal punishment and suffering, but in Option B, you're face to face with with the one who has the power to send you to the place of eternal punishment and suffering, and who, according to the spiritual leaders of my youth, had a really itchy trigger finger.  With the picture painted for me during childhood, it seemed like Jesus was the last person I'd want to meet in a dark alley.  Or anywhere else, really. You know, since he was constantly poised to kick my ass.

May 3, 2011

Congratulations! It's an IUD!


So, I’m not sleeping with anyone right now. Right after I finished writing about Atlas and the Meat, I thought, “I can’t believe I actually debated this…there is no way I can see him again.” And I haven’t. Then I was directing a show that had me working 80- to 100-hour weeks, in which I barely had time to bathe, let alone get in bed with someone. Nevertheless, despite the time crunch and the lack of a lover, the last six weeks have seen me working relentlessly towards a single goal: getting an IUD.


A lot of women I know have been getting pregnant lately. It’s bound to happen, you know, among women my age, but despite the fact that it is commonplace and, I would argue, expected among women my age, each new baby I hear about reinforces a notion I’ve had since the moment I became sexually active: that getting pregnant would absolutely ruin my life. My enthusiastic college sex life was filled with multiple forms of birth control used simultaneously, as well as the occasional neurotic pregnancy test “just to make sure”. Because while every ounce of my desire determined that there was no way I was going to shy away from a full and indulgent exploration of my sexuality, every ounce of fear in my head made me hypervigilant about pregnancy. Because getting pregnant would absolutely ruin my life.


I suppose I don’t have any less a fear of it now. I just have a little more faith in preventative measures. But the pill makes me feel crazy. Condoms are genius…when a guy doesn’t try to negotiate his way out of one. Now that they’re back on the market, sponges give a girl total control in terms of employing birth control, but they don’t really stay in place if you happen to be particularly athletic during a given evening, and honestly, they’re kind of gross. I mean, they’re sponges. By the time you take them out, they’re sponges full of semen. Yeah. So none of these options are particularly great, but neither is abstinence, or sex ruined by the anxiety of potential impregnation. But I refuse to have my biology trump my desire. My biology can’t tell me what I can and cannot do. Biology ain’t the boss of me.


So when yet another work colleague announced her pregnancy, my first response was to (accidentally) blurt out, “I am totally getting an IUD.”