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.

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.”

You Ain't the Boss of Me

Here’s a big newsflash for everyone: I have breasts. Two of them. And while not huge, they enter the room before the rest of me and announce my presence. They are, I would say, undeniable.

 I also have a vagina. And while this does not enter a room before me, I would also say that it is undeniable. The absence of a bulge in the front of my pants means that you know what’s going to be there instead.

I also have unintentionally big, intentionally fake-blonde hair. I’m round and soft-looking. Although I’m young, I look younger than I actually am. And on days when I’m dressed the way I like, I look like I’m maybe 40% Elvegren pinup girl, 30% cartoon character, and 30% Aging Starlet—you know, the once-perfect ingénue just slightly past her prime, who copes with the passing years with booze and pills and overdressing for every occasion with something that’s a little too sparkly, or too revealing, or too ruffled; the woman who maybe fell down drunk in a ditch while walking into the party, but goddamn it, she still looks good, and she’s going to tell you that loudly and belligerently if you look at her sideways.

I am also fucking brilliant.

Don't Hate the Playah, Part the First

“You hate men, don’t you?!” he demanded.  It was more of a statement than a question. 

The guy is maybe 25, 26—one of the oldest students in the class of 35.  He had just described a play, a comedy, in which three wives discover that their husbands accidentally got locked in a meat cellar, and collectively the wives decide to…leave them in there. 

I laughed.  Because it sounds like a funny premise for a dark comedy.  And the guy was describing a comedy. But then:  “You hate men, don’t you?!”

Quite honestly, I was floored.  “Hate men?” I thought, “Me, of all people?”  I stood there in front of the class, mouth gaping open, trying to process the accusation.  And everything in the room went all foggy and turned into colorful, squiggly lines—you know, the psychedelic ones that transport you into the mandatory dream sequence in The Brady Bunch or really, in any other 1970s-era TV show—as I fell backwards down the rabbit hole of my own mind, looking for what could have ever inspired such a comment.

Honestly, I’d be lying if I said that my relationship with men as a whole is unconflicted.  It’s totally conflicted.  I’m not sure, but a bit of conflict might be an inherent part of heterosexuality—gender-based differences become significant because of sexual tension.  Maybe.  But that seems like kind of a lame rationale.

When I was super, super young—maybe four or five years old—I remember thinking that when I grew up, I was going to turn into my father.  Literally.  I thought I would grow up to be a man.  The why for this is anyone’s guess, but my concept of transformation into my dad—because hey, I was a little baby—was absolutely literal.  Literal to the point where I forced myself to eat spinach because my dad said it would “put hair on my chest”.  Because I thought that would be awesome.  Because men had hair on their chests. 

Oh, thank god that didn’t happen.

Dear Mr. Badger

Dear Mr. Badger,

This was bound to happen sooner or later.

It’s been four months since you’ve been gone. 17 weeks. It doesn’t feel that long, but I checked the calendar. Since you passed away, people have been lighting up your Facebook page, tagging pictures of you, inviting you to events, posting “miss you" messages on your wall. I know your family looks at your page, and I hope it gives them some comfort, as much comfort as possible—you know, knowing that you were and are loved.

That being said, I want to punch every last one of those people in the face.

Meat

My touch o’ the shine warns me what he’s about to do about two seconds before he does it.

We’re locked together tightly in a hello kiss that turned serious, and when we come up for air after a few minutes, he exclaims, “God, it’s so good to see you!” He locks his arms around me in a solid squeeze, giving that little growl all guys seem to do when they squeeze you hard, and then my touch o’ the shine just says:  “Oh, shit…get ready!”, and I know exactly what he’s going to do. I have just enough time to draw the deepest breath possible to let out an extended squeal of “Nooooooo!” as he transforms his bear hug into an attempt to lift me up.

I don’t quite get this, but it happens all the time. Dudes, whether you’re making out with them or not, get excited to see you, give you the big hug, growl a little while doing it, and then try to lift you up. I don’t know where this comes from, but I see it happen to girls all the time. And then guys try to do the same to me….

The Cocoon

Not everyone has SuperPowers, you know. If they did, they wouldn't be so super. Trudie, for example, does not have any SuperPowers. She has something far, far more impressive, though. Trudie has magic.

Let it be known that when I say "magic", I'm not talking about the prestidigitation of some sketch, middle-aged dude in a mock turtleneck and a bad independent mustache. I'm talking for-real magic. It's ancient; it's domestic; it revolves around the home and the hearth and the heart. And it runs in her family.

I was, like always, alone in the car, on my way from here to there, but I happened to be passing through Trudie's patch of woods, so she asked me to stop for the night at her family home.