Cream of refrigerator soup: snowpocalypse edition

I don't know. Maybe you've heard that DC's gotten a little snow lately. And by a little, I mean:



Of course, another 4-6 inches fell on top of this insanity after I took this picture of the sidewalk outside my building. You know, I have a very distinct memory of my mom plopping me on top of a snowbank so I wouldn't get into trouble while she opened my stroller when I was maybe 2? 3? years old (yes, I have a freakishly clear recollection of my toddler years). I recall that snow as being enormous. But I was very short then. I'm not near so short now, but this snow is enormous. Not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

But, once again, I'm stuck inside with an odd assortment of ingredients. Tonight, however, I think I might have topped my last soup. Truly, this thing I just made? It could only be improved upon if you licked it off the body of your beloved. Oh, you only wish that was hyperbole.

So, um, let's see. What, exactly did I do?

Snowpocalypse Turnip, Leek and Mushroom Soup

8 or so decent-sized turnips (I had a bunch of different ones, red, gold and the usual white, that I'd picked up at the Farmer's Market last weekend.), cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
4 leeks, chopped
12 oz cremini mushrooms, quartered
1 clove garlic
1 1/2 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP butter
1 tsp dried thyme
1 cup dry white wine
1 qt chicken broth (I like the low-sodium organic because it taste more like actual chicken.)
1 1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 TBSP dijon mustard
1/4 cup heavy cream
juice of 1/2 a meyer lemon (You could use regular lemons here too, but go skimpy because they're more sour.)
salt and pepper to taste

1. Boil the chopped turnips in 6 cups of water for about 6 minutes. Drain and set aside.

2. Heat olive oil and butter over medium high heat in the bottom of a Dutch oven. Add the chopped leeks and sauté for 5-8 minutes or until they begin to soften.

3. Add the mushrooms and garlic and sauté for another 3 or 4 minutes or until the mushrooms begin to release their liquid.

4. Add the white wine and bring to a boil. Then, add the turnips back into the pot. Mix the vegetables together and bring up to temperature. Add the quart of chicken broth and bring it to a boil. Reduce temperature to a simmer, cover and cook for about 30 minutes. Test to make sure the turnips are soft before you continue.

5. Mix in dijon, heavy cream, nutmeg and lemon juice. Salt and pepper the soup to taste.

6. Remove from heat and puree the soup. I used my favorite kitchen device ever, the immersion blender. But you can ladle the soup into a traditional blender (carefully--it's hot and blender lids can blow and spew boiling soup all over you if you're not vigilant) to puree the whole thing if that's all you have.


Enjoy!

cream of refrigerator soup: snow day edition

I haven't been to the grocery store or farmer's market it over two weeks. The weather reports at which I looked predicted flurries today and a little bit of accumulation in the afternoon. Instead, we got what looks to be about four inches of snow that fell in fat, fluffy clumps all day. Needless to say, I got hungry and had to make do with rations I'd reserved in my freezer. Because I'm a genius, however, my concoction turned out most delicious. And so, I give you my "recipe."

Chicken and Black-eyed Pea Chili

2 chicken breasts, poached and shredded (1 qt poaching liquid reserved)
2 tbsp EVOO
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 sweet red pepper, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 qt broth (I used vegetable because it's what I had, but I probably would have used chicken, were it available.)
1 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes
1 1/2 lbs pre-cooked black-eyed peas
3 tbsp chipotle in adobo, minced
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp Mexican oregano (Conventional oregano will NOT do. It's not the same thing.)
1 tsp chili powder
salt and (tellicherry, of course) pepper to taste
3 cups pre-cooked rice (I used basmati because it's what I had and it's my favorite, but any rice will do.)

1. In the bottom of your Dutch oven, sauté the onions and red and green peppers in olive oil until they begin to soften. Add garlic and sauté for a minute or two more.

2. Add can of tomatoes, broth and reserved poaching liquid and bring to a boil.

3. Add the shredded chicken, black-eyed peas, chipotle and other spices. Bring the whole shebang back up to a boil. Reduce heat to a pretty serious simmer and cook for 20-30 minutes until the flavors meld.

4. Spoon 1/2 cup or so of rice into the bottom of a bowl. Ladle soup/chili over the top.

5. Slurp hungrily.

If you have it, it would probably be pretty tasty if you garnished it with chopped cilantro, fresh minced jalapeños and a squeeze of lime juice, but, alas, I didn't have any of that stuff.

No joke. This turned out really well and I'm trés impressed with myself that I just made it up with random crap I had in the house. Not too shabby, considering my limited resources.

Bon Appétit!

Why I wrote

I wrote because it was fun. Because I was an inordinately verbal child -- demonstrably so, early. Because there were stories of pink monsters, who lived in pink houses and slept in the top drawer of my pink dresser, in dire need of telling. I wrote because I was told to, for school. I wrote because some short piece I'd dashed off moved my fourth-grade teacher to tears as she read it aloud to the class -- and that was really something. And then I wrote because people told me I did it well. For a long time, I did it simply because of that -- for the praise from grown-ups.


I wrote because I read. I read a lot. Somewhere in all the reading, the writing about reading became habit. Responding became habit.

Sometimes I didn't write and sometimes I did.

I wrote because someone said, "You wrote exactly what I felt." Or because someone said, "No one else could have said that the way you did." Or because someone said, "These are real poems." I wrote because I was unhappy -- with myself, my life, my world. I wrote because things outside of myself made me angry -- crazy angry -- or inconsolable. Because dissatisfaction gave me fuel and fire. Because I have always been solitary but needed to talk about it. Occasionally, I wrote in spite of being happy, though that's always been harder.


I wrote just to finish the goddamn manuscript. I wrote in spite of disappointment with myself. Or maybe I wrote to write myself out of that disappointment. I wrote because I went to grad school for the sole purpose of writing and I. Do. Not. Give up. I wrote to come to terms with what it means to be a white girl from the American south. I wrote because my body was teaching me something new every day -- things I deeply desired to shape into language. I wrote out of a desire to make something pretty, even trinket-like. I wrote because I'd fallen so madly in love with the oddities of my mother tongue. I wrote because I was supposed to be good at it, even though I wasn't. I wrote to get better. I used writing as a vehicle for sorting out how I wasn't in love anymore. To tell the tale of the demise of a relationship I'd held dear, and to obfuscate the tale with politics and some fancy Sanskrit words. I wrote to get a handle on my own sexual identity, which defied both the relationship and the world beyond the relationship. I wrote to know myself, then, right?


And then I didn't write. I didn't miss it. I didn't need it. Until I did. So, then, I wrote. For practice. And also, to keep from fighting with a friend about movies.


And then, I wrote to respond and to engage and to partake in so-called conversations with a world I never thought would answer me. Which were really just conversations with myself. Obviously. I wrote because I wanted the writing to serve as beacon, of sorts. Because what if someone else out there was working similar stones smooth? I wrote because I had a "project" and because the Internet is a fascinating, immersive place. Because the Internet is provocative, in one way or another, every damn minute. And so is the world that isn't the Internet. And I wrote and I wrote. For 10 days, I wrote just because I was really hungry. Other days, I wrote because I was heart-broken. Others still, because I was amped beyond cranial capacity. I wrote because it was the most important thing to me. And as I wrote, the writing became ever more so.


Sometimes, I wrote because I was turned on. Because I wanted to turn other people on. Because I had this fantasy that my writing could be so charged that it would draw folks to my bed in droves. At times, I thought I wrote simply in service of this fantasy. As though the writing amounted to so much sublimating, which, I'd secretly hoped, would inspire folks to provide me opportunity to sublimate no more. Or less, at least.


At some point along this trajectory, I began to write because I thought I was a writer. Because writing is what writers do. What I mean is that I wrote because doing so had become a facet of my identity, my personhood. Because if I didn't, what am I? I'm a girl with a job, that's what. Not a bad job -- a job that sustains me and for which I'm grateful -- but a job I wouldn't miss, for itself, if I didn't have it. I wrote because being a writer meant that my job didn't have to matter as much. And neither did my lack of investment in my obtuse notion of "career." And again, I wrote because I needed to. Because it made me part of conversations bigger than my own experience. Or because I wanted it to do that for me, maybe.


So, then, it's really a pain in my ass that it occurred to me that I don't actually need it. That, kinda, I don't miss it. Not enough. Or maybe just not often enough. And while I can enumerate a hundred and one reasons I once wrote, I can't name any for why I will or would write again. Save this nagging grunt in my mind that nudges, "Oh, but you should." What is this "should" business? What's the basis for "should?" Why should I? Because writers write. It's what they do.


So what, then, if I'm not a writer?


What if this role I've (at times, forcibly) adhered to my identity is bogus? What should I do then? Huh, mind? Huh? What fucking then?

Now, I write this not because I'm in need of a pep talk or because I'm feeling particularly inadequate in terms of my chops (though I do feel that way, and often). I'm writing this because, last night, a friend asked me why I wrote and he put it in past tense, just like that: "I want to come back to this. Why you wrote." In the moment, his past tense sunk me -- and then it kept me up all night, stewing. Of course, he clarified and said he meant for me to answer the question with a comparison between why I used to write and why I'll write in the future, but it's not like I'm not keenly aware that I am not writing at present. And that, besides this niggling feeling that I should be posting something, anything, because I've established expectations that I would (mainly from myself, but also from the handful of you out there who have so kindly asked me for more), I haven't felt any real tremendous compulsion to write, really, at all, lately. Therefore, though this may be just another bout of blockage, of the likes I've encountered in many iterations before, I think the question of how integral my writing is to me bears consideration.

So, that's what I'm doing. Considering. Because I can't help but notice that a nauseatingly high percentage of those reasons for which I've written in the past seem to be all about seeking external approval and cosseting my puny li'l ego. And I'm considering because I've never nursed any serious aspirations to get paid for my writing (likely out of chickenshittedness) anyway. Given that cold light, I think asking myself just exactly how much I profit from adopting a writerly persona at this juncture is entirely appropriate. Funny how I have to use words to do that, though, eh?

The dormant month

For the first time in the history of this blog, I didn't write anything for the entire month of September. Perhaps you've noticed? Writing a post just to say that, yes, I too have noticed that nothing much has been happening whenever I open up an empty post window feels sort of dramatic and self-aggrandizing in itself, but a few of you have commented-- and I thank you for doing so. It's lovely, really, to feel as though what I do in this space is, in some way, miss-able.

The truth is that writing that abortion post seems to have taken a lot out of me-- intellectually, emotionally, and also in terms of my writerly self esteem. I didn't intend for that to be the case. I was so sure the whole event would come and go, rolling off my back as though I'd grown duck feathers. Friends who've been through similar experiences shook their heads and warned me when I swore it was going to be no big deal for me, but, you know, it was. It is. It is in ways both difficult and astoundingly awesome. I have new friends now. I have new readers now. I have new perspective now. But I also have new anxieties now. This, of course, is how it is.

Three months on down the road, I remain nothing but steadfast in my conviction that writing about my experience was the right thing to do, but -- if nowhere but in my own mind -- it seems to have raised the stakes of this blog. It may well be the most "important"-- whatever that means -- thing I've written to date, and it's certainly the most charged (emotionally, politically) thing I've written here. And it made me want to write better, more seriously, less glibly and with more of a real aim-- at what? I'm not yet sure.

Also, I've been busy. The offline conversations that post generated were plentiful. Some of have dwindled and, as I mentioned, some have kindled new and important friendships. I didn't know the sort of people it would bring into my life, the sort of people who'd respond to it in some way or another, the sort of people who'd take interest in me as a person because of the way I chose to handle a problem that isn't really so uncommon. But now that they're here and talking to me and challenging me and encouraging me, I can't really help but feel like something I wrote -- something I made up out of my own little brain -- has made my own world a little bit bigger. That's kind of amazing, right? And no one is more surprised, humbled and excited about that than I.

So, let's call this quiet period my Epoch of Re-assessment. I'm thinking about the possibility of going to school again. I'm thinking about the sort of platform I want this blog to be -- the sort of ideas I need to process. How a blog is good for processing but not necessarily all that great for instilling rigor -- insular and self-congratulatory as it can be. And I'm thinking about how a relationship between added rigor and my usual spin cycle of ideas might look -- the thoughts I express here and the sort of persona I'll need to cultivate if I want to make a go at... something more... serious?

I'm intimidated, frankly. Well-meaning folks in my most bare-bones support system have been very encouraging, indeed. With a handful of exceptions (exceptions that made me doubt my efficaciousness as a practitioner of written communication, but did not make me doubt the rightness of my choices, I might point out), I received remarkably kind feed-back on that abortion post. But somehow all the well-wishing has me feeling as though I have even more at stake every time I sit down to pound out something -- anything -- witty, wise, winsome or resolutely un-ambitious -- whatever. Yep. Pretty classic. I'm psyching myself out and I know it. I did the same thing when I was working on my manuscript in grad school. Once my classmates and professors began to respond positively to my work, I found I had to lock myself in my office for an entire semester just to keep their encouragement from staunching the flow, just to squeeze those few little coagulated, sticky poems from the turnip that is me. For me, living up to the accomplishments of which I'm sorta kinda proud is always harder than overcoming failures. And that's where I am now--scared it's all downhill from here. And, from here, I know, I've barely gotten started.

So, I'd ask the friends who've been asking after my writing to be patient with me, but that's not really the point. I love that they care whether I write and notice when I don't, for sure, but the standards I'm worried about living up to are mine. So, really, I'm better served trying to be patient with myself and to let the writing come when it comes and not to become exasperated when it doesn't. I am trying not to assign so much significance (to piddly ol' blog posts) that I can't even write fluffier fare -- because it seems silly to take this blog so seriously. But I am having trouble writing fluffier fare. And less fluffy things too.

Which isn't to say things aren't percolating. It's just a slow drip. And that's okay. This time around, moving from the dormant state into a thaw is not something I want to rush.

Mixing metaphors, however? I'm totally fine with that.

Aspirations, sex dreams and my brain on Twitter

Resolved: celebrity crushes are for douchebags.

I am still subject to collecting them.

Allow me to spare myself the indignity of hyperlinking my many moonings over David Duchovny.

Here's the obvious thing about nursing sexual feelings about someone you will never meet: it's totally self-defeating if felt with any earnestness. These people are essentially inaccessible. The things we think we like about them may well be wholly fabricated by whatever publicity machines are operating around them. And, as I've argued before, actual sexual attraction cannot be gauged without a proper assessment of the pheremonal charge one picks up within physical proximity of any given lust object. Therefore, I fully admit that whatever steamy thoughts I may conjure up about a famous person are utterly pointless and based in idle self-illusioning--which I hope lets me off the hook, just a little bit, for the following indulgence in douchebaggery.

How's that for an apologist's disclaimer of an opening?

I follow all of two Hollywood types on Twitter. No, Duchovny's not one of them. There are two Twitter accounts attributed to him but neither appears to be all that authentic. Or interesting. Basically, because I only really care about language, sex, food and the continuation of human life on my planet, most of the people I follow are writers, eco-activists, sex-workers, or chefs (or some delicious mix-and-match combination of the four). But I do follow Diablo Cody. Her tweets sometimes make me snort green tea out my nose. She says cool shit about the confrontational quality of female nudity. And really, she kinda fits into both the sex-worker and the writer categories, so I figure can absolve myself of the usual celebrity sycophanticism (of which, apparently, I'm deeply concerned I'll be accused) on that one. The other one's Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

So, fine. I've been known to wax florid on a film or two of his (again, purposeful lack of hyperlinks here). I like to watch the kid. His intensity, his physicality, his offbeat charisma. I find him compelling. But I think I started following him because I was curious about the sort of hype (500) Days of Summer, which I saw last April at NaFF, would get. That's the thing about film fest fare--when you get to see something before everyone else does, and if it's any good at all, it's inevitable you'll take an interest in what becomes of it. But then, in following him, I discovered he's devised this little hitRECord.org website (Joe, help me out here. I don't understand the capitalization. As the stress in the word "record" is actually on the 2nd syllable, why highlight the first? Picky, picky, I know.), which appears to be a collaborative video remix forum. He links a lot of hitRECord-derived videos in his tweets--several of which have been worth the double-click. Fantastic, I thought. Non-boring celebrity tweets. What a boon! So I continued to follow.

And then he hits me up with this one:




All right, Joe. You got me.

It's like a missile to my ooey-gooey lit-nerd core. It could only have been made better if he'd been reading one of Jim's letters to Nora:

"My sweet little whorish Nora. I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes."*

As it stands, that video reminds me lot of that time I caught Mr. Duchovny casually dropping the word "gerundive" in an interview...and I had to change my panties. Is it really any wonder I've been having dreams of performing prolonged fellatio on this guy?

I've noticed that, much in the way that my sexual crushes and my creative crushes seem to have collapsed in on each other, Twitter owes part of its addictiveness to this collapsing of the distance between us and those whose talents we admire--this strange false intimacy. As such, Joe's thoughts enter mine in a couple 140-character bursts a day. And those bursts have reminded me of how much I loved his 2005 film, Mysterious Skin. And from there, I've been reminded of another sort of fantasy altogether--that one I used to have about becoming a doctor of pervertology. Or something.

Remember all those months ago when I swore up and down that taking my current job would grant me the leeway to go frolicking off in search of yet another useless graduate degree? Well. It seems I've gotten a little more invested in my job than I'd planned. It seems I've grown accustomed to actually seeing my friends in the evenings and having time to pick up my dry-cleaning. It seems I enjoy waking in daylight on weekends. And in a million other ways, life has interceded. But I continue to long for school. Sometimes now more than ever.

Over the course of the last three years writing this blog, a series of observations have coalesced into a couple of big questions. I still don't know what kind of program would have me (Critical film studies? Gender studies? Pop culture criticism? An amalgam?) but I have a hunch said questions would benefit from some academic structure. Here are the basics: in fictional reflections of our culture, non-compartmentalized sexuality, particularly if the sexuality in question belongs to someone female, is described as a threat to social order. As a result, it's often explained away by means of one of three causes--and have a cause, it must. In fiction, disruptive sexuality is rarely a naturally occurring phenomenon. Rather, a fictional slut has become a slut, not because s/he was born overtly sexual, but because either s/he is demonic, s/he suffers some sort of mental pathology, or s/he is a victim of abuse. And as the story goes, the slut either seeks a "cure" or is forced into one--and by "cure," I mean either (usually heternormative) monogamy or celibacy. And there it is: the pattern for which I've been looking-- a little one, a humble one--but a pattern nonetheless. The thing that intrigues me so about this pattern is that it really does seem rather divergent from the way I've experienced my own sexuality. Actually, it's divergent from the experiences of a lot of other sexually open people I know. So, the questions themselves. Why the disparity? Why are filmic depictions folks with fully integrated, big, showy, swaggering fuck-vibes so rarely positive? Why do we perceive sex as threatening in the first place? And so on.

So, because it's what good geeky girls do, I thought, why not turn that question into a scholarly inquiry? Oh, some day. Some day.

But here's where Mysterious Skin fits in. In many ways, this film relays a very conventional slut's narrative with the victim variant I mentioned above. An 8-year-old kid is molested by a man he worships. He grows up to become a rent boy, furiously seeking to replicate the feelings that early experience drummed up in him--feelings he names "love." And then, literally and figuratively, he gets beaten down--punished for his slutty transgressions. On the surface, the character of Neil McCormick, as embodied with so much slit-eyed heat by our Joe, isn't really all that different from, say, Rae in Black Snake Moan. She too was molested as a kid. She too develops an itch. And she too gets smacked into unconsciousness for it.

Now, it's no secret that I love Black Snake Moan for being the flawed disaster that it is. It really is a mess. I suppose I value it most for the way it adheres so slavishly to the model I described two paragraphs ago. Black Snake Moan tells a fallen girl's tale so very straightforwardly, stopping obligatorily to suggest Rae's childhood molestation before depositing her safely into her monogamous hetero marriage, that it veritably points out its own ridiculousness in the doing. The film is, after all, not much more than a fantasy of a sexed-up white trash American South that never was. It's perfect. Bless it's sweaty, bruisy, spermy little Southern heart.

But Mysterious Skin is just that much more sophisticated. For all the ways that it plays by the rules, as determined by the pattern I've been chasing, it breaks just as many. And what I really love about it is that the rules it breaks have very little to do with gender roles, despite Neil's maleness and his queerness. Actually, the film's casual handling of Neil's queerness makes it, in essence, incidental.

Rather, he is subject to many of the usual vulnerabilities visited upon slutty women. Being a lithe young kid, physical debasement is a particular occupational hazard for him. And though he is described as having "a black hole where his heart should be" (or something like that--I don't have the exact quotation), he seeks love through sex-- a thing folks like Oprah try to tell us is behavior typical of women. It's not, of course, but my point here is that within the construct of what I'm calling the slut narrative-- a species of story usually populated with women--Neil ain't special because he's a boy. His psychological motivations seem very much aligned with your garden variety contemporary fictional construct of the harlot. (Incidentally, that boy-seeking-love thing is most of why there's so much fuss being made over the (tres debatable) "reversal of gender roles" in (500) Days as well. That makes me giggle because, last I checked, being a fool for love isn't gendered behavior. Regardless, I continue to find it rather satisfying when it just happens to be a cute boy dipping toes into this gender-role-discussion bath. In more than one film, even!)

So, no, at first glance, Neil isn't a terribly anomalous character. However, this film takes a very notable risk--a risk that knocks it slightly asunder in relation to that pattern upon which I'm harping. Namely, it presents Neil's disruptive sexuality as a thing that precedes his abuse. I know. It seems small. Except that in a culture in which prepubescent children are generally ascribed a pointed asexuality, positing lusty thoughts in the head of an 8-year-old kid drastically complicates the hustler-as-victim paradigm. Can I just shorthand the pretentious Foucault reference here? I mean, here we are, 30-some-odd years after The History of Sexuality: Volume I was first published in French, and still, a large portion of the energy Western culture directs at this thing we call child-rearing is focused on negating innate sexuality in our children, and claiming said sexuality doesn't exist. But it does exist. So when a a very young child in a film describes jerking off to orgasm and being "sledgehammered" by desire, it's noteworthy. And more than that, it takes the story arc out of the realm of the conventional whore's tale.

Personally, I happen to think this little facet of Neil's character goes a long way to lend this film a particular authenticity. I mean, long before I ever read Foucault, I knew in my, er, heart that fucklust precedes the acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics. I was born with basically all the same nerve endings I've got now-- and, as I may have mentioned in previous posts, I figured out what all those nerves endings do pretty early on. Which was kind of awesome. Getting busted by a fellow kindergartner? Not as awesome.

So, right. My point here is that if we understand Neil's seemingly precocious sexual awareness exists prior to his being molested, even in an unformed way, it becomes much more difficult to view Neil as an unadulterated, agency-free victim. I know that idea could be touchy but bear with me. Neil's desire for his baseball coach doesn't, by any means, absolve the adult coach his transgressions against a little kid--a kid utterly lacking in adult perspective, self-preservation instinct and aplomb. But it does mess with the head of the viewer just enough for for a niggling little thought to wedge its way in: just how does a kid's willing participation affect the dynamic between victim and victimizer?

Oh, I know. That thought is an unnerving one that confounds the conventional wisdom regarding these sorts of encounters. It's one few of us particularly want to dwell upon. The notion that grown-ups shouldn't touch the sensitive parts of children is a wholly nonpartisan--and sacred--concept in our culture. Within the landscape of a film, to make an infraction against that concept is to jeopardize an audience's loyalty in a very serious way. But the fact that Neil's ostensible collusion in his coach's desire does indeed squirm its way into this film, without actually exculpating the coach character, is truly what makes its narrative feel both a little dangerous and uniquely challenging. Those two descriptors constitute just about the highest compliments I'll ever pay a movie.

That said, the film itself even looks for ways to undermine the implications that Neil's childish, yet clearly sexual, desires cast upon it. One could point to the character of his mother, for instance. She keeps porn under her bed (bonus points for her, by the way--a woman who likes porn? In a film not so terribly far from the proverbial main stream? How often do you see that?), she doesn't hide her own sexual shenanigans from her kid, and she seems generally oblivious to Neil's teenage tricking on the edge of the playground. Some might call her "negligent." Some might say she "sexualized Neil too young." Well? Meh. I don't buy that argument. I tend to think it draws upon some class-ist rhetoric, actually. She is a blue-collar single mom with resources simply too limited to allow her the luxury of the perpetual child-monitoring that we like to call "good parenting"--which isn't to suggest that she isn't something of a mess herself. But she is, as they say, doing the best she can.

And, yes, the film does go on to imply that every last bit of the blame for Neil's career trajectory into professional cock-jockeying lies with the attentions of his once-beloved coach, rather than with... I don't know...Neil's own jubilant lustiness and generous desire to service the world, one blowjob at a time, with only paltry remunerations as his reward. Now, don't get me wrong--I don't begrudge this movie its portrayal of sex work as degrading. An awful lot of it is degrading. It's not like I'm gonna try to deny that. It's more that, when looking at cultural representations of whorishness through a wider lens, there are so blasted few of them that consider sex work as something other than an act of desperation. I've used the following quotation from debauchette's blog before, and again, it seems apt here:

"This is where the press consistently gets it wrong: they suggest that all sex work is oppressive and dehumanizing, when it isn’t. Dehumanizing sex work is dehumanizing, just as any work that treats human beings as automata is going to be dehumanizing. Or they suggest it’s empowering, which it can be, but only empowering sex work is empowering. There’s tremendous range. And within that range, it’s easy to feel valued only for your sexuality, as if you have nothing else to offer the world. But then, that’s not limited to sex work alone."

Well, someday that perspective will get some screen time. Some day. Maybe. Right?

Fuck me. I miss school.

Anyway.

It comes to this:

"I've played the smart kid, the funny one, the nice sweet one, even the angry one, but never the sexy one."

A while back, I randomly found that little nugget on IMDb, which attributes it to none other than Joe. That's right. He once said he'd never played sexy. Now, who knows when he said it--if it was before or after Mysterious Skin. Clearly, it's hopelessly marooned sans any semblance of context. But, Joe! Seriously? What the crap? Surely you know it's not the part. It's the human energy in the part. You simply can't actualize a haunted teenage prostitute without tapping into some kinda fuck-vibe. It's there. It's in some of those smart, funny, sweet and angry kids too. It's innate. It's what it is. If it weren't there, you probably wouldn't be populating the wet dreams of women who don't know you. Just sayin'.



*It should be noted that I bought my used copy of the 1976 Ellmann-edited Selected Letters of James Joyce with the spine already broken. It naturally falls open to the filthiest of Joyce's erotic letters. It seems some perv before me also bought this book with prior knowledge of its unique contents.

putting my uterus where my mouth has always been

Within four days of conception, the thought that I was pregnant strayed across my mind and I. Could. Not. Shake it. For the most part, my body felt normal. Ebulliently healthy, in fact. The only thing funny was that my tits hurt. And not with the familiar, liquidy, pendulous ache I feel every month. They felt tight and like they were filled with large-grade gravel. I chased that pregnancy thought around my head for a while, shoving it into corners and under other thoughts, but when my period was one day, two days... six days late, I was not terribly surprised.

***

I keep having versions of this conversation:

Friend: So, I haven't talked to you in a while. How've you been?

Me: Better. I mean, I'm good. I mean, yeah, good.

Friend: What do you mean "better?"

Me: I mean, well, last week was strange.

Friend: Strange?

Me: Yeah, kinda rough. Strange.

Friend: What happened?

Me: I had an abortion last week.

I don't usually lead with announcements of this sort. Mostly, I assume people don't really want to know the details of my physical person when they ask after my well-being. I'm not one to revel in the overshare--or, at least, I'm not when not writing for this blog. But I have been pointedly acclimating myself to saying it. I had an abortion. I've been getting used to not cringing in anticipation of receiving a response I might not like so much. I've been consciously choosing to not hide the simple fact that a terminated pregnancy is part of my personal history now. And also, I've been seasoning myself to the fact that I feel shame about exactly none of it--not the sex, not the pregnancy, not the termination.

Upon the materialization of that nefarious little plus sign, I told a few friends. I waited a while to get used to the idea and then I told my mom. A few people immediately said, "You're not going to write this, are you?"

"I might. Probably. I don't know. I haven't decided."

Under normal circumstances, even the best-intended unsolicited advice makes me tic and shudder with irritation. But I must say I was unprepared for the sort comments I, a girl who happens to do a thing with words now and again, received upon intimating that I might write about aborting a fetus. "Be discrete," they said. "Be reverent, somber." "Protect yourself. It's too personal. You don't want those pro-lifers giving you their opinions on your blog, do you?" "Be respectful. Don't make jokes. This isn't funny." People said these things to me.

You know what? Fuck that.

First of all, I have more rhetorical ammo in my arsenal than any pro-lifer could ever hope to dodge. Seriously, people. If you have a problem with my terminating my fetus on principle, bring it. You people don't scare me. You don't scare me primarily because I can't take you seriously. You stand on the side of neither ethical correctness nor personal responsibility and therefore I have very little respect for your opinion on what goes on in my uterus. I know full well that I write this blog under my true legal identity and I wouldn't be publishing this post if I didn't think I could take the heat.

But secondly, though I know they didn't intend it, having people weigh in on how I should write this story felt tantamount to their telling me how I should feel about my predicament--and the subsequent solution. Somewhere in those well-meaning admonishments, I detect the implication that I, a writer and a woman who has had an abortion, am somehow supposed to be delicate in my discussion of this topic. But guess what? This process begins with fucking and ends with a red-brown smear on a comically thick maxi-pad. There aren't too many delicate things that happen in between.

That said, my decision was as clean, unconflicted and singular as a decision could be. Within 10 minutes of the appearance of my plus sign, I had already called a clinic for an appointment. Since, I have not wavered in my conviction that I was doing the right thing--not even once. Like a premonition, I wrote this post a few months back. In it, I confessed that I had no idea what I'd do if I found something unwelcome in my uterus. And truly, until it happened, I didn't know what I'd do. I mean, all along, I've been aware that I pay an extortionate mortgage on a small-ish condo in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. I'm aware that my social infrastructure is a little scanty in the child-rearing-support department. And I know that I am reticent to give my lifestyle the overhaul that having a baby would require I give it. But it was not something I could decide beforehand. I could not be automatic about it. But then, neither could I have known, in advance, of the blissful clarity of thought and internal calm I'd feel in the reality of that moment. I had no idea--not until I felt it.

There really is only one reason the decision was so easy for me. Inviting the guy, whose notch on my bedpost will heretofore be tabbed "the impregnator" (and, alternately, "the narcissist"), into my life--and bed--constituted a poor choice. Truth be told, had the precision-engineered genetic material squirted forth from virtually any other male member with which I've had contact in the last year and a half, I'm nearly positive I would not have felt such single-mindedness. In some strange, inverted way, I suppose that makes me lucky.

So. The guy. Yeah. I met a guy. We went out. On the first date, I thought he was a little boring and had an inflated sense of himself. I didn't imagine we'd go out again. When he texted me something suggestive later that night and followed up with a rather sweet email the next morning, I was flattered. I am easily flattered. But then, over the course of the next two or three dates, I began to tick off a list of inanities as they fell out of his mouth. A vaguely racist comment here. A few tacky digs about other men I've dated there. He frequently claimed to be "charming as hell," which, predictably, had the dual effect of making him seem socially ill-at-ease and uncharmingly arrogant. He accused me of being a film snob and of "over-analyzing" everything. I thought, well, if you don't like that I engage as deeply as I can with every cotton-pickin' thing in my world, you really don't like me. Then I realized it was me who didn't like him. Unceremoniously and definitively, I cut it off.

Two days later, I felt that tightness across my chest. And I couldn't decide what to wear. I blamed girly neurosis and commonplace sartorial indecision when I began changing my outfit 14 times every morning. Nothing fit right. It all itched and hung at an angle. I'd never, in my adult life, felt less sexy--in every last article of clothing I own. And then, internally, recurrently: I'm pregnant. Quiet. It's nothing. Fuck, I'm pregnant.

I still shake my head at the boneheadedness that got me into this age-old pickle. With a dude so cacophonously sub par, no less. But, simply put, I've had worse sex. Had he been able to keep some of those stale pomposities corked up inside him, he might have kept me entertained for another week or two with the sex alone. Between my inability to deflect the lavish demands of my libido and my irrational, yet persistent, anxiety that I may never have sex again, I'm rarely motivated to say "no." So, I don't know, somewhere around Round Three or Four one night (so as to not paint the poor fellow as utterly irredeemable, I really should concede that his stamina and resilience were definitive checks in his pro column), we ran out of his preferred style of condom. He imperiously objected to whatever I happened to have in my purse. Then, classily, he proceeded to make fun of me for having dated guys with cocks small enough to fit into them. He totally did. In the moment, his uncouthness left me too flummoxed to say anything about the teasing. Perhaps if I had said something, I would have been better able to shed the bitterness I continue to taste when I think of him.

So, sure, I knew I was ovulating. But I was also burnt out from having to play rousing games of Condom Police with nearly every guy I meet. I've had a perfectly good education about birth control methods, thank you. I know my options. But my experiments with hormone-therapy-based birth control have been disastrous and I'm nervous about slippage and increased recurrent UTI risk (I'm already quite prone) with copper IUDs and other insertable items. So condoms remain my only and my last resort. I'd love to generalize, averring that women are simply more aware of their personal consequences, in terms of condom-free sex, but, of course, that's not universally true-- I certainly have been with incredibly meticulous men who are all about the condom love. Regardless, I so often feel put in the position of being the safe-sex enforcer--a stance of suckage. I am the one, after all, faced with the decisions, the costs and the bodily disturbance when worse does (did) indeed come to worst.

That night, I was wet and lacking conviction when I suggested we delay. I caved. And he probably waited about a beat and a half too long to pull out. He came mostly into the crease of my thigh.

I realize this story is rife with dumbassedness, especially considering we weren't a couple of ill-prepared teenagers, but rather, two sexually experienced adults in our 30s. But it's exactly that that makes it a particularly valid little cautionary tale. Folks, it happens. It happened. What can I say? Fecundity, sex drive, all of it: signs of proper bodily function. Of health. They're also terribly dangerous toys.

***

I don't owe anyone a justification for my decision. I'm not trying to convince anyone I did the right thing. But because I'm shooting for accuracy and honesty, here's what was in my head as I stared at my fateful pee stick: I figured I had three options: 1) I could have the kid and selfishly deny it access to its father, out of my own shuddering distaste for him. 2) I could have the kid and spend the rest of my life resenting both it and the guy. The guy and I could have 18 years worth of epic battles over personal values and child-rearing decisions. And I could stretch my already tight budget beyond capacity, thus raising my own child with far less privilege than my parents granted me. Or 3) I could terminate.

I was so lucky. My choice couldn't have been clearer. Option #1 was out of the question. I could never prevent a kid from knowing its father. That's ugly karma in which I don't care to partake. And no way, no how was I going to bind myself, for the rest of my life, to an anti-intellectual jockstrap registered fucking Republican ("I voted for Obama, though. Hope I don't regret it!" Oof. Like a post-coital whomp to my belly. ) -- much less do so to some poor, unsuspecting infant. The chances of him and me being able to maturely co-parent with a reasonable degree of accord? Laughably slim, right? I simply couldn't have let it happen. It would have made not two, but three lives exponentially more difficult. No argument in the world could convince me that there's a shred of ethical propriety to be found in that option.

***

I've written several drafts of this post. I've been bashing my head into it, unable to settle on an approach. I thought about detailing the procedure itself and the two fairly harrowing days that proceeded it. Fears of miscarrying, extra blood tests, delays, cramping, nausea, nerves-- all of it. Because no account of the abortive experience was real for me until I had my own. At times, I thought maybe I could try my hand at that version.

I thought about writing a letter to my doctor. I wanted to tell him about how rare and thoughtful and cautious and empathetic I found him to be--and how lucky I felt to have serendipitously become his patient. For the first time in years, a conventional medical practitioner put aside the hierarchical doctor-patient relationship structure in order to listen to me. I have a mild clotting disorder. Even minor surgery is a little more risky, a little more nerve-wracking for me. He talked to me, called for extra bloodwork and reassured me. The clinic I chose does a volume business, so his personal attention was more than that for which I could have asked.

Lucky. I am. Really.

Oh, and the sorority. I've begun initiating conversations with women close to me--the ones I knew had also terminated pregnancies. I wrote to women who'd written their own narratives-- to learn more, to say thanks, to affirm and be affirmed. That day in the clinic, even, I shared how-I-got-knocked-up and I'll-never-do-that-again stories with the jittery women waiting with me. All of those stories--varied as they are--are in my head now. They're part of this, crammed in here too. It's a bond. I can't explain it.

And I'd be remiss to not speak to very cool part of being pregnant. I felt such unexpected relief when I realized that, somewhere in the my mind's recesses, the fact that I'd never gotten pregnant before, despite all the messing around I've done, had bred a niggling worry that I might not be able to if I tried. In a strange synchronicity, it seems the author of one of my favorite blogs, Nightmare Brunette, has been going through something similar. She says this about the body's independent machinations:

Conception is still fundamentally a pretty amazing thing. In this condition, I could move to a place with no other people and, in less than a year, I would have made my own company. It's stupid to try to pretend it isn't special, to act like it's mundane and not miraculous to have this event trying to happen inside my body. You don't have to be religious or spiritual to think the ways nature works are exciting. You just have to not be a cynic.

She's not wrong.

And then there's my body's healing process: roughly 48 hours after an abortion, progesterone and other pregnancy-elevated hormones begin to dissipate in the blood. Morning sickness subsides. The mind sweetens into new relief and pre-pregnancy order. And despite all my best intentions for putting myself on a sex diet, my body began feverishly campaigning to get its pregnancy back. Gnuuh. Fertility. The staggering uptake in my cocklust had me swimming in flesh in my dreams, both regular and day. I've been haze-headed, soupy, lit-aflame-with-the-libidinous-directive and, really, nearly euphoric.

But it's all just too much. Too big. More than one measly blog post can possibly hold. I'm sorry. My form fails me.

***

Ultimately, I suppose the particularities of any of the writerly approaches I might have taken do not comprise anything unusual--and maybe not even anything all that interesting. The Planned Parenthood website says that "1 in 3 American women have abortions by the time they are 45." That's an awful lot of us. And yet, I've only read a handful of firsthand accounts. Why is that? The sheer paucity of these narratives is a problem, I think.

Right after my procedure, my doctor asked me, "OK, what are you going to do now for birth control? Because I don't want to see you again unless I run into you on the street. Although, of course, you might not want to acknowledge how you know me." Even he, a man who makes a living by providing this necessary service to his community--and, as Dr. Tiller's murder reminds us, risks his life to do so--is so deeply inculturated with the notion that unintended pregnancies and their subsequent terminations are humiliating for women that he back-stepped at his own hypothetical musing about he and I running into each other. But I wasn't humiliated. I said, "Doctor, I am not ashamed of this. Actually, I'd be proud to acknowledge that I know a man who does what you do." I don't think he was expecting me to say that. But I meant it.

Nevertheless, there still aren't all that many women telling this story--not publicly, not with their names attached. Even the article I linked in my previous post was submitted anonymously. Had I been able to write to its author and thank her personally, I would have. I was, however, able write to one Ms. Chelsea G. Summers to thank her for her three remarkable posts in which she details her experiences, and the fallout of telling of her experiences, over on her blog. Her posts gave me perspective and, well, kept me company that night after my surgery. And also, she makes a point that, frankly, goes unsaid far too often:

It’s no secret that I've had seven abortions, which is, I admit, a lot. I have narrated my abortions in stark detail, and I have discussed how people who identified themselves as pro-choice castigated me for my recurrent choice to terminate my pregnancies. Looking back on my life and the fifteen-year period of these abortions, I believe that my choice to abort was absolutely correct, even if my fuzzy choices that led to my getting pregnant were not. Faced with the same decision again—an unlikely scenario as I’m now about as likely to get pregnant as I am to die in my bathtub—I would unhesitatingly choose to terminate the pregnancy.

I've written about how difficult it was for me to come forward and tell the story of my abortions. I haven’t written so much about how rewarding it has been to hear from other women who have suffered as I did in the shadow of their silence. These women were afraid of voicing their experience of choosing to terminate a pregnancy, just as I was. We all lived in fear of being judged. Reading my story, many women came forward and thanked me.

Though I have been quite open about all this with most people in my life (and now with whomever reads my blog), I continue take her point well: no matter how right the decision, the telling of the tale is still a loaded act.

It's been a real challenge for me to write this post. My usual blurt-it-out-don't-look-back writing process had been shot to hell as I've fought through an anxiety about whatever judgment may yet come my way. Not only do I feel like what I'm writing is important enough that I care whether it's "good," but I also feel nerve jabs in my stomach every time I get close enough to finishing it to hit that "Publish Post" button at the bottom of my screen. Atop all the self-doubt I usually feel about my writing, an excruciating awareness of the political load that this issue bears has threatened to snow my post under more than once. As I said before, it's not that I'm ashamed of the act--any of the acts. But I will be ashamed if I can't manage to write a piece compelling enough to be worthy of the textual heritage of the issue at hand. For that reason, I too have been afraid of voicing my experience. Plainly put, I am more afraid of letting down my sorority sisters with a half-assed telling than I could ever be of a bunch of folks who disagree with me on the basis of religio-social principles that have no bearing on my life.

That said, the stories are, indeed, beginning to wend their way out of the closet--and with increasing momentum. The other day, a friend sent me a link to this HuffPo article about Ms. Magazine's upcoming "We Had Abortions" issue. 5000 women signed a petition, which will appear in the issue, acknowledging that this event is part of their histories too. Signing that petition is no small act, considering that people continue to die for us to have this right. That article also mentions another Steinem brainchild, The Choices We Made, which anthologizes a series of celebrity-written essays on the topic. The narratives are piling up, and as they do, I can't help but feel like the politics I've been preaching for all of my aware life are being validated. That's the power of these stories. We need them because the dominant narrative (Abortion is traumatic! It's emotionally depleting! It's crushing and sad and conflicted!) that exists in the social imagination doesn't have much in common with the reality of the experience.

I wasn't traumatized. It was the pregnancy that depleted me; ending mine restored me. When it's right (and I do not assume that it's given that abortion is always--or even often--right), it's neither sad nor burdensome. It's not even terribly upsetting. I didn't feel anything of those things.

***

I did feel something, though. Three things, to be exact.

I expected I'd be scared. I was scared. Not petrified, really, but on tenderhooks, for sure. I'm wary of conventional medicine in general and having my guts plumbed isn't high on my list of favored party games. I was scared in the way that I'd be scared before any medical procedure--not, specifically, because I was to have my uterus sucked clean. The specifics of the abortion, in fact, were really only incidental to my anxiety.

I also expected to feel lonely. I can't deny that, in the exam room, I had one of the most acute moments of psychological isolation I've felt since I was a kid. That room contained one doctor, one nurse and one patient. In truth, it was me and my decision, alone on a cold table. When the nurse offered her hand, I leapt at it. So grateful was I. In that singular moment of my own exaggerated cognitive withdrawal, another human recognized that I was a human--a human in pain. And she held my hand. Almost immediately, I felt like I was imposing (because I usually feel that way when people are kind to me) and I thanked her. And then I realized it was her job and felt silly...but still grateful. Such are these moments, I suppose.

But I never expected I'd feel moved. It's one thing to feel imperturbably assured of the correctness of your choices. It's quite another to feel uplifted deep down in your consciousness by the very ordeal to which your choice has led you. In the hours and days that have followed my abortion, and even in the recovery room immediately thereafter, I've been thinking quite a lot about all the activists who've spent their productive lives fighting for me to have all the readily available options that I do. The abortion providers who continue to be murdered as a direct result of their conviction that we should trust women have come to new prominence in my thinking. And I've been remembering how I was the only girl at my 8th grade lunch table preaching the pro-choice ethic that forcing a woman to bear a child is a disproportionate punishment for a few seconds of orgasmic accident. In the end, I didn't wish this mess upon myself. However, I have found the experience of living out the bottom line of my own long-held political stance--in a tangible way, within my own body--to be a profound one. Asserting this sort of empirical authority over my physical person hits deep. No other way to say it.

***
And after that, what is there left to say?

This, I suppose: in publishing this post, I'm aware that I may be forfeiting (tiny readership or otherwise) whatever privacy to which I might once have clung in favor of asserting that my abortion is not something I want to hide. That, too, is my choice.

I think it's a good choice. But I know it's a choice that may well might me bite me in the ass. That's okay. A little ass-biting is still better than forced parenthood.

Your soul resides in your stomach.

Last Sunday morning, I took my mom to the Dupont Circle farmer's market. Amid the splendiferous array greens like purslane and French sorrel and the tables full of locally-made saffron-scented sheepsmilk cheese, we found a table selling real, honest-to-god black raspberries. You see red raspberries all over the place. Every once in a while, even Trader Joe's carries golden raspberries. And I'm not talking about blackberries. Black raspberries are different -- something special.

Personally, I haven't seen any of those little purple guys since I was a very small kid. When I lived on the farm out in West Tennessee, we actually had all three varieties of raspberries in our garden. In truth, I had no idea that raspberries were a luxury until I noted that you pay $5 for a quarter-pint in most grocery stores. As a kid, I ate them by the fistful--such opulent gluttony!

So, when I put the first one in my mouth, the sense memory of the summers when I was 4, 5, 6... was so terribly intense that it pricked tears into my eyes. I'm not exaggerating. I was standing right there on 20th, willing tears away. Tears over a raspberry.

This is the kind of experience that, I'm pretty sure, is unique to the farmer's market milieu. Unique in an urban environment, anyway. My raspberry was organic, grown in neighboring state Pennsylvania and flawlessly mold-free. Probably, it had been picked yesterday--at the very earliest.

And then, feeling freshly virtuous from our locavore's shopping expedition, I took my mom to see the new documentary, Food, Inc. Now, since I began this blog, one of the recurring themes (besides my own narcissism and my desire to have a lot of sex, I mean) is my conviction that the American food supply has long since gone to hell, tipped out of its handbasket and danced around in its own fecal matter once it got there. How many eco-food films have I admonished you, fair readers, to go see? Milk in the Land, Flow, Fast-Food Nation ... I can't even remember all the others. It's not new news that my anxiety about what we all eat and how we choose our foods is ever ratcheting itself higher. And as a result, I feel as though it's not even possible for me to scream loud enough. Especially considering my readership is, you know, modest.

On a day-to-day basis, I am frustrated that I'm not making any headway with even my closest friends and family members. My own dad insists buying organic half-and-half is a waste of money. I had an argument just the other day with a friend who prioritizes saving money in the short term over the exorbitant costs to the planet, to underprivileged peoples, to conventionally raised animals and to our bodies that buying from mainstream corporate venues makes inevitable. And even the friends who I know buy the argument that sustainability, organics and locally grown foods are not just the best way to eat, but the only way to eat, will still swing over to the grungy local Safeway more often than they'll admit aloud to me.

I blame bottlenecks in the information flow. The information that is to be found in a movie like Food, Inc. is simply not available to those who don't pointedly seek it out. Most people haven't seen footage of a feedlot (and probably don't want to). Most people don't have the foggiest clue as to what the inside of a corn refinery looks like. Most people, in fact, hear of a salmonella outbreak caused by contaminated spinach and simply stop eating spinach. They don't understand that spinach should never be contaminated with an animal-borne bacteria, or that the only way spinach could possibly encounter salmonella would be for it to be grown in the path of run-off from a corporate chicken house.

Now, I could go into plenty of detail as to the ecological and dietary carnage that you'll see in this film. Feedlots look like Auschwitz for cows, people. Commericial chicken houses? Chickens, grown too fast and too fat to support their own body weights on their little chicken legs, teem in dusty clouds of dried fecal matter, squawking like banshees. The brevity of their miserable lives is almost a blessing. And corn. I can't even begin to address the giant clusterfuck that compose the corn-producing entities in this country. So, I'm not going to.

I will, however, take this moment to offer a plea: see this film. See all the other films I liked above. Read The Omnovore's Dilemma. Read Fast-Food Nation. Read anything Alice Waters ever wrote. Read Mark Bittman. Read Deborah Madison. And then learn how to eat anew. How to value quality, untainted food over cheap food. How to consider the longterm ramifications of every dollar you spend affect every other single solitary human with whom you currently share the planet -- and all those who'll come after you.

And consider this: in 1950, the average American spent 10% of his or her family's income on food. Today, the average American spends only 3% on food. And bitches constantly about the price of an anti-biotic-free, non-rBGH, organic jug of milk. If these statistics don't show us that our priorities are out of whack, I don't know what might.

So, in lieu of a full-on review (in hopes that my guilt trip and paucity of my characteristic spoilers will lead you to the theater), I offer three takeaways:

• Our mainstream food supply chain was designed by Heironymous Bosch. Everything we eat may as well be coated in petroleum, then shit, then money. That's not a metaphor. At least not the oil and shit parts.
• Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are the prophets of our age. If you're not listening to them, not reading them, not taking their wisdom to the bosom, you are tolling the death knell for middle class, comfortable American life as we know it. Clean the fucking cobwebs from your eyes. They know the light and are desperate to bring it to you.
• Activistic consumerism is the most viable, valuable, powerful tool for social change we've got. Engage your soul when you spend. If your money is going in the opposite direction of your personal code of ethics, you're either underinformed or a hypocrite. More than likely, you're the former. Fix that. Educate yourself about the companies from which you buy. Do they mistreat their work force? Do they raise sick animals that are bound to make your family sick as well? Are they contaminating the water tables with their putrid run-off? Will their practices make this planet uninhabitable in under two generations? If the answer to any of these question is yes, show them you don't believe in their practices by not buying their products. The demand for organic foodstuffs is growing by 20% every year. That's consumer, not corporate, power, folks. And 20% remarkably high number--one of which we should be proud. It's us--not the corporations--who control where we spend our money. We are in control of the food industry because if they aren't making products we'll buy, they'll start making ones we will. We're witnessing a sea change, my friends. On which side will you be when the tide comes in?

Because I mean to put my own efforts and money where my mouth is, I've renewed my commitment to the locavore life. Because it is my strongest of convictions that every person's individual sense of responsibility with regard to ethical consumerism is the very thing that need reach the proverbial critical mass in order to turn this heavy boat around, I mean to make a tangible adjustment in my own life. I'm putting it in print because I hope telling you, a handful of strangers I may never meet and a slightly bigger handful of friends and family members, of my resolution will help hold me accountable. And also... well, maybe because I secretly hope that I can motivate at least a handful of you into changing your buying habits alongside me. Ultimately, though, I can't, in good conscience, spend another dollar on food without considering the effect that dollar will have on the global community.

So here you go:

Every weekend, I'm gonna haul myself out of bed at a very early o'clock and buy as much of my weekly rations as I can at one farmer's market or another. DC is full of farmer's markets, with representatives mostly from farms all over Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The variety of products is certainly ample enough to support the most omnivorous diet. For any local readers, check out the DC Harvest blog (their tweets are plenty informative as well) for some great tips on what's good where. Everyone else? Your research is only a google away.

This morning, I went back to the Dupont Circle market. It was a glorious morning. Healthy farm boys handed out apricot samples. Pretty women pushed strollers or flicked ponytails. Everyone had on a maxi-dress. And I found grass-fed lamb summer sausage and beer-washed sheepsmilk cheese. I bought some pitch-perfect cucumber mint vodka gelato. The tomatoes--dear goddess, I would have sold my firstborn for those tomatoes. And apricots that boy handed me were flavorful like you just can't get, not even at Whole Foods. It's expensive to do this, no doubt. But I don't think I've ever felt so happy forking it over.

So, because all this puts me in a good mood, how about a recipe for a salad I just made up?

A Mid-Summer's Night's Salad

For the salad:
2 small fennel bulbs, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped (I found purple ones--gorgeous--but any color will do.)
3 small new carrots, chopped into rounds
1 luscious summer tomato, chopped
5 or 6 radishes, sliced
2 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon leaves

For the dressing:
1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 clove garlic, minced
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp cumin
cayenne pepper to taste

Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. This would probably serve up to 3 people, but I just ate the whole thing for dinner. It was a lot of vegetables, but it felt so virtuous (after all the sheep cheese I ate earlier) that I couldn't stop.

Bon appetite!

Freak vs. Perv: a battle for public opinion

Take, for instance, the really beautiful packaging and marketing of Agatha Bois' Carnival Wax perfume oil line. It's inspired by all manner of carnie oddities. Sexy, no? Intriguing, even.

Bearded ladies show their tits. Circus midgets dress for burlesque. The tattooed lady is usually just plain naked, her skin creating its own inky, illusory costume. Somehow the spectacle of carnival freaks is rarely not suffused with a certain kinky sexuality. Do you want to fuck the hot feminine body topped with the face full of very masculine hair? Does it make you a freak, rotted through with gender confusion, if you do? What about the girl who can't drop her uniform at the end of the day? She may be beautiful-- she may not--but you can hardly see her through her markings. To what deep-down dirty desire in you does her self-obfuscation speak? These are the implicit semiotics of the sexy circus freak.

OK, so, it stands to reason that, collectively, we'd have a hard time parsing sexual deviance from other forms of weirdness. After all, they make such a luscious, macabre and transgressive picture together. However, I mean to argue here that a conflation between perversion and a more generalized nonconformity begets a multi-stranded brand of bigotry that ultimately profits no one--except the people who seek to make themselves feel better about their own weirdness by scaling it next to the weirdness of those onto to whom the designation of Official Freaks is conferred.

This post, of course, is generated by the yesterday's death of Michael Jackson. Firstly, I should say that the day any celebrity dies is also the day thousands of other anonymous folks around the globe die. Practically speaking, I don't suppose fame lends more momentousness to one death than another. It really doesn't. People die. Big deal.

And even this death in particular. Sure, I was a little kid in the 80s. I have very specific memories associated with many, many songs in Jackson's oeuvre. Some of those songs elicit nostalgic affection and others, well, forgive me, get on my nerves. His celebrity in and of itself doesn't seem a thing worth mourning, for sure. But, even if you don't actually enjoy his poppy output in an aesthetic way, it's very difficult to deny that the spark of creative genius dwelt within him. I don't much like Elvis or Sinatra. Will I acknowledge they each contributed some rather remarkable accomplishments to American pop culture? Well, sure. Why wouldn't I?

But I'm no music critic. What the hell do I know about music? I couldn't care less how people take sides on the earth-shatteringly important, tremendously divisive issue of Michael Jackson's talent. What does bug me, however, is the way folks think a) they have a right to opinions about celebrities purely by virtue of their being celebrities (and, subsequently, how much they relish those opinions when they're negative) and b) their opinions are informed enough to be meaningful in the first place. My disclaimer here, of course, is that, no, I don't think everyone's entitled to an opinion. I think everyone's entitled to an informed opinion. If you don't feel like bothering to get informed, well, then, shut the fuckityfuckfuck up. (Also, whether immunity from strangers having opinions about your personality is something you sacrifice when opting into the fame-and-fortune game is a whole separate issue that would constitute a digression, so forgive me for not addressing it here.)

But sadly, I've been reading a lot of uninformed opinions about the man that Jackson was. Twitter's been full up to the brim with so many pedophilia jokes I'm half-tempted to run out and grope some boys my own damn self. (Shut up. You know nothing.) The reality is, folks, that we know very little about Jackson himself. We know there were charges brought against him. We know the father of the kid openly admitted he was after a hefty pay-out. We know our legal system offered Jackson full, unconditional exoneration on, not one, but two separate occasions.

However, we also know that calling Jackson eccentric is an understatement. This morning, I posed the following question on Twitter: why insist upon conflating sexual deviance with more generalized oddness despite multiple unqualified legal exonerations? In response, I got some layperson shrink-speak that I found sort of annoyingly presumptuous... something about symptoms of sociopathia or some such. To me there's a pretty grand disconnect between what we know of those who achieve stratospheric celebrity and what we could deduce from seemingly similar behaviors in our intimates. So, in general, playing armchair psychoanalyst to these people strikes me as a keenly fruitless endeavor. Celebrities aren't our friends. We have absolutely no context for their nuttiness. We are never given anything in reasonable semblance to the full story. Therefore any opinions we form around them are inherently uninformed, and therefore not worth much.

That said, please allow me a moment to engage in the aforementioned fruitless endeavor for just a minute. Before I do so, however, let me also say that I posit the following as pure speculation. I do not know what I'm talking about. I'm peering in at the life of Michael Jackson through a wee pinhole, same as you.

OK, now: it seems reasonably plausible to me that everything we've seen of Michael Jackson that appears aberrant to us "normal folks" is what might happen to a person whose psyche crystallized when he was a very young child. The high-pitched voice, the gravitation towards people who are of a similar mental age, the complete disregard for the value of money, the toys, the tree-climbing, the trouble anticipating the consequences of things like hanging a baby over a banister, the naming of his real estate complex after a fantasy-land from Peter Pan, etc., etc. -- I'm sure we can all think up a handful more examples. Everything about him suggests "child" to me. Not "pervert."

Perhaps you'll call me naive for saying that, but bear with me. Just hold the Jackson-as-developmentally-retarded model in your head as a possibility for just a minute. Now, we can conjecture further that the pressures put upon him during his actual childhood did some irreparable damage--we all know the story--and he then spent the rest of his life trying to escape the very grown-up burdens that were thrust upon him long before any normal human would have developed the proper mental tools for coping with them. Add to those burdens a particularly heightened sensitivity as is common among people blessed with inordinately impressive creative abilities? Roll him in chopped pecans and you've got a recipe for a real nutbar.

For the sake of argument, let's just say my own armchair-shrinkery up there is all completely dead-on correct. (What? It could happen.) Michael Jackson was a child who had unusual taste and had been given limitless access and money. Up to this point, all his behavior could be easily assessed as outcroppings of those parameters. So, what I'm wondering is when, exactly, in the course of our understanding of any authentic nonconformist, do we fetishize, eroticize and translate hyperbolic strangeness into full-on perversion? In this case in particular, I want you all to think back: weren't you saddened when you first heard about the accusations? I mean, Jackson was the quintessential eccentric genius when I was a kid. Even then, I remember feeling plain ol' disappointed that such a black mark would forever after be associated with him. And then relieved when it turned out that first kid's dad had put him up to it. Given, I'm not one who reaps some schadenfreude-laced reward from watching celebrities flail. Lindsey Lohan breaks my freakin' heart. But tell me honestly: did it not ever occur to you that there might be some merit to the idea that that kid's dad was an opportunistic fuck, who saw a freak and tried to exploit him on the basis that it wouldn't be too hard to convince the public that a freak is a freak in every way?

Let's stop for a minute and think about Michael Jackson's outward sexual persona(e). I've read an awful lot of people calling him "effeminate" and "creepy" and even "dirty." Personally, I find all those descriptors to be a realy quite divergent from my own perceptions (and, again, they are merely my perceptions). To me, Jackson's stage persona is actually aggressively masculine. He curls up his lips and bares his teeth like some kinda sepulchral coyote. That thing he'd do where he'd puff out his chest, throw back his arms and scream? It's the same kind of gesture you'll see, like, Wolverine make (OK, maybe Hugh Jackman's not the best example of raw, manly beastiness, but you probably get my point anyway). The pelvic thrusting, the crotch-grabbing? Those are not feminine dance moves. They, in fact, scream, "I have a penis, watch me grab it, thus asserting my status as a fully intact male." OK, you don't have to believe me about that either, but really. Just try. Watch some of these video clips of his performances running in infinite loop on every TV station ever right now. Report back to me what kinda swishy, girly preening he does. Honestly. I don't see it. But I'll eagerly await being corrected.

But what about his off-stage sexual projection, you ask? How can I deny his limp-wristed, twee little ways? Easy. I don't see any sexual projection when he's offstage. Again, folks, I'm just telling you what I see. You may well see something different and you may be right. But so might I, and here's why: he is a man-child. Well, not quite. Children often have very real, very perceptible sexualities. He is the man-child of his own platonic-ideal-of-a-man-child fantasy, i.e., a wholly asexual being, not particularly consumed with the "corrupting" impetus of sexual desire.

In the last several years, he's voided himself of virtually all secondary sexual characteristics--of either gender. On her blog today, Susie Bright said, "MJ was not only denied childhood, but his gender feeling, his sexuality— everything real about him had to be refuted." That's not something someone who wants a whole lot of sex does. His ongoing self-sculpture process, which, by the way, I do tend to conceptualize as part of his creative output, was not designed to be sexually attractive to anyone-- men, women, adults, kids-- anyone! His visage called up, not kinky sexuality, but asceticism. If you listen to interviews, he used the word "innocent" like a wistful refrain. His usage was not in the sense of "not guilty." He uses it to mean, alternately, "chaste" or "youthfully unencumbered." Try as I might, I can't see someone who goes to such lengths to de-sexualize himself and who so idealized the idea of "untainted youth" as one also consumed by lust for mid-pubescent boys.

Again, I, like all the rest of you, am only looking at Jackson through a weensy chink in the wall. But I don't see a pervert. I see an emotionally stunted whackadoo. And once again, with zero standing evidence supporting the accusation of child molestation, a whackadoo does not a pedophile make. If someone wants to find me said evidence-- and no, unmitigated conjecture doesn't count--I'll be happy to change my tune. But no one was able to provide it in either of two legal proceedings, so, for the time being, that's good enough for me.

What's more, I like whackadoos. Right. I know you're shocked. In my experience, an authentic nonconformist is rarely such by choice. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, being weird is not about getting attention. Sometimes garnering attention is a result of being weird and sometimes the weirdo in question really likes the attention, but the weirdness itself, from what I can tell, is nearly always self-propelled and self-perpetuating. When it's real, anyway. And as great as witnessing weirdness can be for all the rest of us (I mean, it is great. You are hardly ever bored in the presence of a strange human, even if the strangeness does, indeed, make you uncomfortable), it's a very tough way to live for the weirdo him- or herself. What I mean when I say that noncomformity isn't a choice is that, well, why would a person choose to feel alienated from every other human on the planet, at all times, if he or she didn't have to? Inevitably, a life spent swimming upstream leaves scars. And most of us are too chicken or too myopic to do more than glance askance at a freak's scars, for any number of reasons. The bizarre, the outre, the unexplainable-- they're all just plain scary for a lot of us. We do worry about contagions and all, don't we?

Ultimately, I think that what makes us so uncomfortable about Jackson is not that he may or may not have been capable of molesting children. It's that he screwed around with his own gender identity to such a degree that we don't have a framework for understanding it. That's unnerving for the herd. But then, what's so great about being part of the herd?

To that end, why, you ask, do I like freaks so much? Do I identify with them? Do I have some kinda romantic aspiration to be one? Am I secretly one myself, but cover well with all my good personal hygiene and whatnot? I can't say I want to populate my life with nothing but freaks--that would undoubtedly be a greater emotional load than I could bear--but I certainly adore the ones who grace my existence now (and there are a few--gleaming gems, all). As for whether I identify with them? Well, not exactly. Personally, I think I'm deeply, tiresomely normal. Why wouldn't the things I do seem perfectly normal to...me? In fact, I often grimace in the face of my own mundanity. However, oddly enough, most other folks with whom I interact, both cursorily and intimately, seem to think I'm kind of a whackadoo my own damn self. So, I supposed I've internalized a little of that feedback. I negotiate both spheres, perhaps. Neither very well, maybe.

I do think, however, that I'm pretty good at empathizing with oddness, whether or not I'm terribly odd myself. Or rather, I appreciate the pain of the abrasions caused by rubbing our culture the wrong way--and think flouting social rules that feel unnatural is a goddamn honorable way to earn those abrasions. And for that reason, I find I'm far sadder reading commentary that speculates about and makes light of Jackson's supposed sexual proclivities than I was reading of his death itself. Again, I don't care if you liked his music or didn't. I don't care if you thought he was a laughable fop or if you respected him as an iconic superstar of your childhood. I just hate to see a bona fide nonconformist get raked over the coals in the court of public opinion, primarily because of his inability to square himself with the rank and file, when the court of law found him blameless. That hurts my heart, people.

Beyond my somewhat kneejerk championing of our culture's rarities and throwbacks, however, I'm also fairly deeply concerned about the wider ramifications of, as I mentioned on Twitter this morning, the conflation of a more generalized weirdness with sexual deviance. How quick are we to assume that a person who deviates from the norm socially also deviates from the norm sexually? When you stop at your local independent coffee roaster (I'm watching you! No effin' Starbucks, ya here?) tomorrow morning, try playing the pin-the-thigh-restraint-on-the-kinkster game. Who is the weirdest person in the room? The the uber-friendly barrister who thinks forcing social interaction with sleepy customers equates with good customer service? The ponytailed girl with a Coach bag sitting at the sunny table? The girl with smeared kohl under her eyes and holes in her fishnets? My point is that social maladroitness, unusual wardrobe choices and sexual aberrance can certainly appear in the same person, but there isn't much more than a tenuous correlation amongst the three. In other words, not every tattooed lady is your good-time gal. But sometimes the redhead in the tasteful retro pin-up pumps is.

It's a crying shame to think that we have no way to conceptualize weirdness without fetishizing it and associating it with perversion. And make no mistake: sexualizing nonconformity does, indeed, fetishize it. The social consequences of not maintaining a cognitive distinction between eccentric behavior and sexual deviance can only ever be drastic and unfortunate. If you assume all nutbars are pervs, we may as well go ahead and force them to sign sex-offender registries right now. Yeah, let's restrict all their freedoms. Let's apply the most suppressive, most limiting normative dictums to the authentic noncomformists among us just in case they get a wild hair to stage a performative hog-fucking ritual in front of The Limited at your nearest shopping mall. Because you never know with those people. (C'mon. Try to tell me Michael Jackson isn't your Other. Just try.) Or, better yet: let's enact boatloads of legislation that restrict how we touch each others' genitals, how we get aroused thinking about the sort of genitals we'd like to touch, what sorts of tools we can use to touch each others' genitals... all on the grounds that both weirdness and kink are both inherently terrible, awful, very bad, no good things.

Except that neither of them are.

Here's where I land: There is a lovely edenic locale, somewhere between empathy for a tough life and appreciation for a talent of geologic proportions, that bids us resort to neither crucifixion nor idolatry. How 'bout we all go there? I bet they have carnies. And they'll hold you like the River Jordan.

My blog and I have agreed to an open relationship.

It's no secret. I've been working long hours lately. I've been schlepping home late, smelling of bluebirds. It's true. I've fallen rhapsodically, deliriously in love with Twitter. Sadly, however, my fervent and frequent 140-character fixes of expression have led me to neglect longer writerly endeavors-- namely, blog posts. Now, I'm sure, once this first flush of limerence fades into the comfortable secondary time-suck it was always meant to be, I'll be able to turn my attention back to my first love, my lifelong partner, my bunny-lovin' spewings. But in the meantime, oh, how I do adore my eight-or-more-times-a-day Twitterly trystings. I do. I so do.

For years, I've resisted Facebook. Frankly, I have minimal interest in hooking up with all those once-plaid-skirted girls with whom I went to high school. Distant family members would doubtlessly become shifty and uncomfortable were they to read of my fantasies of molesting strange men on the metro or of my taste for sweaty naked girl art. One day, I'm sure I'll cave and join up and then I'll have old Republican acquaintances giving me hell in comments, just like all my other Facebooking blogger friends do. But for now, I've got just about all the online presence I can handle.

Twitter, however, entered my life rather serendipitously one night when my friend Jen, in her infinite, intuitive wisdom, sent me an invitation. Quickly, I realized Twitter was the exact blogging companion of my dreams. Daily, the internet washes little scabs and flotsam onto my shores. So many beautiful and disturbing images. So many weird and worrisome articles. So fucking much constantly refreshed novelty. Though it's true what Sappho said, -- "If you are squeamish, do not prod the beach rubble."-- I do so love the bounty of the internet. So, prod it, I do. Thank gods for my strong stomach. But not every sexy photo, not every weird blurb, certainly not every silly YouTube video merits a full-on bloggerly essay. And yet, I'm driven to share my happenstance findings.

Enter Twitter.

I started tweeting because I thought it would make a healthy sidebar to my blog. I could link to my heart's content and not feel obligated to offer more than 115 characters worth of analysis. But quickly, it became more. So very much more. Tweeting is like launching headfirst into the best, most far-ranging conversation you ever had, only you never get too tired or too talked out to keep going. And even if you do, everything everyone else says while you sleep is waiting for you in the morning. Since joining, I've had hilarious, enlightening, and even touching exchanges with some folks with internet presences far more impressive than my own, whose writing I've long admired, who render me downright star-struck. Last week, Susan Orlean (yes, that Susan Orlean) re-tweeted something I said and, voila!, I suddenly had 15 new followers. If I can get Joseph Gordon-Levitt to follow me, I believe I will have achieved the Twitter dream. But moreover, the exchanges are immediate and pithy. And, like, authentic. It is an online community of my own design. How could I not succumb to such voluptuous overtures?

Beyond my own adventures in tweeting with the stars, however, I really do feel like I'm watching the dawn of a new medium. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the #Amazonfail phenomenon, in which twitterers, en masse, shouted down a weird, dubious, new policy of censorship Amazon attempted to unleash. And over the last couple of days, if you want up-to-the-minute news and videos coming out of Tehran, where the bandwidth is so low news networks can scarcely communicate within themselves, you turn to Twitter. Twitter is where the photos and videos of the violence-- the ones CNN will never show you-- have found an audience. Sexy illustrator Molly Crabapple, called it the "engine of a revolution" earlier tonight. There is real power here. It's galvanic. You can see it.

Now, I know, plenty of high school kids tweet to tell you about how drunk they got last night. Plenty of celebrities use it for not much more than specious self-promotion. But to say that's all it's good for? To say that's the only use any of us have found for it? Well, to say such a thing is to sorely underestimate the potential of the tweeting community. And the medium itself. Twitter is the living global democracy of exchange, parceled out in links and the essentialists' terse texts. In the end, it can't be denied: it takes a specific discipline and linguistic nimbleness to say what you mean in such tight confines. See for yourself. The best tweeters really know how to work it.

There are a lot of us. If you aren't following, you just might be missing, well, everything. All I'm saying is the bluebird is not a force with whom one trifles. Got it?

Oh, and if you want to follow me, check out the linky fun over there on the right.

slutburger

I meant to write a post about Padma Lakshmi's now-infamous "slutburger" ad for Hardee's/Carl's Jr. a while back, but somehow the chance to do so when it was still relevant slipped by me. So, I'm gonna do it now instead, when I haven't seen it on the air in weeks and no one cares. Awesome.


Still, here she is:



Anyone besides me want to help her lick barbecue sauce off her ankle now?

I consider my post-ad-watching desire to put my tongue in Padma's burger-filled mouth to be well within the realm of normality. However, it seems plenty of folks would rather call her a sell-out and accuse her of all manner of sexual indiscretion, rather than kiss her. And this, I both do not understand and find rather grotesque.

A few weeks ago, my mom sent me this little blurb about it from my hometown paper. It struck me as one of the most out-of-touch things I've encountered in a bit. First of all, it's author claims the slutburger ad is "the sort of thing you'd expect from a Paris Hilton" but not a "classy beauty" like Padma. Because only girls with porn vids running rampant through the corridors of the internet would dare flash cleavage while eating a burger, right? Certainly no one with goods enough to nab a preeminent novelist the likes of Rushdie would do that, right? Well, why the hell not?!

The blurb from The Tennessean's food blog wants to act like it's all indignant that this woman so often associated with schmancy food would dare lower herself to hawk fast food, but this surface argument that it's author is attempting to make holds absolutely no water. For Exhibit A to that effect, I bring you this behind-the-scenes video in which Padma explains her own personal nostalgia for shitty fast food burgers. And frankly, the idea that Padma Lakshmi, gosling-like goddess of the haute cuisine scene, has a big heart-on for a burger just makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I love labor-intensive, esoteric food as much as the next girl, but really? If you offered me a guacamole cheddar burger from Bobbi's Dairy Dip, a craphole ice-cream stand over on Charlotte in Nashville, I'd be on it so fast you'd think it was made of fuck-me shoes. Even the most committed gourmands among us still get all woody over the occasional junk food indulgence. It's not like that stuff doesn't taste good, even when we've gone to the trouble of refining our palates.

No, the problem with Padma's ad is not that she's eating a fast food burger rather than braised pork cheek on a bed of salsify and Jerusalem artichokes. It's that, as the food blogger says, she has a classy image and yet, in lending her fair countenance to Hardee's/Carls Jr., she's joined the ranks of other sluterific pop-culture-friendly ho-bags like poor Paris. Now, I've defended Paris before. I actually love that carwash fetish-girl burger ad. I think her vampy camera mugging almost makes up for her role as an unenthusiastic cunnilingus receiver in the aforementioned titty flick. She's sexy, she's clearly having fun with her well-heeled harlot image and she owns that ad. So the idea that it would be an insult to Padma to compare her to Paris is, well, insulting to Padma.

In reality, the import behind the rhetoric in that little newspaper post is the underlying assumption is that "classiness" and overt sexuality are incompatible. And to that, I ask, why can't Padma lick sauce from her fingertips and let us marvel at her stellar pecan-colored tits in that push-up bra and not still be a perfectly respectable food snob and ex-wife of a literary supernova? To use the term "tramp" (and mean it derogatorily) to describe Padma just reeks of the kind of advocacy for the compartmentalization of female sexuality that does no sexually comfortable woman any good at all.

Now, this is not to say that other Carl's Jr./Hardee's ads don't play on some problematic traditionally gendered behavioral stereotypes in which dudes become dim-witted, narcissistic cavemen and women become nagging harpies (although hot ones). But no one of either gender fares very well in those ads, and undoubtedly, only dumbasses who send email forwards like this one would think they're funny anyway. See Sarah Haskins' video commentary to that effect below. Haskins makes a worthy point regarding advertisers thinking they're clever in targeting the basest of aspects of culturally prescribed "manliness" and even goes on to demonstrate how Paris has talents for multitasking that exceed the norm:



However, Padma's ad isn't crass or puerile at all. It is, in fact, dreamy and nostalgic. And I continue to feel that her conflating of her sexual charisma with her foodie street cred seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Doing so is, most certainly, in keeping with her career trajectory thus far. I mean, it's not like she got hired on as the host of Top Chef because of her food knowledge. She got hired on because she knows food and because she's startlingly beautiful. (Some among us might argue that Tom Colicchio's smirking blue eyes don't hurt the show much either.) Even long before Top Chef, she put out this book. And if that cover doesn't draw a visual analogy between her body and all the luscious, juicy fruits of the world, I don't know what does.

It's hardly new news that food is sexy. There's also nothing revelatory about the idea that Padma Lakshmi is incredibly genetically blessed. So, saying she can't have her burger and make you want to fuck her too doesn't do much besides advocate the annoying cultural directive that women should lock their libidos in the bedroom and pretend they aren't all fuck-happy in their waking lives. I can't speak for Padma, but I do know that kind of compartmentalization is exhausting for me. And it also smacks of the kind of retrogressive restrictions on the behavior of women that, well, get us nowhere in terms of claiming our sexual personae as our own.

...Which is all just to say, if anyone wants to make me a guacamole cheddar burger with a good, black, crusty layer of carcinogenic char, I'll do my best Padma for you, all sexy-like.

Dispatches from the Dating Trenches: the online dating profile I'd write if I had any balls at all (and wanted to attract, well, actually, no one)

Let's start here:

• Do not show interest in me if you've clicked the radio button next to the word "conservative." I will look at your political alliance before I look at your pictures. And I will dismiss you, no matter how cute you are, if you vote Republican. It's not that I think all such folks were necessarily birthed from the devil's own anus, per sé. It's just that the combativeness-as-erotic-charge model of relationship has long since lost its sparkle for me. And you shouldn't doubt that I will fight with you if your values don't align with my essential secular humanist ones.
• I'm an introverted, irascible bitch. I am not well-moderated. No one has ever called me "laid-back." I am obsessive and the hamster in my head runs his wheel expressly to keep me awake most nights. I'm intense and neurotic. I laugh easily, but I tend to think my own jokes are more hilarious than yours. I am actually fairly kind and if I like you enough, I can even be warm. But I'm what some might call "complicated." If you're looking for an easy, pleasant, cheerful girl, she ain't me.
  
• I do not like groups composed of more than 4 people. I do not like parties. If you promote your capacity as a flibbertigibbet, I'll probably go hide under my bed and not come out until I've stood you up for our first date.
  
• If your profile says,

  "I'm a laid-back guy looking for a girl who looks just as great in a cocktail dress and heels as she does in jeans and a baseball cap,"
  

  I'll consider it reason sufficient to blow you off immediately. Firstly, "cocktail dress?" You know you mean "slutwear"-- which I will wear on occasion, but I'd rather you'd just call a spade a spade. And you'll never, ever catch me in a baseball cap. Hat-hair with normal hair is one thing. Hat-hair with the crazy Jew mess I've got going on is something else entirely. But more importantly, dear catamarans from heaven! Do you have any idea how many dudes write the above sentence, verbatim, in online profiles? I can spot you a quarter. You are hereby instructed to buy an original thought with it.
• Other grounds for immediate dismissal include proclamations of affection for any of the following:
• Titanic
• The Da Vinci Code, book or movie
• Jesus Christ, your lord and savior
• Taco Bell
• taking me to sporting events
• Eat, Pray, Love (No joke. I've seen it. From a dude.)
• Hummers* (It's way worse if you actually include a photo of you and your natural-resource-wasting -small-cock-compensation-mobile. And worse still if it's just a picture of the car, with you nowhere in sight.)
• not reading
  
• Sideways
• sexual "fidelity" in your women
• If you can't put your prepositions in the right places in your sentences, I will laugh at you. I will not, however, go out with you.
  
• If you are actually looking for a mail-order bride, you're at the wrong site. I might be a little mouthy for you.
  

If, however, you comprehend the fact that no adult makes it past age 25 without acquiring a few emotional duffel bags; if you have the good sense not to grow hair into assorted configurations like mullets, comb-overs or pencil-thin mustaches (unless you're John Waters, but I don't know what you'd be doing, looking for the likes of me, if you are John Waters); if you won't crowd me; if you're patient with my oddness because you're odd too; if I think you're funny based on your command of written language; if you see through this pathetically translucent spate of attitude to the lonely girl beneath all the bravado -- well, then? Then, I might berate myself a little less for asking my computer to send me my own personal dreamboat(s).

*I mean the vulgar vehicular behemoths, obviously, not blowjobs. Professing a love of blowjobs is OK with me.

Was I loud?

I have a handful of nearly completed posts that've been filling the silences in my head, if not the ones on this blog. I just haven't gotten around to cleaning them up yet. I will, but not tonight. Tonight, I want to talk about this:

The single most astounding aspect of watching men with other working women is their degree of gullibility. My friend was not faking in an over-the-top, porn-style screaming way. But she was amping up to orgasms very quickly and then not doing much shaking or trembling to indicate coming. She’d simply say “wow, did you feel me come?” or let her “you’re going to make me come”s do the work for her. She also did a funny thing that I’ve only seen from blondes: swear to indicate her pleasure’s intensity. Are there women who do this naturally, genuinely? I don’t mean that she was dirty talking, simply that she was saying “oh fuck” or “fuck yeah” to encourage him in an affected, simpering voice. Not whimpering, which would be hot.

(via Nightmare Brunette's Tumblr)

Well, are there women who do this naturally, genuinely? I must confess, yes. But more on this in a moment.

The above Nightmare Brunette post reminded me of a night, few months ago. I was lying naked next to someone in a bed in an antiseptically designed (though pleasantly decorated) condo in an unpleasantly distant suburb of my city. We heard the mewlings of some poor woman directly upstairs from us and I began to smirk. She was all "Oh, Baby! Fuck me! Fuck me harder. Yeah. Fuck me. Fuck me harder!" in a painfully redundant loop that never crescendoed, never slinked down into murmurs, never released into gasping inarticulation. Her exclamations just flat-lined at a put-on frenzy that in no way mimicked the rising and falling action of orgasmic sex. I mentioned this to the person lying beside me in bed. He said he'd heard her "histrionics" (his word) a few times before, but it had never occurred to him that she might be putting on a big ol' porny show for the benefit of her gentleman caller. Astounding, indeed. It is baffling to me that some men really can't tell.

The truth is I'm largely unconscious of my own mid-coital sounds. Often, afterwards, I'll notice my throat feeling all scratchy and strained, like I've been working the heavy-duty ujayyi breath for a couple of hours. "Was I loud?" I'll squeak out over roughened vocal cords. Mostly, they tell me I vocalize at an average decibel level. Loud enough to seem appreciative, but not shriekingly expressive enough to draw a visit from the police. But the ones who're self-conscious about it? Who have roommates or thin walls? They whisper, "Shhh, shh..." to me and sometimes try to cover my mouth. That, of course, eggs me on. After all, the exhibitionist in me loves the layer of erotic charge a roommate's ear can cause to accrete atop our furious trysting. However, for the most part, mid-fuck, I'm not thinking about the sounds I make and can scarcely hear myself. As it should be, I think.

Still, yeah, I have heard myself say, "Oh, fuck!" now and again. In a manner nothing short of authentic, no less. I think I say it much in the same way I would if I stubbed my toe or if I crumpled into a chair at the end of a day. "Oh, fuck." Whispered, like punctuation to sensation. Off-handed and directed back to myself-- a decapitated sliver of inner monologue escaped into the outer conversation. Neither simpered nor whimpered, but breathed. Well, maybe occasionally it's whimpered. When whimpering is that for which it is called.