I have enough friends

Every time someone bails on me I feel I should be thanking them for doing me a favor, because their presence does me more harm than good and I wouldn't have whatever it takes to push them away. And then I get angry at them for pushing me away, but really I must be angry with myself, right? For not respecting myself enough to flick them from my skin like so many mosquitoes.

Moody!

Good...bad. Good...bad. Baaaaaaaaaad...better.
Today I bailed on a massage job opportunity, mainly because it seemed like a bigger hassle than it was really worth to me. I know I run away from everything that smacks of commitment, anything that impairs my freedom to run away or make plans at the last moment...but I'm torn over whether this is an egregious example of that character flaw.

Stay Frosty

I'm fighting the urge to say this to my brother every time I say goodbye to him. He won't find it anywhere near as funny as I do.

He's frosty but he's cute too - look at him with his nephew:

When it's over

I look forward to change - once it happens I'm not usually thrilled with the result, but there's always the hope that it will be better, and sometimes it is, at least for a little while. But I wonder how I'll feel about death, when it looks like it's coming soon. It's not really change for the person who's dying - it's the end of change. It usually represents a big change for those left behind, though. Both of my paternal grandparents are nearing the end now; my grandmother has been unwell for years now and has made it clear that while she loves all of us, she's ready. But she's stuck in a hospital room attached to oxygen. Her husband of 71 years fell two weeks ago and broke his hip - since then he's been not in his right mind and is now refusing to eat. They are both in their 90s and have lived long and interesting lives, much longer than most. I was sad earlier thinking that when one of them goes the other one will likely not even be aware of it - but then realized it's probably better that way for them. It's only bad for those of us watching.

I don't know what to do about my moods - I'm angry, so angry I'm clenched and shaking, with chest pains, and then once that's over I'm crushed, just completely sad. I have no ambition and no direction, and neither of those things even seems like something I would want. This is why change is attractive to me: something new is always good when you don't have any real drive - when you have nothing to lose you don't really mind leaving things behind and starting fresh, because maybe this is where happiness finally lies ('lie' being the operative word there - you can't find happiness in a new place). But how long can I go on like this - and how long before the end of change starts to seem more attractive than yet more change itself? The drugs don't work.

Sadly, Girls Rule

I've been reading Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities and today was struck by the realization that I've never felt like a woman. I'm 33, financially independent and sexually active and I feel like a girl. From a physical standpoint I know I don't present as a woman: my body isn't particularly womanly, my face is youthful (although my hair is greying), and with today's culture only clothing options being frumpy, manly or girly, most of us choose the third.

Because that's exactly the problem: this culture. Wolf talks about other cultures in which a girl is systematically and often ritualistically taught how to be a woman, and only when she has proven herself to have completed her education is she considered a woman. She is taught not only how to fuck, to please both herself and her partner, not only how to cook or dress, or take care of children, but how to see the world through the filter of grown womanhood; to no longer see herself as a girl.

Not only has American culture failed at this practice since its incipience, but it's only gotten worse in the last quarter century. Now there are no women. Everyone is a girl, no one wants to get old, no one wants to be boring or matronly or unsexy. No one has received any education that would convince them that womanhood does not have to signify any of these things, and can offer wisdom, security and self-possession besides.

I want to be a woman. I think it's time. I want to have confidence in myself as a grown female, and I think it's something we should all be working toward. Whether or not we ever manage to create an ideal, equal society, women will still have a specific role, and even those of us who don't plan to procreate play at least a part of that role. Things will go a lot smoother if we can all stop feeling (and consequently acting, dressing, talking) like insecure 14 year olds in the face of the quarterback's attention or derision. We are not conditioned to see our sexuality as our own, but instead as belonging to the beholders. Lacking a firm sense of adult identity, we look for it in bed and later in marriage. How can society be expected to function properly if half of its membership (the smarter, more reasonable half) suffers from such insecurity and lack of identity? We fight for our causes and do great work at our jobs and still go to bed at night empty if we haven't got anyone there with us. We run companies and raise children and still worry about whether we're attractive or thin or young enough, whether it will be enough to get or keep a man. Of course we want to enjoy comforting and cozy personal lives, but we should be able to enter them as women who know what they want and what they won't put up with, not as girls who are pretty sure they don't want what they're getting but are afraid to do anything about it for fear of being left alone.

We should have been told long ago that society needs us as much as it needs men, and not only as conception vessels. That our individual identities are too important, both to us and the rest of the world, to submerge in an effort to be somehow more lovable, or just acceptable. As much as anything in human existence can be said to matter, we matter. But we have such a hard time thinking we do, and therefore we are just not confident enough to call or consider ourselves women.

Backformation

Linguists use the term backformation to indicate the creation of one part of speech from another when the first should have followed on the second. A personally egregious example of this is the new use of the verb 'to impact.' There has always been verbal meaning to 'impact' - stuffed into a small space with no exit, e.g. molars, tonsils, colons. But the noun 'impact' means 'effect,' and more recently has come to mean 'greater than normal effect.' With an eye toward making an impact, then, marketers and other business jargon users have created another meaning for the verb impact, 'to affect,' and more to the pragmatic point, 'to affect in a big way.'

Backformation is common, and its enemies tend toward pedantic purism; therefore I pause in my resistance to this instance of the phenomenon. I think what I hate most about it is the laziness with which the jargoneers have latched onto it. Much like with 'amazing,' 'make sense,' and 'throw ___ under the bus,' the problem is not with these words and phrases but with the frequency with which they are used, to the exclusion to all other options. I understand comfort with one's vernacular but vocabularic complacency drives me insane.

Bottle it

So in spite of the sedatives I've recently been prescribed (favorite pharmacologist line: "you don't have a history of violence, do you?"), I've felt nervy, jittery, on the edge between collapse and flight all day. My stomach's been dodgy and my hands have occasionally shaken. Were it not such a dangerous high (if taken too often), I would wish that delicious anticipation could be bottled.

Today's anticipation lasted well into the evening, and only slowly stopped bubbling over, as if moved to low heat, once I realized the connection I'd looked forward to was not on the cards for tonight.

The buzz is wearing off at last, helped along no doubt by convenient pharmaceuticals. I can't take it personally; I know him, he hasn't avoided me - he's fallen asleep. I can just hope to see him tomorrow night instead...because no matter what, I have felt it and will do what is required to feel it more, again, more again.

But it seems such a shame to let this effervescence go flat, or evaporate. As though something, sometimes the one thing, delightfully sweet in me has been allowed to fizz and fall out.