Dear Magdalene,

Last night I discovered my mortality, locked in on its deathly gaze, and 3 - 2 - 1 plucked its eyes out.

There are moments, much too many in my silly little life, where I come to a cliff, plunging below, and despite crippling circumstance manage to tap into some hidden, deep abyss of salvation inside me and in the middle of a nose dive I find my rip cord.

These moments come where I see who I am, in the unflattering light of truth and honesty, and discover something both invigorating and terrifying... a seemingly limitless boundary.

The night falls and I helplessly along with it into a faceless consuming flame but with slow, heavy, calculated breaths, I reach out to a stranger and she plucks me from my widening grave. While she stands guard over my hollowing body I find my light in the devil of a darkness. I greet a wall and obliterate it with nothing at my aid but my mind. And using naught but wits, and deep meditative concentration I find my burning wings and I fly into the quenching rain.

And in the quiet of the dawn I slip back onto the ground and I wonder both how did I survive the night, but more still, could it ever get dark enough before I cannot see? I have faced the fires, and I have put out every one.

Is this all you've got, oh crowded nature?

Hit me with your best shot. I'll take you down, blindfolded.

For the Bulldogs

Oh Graduation... that happy time when you celebrate your survival of brutal academic warfare, when you're not quite sure what you've accomplished but feel pretty damn certain something significant just ended. You're a little softer in the middle now, little rough around the edges, and finally have time to notice. You'd do something about it but the last few years of sleep deprivation have only just begun to settle under your eyes, on your shoulders, and in your chest and you're starting to have the tinglings of remembrance of what energy used to feel like...

But oh happy day! Right?

You're free! You're free to be that homeless, unemployed, underpaid, over-educated top 1%. It's terrifying and liberating and you wouldn't take it back for the world. You've tested your limits, you've found yourself in the face of defeat. You're a professional now and this horror of reality that you are about to embrace is a privilege, damn it! Rock that poverty!

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

A little while back I had a close encounter between a bathtub and my iPod and now I can only shuffle the tracks or I get locked out of the main menu... so when I'm out jogging with my headphones in, this song will suddenly come on and every time it does it makes me feel like a champion. If you don't know Edith Piaf, get yourself acquainted. If she can believe what she's singing I think you can too.

-- (for the less french savvy) --

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing
Neither the good that I've done nor the bad
All this is much the same to me!

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing...
It is paid, swept away, forgotten
I don't care about the past!

With my souvenirs
I lit a fire
My sorrows, my pleasures
I need them no more!

Swept away the love affairs
With their tremors
Swept away forever
I leave with nothing ...

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing
Neither the good that I've done nor the bad
All this is much the same to me!

No! Absolutely nothing...
No! I regret nothing...
Because my life, because my joys,
Today, that begins with you!

Inside/Outside

There's a part in her novel, Invisible Sign of My Own, where Aimee Bender describes the character of Mona Gray's neighbor who wears on a string around his neck numbers that correspond to his daily mood. Sometimes he's 3, usually a 5 or 7, and on really extraordinarily good days sometimes he's close to 10. It's out there, for everyone to see, to know. Open, clear.

I found out today that yet another one of my very good friends is going through something, something I wish wasn't so familiar. It reminds me of this book. It reminds me of how much easier it might be if we had our own silly numbers to wear, when all the words to explain what was going on inside have been pressed out of us under the weight of our world. Where the rest would know how you were doing outside of who, what, when, where, why.

Asking for help has such an ugly stigma, such an ugly, weak, helpless, shameful stigma. The saddest part with this is that no one can help until you're ready to ask for it, and sometimes that just never happens. Sometimes it's to stop something perceptively worse, sometimes it's to stop something that can't perceptively be worse. I cannot say what is going through my friends' minds, or what was going through the mind of the one they lost, though I have a feeling. I've tasted some of the fruits, and whatever side you stand on they remain bitter and biting.

Though what remains is a memory, it's not likely to be forgotten. As much as I wish it wasn't then and isn't now, it is a inextricable part of who I have become. The beauty of remembering though, is it's always transient and changing. Every time you recall something, you're pulling out this imaginary file, rifling through it, but before you store it again you integrate the current climate of your brain's chemistry thereby distorting the original context. So what I have left to offer them of my experiences is really just the haunting, skeletal remnants of phantom recollection. Even still, something like that stains and leaves a mark.

Inside...

... is somewhere deep, dark. Where feelings fade into a vacancy. Things become disproportionate and exaggerated to a point where there was no before. There are no things like full and warm. Friends and family grow distant. Words are forgotten because none of them fit anyway. Close your eyes for a minute and that light goes out, that little guiding, end-of-the-tunnel one, that serves as an often overlooked reminder of impermanence. It's not necessarily that everything must be over, but it's unclear where one thing ends and the rest begin. It's all tangled up together, with reason, with the promise of chance, of change, of tomorrow. It's all grey and flavorless. Then comes the speculation... of the end... but when inside, you forget about those who are not, the ones who inevitably will bear the weight of that world you wish so much to shed.

Outside...

... time stops, abruptly and charged. It knocks you off your feet. Your insides hold still, hold tight. It's like if you're still and quiet long enough, maybe it wont be real, maybe you wont fall, maybe you'll wake up. Were you sleeping, you wonder... but it's come. It's been. It's there. And it's an end of one pain and a beginning of another, and the latter is in pieces, unscripted and innumerable. And you're left to reconcile what was never in your hands to change.

And I have these very good friends, who are going through something. And I wish it will be different.

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Meet Norrie May-Welby. Born a man, reassigned as a woman, and officially gender neutral as of January of this year, thanks to the progressive Australian ruling classifying May-Welby as a "neuter."

Pronouns be warned.

After a recent intellectual discourse on the subject with a similarly curious mind, I learned that the most common form of gender reassignment is apparently for men who feel they are lesbians. I know one such case personally and though, admittedly, it was not expected, it made perfect sense. I met this person as a man. I went to a tea party with this person as a woman. And I have to say, she was far and away much better for the transformation. The altering of demeanor and morale was so strikingly positive, I could not be anything but supportive and excited for her. What a relief it must be to finally know thyself. Is that not the ultimate goal: nosce te ipsum.

Oh, but the conversation doesn't end there, how can it? Something so human, so important, so spiritually personal, begs for deliberation. What exactly happened here? I do not believe she has had or will have a gender change, anytime soon anyway. So what exactly changed? What are those things that make a man a man and a woman a woman?

Mentioning this to my baby siblings, with their young, eager minds, forged a new question. If we are beginning to redefine gender identity, how now do we categorize sexual preference? If your orientation is grounded in your biological gender, what are you then, for the sake of labeling, if you are of this new breed "neuter?"

Before I can explore what homosexuality really means, I suppose I must first understand how we distinguish ourselves as any particular gender in the first place.

Before I go on, I want to point out that I use any and all formal technical jargon and phrasing somewhat uncomfortably. There are areas of science that I fear stray a bit from humanity, but that is a private qualm. I mention it only in the event that my words and descriptions might offend unintentionally.

Consider the Cognitive Correlates of Biologic Sex and Gender Identity in Transsexualism, a study undertaken by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Studies at University of Washington, one of the leading medical schools in the US. To be elected for a sex change operation, a patient must undergo a battery of psychological evaluations in order to be determined psychologically fit for the physical change. (For those less inclined to read peer reviewed journals, may I suggest TransAmerica or Boys Don't Cry as a glorified, hollywood alternative. Lights, camera, and action aside, it's an interesting peek into this topic for those who are unfamiliar with this culture.) In this study, twenty-two clinically determined transsexuals underwent two different psychological profiles. In addition to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and what they refer to as a "measure of conceptual styles," the investigators used the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, your typical IQ test, in which the subjects aligned with their biological gender. The other measures associated the subjects with their gender identity but with no psychopathological explanation for the varying results.

All that the IQ test tells me is that there are in fact both male and female brains, but this identification is somewhat meaningless and has less to do with gender identity than merely perception of and engagement with the world. Several years ago a neighbor was on an education board and needed young kids to test drive a new IQ test. Dutifully, my mother lent her my brain, much to my dismay, for four hours one painful Saturday morning. I never got the results but I can assure you, asking an ADHD kid, last minute, to sit for four hours and answer questions about shapes and numbers and words in a classroom full of windows, toys, and pictures, is not going to give you accurate results. Granted she was not testing my gender association, who knows where my profile would have fallen.

Then there's the observation that you can classify one individual as both 'male' and 'female' depending on what test you give them, what statistics you present, etc. And here is where science fails us. We are attempting to take this deeply personal quest and slicing and dicing it under a microscope to try and define it biologically. It is interesting that wherever science falls short, philosophy and spiritual theory jump in. To know thyself is in its own phrasing personal, so what then does it matter how you package it up in societal words and labeling?

In this light if it feels right to May-Welby to be a neuter, and for my friend of a friend to be an XY lesbian, who am I to question it? I'm putting science aside on this one.

As for where I stand, well, you'll have to take me to dinner first.

putting words in my mouth

Hank: I'll make it up to you.
Rebecca : I know.
Hank: Do you?
Rebecca : Sure, you never mean to let me down, but you do.
Hank: Yeah, I guess I do.
Rebecca : You know, its all well and good to talk about happy endings. But if the person can't deliver, if he keeps screwing up, well eventually I guess you kinda just have to say "fuck you"... or words to that effect.
--
Californication 1.7

What I am, is perturbed.

A thirty something friend of a then boyfriend leaned into my early twenty something-ness over a yuppy dinner one upper middle class Monday night, and over an herbal Pinot breath she whispered to me her shallow wanna be modern, urban proverb. This is what she told me.

She said, in so many well intentioned, superficial words, that I need to take good care of myself. No, not my health, but my looks, she meant. Qualified it then, like a punch to my ovaries, with the misguided clarification that "this" is all "we" have. This being our seductive prowess, and we being womenkind.

I politely hid my growing disgust and nodded in forced sisterhood camaraderie then immediately began questioning her primordial retrograding insanity. I am no feminist. That I would like on the record in bold italics. But what is this?

What happened to esteem, what happened to intellect, to the lure of ambition, tenacity, and confidence? What happened to the 21st century, to progress? How can I still, now, find these women who believe and preach so convincingly that we have so little in our lot as the influence of our looks instead if the sensuality of our capable minds? How can these women still believe that men lend us our own strength and caliber?

In that moment, the warm spirits from the shared dinner-side bottle had shriveled up into a profoundly sobering pity. How have we failed this poor woman? How have we led her astray so far as to believe her one path to success was through pubic waxing, brow plucking, product and plaster? What happened to her to believe only her looks made her worthy?

Or is she right, are our looks our only gamble on success,

on love?

---

I first watched The Pleasure Seekers about a year ago at the insistence of my one-up sister and I have to admit -- I enjoyed the crap out of it. I enjoyed the dresses, I enjoyed the songs, but what I enjoyed most was the fucking talent. Okay, maybe not the Susie character, she was a space cadette of the worst order of woman, the gullible, idealistic, submissive "this is all we have" kind. What I didn't enjoy though was how dominated these otherwise beautiful and vivacious woman allowed themselves to be by their subsequent men.

Now, I am all for throwing caution into the wind for love, but this isn't love, this is a sickly dependence on the validation of a male counterpart. Where does love become sacrifice? When is it okay, if ever, to completely surrender yourself, your strength, your independence in the name of love?

--

That was the last time I saw this friend, once removed. Roughly two weeks after this sauced and sorry advice, I left said former boyfriend for his utter lack of respect for who and what I am. I cannot point my hindsight finger at her mistaken words of wisdom, but they did plant some much needed skepticism in that love-blind mind of mine.

--

On the drive home from my last pitiful day of work, I listened in on my favorite NPR wires in time to catch Divorced Kid, a Minnesota radio story about divorce, from the perspective of the turmoil tossed children. I thought about how my parents are still together. I thought about how lucky I suppose I am, and about how much their fighting affected me, as a youngster, and as a... much older youngster... and I wondered, as I still often do, is this what marriage is? Should you just stick together through thick and thin? Or should you just get real and never make an affair contractual? What is love anyway? How much does it have to do with marriage, really? Is it something transient or can it be so real that it lasts a lifetime? What do they have? What did I have?

--

What is marriage? It works for my parents but I still don't want what they have, and will go out on a limb here and take it you don't want what your parents have either, be they divorced, separated, or "together." Thinking back on all my failed romances it makes me wonder what it is I am even looking for.

I know what I want, but how then do I reliably lose my way every time I go in search of it?

I thought, wouldn't it be nice if the next guy I met wanted to make babies and go with me on adventures and be there for each other. And then I met a guy who wanted to make babies and.....

and the only way it could have been more wrong is if it were written by Quentin Tarantino himself.

If what I want is simply a companion, if what I want is a hiking buddy, a book club of two, a philosophy junky, a sound board, a meditation guide, a teammate... why then do I keep getting shafted by this silly love business... whatever the hell it is...

What am I doing wrong? What do I not understand?

What is this thing that makes good, smart, sensible people go completely nuts over other people... people who wouldn't know what to do with you if you came with an iPhone app?

--

Can love die?

If it dies, was it not love, then?

How can love feel so much like poison, like torture? Is it not love? Is it lust then? Is it infatuation? When does it become one and not the other? How can you know who you are, what you are, and have that be such a mystery to another? How are we misrepresenting ourselves... or how do we keep finding the uninspiring idiots? And worse, how do we keep falling for them, and succumb to worse versions of ourselves in the process?

--

And back to this troubling phrase, "this is all we have." If this is the kind of woman he is around, it is no wonder I felt so very little like a human being with my former partner, and so much more like a doll. To have worked so hard to shape my intellect but feel only appreciated for my ass is demoralizing at best.

--

Tell me, my friends, what is love, be it in romance, at work, between friend (and foe)? And what the hell happened to it? Where did we go wrong?

No Religion, Too.

My two dear darling beautiful friends G and G went with me to the planetarium today to watch Center of the Universe. Before the show I was remarking how I couldn't contemplate outer space because it was so magnificent and incredible and I hadn't yet figured out how to factor it into my complex, piecemeal belief system. The presentation was so beautiful and gently probing however, that I became all at once awestruck by the beauty of knowing so little and being a part of such an enormous ... thing (even if relatively insignificant). I left there corrected, humbled, and yet, unshaken. I am still without a theism, deeply in love with nature and science, still believe art is what makes life bearable, etc. The universe was still a universe before I existed, my mom told me so, and will likely still be a universe long after my useful body parts have been donated and my remaining bits have been burnt and the ashes have been mixed in with a newly planted tree (my death wishes). And that relative insignificance doesn't scare me anymore. Whether or not my existence matters in the grand scheme of things, as far as I can tell, doing good work and promoting peace, love, health, and justice still seem like something worthy of my short little insignificant time here on this one little planet. This is the world I have to live in right now and I want it to be a happy, healthy, peaceful, decent, courteous, respectful, thoughtful, loving, funny, delicious etc place. Amen.

That said... my experience today got me to thinking... as pretty much everything does.

This is what I was thinking about:

There are two things people fear most, two things that send them either running to or running from religion, and they are: death and the cosmos. Death leads to questions about the end, cosmos, the beginning, and both to questions about meaning and purpose.

After experiencing more premature deaths than I care to describe here, I have constructed a very personal relationship with death. For one I was born during the spirit of the Dia de los Muertos celebration and though that is neither here nor there and simply serves as a fun insignificant fact, I've always felt strangely connected to the earth with a peculiar acceptance of mortality. I suppose part of that was a small misdiagnosis by my now former personal physician followed by yet another one of those too close for comfort premature deaths that convinced me for a long time that I was going to die young. Suddenly now was so precious, then wasn't important, and next wasn't so assured. I began living in the moment more and more fully. This obsession with present investment in turn manifested as an anxiety disorder in which I couldn't fall asleep at night if I didn't feel I had been productive that day. I thoroughly detest wasted time and find being around unambitious, weak people as a major source of irrational panic. But over the course of a series of adventures (and misadventures) my mind and whatever internal parts of me constitute my spiritual nature have found a growing peace. Sleep still evades me from time to time and my restlessness is persistent but most of my worry has subsided with the soothing discovery of Buddhism.

Before I took my Buddhism and Zen courses in college I was a mischievous Catholic. I say Catholic because that was the groundwork of my first religious stirrings in a horrifically hypocritical Catholic school where my Catholic faith was just as quickly being constructed as deconstructed. Being brought up in a family of fiercely independently minded intellectuals and academics I naturally had a strong inclination to question everything. By the time I discovered Wiccan paganism in 6th grade I had already put the notion of a god on the shelf and had flat out refused to go to mass by the time I was 13. It wasn't that I was anti-theism or anti-worship, it just no longer felt comfortable to wear that Catholic title, to partake in the Catholic customs, though the principles of thought remained (the golden rule, love thy neighbor, forgiveness, that good stuff). The one thing Catholicism, Wicca, and Buddhim, and ultimately the career I have chosen for myself have in common, is the notion to do no harm, to oneself or another. This for me transcended into a long journey of self reflection and at times self persecution, always on some existential, transcendental quest to improve myself. Admittedly I went a little overboard in my young, timid late teens and hit a slight self-loathing, destructive patch but the thing that cured me wasn't a personal lord and savior but community service and art, the former to remind me that it wasn't all about me, and the latter to help me healthfully digest my past, comprehend my present, and dream sweetly about my future.

In my meditations on what I have done right and what I have done wrong, on the bad things that have happened that I allowed, and on the good things that haven't yet that I have no control over, I have come up with a pretty good, albeit personal and nameless eclectic religion that goes something like this:

I believe...
~everything is connected, you, me, this desk plant, the water I'm drinking, everything
~you should treat everyone with respect regardless of who, what, how, when, and why, especially if you expect it in return
~everyone should have food, shelter, healthcare, choice, education, love
~whether or not there is a god isn't going to change how I live my life or why I live it the way I do. I will respect the possibility but I will not base my decisions, actions, intentions, or motivations on that theory.
~what you have and know right now is all that is certain, it's precious and fleeting and should never be taken for granted
~if __ doesn't make you happy, make you a better person, inspire or support you, get rid of __, life's too short otherwise.
~the planet is a living thing that is not ours to own but ours to love, nurture, respect, and restore
~nature is far more powerful and complex than we could possibly imagine or begin to explore
~everyone has a right to what happens to their own body - this means regardless of how I feel about abortion it should always, always be legal, safe, and accessible
~sexual liberation is life affirming and abstinence only education is irresponsible. Kids are going to have sex, face it and teach them how to do it safely, responsibly, and respectfully.
~you have to be comfortable with yourself before you can have a really fulfilling, satisfying intimate experience (with or without sex)
~you only get one body so if you're going to put it in harms way, at least know what you're signing up for and be ready for the consequences should they arise. Everyone has their vice, just know what you're gambling and ask yourself if it's worth it. For me, if it's not something I'd want to tell my little siblings who look up to me about, then maybe I shouldn't do it.
~"an eye for an eye" makes no sense and only perpetuates pain (has something to do with my notion of everything being connected)
~the Wiccan Rede, "an ye harm none, do as ye will" includes harm to yourself, and that you can only have as much self respect as you allow others to show you and as much as you show other people
~marriage is personal and has nothing to do with gender, race, or creed. I'm hardcore equal rights. I've been fortunate to have really strong women in my life but I still don't follow feminism for this reason. I'm a woman, ok, so hear me roar... with equal volume and vivacity as male counterparts... as well as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders.
~this is the only life I have or will ever know, so I'm not putting all my eggs in the heaven basket...
~if you don't plan for the future you wont have much of one
~an education is the greatest gift, tool, and weapon
~the most important and significant thing I have ever learned is how to read
~there is tremendous power in the strength of the human spirit and will
~happiness is not a goal but a perspective and a way of life, you cannot achieve it passively
~if you dont like it, change it
~children are the future, invest in them
~you're stronger than you think
~you have to love yourself before you can give love or let love happen (with any success or health, anyway)
~asking for help is a sign of strength not weakness and if you can help, you should
~confidence is key to pretty much everything
~if you're not going to do it right, well, or with integrity, don't do it at all
~people are inherently good and learn evil
~if you don't deal with it now it will distort and haunt the later
~nature has a way of balancing things out but it's not something you can count on for personal gain, validation, etc. karma is an idea, not a guarantee. good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. that's just life. it is what it is, how you deal with it is what matters.
~focus on the good and the positive and you'll live a happy, full, rich life
~perfection is an illusion and an unattractive one

... what have I missed...?