Thought That Came Unbidden

When my friend Danielle asked me if I had a weblog my first question was “why?” When she replied “Well, I want to read it and link to you” it honestly kinda freaked me out.

Then my friend Gillo dropped me a comment about installing categories. Gillo…I shouldn’t be surprised. He shines bright lights into the most interesting, undiscovered corners on the internet. The enviable thing is, he gets paid to do it.

Now that I’ve tracked-back to Dykewrite for Bitch About Your Job Week there is a possibility that other folks may wander by. So why does this freak me out so much? I mean, after all, if it’s on the internet, it’s findable.

This thing started out as an experiment for me. Techno-challenge to see if I could play with Movable Type (which I confess, I did not install myself), extroversion (is that even a word?) challenge for someone who is incontrovertably an introvert. It was a bit of a half-assed challenge, though, because I did nothing to promote myself.

Now, I find that I’ve got friends who are actually reading the damn thing and I have to wonder, is it going to affect how I write? Is it going to affect what I write?

I don’t know. All I know is, I’m now addicted to the damn thing. I like writing here. Maybe someone will like reading it eventually. Maybe I’ll even make it easier to find…some day.

And once again, for the second time this year, the veil between the worlds grows thin, electricity fills the air, and not everything is as it seems. It must be Halloween.

I’m sure that law enforcement officials are thrilled beyond belief that the holiday is a Friday this year; so many more opportunities for overwrought frat boys and girls to act out in public than there would be if Halloween were any other day but Saturday. The Washington Post reports that the DC area is looking forward to its first Halloween in two years. This same article also stated:

“Halloween is the one time of the year when grown-ups get to play,” Casidine said. “There’s no meal to be prepared. There’s no religious connotations. It’s really an adult holiday.”

Of course adults like Halloween. We’re trained to as children, for one thing. For another thing, it allows us to put on a mask we might not normally wear and to play with an identity that at another time might be to scary for us to indulge. In some cases, it allows us to take off a mask we have to wear to get through everyday life. It saddens and frightens me, though, that we’ve lost the connection to exactly why we wear masks at all on Halloween.

Halloween, or Samhain, is one of the two times of the year that the barriers between the world of the living and the world of the dead thin. The point of Halloween masks was to disguise your real face from spirits that might be seeking vengeance. The whole concept has me going back to pondering identity, how we define ourselves, but, more importantly, what it is we show to others.

The face I show at work isn’t the same one I show at home. The one I show to my mother isn’t the same one I show to my best friend. And I certainly don’t show the same face to people I interact online that I do to people I know in “Real Life.” While they are all parts or aspects of me, none of them is the whole.

In some ways, what appears electronically, here and in other places, is the best of me; the distillation of who I would like to be able to be in person. Some of that may be because I live my life in my head and possess more than a modicum of intellectual vanity. I’m smart, I know I’m smart, and I’m not shy about it. Since looks and all those other things on which people make value judgments (ethnicity, stature, weight, gender, age, and a myriad other things) don’t matter on the page, I get to be who I want to be, not who I am. In many ways, who I am online is more genuine than who I am in person. And that genuine quality is what is missing from most adults.

We take on roles as we grow older, put on different masks. In some ways, I think this is why people have children; to recapture that simple joy of being able to say exactly what you think. But are we more flexible as children?

Think about it for a minute…being an adult is, in many respects, about tact. It’s about being able to answer the “does this make me look fat?” question from your best friend in a way that, even though you both know she needs to lose 15 pounds (and you both know that you both know), doesn’t make her feel like you’re saying “Of course it makes you look fat, you big cow! You need to lose 15 pounds!” A child will have no qualms about telling another her true opinion about something, flat out, bald faced. While this may result in hurt feelings, or even tears, two hours later the same two children will be playing happily together as if those tears were never shed.

And can we ever really perceive the whole truth about ourselves? Or is the truth of someone a combination of self-perception, presentation, society’s expectations, and the perception of others?

No answers, not yet. Yet another memo from The Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department.

October 11th is National Coming Out day. As HRC points out: Coming out is a journey, not a destination.

So…not to put too fine a point on it but…I dig chicks. A lot..

I’ve never been a girl except in the biological sense. I’m not a slight little thing with no muscle mass. I’ve got big, broad shoulders and the thighs of my farmer ancestors (from both Italy and Ireland). I think women’s shoes are ghastly, painful things, and women’s fashions are largely designed by gay men hell bent on expressing their vast depths of misogyny in the most unique way they can find. Don’t believe me? Then explain to me, please, why men’s fashions have trended to baggy and comfortable for the past thirty years while at the same time women’s fashions have trended toward the skin tight, flesh baring extremes we see today?

Needless to say, all of these things, and more I’m declining to mention here, combined with the fact that I never did learn just how to actually be a girl have made any of my various forays into the world of the feminine painful and slightly embarrassing.

I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo, and because I’m an incredibly deliberate person I’ve spent a good chunk of time in the past few weeks researching the symbols and images to which I’m attracted before I commit to a permanent inking. It was no surprise, then that most of the symbols that attract me have masculine implications.
[Read more…] about The yin and the yang of it all

I’ve never understood the American obsession with scents. We slather ourselves with perfume and then get on public transportation neatly subjecting everyone around us to what we think smells good. I’m not even going to touch the American obsession with bathing. I mean, let’s be real for a minute. Unless you work construction or some other job where you actually get dirty during the day you probably don’t need to bathe every day. Yet, that’s the American standard complete with scented shampoo, soap, “body wash,” lotion, and the like. It was the American obsession with air fresheners that brought today’s thought to mind.

Normally, the restroom at a restaurant either smells pretty neutral or smells like some sort of industrial air freshener (lemon, floral, and orange being the most popular scents in that order). The restaurant I ate lunch at today had a bathroom that smelled like waffles. And as I’m standing there washing my hands and being bombarded by the rich, sugary smell that triggers so many wonderful associations (brunches with friends, lazy Sundays where all I do is eat and take four hours to read the entire paper) and all I could think was “why don’t they make this smell in a spray?”

See, most air fresheners work by bombarding your nasal passages with chemicals and actually overwhelming them. Repeated exposure to most air fresheners will actually reduce the acuity of your sense of smell. The list of chemicals on the side of a container of air freshener is absolutely rife with what should be, by all rights, considered hazardous toxins. Despite this, people buy Glade Plug-Ins and the like by the truckload. OK, if my nasal passages are going to be subject to other people’s toxic crap, let’s at least make it smell like something enjoyable.

Imagine this…a house that always smells like baking bread. Or what about cinnamon rolls? Waffles? For the omnivorous among us, a grilling hamburger? Lemon cake? Coffee (really good coffee, not that burned shit that Starbucks sells for $4 a cup)? Clean laundry? Blueberries? Warm leather? A grilled cheese sandwich? Popcorn? Mom’s spaghetti sauce? All scents that have powerful associations for many people.

We’re clearly not going to give up chemicals so lets use ’em to the best advantage.