Interlude: Ali G

For the purpose of covering up the horror that was yesterday, I post this gem of a video by boyfriend Sacha Baron Cohen. I mean Ali G. In it, he poses the important question: Why did Jesus go around with all them reindeers?



If you don't know Ali G and you watch this video, your whole life will change. If don't know Ali G and you don't watch this video, you are stupid. If you do know Ali G , you might not know this video but either way you should click it.

If it weren't Dark and Stormy Week I would say I love you and stuff but I can't.

(But I do like you an awful lot).

Have a good weekend.

Girl Power, Dark and Stormy Style

I was over at Pool's place last night and the topic of the day was misogyny.

It reminded me of a few lines of conversation I had recently with another person who said (I am paraphrasing, here) something to the effect of "it's ok for women to be... like women." And then I remembered another chat I was having with some other person about feminism and how much good it did "us." And yesterday, my friend Mitt emailed me, all casual like, and asked what I thought of feminism.

Since most of my readers are women, let me address you first. Hi, ladies! This is my longest post on record if you read it, you will not like me anymore. I am not a good feminist. (Oh and I threw in some drawings along the way just to liven things up a bit).

Here is what I wrote back to Mitt.


Mitt,

Women are not valued in our culture. They were not valued 50 years ago and they are not valued now. Before feminism, women were told they could a) get married b) become a nurse c) become a teacher d) become a librarian or e) be a secretary. They spent their teenage years preparing not for college, but preparing for marriage, which meant competing for mates. This competition was waged mostly in terms of the attractiveness of their bodies, and the giddy sweetness of their dispositions. They measured their success not in terms of education, but in terms of their ability to attract a successful man who could take care of them. Nursing school was for ugly girls, teaching was for boring girls, and the school library was for girls who were - horror of horrors! - smart and serious. Secretarial work, as everyone knows, was for sluts.

The idea that a woman could do anything else was considered really too silly and ridiculous - certainly too silly and ridiculous for a pretty girl who could get a husband. Girls stayed virgins until they married, not because they felt no desire, but because they were taught to pretend they had no desire, so their virtue could be proclaimed as both a medical fact and emotional and social commodity. Virgins were valued because the very best men married them. Non-virgins became secretaries, as everyone could see.

Women fell in love, and when their boyfriends looked at them and said I love you, what they meant was "I will marry you and take care of your for the rest of our lives. We will always be together." Their wedding days were the happiest days of their lives.

Once married, women cooked and cleaned and decorated. They spent their days feathering the nest - on a budget, mind you, so as not to be wasteful of a husband's hard earned money. The good wife knew that she ate on the bounty of her husband's charity. She wore pressed dresses and heels all day so that she would be appealing to him even when he was not at home. When he arrived, he was greeted with a martini and the evening newspaper, because he had worked so hard all day. While her hero was reading the newspaper and smoking his pipe, she would finish whipping up the hollandaise sauce for the vegetables, which you understand, she has been working on all day, without modern electrical kitchen aids. When she had cleaned the kitchen after dinner, when he had finished his newspaper, they would retire for the evening and have sex, regardless of whether she actually felt any interest.  She did not consider whether she was interested in sex or not important, because everyone knows that it's a wife's duty to please her husband in bed.  Women who don't are sorry when they find their husbands have strayed with their secretaries.

Sooner than later, the wife became pregnant. A new life! Joy! Life was a pony ride through a daisy field. A never-ending romp through a meadow of lavender. Sheer bliss.

Childbirth is unbelievably undignified and painful, but her husband, thank heavens, doesn't have to see her blood greased legs or hear her screaming. He is fiddling with a cigar in the waiting room, and for that she is grateful.

The child is laid in her arms, and suddenly she knows, all the way down to her bones, that she cannot so much as brush her teeth or clip a coupon without first considering the ultimate effect her action will have on her child. She also knows that it is also dreadfully important that the home she has created be just as orderly as it ever because her husband deserves a sanctuary from his terrifically difficult work, work he does so that she can eat have more than one pair of shoes. Which reminds her that if she seriously expects her husband not to stray, she'd better "get her figure back" very quickly indeed.

Back at home, she discovers something surprising: her baby needs her, but it does not love her. If it loved her, it would not scream non-stop for four hours at a stretch, regardless of whether it is hungry or tired or changed or burped. If it loved her, it would not yank on her hair and punch her in the face and chew her nipples bloody while she tried to feed it. If it loved her, it would sleep more than 45 minutes at a time. She abandons all hope of keeping the house orderly, and the faint prayer that she might not die soon replaces the idea that she might get her figure back. She learns what any woman who has ever had a baby, or witnessed the transformation of a friend during the six weeks post birth knows: there is no such thing as post-partum depression. There is, however, powerful, homicide inducing post-partum regret. If she is depressed, it is because she sincerely would put the baby right back inside her body if it meant she could sleep for even two hours together. She finds herself, against her will, feeling a little resentful that her beloved does not seem to notice that if he did just ONE night feeding, she could sleep for THREE hours. It would never occur to him to try to do a feeding. After all, she stays home all day. She can sleep whenever she can.




She resents, just a little bit, that he gets to go to an office every day and cannot hear the baby screaming. She resents, but only a very tiny bit, the fact that he looks so refreshed and happy when he leaves her all alone with her vomit-matted hair and blood-crusted nipples and goes to work. Looking at herself in the mirror, she does not wonder why he hardly ever wants to have sex with her anymore. And so she is not surprised when she discovers that he does not love her anymore. She knows this because his shirts have a peculiar floral smell, and he has taken to showering the moment he comes from work. Of course, he does pay the mortgage and keep the lights on. And that's something. To make herself feel just a little less lonely, she has another baby.

This is if all goes well.

Here's a view (dramatized and probably unjustly dark) view of life for women after "feminism."

Girls now are taught from an early age that they can have it all, that they, too, can leave the house every day and go to a fulfilling, intellectually and spiritually meaningful workplace of their choosing. If our girl wants to be a machinist, it's no problem. If she wants to be a physicist, she should go for it. If she wants to wear a pantsuit and run for president, she can absolutely try.

Rather than preparing for marriage, she prepares for college. At the same time, she diets and pinches and primps. She curls her eyelashes and her hair. She paints her nails and shaves her legs. She waxes her eyebrows and she gets her teeth whitened. If she is a real achiever, she gets a nose job or breast implants. None of this prepares her for college, of course. She does these things, which, by the way, interest her far more than her schoolwork, so she can get boyfriends, boys she will "date" not because they have even the most remote and tenuous connection to her future, but because "hanging out" with them and exploring their sexuality together will make her a more seasoned and complex human being.

With these boys, she must mask her desire. Desire is slutty, after all - unless she can convince the boy that she is breaking her very chaste principles only because she is overwhelmed by her love for him - and by his extraordinary make out skills. At the same time, her friends make fun of her because she is still a virgin, a condition that proves that she is really too silly and ridiculous. Her boyfriend, like all modern boys, expects sex because everyone else is getting it and he feels that in 2007, it is his personal birthright to have sex with every girl he pays the merest scrap of attention to. For a girl not to have sex is old fashioned, silly, ridiculous, not the mention the very opposite of cool.

She relinquishes her virginity to the first adolescent boy who makes their hearts beat faster because he tells her that if she won't someone else will, and she does not want to lose him. And anyways, she is pretty sure she loves the guy, and love makes it ok. Love conquers all. The first time the adolescent who makes her heart beat faster says he'll call and doesn't, she will have the work of becoming emotionally seasoned and complex well underway. But in the back of her mind, she knows that when whoever said "love conquers all" didn't mean that love was supposed to conquer her, to make her a prisoner to a fucking telephone. She will cry for over it for days and be ashamed. But she won't know quite why.

If she is lucky, she will make it through high school without getting pregnant or HPV. And she will have explored her sexuality - the result of which will be that she has learned how to fake orgasm so convincingly that not even God could tell she was bored to death.

If she is unlucky, she will learn that love might have conquered her good sense, but has not conquered biology. She gets pregnant, gets an abortion, gets HPV -- and from a totally different guy, a guy with a Camaro and a mean streak a mile wide, chlamydia.

But we'll just assume that she is lucky, because as we all know, the world is a kind and friendly place.

She emerges from high school a modern and emancipated woman. But it will take college to teach her these words.

In college, she joins a sorority and learns, using a banana as a proxy, that it is indeed possible to put a man's penis most of the way down her throat. It's about relaxing and accepting. It's about not defending. The same principal applies to funneling beer - which she has also gotten very, very good at. She dates boys who also like to funnel beer, and she is proud of herself because she mostly always demands that they use a condom when they have drunken pre-dawn sex. She is responsible like that. Though she sort of likes the sex, she often finds herself thinking of the adolescent boy and wondering where he is now, what he is doing. She is afraid, for some reason, to find out.

She takes classes in metallurgy, but they don't suit her. She takes English classes, but she finds all the poems and plays about love seem like they are about a sort of love she has never even heard of, the sort of love that makes people stare at the moon and weep and want to hold each other forever.  It all sounds really cheesy to her.

She takes classes in psychology, but she finds that all they do is make her think about herself. She tries environmental studies, but she just doesn't care about the color paint they use in hospitals.

Then she takes classes in sociology, and learns that she is right to think only of herself. She learns that men are the enemy, that men have been exploiting her and her sainted female ancestors since the crust of the earth cooled. That it's all the fault of the man, that men are the source of all problems in the whole universe, ever. She feels, for the first time, angry. But she does not quite know who to be angry with. Her parents? The adolescent boy? Herself?

She takes anthropology wonders whether ancient peoples who saved the skulls of their ancestors for worship had the same kinds of issues she has. She wonders if she had lived back then, if she would have been married. She is a good feminist, however, and she knows that she is not supposed to care about this.

She spends her nights smoking cigarettes and weed in a black dress and Birkenstocks- with the other feminists. In the circle they talk about subverting the dominant paradigm, about social justice, about how it's really dishonest to fake orgasm because a man has a right to know that he satisfied her. That she "owes" her man a real, honest to God orgasm. Since faking orgasm is the only thing she feels really very good at, this terrifies her.

It feels like giving up her freedom.

The summer after graduation, she will go to Ohio for her cousin's wedding, and she will cry the whole time. At the reception she will have far too much to drink. She will tell one of the waiters, who reminds her of the adolescent boy, that she loves him. He will fuck her in the lady's room. Shortly thereafter, she will be spotted, by her father, leaving the lady's room while tucking her underwear into her purse. He will look as if he has been murdered, and he will say, between gasps that she is pretty sure are really sobs, that he didn't raise her to behave that way.

After college, she will get a job doing secretarial work at a law firm in the BIG CITY. She knows that the title is slightly beneath her, since she went to college, but everyone goes to college these days. She also knows that if she impresses the right people, she'll move up the corporate ladder. There are lots of women who do really well, too. Some make six figures.

So she's heard.

Five years later, she will have discerned that the women who are no longer secretaries are all women who have fucked the management. Half were fired for fucking the management and half were promoted. She can't figure out the basis on which the decisions were made, and she thinks it must be determined by who exactly you sleep with. She isn't sure who her meal ticket is, though. So she works her ass off and hopes someone notices. No one does.

At the mall on a Saturday night, she sees the orchestra from the local grade school performing in the mezzanine. There is a boy who looks just a bit like the adolescent boy, and he is playing the cello. She also sees a woman who is clearly his mother recording him with a camcorder. She is thinner, prettier and younger than she is. She is also carrying a far more expensive handbag. She looks happy.

She discovers that she wants to get married. And eventually she finds someone. But she will not marry because he makes her want to stare at the moon and weep and hold each other forever. Her man does not promise to take care of her or her children. He does not even make her heart beat faster.

She is thinking about the woman with the camcorder, she is thinking about not waking up alone every day for the rest of her life. She is thinking about how badly she wants someone to think she is worth marrying. She is thinking about how relieved her dad will be that he doesn't have to worry about her anymore. So she accepts his offer. And what an offer!

They will marry, and she will pay for the wedding. Because tradition says that her parents should pay. The fact that they can't afford it is inconvenient, yes. But it's her problem, not his.

They will get a house, and she will keep it clean, well decorated, and well stocked with food. She will not even consider quitting her job so that she can undertake these duties, because he won't have her freeloading off him.  These are modern times, after all, and women work. She should maintain her own keep. She will pay half the mortgage even though he makes three times as much money. She will pay for all the groceries because she does not know how to ask him to split the bill with her, even though he eats about twice as much.

She will work ten-hour days, and then she will cook, clean, and decorate on the weekends while he plays golf and goes to strip clubs with his friends. When he comes home from the clubs, she will ask him what the strippers do so that she can mimic them in the bedroom. She feels like it's really important to keep her husband satisfied, since everyone knows that a woman who doesn't satisfy her man in bed shouldn't be shocked when her husband leaves her for another woman. By the time they have been married a year, he is opening bringing pornography into their home, and soon, he is asking her to perform sex acts he would have been shy to mention to a prostitute before they were married.





She still has no idea what it feels like to reach orgasm while in physical contact with another human being.

They fight constantly. She wants a camcorder and a better handbag. He wants to come home to a hot meal and a newspaper. When she gets pregnant, she notices for the first time that her husband's shirts smell ever so slightly of perfume. He comes home later and later. In the eighth month of her pregnancy, while she is timing her contractions and praying that she does not die in childbirth, her husband comes home drunk and calls her a fat sow before her passes out in front of "Stormy Daniels Does Everything with Everyone" a video she now knows by heart.

The next morning, he leaves her for a much younger, much prettier secretary who works on another floor in his building.

When her baby comes, she will be entirely alone. When she holds her child for the first time, she knows now that no matter what she does, she will have to think of her child first. She cannot so much as brush her teeth or clip a coupon without first considering the ultimate effect her action will have on her child. And that she will also have to pay the entire mortgage, pay the light bill, and keep her job somehow (so that she has some kind of "identity")

If her baby is a girl, she will somehow have to teach her that men are not the enemy so that her daughter has a reasonable chance of ever loving anyone. If her baby is a boy, she will somehow have to teach him how to be a man, even though she is not sure she knows any worth emulating.

Still, her child is a joy, and she'd have another one if she could afford it and could do so without feeling that it was "wrong" to do so without a man in her life to father them. So she doesn¹t. And her child grows up to be a megalomaniac because he actually thinks the world is "about" him. How could he not, when he is the absolute center and entire meaning of his mother's life, when he is all she has in the whole wide world? Though he means this much to her, he will care less and less about all she has given him, as he gets older. He will develop a really jocular, bar-chums relationship with his father, who is much cooler than she is. He will, in the end, put himself first - because that' exactly what she has trained him to do.

So goes the world. Right?

At least half of the modern and emancipated women I know who are married would rather have never been married at all, since they are married to men who feel they did their wives a favor by lowering themselves to being "tied down." The feminist movement trained women to think they "have it all" because they have children, a husband and a fulltime job. Yep, they have it all. All the work a person can do without her brain liquefying and running out her ears.



Women are not valued as caregivers, and the work of care giving, because it is women's work, is considered degrading. Women feel compelled to do it, and yet they are ashamed if they enjoy it and even more ashamed if they choose it.

Women are not valued as coworkers, either. Obviously, if we were valued for our labor, we'd make a dollar on the dollar. And more important, we wouldn¹t have so many women trying in vain to crack the glass ceiling, while also feeling 100% responsible for caring for a home, a husband and children while paying half the bills. Thats just as unjust in my opinion as women not being able to pee standing up or get jobs as executives. (Note: neither of those things is possible on a significant scale yet.)

So what do I think about feminism? I think it's just great except for the part where women are hated and devalued just as much as they ever were.

Am I a feminist? Hell, yes. Because I still believe there is still reams of work to do. The thing is, I part ways with most feminists when I say that a huge part of the job is taking back the respect we used to demand as our birthright instead of abandoning it to prove a point about being emancipated. The exquisite pitch of misery and complication I see all around me every day in the faces of overworked, frenzied, lonely, abused women is not what I would call emancipation. 

I want to state, on the record and with no equivocation, that I believe in love. Even I, who am sometimes called the dark phoenix by my friends (I can convince anyone in ten minutes or less that their significant other, particularly if he is a man, is actually the main source of the problems and the worst thing that has ever happened to them), believe wholeheartedly in the power of love. I cry at movies. I love the sublime otherness of the male creature, and I sometimes even make out with Jib. Oh and I love babies. I sing songs to children. I think weddings are fun. In addition, I also think being a woman is awesome, in part for the following reasons:

Breasts
Lipstick
Cooking
Holding hands
The smell of a man's dirty shirt
Shoes
Babies
Nail polish
Skirts
Lingerie
did I mention lingerie?


Was I clear enough? I love children, needlework, doing laundry, washing windows and horror of horrors, cooking. And I am not going to pretend I don't like doing these things so that I can be a better feminist.

Perhaps this is what the feminist movement is about in the first place but the suffering inflicted on both sides of the continuum is just staggering. And no, don't get me started about how confusing the male situation is given these changes. I"ll break the internet. And I am not even a man or married to one.

Sometimes at the end of a long post about something serious by asking people to go easy on me. Not today. Shred me if you want. (But you can't make me stop loving pretty underwear and housework. You can't stop me. You can't. So don't even try).

Dark and Stormy Week - 2/17-2/23

This week is officially and belatedly declared Dark and Stormy Week, 2008 at Reader.

Why?

Because, I, Nina, writer of reader, have been feeling dark and stormy for three days straight and can foresee without obvious unreason a further three more posts (or four) of dark and stormy (read: depressive and scary) content.

Work is kicking my ass, I am broke (because of um, a paperwork mix up at a certain place I will not mention - not because I bought a helicopter) and I am filmy and agitated because I don't have time to work out and I don't like my hair and suddenly, for no reason I can discern, my fingernails are growing so fast that I have to cut them every day to avoid embarrassing typographical errors. This has to mean I have some kind of rare, painful and humiliating cancer. Doesn't it?

Yeah. I thought so too.

Also I am wearing out the seat of my pajamas by working from home and never getting dressed. People, pajamas should not wear out in the ass first. Right? Right???


Also there is still the faint odor of onions in this apartment since, uh, there was in fact an onion on the premises as of yesterday. I am therefore vaguely gagging at any and every moment. Dammit.

If I can get the, um, avalanche of work done, I'll post something bright and sunshiny later. But if not, not.

Oh and tomorrow I will do as I promised and post about my one and only diagnosed psychiatric disorder: fear of heights. (I am over it but the story of how I got over it is dark and stormy in keeping with the theme of the week - and also, according to me, amusing.

See you then.

Oh hey! Before I go, have another unrelated photograph. This time of, um... oh, some guy Mischa and I got hammered with in Aguas Calientes. Oh and there was dancing. That was fun.

10 minutes or less

Today I must write my blog post in ten minutes or less because I have a student conference at 3pm and another five before 5pm. I also have thirty papers to grade that are late getting back and I have a snotty email from someone asking for a list of something. I forget what. Friggin gainful employment. I do not like it.

So today instead of writing anything useful I'll just tell you that I threw a hissy fit this afternoon when I ordered a chicken sandwich with lettuce, no tomato - and walked away with a tuna sandwich LOADED WITH RAW ONIONS* and tomatoes, with no lettuce on the opposite kind of bread I ordered. The hissy fit involved violence and I will not describe it to you because it's embarrassingly childish. Hint: I am no longer out of cat food.

Oh and here's a picture of something that has no relevance at all, just because whatever. I took it in Peru.



See you tomorrow.



* I will DIE with a smile before I will eat bananas or raw onions. Call me a spoiled brat if you want but I GAG when I so much as SMELL these items.

Someone call PAVTAC

PAVTAC: People Against Violence Toward Annoying Cats, please help me. My cat. Oh my God.

Would you believe that at one point this afternoon, I picked up my cat-head and approached the open window intending to drop him fourteen stories to his death?

It's true.

Why?

First, he is annoying. He sings all day and he bitches about the food and only likes me between midnight and six am. He expresses this very transient affection by sleeping on my head. (I don't like that).

Second and more to the point, he stole my Xanax. I was sitting here doing my stultifying and soul-sucking job when I got it into my head that I should check the linen drawer - which is cat-head's favorite place to sleep during the daytime.

There I found cat-head, stoned out of his gourd with the baglet between his teeth. He was nibbling at the seal. He was probably about three nibbles from having a complete break through and ODing right there in the linen drawer.

He sure looked happy, though.

Thank you to everyone who prayed for the return of my drugs. Y'all are pals.

Oh and speaking of cat-challenges, go read this.

Tomorrow I will honor the beautiful, virtuous, and wicked smart Em's request and talk about my heights phobia. So embarrassing.

The Pile

At 5am this morning, I was up to my elbows in coffee grounds, junk mail, take out containers, and something resembling cookie dough but that I am pretty sure (allegedly) was cupcake batter. There was also some untoward greasiness. I might have been crying.

??

Oh, ok. I'll tell you.


At 4:30am I woke up and decided to brush my teeth. I noted that my throat was sore and my face kind of hurt. Huh. Since I was vertical, I decided I'd check email. I did. One thing led to another and it was 5am. I knew that the rate of speed then evident in my brain would not permit me to go back to sleep. I needed help with that project so I looked to the upper right quadrant of my desk for the small plastic baglet containing the two month supply of Xanax I bought two weeks ago.

Not. There.

I then remembered that I had cleaned off my desk that afternoon and had put the Xanax in the drug drawer. Cool.

But not.

Because it was Not. There.

So then I went through the drawers in my desk, thinking I might have stashed it there during my afternoon cleaning frenzy.

Not. There.

I went back into the bathroom and checked every drawer.

Guess what?

Exactly.

I started to cry just a little bit.

Then I recalled that number of times that I have thrown important things into the trash can during a frenzy of cleaning. I recalled the time I found my wallet in the freezer and the other time I found my passport in the yarn stash.

So I went down the hall the the trash compacter and pulled out the trash bag I had deposited there six hours earlier. I brought it back to my apartment, got out a new trash bag and proceeded to transfer the contents of trash bag one to trash bag two, all the while keeping an eye out for the precious baglet containing the controlled substance for which I can get no refills for sixty days and without which I am not likely to be able to sleep for at least one day a week. Oh and don't forget that there is no way in hell I can withstand a bout of father illness terror without the baglet.

So anyway I was gagging, crying, praying and cursing my way through the trash when I had another thought.

What was I wearing while I was cleaning out my desk?

Oh holy God no.

I ran to the elevator and hit down button C and entered the laundry room and tripped my way over to the washer containing the load of scudgy clothing I had washed at 11pm.*

I withdrew each item, carefully looking for any sign of the baglet.

There was no sign.

I started the dryer and returned to the trash. Cupcake batter? Absolutely. Half eaten swedish fish? Hell, yeah. Baglet?

No.

It was then 6am. I was delirious and my throat hurt and I realized that it was now time to consider The Pile.

If you have one yourself, you know the despair that produces it and the heartbreak that accompanies the thought of it.

If you don't, we are not right for each other and anyway you are bad in bed. Go away.



So I had to consider that I might have applied the baglet to The Pile. And once I thought of The Pile and the fact that it might possibly contain the life-giving baglet, I was in.

Here's a sample list of what is in the pile:

Coupon mailer for Lord & Taylor, expired 11/1/07.
Pay stub from 1997 itemizing a truly charming and demur sum paid to me by those bastards I used to work for.
A jump rope
A crumpled up metrocard receipt
A corroded penny
A dried out hot pink highlighter
My library card
My health insurance ID card
One post-it note covered with hearts and stars I drew while on the phone with Somebody
A half used book of matches
Four pieces of my mother's monogrammed stationary
An envelope containing about three hundred buttons
A sweater shaver
A USB cable
Another USB cable
My old cell phone
A dry cleaning receipt from 2004
A W2 form from 1999
A laundry card

Do you know, reader, what was most assuredly NOT in The Pile?

Yeah. Not. The. Baglet.

It is now 6:38am. I have stopped looking, but I can assure you that it is not because I don't care. I care a whole fucking lot. But I am out of places to look. And yes, I checked the entire yarn stash, the underwear drawer, the kitchen cabinet, the kitchen sink, file cabinet, bathroom trash and the handbag I have not looked twice at in four years. I am out of places to look.

And most assuredly screwed.

So you tell me. Where is the baglet? Where have I not looked?

Have a better Monday than I am having. You'd almost have to be dead not to.

Sin of the week, 2/17/08

I will be committing my sin of the week right now. Today.

My sin will be running my mouth about stuff I don't know enough about to merit voicing even the smallest opinion.

Would it be too much truth for you if I admitted how many times I have googled "ten commandments" in order to scan the list of BAD THINGS NOT TO DO in search of blog material? In fact, what the hell. I mean heck. I will list them now.



I lifted this image from Wikipedia, so don't get all excited and act like I am calling myself a theology expert. I am not. For all I know, this Wikipedia chart may be wrong, too. But for the purpose of saying what I want to say today, I am going to pretend it's true. (Any of you who would care to post a comment in support of the image's veracity or lack thereof, please do so. We could all use the info).

From where I am sitting, I can tell you that the Catholic column looks accurate. Notice that for Roman Catholics, there are three parts to commandment one: I am God, no other gods before me, no making idols. For other folks, that second bit about no other gods before me and idolatry merits its own commandment.

Now, I know very little about what the Protestant protesting is all about. I have heard of Martin Luther and his list; I know there was some argument about whether statues were appropriate and there was also some stuff about priests being able to marry. Oh and some people say that the Hail Mary is like acting like Mary is God? Oh and I think there was a king in England who wanted to get divorced and he made some objections to Catholicism too. Right? Or? See how educated I am? How embarrassing.

Notice at the other side that Catholic's have a separate commandment for not coveting other people's stuff. For other people, that gets lumped into the one about not coveting other people's wives.

I respect other people's faith traditions and I will tell you without further adjective that most of my actual real live friends are non-Catholics. In August, I will be climbing Kilimanjaro with one Buddhist, one Jew, and one Muslim. I will be the only Christian on the team. I have no problem with other folks and their beliefs.

That said, I am rather partial to the Catholic commandments. The three part version of commandment one, at least according to the people who wanted to call it two commandments, is what helped me come back to the Church after I did what many people do during college: I left the Church and went on my merry way feeling spiritual all by myself. It worked out ok in a lot of ways. I wasn't in the habit of killing, stealing, insulting my parents or coveting much anyway, so all it really allowed me to change in terms of behavior was quitting that enormous hassle that was going to church. Hooray!

To this day, I have no idea what turned my feet the other direction. I do know that some time just after I moved to New York, I was rushing to the train and I was late and freaking out and I was about 100 yards short of Grand Central when I became aware that I was passing a church. I looked at it. It was obviously Catholic. I kept going, but I said to myself, "When I go back, that will be my church."

I didn't think of it again for a while. Six months, probably. Then I started, without much reflection, to choose the route to the train that went past that church, even though there were four other routes to the station that were just as fast and maybe a little faster. And when I did, I would look at the door of the church and think "my church."

Within a few months more I was touching the door as I went past.

Then I stopped to peer through the window.

I noticed that if I looked through the west door window, I could smell incense.

But I kept walking by for a month or so longer. And then, of course, I went inside. And then I stayed long enough to get through a whole lunch-hour Mass. And then I stayed for two of them and paid attention for at least ten minutes. Within a year I was ten steps from confession. Then five. When I finally made it into the confessional, I believe all I was capable of saying was "I have not been to confession in ten years. I suck at life. I don't belong here." (But that's another story).

A bunch of folks would call what I was doing - setting up a building as something to work toward - idolatry. Was that false God worship?

I say it wasn't.

I say it was noticing that a certain place was sacred, and little by little, allowing myself to be drawn to it. I no more think that God is physically located in the door of that church than I think that God is going to do as I like and deliver unto me a notarized list of items he would like me to accomplish in my life. (I did ask for that. He didn't give it. Darn). But the idea, anyway, that a place, a space, or even an object can having meaning is most assuredly not the same thing as setting up a statue and calling it God. Catholicism allows, as far as I can tell, people to call places and things meaningful without calling them God. I rather need that. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't have my church. I could write all day and not come close to telling you how much I love this church. I have been to dozens of others in Manhattan and I can tell you that of all the ones I could have been drawn to, this was the right one.

Of the other difference between the Catholic commandments and the others, I will say only that I rather appreciate there in-writing notation of the difference between coveting people's spouses and people's property. That's not the same thing at all.

The end.

OH. And please go easy on me. I did in fact start this post by admitting I was too ignorant to be writing it in the first place.

Happy Sunday.

Love,

Nina

Trailer Fantasy

If you are certain people you already know all of this information and you can totally skip this post.

Come to think of it, everyone can skip this post. It is not very interesting, after all, to hear about how dearly I wish I lived all by myself in a rusty single-wide trailer* somewhere very far from anything bright and shiny. Except for maybe stars.

My empire, people, is shabby and slapped-up ugly. It takes all I got to run it, and I do it badly most days. You could make a very good case, if you really knew me, that I ought to be evicted from my life and that all its constituent parts should be sold off to better people. Metaphorically speaking, there is a sign on my back. It says:

DESPERATELY SEEKING NEW MANAGEMENT. (Apply within, but be warned: she bites.)

Hence trailer fantasy. The one where I walk out of here and get on a bus and just go. I arrive Somewhere, USA and buy a modest trailer home somewhere far far away and not too cold (because I don't plan to be able to afford heat). Then I apply for the most flat, ordinary and uninteresting job I can find and on my off hours, I sit very still in the cold dark tube of my dwelling and patiently wait to die. The. end.

As far as I know, there is nothing illegal in this plan. And it's beautiful. It is beautiful because it is so simple.

I love this plan so much that I have already made gestures towards executing it. I have sold most of my stock and paid off the nagging bills. I have thrown out about half my clothing (did that last week while y'all weren't looking) and I finally let go of all those notebooks I was saving from college. You know, the ones with lectures notes from The Scarlet Letter in them. As if I needed to brush up on what happens to girls who choose the wrong man and shit. (hint: that's information I already have, thank you).

The flaw in this grand, simple plan is me.

I, Nina-swears a lot - would fuck it all to hell up. You know I would. I would get into my trailer home and I would be jubilant for about two days. Then I would get it into my head that I wanted to make curtains for it or some nonsense like that and so I would go out and join the newcomer's sewing circle and before you know it I would be part of a quilting bee and FREAKING OUT that I didn't get first place in the Abstract Division. And even before that, I would be wandering around out on a prairie or whatnot, screaming, "HEY! DOES ANYONE ELSE LIVE HERE! I LIKE ROCK CLIMBING! CAN ANYONE FIND ME SOME ROCKS!"

*dramatic pause*

"I LOVE EVERYONE! LET'S ALL BE FRIENDS!"

And then I would have a new friggin' empire full of mystery, drama, and complications. I'd buy a television and a microwave and some new jeans because I think they make my ass look good even though I know my ass is still my ass, here, there, and everywhere. Even in New York.

And that, internet, is all I have to say to you today.

Thank you for reading, and have a weekend.

* If you are the sort of person who cracks on people for living in trailers, you are banned from reading my blog until you get better manners. Trailers rock. Everyone knows that and it's time you learned it, too.

No, Johnny, I will not marry you.

I got an overwhelming number of marriage proposals yesterday. People even promised to commit adultery - to leave their spouses just to get access to my naked gorgeousness. So as you can imagine, I felt rather ashamed of myself for being so immodest. But I couldn't help myself. I felt so beautiful and I was just so happy.

People, Neil loved me yesterday. What could be better than that?*

I am accustomed to men falling all over themselves in the hopes of one kind word a year from me, the one and only Nina-alone a lot- Corrigan. (Yeah, I have a fake LAST name, too. My dementia is total).

However, I must say that this missive I received late last night, after I had finished arranging the 4,332 roses I received from various admirers, was rather surprising:

To: Nina.Corrigan@spacefuckcrazy.net
From: Johnny.Depp@internationmoviestar.org
Re: Love

Dearest Nina,

I almost broke the internet yesterday looking at the vision of naked gorgeous that is you. I was beside myself with admiration and passion - and dare I say it - joy. I could not take my eyes from your wriggling, naked form. Your hair entranced me. Your lips enthralled me. Your breasts.... Dear God help me.... your breasts. Are they real?

Nina, my angel, I know they are real. I know it because I know of your virtue, your integrity, your passion for all that is right and good in the world. I know you would never post a picture of your naked self on the internet unless it was a real life likeness. Plus I saw you dancing at Scores last year when you were hard up for tuition money and your daddy was in the hospital. You're hot.

Nina, I love you. I've tossed Vanessa's Versace gowns and her ten million pairs of shoes out in the alley and I've called the Parisian songbird rescue mission. They are on their way. (I dropped the kids off at the orphanage this afternoon and by the time you get this, I should be done burning their toys).

Nina, my dearest one, be mine forever.

Marry me.

Love,

Johnny (Depp) (the guy in the pirate movies).

P.S. I have enclosed a picture of myself from one of my lesser known films. It was about Chocolate and Lent and since I know you are Catholic, I thought you might approve.



Well, as you can imagine, I was astonished. I thought it over, but really, what really needs thinking about? There can only be one response to such a missive as this from a creature such as myself. (I am awesome - as a creature, that is).

To: Johnny.Depp@internationfilmstar.org
From: Nina.Corrigan@spacefuckcrazy.net
Re: re: Love

Forget for a moment, Johnny, that you are an internationally adored film star and that women everywhere throw their undergarments at your head if you so much as look twice at them. Forget also, Johnny, that you are universally agreed to be intelligent, sensitive, sane, and by all accounts generous and kind. Forget that you have managed go your entire career without being photographed getting out of a car with no underwear on (not that some people wouldn't approve because some people, not me, mind you, but some people would totally dig that). Forget, finally, that you have good teeth, no known allergies and an excellent track record with women (although I am not cool with the fact that you never have married the mother of your children - kinda shabby of you, I say). I haven't even said yet that you are hot. Well, I say it now. Johnny, you are smokin' hot.

But no.

No, Johnny, I will not marry you. To all your excellent and admirable qualities you must add one more and I regret to inform you that despite your millions, you have not the means to remedy your deficiency.

You, Johnny, are short. At 5'6", you are a full three inches NOT as tall as I require to consider you a potential mate. I am sorry to have ruined your equanimity, your relationship with Vanessa - nay - your entire life by posting that naked picture of myself yesterday. But me you shall never have. You are simply not up to my standards, and a girl like me? Thirty-eight, single, broke and crazy? I can afford to be picky.

So I won't marry you.

Not love,

Nina



* Well, I can think of ONE thing, but he has the merest little wisp of an issue with CHEATING,and I must not be thus dishonored.

Best Internet Valentine EVER

What on earth is THAT, you say??

Why it is me, Nina alone-a-lot, dancing around my apartment TOTALLY NAKED.

Why such joy?

Take a look at this:



Reader, this is no ordinary internet valentine. This is Neilochka, who half the world is mad in love with.

Go check him out at Citizen of the Month. I'll be dancing naked until you get back.

See??

MY internet valentine is the paragon of excellence who started the Great Interview Experiment. He is also the best kisser ever and did I mention we have been making out on the internet for months and I never told any of you? ( I do try to be a lady.* Sometimes).

Neil, I would like chocolate covered diamonds. And imported peonies. The DUTCH ones.

You have made me very happy. I love you!


* There was someone else for like two hours but I am SO over him.

Six minutes in the shop

Why am I always the last to know these things? Namely... well. Let's see if you can figure out what I learned about my fellow Americans yesteday.

I was out taking pictures for you, and I thought since I was within ten steps of the correct place, I would get my eyebrows threaded. I peered into the window and saw that the salon was empty, so in I went. It was 2:03pm.

At the desk were three Asian women in matching purple shirts. There was a man standing next to the desk in a blue delivery uniform. He was holding a clipboard and stabbing at it with emphasis as he explained the following:

"OK so I start my deliveries at 4am in the neighborhood. So if you leave your containers outside I can pick them up and return them the next day," he stabbed at the clipboard.

"We have delivery at 10am," replied the eldest Asian.

"I start deliveries on this block at 4am," he said again. Again with the stabbing.

"We have delivery at 10am," repeated the elder Asian.

I leaned in a bit. "Hi," I said. "My eyebrows," I said. "Can I get them threaded?"

"Yes, of course," said the younger Asian. Then she turned back to the delivery guy. She was gazing at him as if he were big ol' cherry cheesecake with extra cheese. It was absolutely not subtle.

The elder Asian repeated, "We have delivery at 10am."

I looked at my watch. It was 2:05pm.

"We have delivery at 10am," said the youngest Asian.

The delivery guy laid his clipboard on the desk and pointed with the pen. Then he pointed to his truck - and said, "You see that truck? It is in Yonkers by 10am."

The younger Asian laid her fingertips on his forearm. It was absolutely not subtle. At. All.

He tried again. "I make deliveries in this neighborhood at 4:00am. I am already two boroughs away at 10am."

"We have delivery at 10am," said the eldest Asian. She removed the younger Asian's fingers from the forearm of the delivery guy. That wasn't very subtle either.

I looked at my watch. 2:06pm. The younger Asian tried again.

"Delivery at 10am. New containers," she pointed to the clock. It said 2:07pm. Again she looked at him as if she wanted to rip his pants right off. Opposite of subtlety, there.

The delivery guy looked at me and said, "I am sorry. Can you give us all a moment?"

Oh, hell yes, I thought. Hit you some of that.

"Sure," I said. Then I picked up a copy of Cosmo and walked over to the window. I flipped through the magazine and watched the snow fall.

Behind me:

"We have delivery at 10:am," repeated the three Asians.

"What you are saying," said the delivery guy, "Is that you would like me to drive back here from Yonkers to deliver your water bottles when you open at 10am."

"We have delivery at 10am!" the elder Asian was elated. It was 2:08pm by then.

I turned. Younger Asian was grinning and groping the delivery guy's forearm. She was also gazing longingly at his crotch. It was absolutely... well I think you know by now what it was like.

So I decided to try again. I gestured subtle-like toward my pale blond and uninteresting eyebrows. "Threading?" I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from saying "I HAVE DELIVERY NOW."

Know what? I was completely, totolly, universally ignored. The elder Asian said, "Yes, at 10am!" The younger Asian - I am not kidding - started massaging his shoulders. The youngest Asian smirked and started picking at her cuticles.

It was masterful. The delivery guy hooked his pen into his shirt pocket, crestfallen. "OK," he said. "I come back at 10am."

It was 2:09pm. There was a swirl of purple and blue mutual appreciation in progress at the desk. Nobody in the whole joint cared about me or my eyebrow grooming.

Not wanting to interrupt the orgy of joy, I silently backed out of the salon and took a few more pictures for you.






I can think of at least three useful lessons to be gleaned from my six minutes in the shop yesterday. What do you suppose those lessons were?

I took these pictures for you

Then this evening:







I will post again later and tell you something you already know. But come back anyway. It might be funny.

Reason # 4534 I am still single

It's because I am a sick, sick person. And a danger to myself and others. (Well, ok. Probably just to others).

I have friend. Her name is Julie but we call her Supajewie around here.*

I love Supajewie and would probably shrivel up and die without our daily twelve hour IM conversations. But I have one little tiny issue with Supa. It is that she is married. By all appearances, she is glad of this fact. Oh, and she has a small person. (I am ok with this. Mostly).

Yesterday we were having our usual utterly pointless conversation when I decided to ask her some harmless questions** about her husband, whom I have always suspected to be an OK person. I have no proof of this, really, but he does seem to not completely suck.



Well, yes he does. He fusses with his hair. I find this very, very unattractive. As you will now see.



NO??

People, I was there when it happened. What, you ask? Oh, the day she met her husband on the internet and moved into his house three days later, married him six months later and then commenced breeding. That's right. She was pregnant six weeks after the wedding with a guy she'd known less than a year. So obviously I have been waiting for him to turn out to be a complete ass hole. Obviously!

Next we talked about how she knows what love is and I don't.




Then I gave her some parenting tips:




Then we discussed the meaning of life. Oh I mean the great circle of life. Oh I mean marriage. And stuff.



And then there was that other important safety tip I offered:



**** edited to add photograph of actual "Little Tykes" hammer Julie uses to help her child relax****




More was said yesterday, obviously. We discussed horseradish and oysters and reminisced about going out drinking and eating like savages before she married that motherchucker I mean awesome guy and had a baby. Then we reflected that the good Lord was probably right when he chose to make me repulsive and childless. Not sure you agree?

Yeah, you do. See above. Freezer.***

Happy Tuesday.

*Go ahead and marvel at the fact that I have managed to get and keep even one friend, given my behavior.

**Go ahead and notice how amazingly rude that is.

***Oh, relax already. Julie and I have been running this gag about how to quiet her child since the child was born. I don't have children (as I have told y'all at least 134243354334534 times,) but I do know what suffering is endured by people who have screaming infants and can find no method of placating said infants. It's rough. So rough that most parents have had moments of sincere regret while holding a six week old baby at arms length because said baby is splitting your eardrums. And you have not slept more than two hours at a stretch since the moment the infant tore your body to ribbons in its effort to get born. So we joke about it. To relief the, uh, tension.

Three kinds of sad and a cupcake

Everything was going fine until I realized that there was no way I'd have time to clean out the fridge, bleach it, and re-supply it. I realized I was going to end up eating take out for dinner. So I got sad.

Then I was transferring all my CDs to my new machine and I realized that Ok, Computer, Where'd You Hide the Body, and It's Takes a Nation were all missing from my stash.

Then I got really sad.


Then I decide to counteract the sad by running up and down the stairs for half an hour. I did. I lamented that I am even more out of shape than I ever dreamed possible.

Sadness increased.

So I had a beer and put the Everest DVD into my machine and then minimized it so I could still work. I watched people climb. It was not cheering me up. I couldn't decide what to eat for dinner because I didn't want hot wings or Chinese or cheeseburgers. I watched more climbing and I got sad sad sad because I am never going to climb Everest and I can barely run the stairs in my building and where is OK, Computer and no one should be without James McMurtry and Flav-a-flav is an ass-hat but I like that CD and why can't I be stronger in the femur and run some more stairs and my toes are all wrong and I hate my new hair and my rings are tight and at least there's Yankee Bayonet but.. but... but... fuck it all. Where are the cupcakes?

(I didn't eat the cupcakes). (But I did have a cookie and a rollicking good time feeling sorry for myself for no reason).

Happy Monday.

Sin of the week, 2/10/08

Forget for a moment that I spent enough money on the upper regions of my head this week to provide food, shelter, and medical care to a child in a third world country for five years.

Forget also that I picked my cuticles and thought about football in church and that I neglected my job and, oh, bought a computer two times more expensive than was strictly necessary.

This week's crime is nothing new. It is a pernicious and well-worn habit. It is the worst thing about me.

Reader, I am a terrible friend. Sounds really un-sexy, as crimes go, doesn't it? Well. I suppose it is. But if you knew the extent to which I am guilty of this, you'd be rightly disgusted.

On the right, you'll find Newsy on my friends bar. We met nineteen years ago in college and have been friends all of those years, but for one thing: I never, ever call her. In fact, at this very moment, I owe her at least twenty phone calls. That's right: twenty. I am pretty sure that her mom had surgery for breast cancer recently. Her father has been in poor health for years and she has the same tiresome problems that I have. Except that she is about 1000000% times more busy than I am. And yet she still calls me and makes the train of our friendship run without my help. I have no idea why she bothers because if it were up to me, we would have lost touch years ago.

Then we have Skate. We have been friends since just about the moment I moved to New York. He is a lovely guy and one of the more fun people I have ever known in my entire life. He's also wicked smart and did I mention the fun? Well. Skate has been trying to get me to go ice skating with him all winter. Winter is almost over. Last week he sent me an IM saying "I hate it when you drop me like this. Maybe one day when you decide you like me again, I just won't be here. How would that be?"

Did I answer? No. The scary thing is that when I finally get back to him, he'll forget my neglect without a grumble. Then he'll take me out for sushi and hold my hand for hours while I talk about my issues. He has been doing this for years.

This behavior drove my friend Lola so crazy that I am sure it is part of the reason she is no longer speaking to me. (Of course, she is not speaking to anyone and aside from a coded message left in comments on my birthday, I would be pretty sure she was dead).

Oh, and Jib? Oh my God. Six solid months of emails, phone calls and text messages. That I have not answered.

So why am I such an ass hole? I am sure you know there is no excuse. As I sit here, I realize that coming up with a decent explanation is pretty much impossible, too.

*sigh*

OK, I'll try.

I love people. I really do. The problem is that my relationship to the outer world is very different from that of regular people. I am so introverted that I am pretty sure I could successfully wall myself up in a cave with a life time supply of batteries and a laptop and never feel the loss of other carbon-based life forms. OK, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but not an extreme one. I love people. I like them, too. If you've been reading for more than a few weeks, you know that my family is pretty much the whole show for me.

My bad behavior, then, is driven by the fact that while I love people, I don't need them. If that disgusts you, I can understand why. But love doesn't beget need. Need begets love, perhaps, or children wouldn't grow up to love their parents. (Good thing, that, right? But I digress).

I love people. But I don't need them, and if you give me other items, issues, activities and obsessions...

Well.

A dash of drama in my family, three times more work than I can handle, a little narcissistic self-absorption, daily cookie resistance and some really filthy floors- and then get me to thinking about myself or drawing pictures for my blog - and my emotional resources fall below levels required for basic decency.

It is no mystery to me why I behave this way. The real mystery is why I have so many wonderful people - people who would drop everything to help me if I asked - people who would walk a mile on their hands just to amuse me, some who have stood by me for half my life - given my life-long neglect of them. All I can tell you is that Merry knows I have this issue and has chosen to roll with it. Pax has this issue herself and so she can roll with it too. Bibi and Sri absolutely hate it and seriously, they'd kick me to the curb if I were not so obsequious and pathetic when I finally call them back. The rest of y'all? I don't know how you put up with it. I don't know why you do, either. I don't deserve you.

So when someone asked me last week what I was "doing" for Lent, the answer was "calling people." Seems an odd way of practicing repentance and abstinence and humility, doesn't it? Well for me, it means I have to apologize to about fifteen people and it means I have to abstain from my shabby, delusional self-sufficiency and it means I have to be humble enough to admit that I cannot, in fact, make it all alone in a cave, however much my disordered brain thinks it would very much like to do so. I have not even mentioned yet that my neglect hurts people. It would be good if I could stop doing that and try to meet other people's needs instead of being satisfied that mine are being met because I have convinced myself that I don't have any.

Which, by the way, is total bullshit. Anyone who knows me in real life - or who has read more than three entries on this here internet diary - knows just how much bullshit it is. (it's a lot).

If you, reader, are still talking to me after reading this, I have no idea why.* I am clearly the Worst Person in the World. Oh wait, that's Larry. Oh, what the hell. Since it's Lent and everything, let's say we get over all that and forgive ol' Larry. After all, he is spacefuck crazy and while is behavior is worse than mine, his challenges are far greater, too.

See you tomorrow. (That is if you are still talking to me). (Please still be talking to me).

*Oh don't forget that I love you. And that you are beautiful. I am sorry. I can't help myself...