Someone mentioned to me one of the more ridiculous responses to my comment at Feministe.  I stopped reading the thread after I said my piece, because I have absolutely no doubt that the admins are going to do jack shit to keep the mama-hating and kid-hating to a minimum, since one of their own wrote the original bunch of vile bullshit that sparked it.  I’m just not going to spend all day engaging in back-and-forth conversation with a bunch of hypocrites, overseen by people who are willfully ignorant of their own privilege.  HOWEVER, I am seriously not going to let it completely slide that someone presumed to imply that it’s okay to hate kids or advocate for their expulsion from public space if you have a condition that gets aggravated by kid noise.  I hear this one a lot.  It’s still bullshit.  First of all, there are millions of children with those same disorders.  Second of all, many adults engage in some of the same triggering behaviors, but you don’t attribute it to their age, right?  And third, no one should ever make the mistake of talking to me like they know any fucking thing about my experience.

Two years ago, when I was not a child but a fully grown woman in my 30s, I went through a set of circumstances that made me feel less empowered, less in control, more afraid than I ever had at any point in my entire life.  Because of this – and because of the underlying psychiatric disorder it triggered – I started having panic attacks in very public spaces, most frequently in the massive train station through which I had to pass twice a day as part of my commute.  I would be unable to breathe, unable to stop sobbing, and just barely able to keep from actually screaming.  I tried very hard not to be a “burden” on other people in the train station with my actions, since I have interacted with human beings enough to know that many of them (hi, Feministe commenters, I mean you) are unsympathetic assholes who relate to their fellow people in a framework of “is this convenient and comfortable for ME?”  I was, because of this knowledge of the unrelenting selfishness of my fellow ADULTS, horribly embarrassed and so, so scared every time it happened.  It was impossible, however, to hide it.  People stared.  No one ever helped or even asked what was wrong.  Probably a few of them went home and complained about how I’d disrupted their whatever.  Maybe they talked shit about me on the internet.  Maybe they said, about the friends who would come rescue me and take me home (or to their homes) in cars so I wouldn’t have to ride the train all the way to my house two hours away from where I worked, that they should have controlled me better.  But I bet none of them called their responses feminism.

And NONE of this makes me less sympathetic to children or their caregivers, even though sometimes the sharp squeals of little kids, or their occasional tantrums in the station, would be contributing factors to my panic.  Logic, I would think, dictates that having been so powerless, and so at the whims of my own out-of-whack chemistry that I couldn’t keep from publicly making a scene, I would be more sympathetic to other HUMAN BEINGS who sometimes lose control and need help getting their shit back together.  So maybe certain people who think it’s okay to hate kids because they personally have problems that are sometimes exacerbated by the sounds made by other human beings should stop presuming to have the market cornered, and stop presuming that excuses their prejudices.  Just a thought.

So, hey everyone, annoyance is not a feminist issue.  Unless your annoyance is at the patriarchy and the manifestations thereof, it is not a feminist issue.  It is a personal issue.  Believing that your personal annoyances about any and everything are Issues that should be Discussed is a function of privilege, plain and simple.

Now this is not an argument against the idea that the personal is political, which is something I strongly believe is true.  This is an argument against the tendency of hyper-educated, upper middle class, privileged, [generally] white women to pervert that concept and make it into precisely the kind of individualistic, special snowflake bullshit that feminism is supposed to stand in opposition to.  The phrase is meant to imply that individual instances of suffering under oppression are political issues.  It matters if someone uses a gendered insult at me.  It matters if a man touches my body without my permission.  It matters if school administrators don’t take it seriously when I am harassed in the hallways, or if my boss turns a blind eye when a misogynistic comment is made in a company meeting.  These things are personal to me, and they are political, as they are part of the system of oppression in which my life is conducted.

By the way, in case we have all completely taken leave of our senses, now might be a good time for a little refresher on another concept I thought was integral to feminism: that suffering one form of oppression does not mean you suffer all forms of it, that you understand how all the forms of it function, or that you cannot also be part of a system of oppression that other people face.  Let’s take for example the fact that I am a woman in a sexist society.  The patriarchy oppresses me as a woman.  I am oppressed by sexism and its perpetrators.  That doesn’t mean that everything that ever goes on in my life is oppressive to me.  I am not oppressed by my car running out of coolant.  I am not oppressed by a measuring cup falling into the space between the sink and the fridge in the middle of a baking project.  I am not oppressed when the coffee maker at work takes forever to heat the water before producing the first pot of coffee on a Monday morning.  I am annoyed – as hell, sometimes – at these things.  But none of them are oppressive, which is why you don’t see me taking to the internet to write 83 paragraphs about them in a space that is designated for discussion of the actual oppressive systems of which I am a victim.

I’m also not fucking oppressed when someone’s behavior annoys me, especially if that person is a member of a class of people who are in fact oppressed by a class of people to which I belong.  I am a woman.  I am also an adult.  Children are members of a group of people who are oppressed by the group of people – adults – to which I belong.  (You might be the kind of complete jackass who doesn’t get that children are oppressed and controlled by adults, but if so, you should probably hit the highway right now, because I will never waste my time educating you about that, and I will also never allow comments arguing against this extremely obvious fact.)  Before anyone gets their boxers up their ass, I’m not comparing or ranking oppressions.  The condition of being a child under a system of adult control does not equate one-to-one to the condition of being a woman under a system of male control.  No two oppressions are identical, but the fact remains that being oppressed in one circumstance does not render one incapable of being oppressive in another.  I also subscribe to the theory that one cannot be oppressed in a situation where one is the oppressor – that is, men can’t be oppressed by me, I can’t be oppressed by non-Christians, and … listen closely… children cannot oppress me as an adult.

So when a kid behaves annoyingly, I am annoyed.  (Likewise, magically enough, I feel those same feelings when an adult behaves annoyingly.  Imagine!)  I am not oppressed.  It is not a matter of discussion for an anti-oppression group when a kid raises her voice in a bookstore where I’m browsing at lunch.  Because no one was oppressed.  In fact, if we’re going to talk about it in an anti-oppression framework at all, we should actually be talking about what the least oppressive way is to handle the kid’s voice-raising.  Any childfree hipster assholes who might be stupid enough to be hanging around my blog might snort derisively at this idea, and that’s fine.  Sometimes when my kid was showing her ass back in the ass-showing toddler years, I snorted derisively at the idea of doing anything other than snatching her up, taking her out of whatever situation we were in where she was annoying the fuck out of other people, and very loudly reading her the riot act.  It’s a common reaction.  It’s oppressive and controlling, but it’s very common, and I’m not judging individual parents for it.  I did it all the time when the kid was a toddler.  I did an updated version of it this very morning when she pulled some maddening seven-year-old nonsense on me.  It’s not that it’s not understandable, it’s that there’s nothing interesting or radical or feminist or anti-oppression about it, and therefore it doesn’t make for a particularly feminist or anti-oppression conversation topic.

The point is, children are human beings.  My daughter, in fact, is a woman (albeit a tiny one right now), making her kind of the ideal candidate for membership in feminism.  (Except she’s a working class person of color, and from what I can tell anymore, at least the feminism represented on the internet couldn’t give less of a fuck about people in those categories, either.)  If we’re concerned about tearing down systems of oppression, we should be raising people who recognize it, reject it, and feel empowered to fight against it.  I’m not saying I am perfect at this.  My own parenting fails this test every single day.  But I try.  I think about it.  I don’t pretend the moments in which I silence my daughter, control her expression, or make her feel like she’s a burden on me or other people are shining moments in our relationship.  I fucking certainly do not pretend that they are explicitly feminist moments.  They are just moments when I react in the way we are taught – by the same fucking patriarchal influences that teach us how to oppress other groups of people – it is okay to react when an annoyance is coming from a child (which is usually wholly different from how we would ever react if an adult annoyed us).  There’s nothing special about it.  There might not really be anything egregiously wrong with it, and my kid will probably survive it all just fine, but I’m not going to be a fucking hypocrite and pretend that these are moments when I’m applying feminism, and I’m never going to ask feminists to validate my knee-jerk annoyed reactions and call them feminism.  Maybe they’re not unfeminist (and, uh, they probably are), but they’re certainly not especially feminist, and they don’t belong in a feminist discussion.  Feminism is not the space where we trade tips on how to better control other human beings or air our irritation about how people we’re actively oppressing are behaving toward us… or at least that is quite seriously NOT what the fuck I signed up for when I CENTERED my identity on feminism for all of the most important years of my adulthood.  I was looking to have my way of thinking challenged, top to bottom, and to divest of my privilege and my own oppressive viewpoints and reactions.

Just… for fuck’s sake!  Am I really having to write this down?  Are we [privileged American feminists] this self-centered and fucking stupid?  Has feminism become so focused on personal choice and personal fee-fees that we can’t fucking employ basic logic to keep us even marginally on task?  Are we so infected by the toxic scourge of individualism that our brains are just fucking rotting now?

I feel like this is pretty basic, but if a major feminist blog with writers who are viewed and called upon as the philosophy’s scholars are too fucking dense to put it together, maybe it needs repeating, not that any of those people read this.  But maybe someone who pops in here because of the rageful comment I made over at Feministe will see this in a new way, or maybe they already see it this way and will just know that at least one other person thinks that the kid-bashing (and, for crying out loud, mama-bashing) in feminist space is disgusting.  So.  Lean in to your screen and read this shit real closely.  Telling an entire huge segment of the human population that you are disgusted by them and they need to shut up so you don’t have to hear them is not consistent with resisting oppression, which is what feminism purports to be about.  Publicly pressuring the caregivers of these people to oppress and control them more for your personal comfort is not consistent with resisting oppression, even if you insist that it’s just for a little while until they reach an age at which you will find them acceptable and deserving of inclusion in your anti-oppression efforts.  Conducting that pressuring under the guise of an anti-oppression movement?  Calling your own oppressive bullshit anti-oppression?  Calling it feminist?  Never mind the inconsistency; never even mind the Orwellian hilarity of it; it’s just fucking sickening.  Among myriad other reasons I feel less comfortable in a feminist identity with every passing day, this shit makes me want to give the whole goddamn thing a big, loud, bookstore-peace-disrupting Fuck You.

Yeah, this is going to be even harder than I thought.   You guys, I am a terrible misanthrope.  I knew this – it’s something I have taken pride in – but even I didn’t know the extent of my misanthropy or just how entrenched it is until I started really paying attention to how many times I day I think or want to say something excoriating about somebody.

Some of the biggest challenges so far have been at work, particularly when someone else is complaining.  I have found in the last 24 hours that I’ve almost completely forgotten how to respond to someone’s complaining without either joining in or telling them they’re wrong.  Clearly the first option is a flagrant violation of my promise to behave myself, and the second doesn’t really feel exactly right either.  Also, people complain A LOT in my office.

Also, I’m probably going to have to think about avoiding … the entire internet?  Which would quickly lead to my hospitalization with severe withdrawal symptoms.  The problem isn’t that I regularly seek out content with which I disagree.  I avoid the fuck out of it, in fact.  My Google Reader subscriptions list is not heavy on the Free Republic types.  I’m not one of these people (like Mr. DiSnazzio) who can find much amusement in the words and antics of the political right wing.  (What I find is that I badly need a drink or a Quaalude or something, because my heart rate goes through the roof.)  So I was already not just deliberately looking for people to be mad at and say unkind things about.  But I’m having a hard time not erupting in a spasm of “OMG WTF” at the missteps of the people with whom I generally agree.  Because that is what I do even on the best of days.

Now I’m not about to engage in or endorse a life of silence in the face of fuckery, not even for 40 days.  This is about Christianity, after all, and our main dude was not a meek acquiescer.  He was a fired-up radical, and that is why I like him.  He had Things To Say about oppression and inequality and cruelty.  So when something needs dealt with, I intend to deal.  I just intend to deal in a way that doesn’t involve me going, “Look at this jackass over here.”  I’m going to try to address people directly and use my big-girl words, like, “What you have said here is hurtful/offensive for the following reasons.”  I might even throw in some pleases and thank yous.

But I’m also going to try to ratchet back the massive hypercriticality of others and instead work really hard (REALLY, OMG IT’S HARD) at figuring out, in the moments when I feel like I’m going to quite possibly literally* choke to death on the “evil words” I want to say, what exactly is going on inside me that is making me feel so “hooked” (as my awesome Jungian analysis used to say after I told him that the general public overuse of the word “trigger” made me twitch… ’cause um… I’m hypercritical…) by whatever is making me feel like I’m bursting at the seams with evil.

Also, my sister-in-law wrote something yesterday that reminded me that there is a component of Lent that we often ignore that I didn’t write about here: the giving part.  Because it’s not just about self-denial; it’s about sacrifice.  And, for me, it’s about sacrifice for the common good specifically.  I have some things going on that dovetail with this that have been in the works for many months – namely, volunteering at the jail – that I’m going to focus extra hard on.  I’m hoping to use Lent as a springboard for very consistent and frequent future efforts to make myself useful in this way.  The blizzardry (that’s the actual blizzard plus the aftermath) has made this really difficult, but now that it’s subsiding a little, I will – I HOPE! – finally have some more to write about this stuff very soon.

*Yes, fellow hypercrits, I know.  Not actually literally.

Me, on Twitter:

That hategasm was brought to you by my Lenten goal to “build up” with my words, a la Ephesians. Today is like Snarki Gras for me.*

(Normally I try not to get all self-referential, but c’mon, Snarki Gras.  You know you LOLed.)

Tomorrow begins Lent, when recovering Catholics the world over still give up alcohol and cussing just out of habit.  Oh, and also when Christians spend 40 days preparing ourselves for Easter to represent Jesus’s time in the desert telling Satan to pipe down.

I want to explicitly state something here that – shocker – probably won’t be popular with any more devout/fundamentalist Christian who wanders by.  I observe Lent not because I believe God will be mad if I don’t, or because I believe God has an opinion on this one way or another.  I think that view of things assumes a pretty egotistical God.  It’s hard for me to believe that God wants us doing all these things to prove something to [him].  I observe Lent because I feel the exercise and discipline of it brings me closer to God through my focus on what I believe [he]’s expecting of me in my life in the world.  Therefore I try to make the observance meaningful by not merely giving up caffeine (though I probably should, for myriad other reasons) or whatever.

This year, I’m not exactly giving up something specific so much as very intently focusing on something.  My priest suggested this a few years ago, that maybe we could think in terms of “doing” instead of “not doing.”  So I’m doing and also not-doing, and for the first time ever, I’m actually paying attention to the actual bible instead of just looking around my life and going, “Well, I’ve been meaning to quit mainlining soda anyway, so…”

Ephesians 4:29 has popped into my life a couple of times recently in different circumstances.  I don’t know about signs, and we’ve covered that Nick Cave and I don’t believe in an interventionist God, but for reasons probably having to do with what’s going on in my own psyche, I have noticed it when it’s popped up.  (Because in my religious practice, “God” is pretty much interchangeable with “Jung,” apparently.)  It says:

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

I know this is going to be ridiculously hard for me.  Evil talk is in my DNA.  I love evil talk.  Without evil talk, I will be silent about 60% of the time.  And a good half my relationships will probably quickly die from a lack of anything to discuss.  But I was thinking about this today and realized that I also have a great example for how not to be an evil, snarky bastard all the time in the form of my mama.  “What is useful for building up” is pretty much always what comes out of my mom’s mouth.  You can’t complain to her about anyone without getting her hypothesis about why said anyone might be acting like a complete jackass (which is something that has many times caused me to contemplate strangling her, and I can say that here because she already knows).

So for the next forty days, I’m going to follow in my mom’s footsteps, and I’m also going keep that verse stashed someplace where I can see it when I need it, like seventy times a day at work and every single time I am caused to interact with health insurance company reps, hipsters, or my own reflection.

*For context, the referenced hategasm was about two OMG INSUFFERABLE interns and their excruciatingly annoying and loud conversation at a coffee shop downtown today.  What?  Lent starts tomorrow.

Is there a significant difference between the makers of the asininely-monikered Booty Pop underwear (look it up yourself if you must) using a woman’s barely-covered ass to advertise a product, and twelve dozen feminist/progressive bloggers posting the commercial in its freaking entirety on their blogs, especially if those blogs sell ad space?  You’re still trafficking in bare female ass.  It would have been perfectly reasonable to discuss the commercial, describe it, and voice your complaints while also not rebroadcasting it.  You could explain your unwillingness to rebroadcast it by explaining that since you’re grossed out by the makers of this bullshit selling women’s body parts like so much disembodied meat, you’re not going to participate in that same display.

Just. A. Thought.

I almost forgot.  This will be quick, because I expended all my energy on my earlier post and on work and on bracing for what I can already tell is going to be Migraine Friday (it starts, often, with EXTREME sleepiness – or The Omgsleepies, if you prefer [The Omgsleepies is totally going to be my new band name... for my not-band]).

So a blasphemy quickie: I think all this “whoever does not believe is condemned already” business is really ridiculous.  It irritates the bejesus (heh) out of me every time I hear it.  I assume this is self-explanatory, but in case it isn’t: I cannot and do not believe my atheist and non-Christian pals who do all types of goodness are condemned, certainly not by my Good Buddy.  In fact, the idea of condemnation doesn’t sit well with me, theologically, socially, or in any other way.  Condemnation is the opposite of grace.  Condemnation is for the birds.*

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of writings and talkings of non-literalist Christians like Marcus Borg, lately, and I feel confident that I will get to the bottom of this matter with my Christianity and my affinity for John intact (it is hard not to like him, I picture him as this wild-eyed, enthusiastic hippie goofball, kinda).  In the meantime, though, I cringe when I hear this… it seems almost always to be said by someone who is using it as justification for offensive, Christian-supremacist purposes, and it leaves more than a bad taste in my mouth.

*Note: I like birds.  Birds also should not be condemned.  Big up to birds.

So, the mayor.  Let me tell you about my fee-fees on this matter; gather ‘round!

I could cop out here and just post a link to Mobtown Shank’s post from yesterday about what the hell everyone is so happy about, because that describes a lot of my feelings about the reaction.  But I always find that I spend half an hour ranting to Mr. DiSnazzio about something in the car on the way to work and then don’t say anything about it here in this space I made just for such umbrage-y things.  Perhaps Mr. DiSnazzio’s ears will get a break in 2010 if I can just remember to write it all down.  (And perhaps we’ll hear from Mr. DiSnazzio in this very space if he takes me up on my offer from this morning to guest-post his own umbrage.)

Anyway, Mobtown Shank pointed out a thing that’s been disturbing the crap out of me lately: the unremitting, gleeful celebrating of our mayor’s downfall.  It’s really creepy, y’all.  Not because I necessarily believe she is innocent of the crimes of which she was accused.  A jury found her guilty of theft, she pled to perjury, and I accept that she is guilty of those things.  And also not because she was such a great mayor.  The city’s in no better shape than O’Malley left it, and you can assign blame in whatever percentages you see fit to him, to her, to a number of other persons and entities, up to and including George W. Bush, I’m sure.  She probably didn’t do things that should have been done and did do things that shouldn’t have.  I was kind of agnostic on her to begin with, and I also don’t know that her resignation and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s ascendancy are going to make much more difference than Dixon’s coming into office in the first place.  (It’s hard to be anything but agnostic about Baltimore politics and the possibility of any particular candidate for anything to bring about change.  Look around.)

All of that is to say that I don’t care about this because I’m a huge fan or anything.  I neither love nor loathe Sheila Dixon, personally or politically.  I care about the reactions because the reactions tell a rather unsettling story about the reactors.  I should say here, by the way, that the majority of the “ZOMFG YAY DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD” reactions, along with the “ZOMFG GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS” stuff I saw leading up to Dixon’s convictions, were online, usually in the comments to articles on the Baltimore Sun’s website.  This is noteworthy for two reasons: one, people are much bigger shitheads online than in person, always; and two, there’s no way to know whether the commenters were actual City residents, and I tend to believe they weren’t in most cases.  I’m sure the City has its share of rabid Dixon haters (all of whom probably fall into the categories outlined by Mobtown Shank), but I have lived here for almost seven years now, and it is not my sense of this town that the majority of its citizens are the type of people who get quite this frothed up about stuff.  We’ve got bigger fish to fry, usually.

Again, not because it’s not a big deal that Dixon broke the law.  That is a big deal.  Mr. DiSnazzio said his heart isn’t breaking for her, because people lose their jobs all the time when they fuck up on their jobs.  I agree.  (But I also have a certain pesky Catholic sensibility about this stuff, and it leads me to feel empathy for her and to sincerely hope she finds some peace and clarity after the dust settles, no matter how much that might annoy the pitchfork-wielders.)  It’s just that we’re talking about $500 – and that’s the amount she was convicted for after this excruciatingly long (for the City) ordeal.  Most of the Baltimoreans (Baltimore Cityeans) I’ve talked to about this have said that this is a lot of hullaballoo over something that doesn’t seem worthy of this much hullaballoo, and that we’ve got other problems that need addressing.  Meanwhile, the commenters on the Sun are melting down like she ate a baby at City Hall.

So the disproportion unsettles me.  It can’t be separated from the fact that she’s a black woman, first of all.  It also can’t be separated from what has always seemed to me like suburban residents’ views of Baltimore as some aisle of pure criminality/leper colony/some shit (I keep seeing comments that start with “only in Baltimore,” and no, not only in Baltimore, you jagoffs, not by a long shot).  Which also can’t be separated from the fact that Baltimore is a majority-black city.  It’s just deliberately ignorant to pretend race isn’t a factor in this case, and lots of people are pretending (and INSISTING overly much on) that very thing.  Seeing this outpouring of vitriol about a black woman is disturbing, especially when I know damn well – as every intellectually honest person does – that it absolutely would not be at anything near this pitch if she were a white dude.

This all just contributes to my persistent general sadness about people’s unwillingess to meet our capacity for goodness and for… bigness of heart, I guess.  It bothers me to watch people – especially people who apparently live close by – default to hatefulness and knee-jerk bullshit reactions, like it’s a contest to see who can be most awful or mean, or who can walk closest to the line of overt fucking bigotry without going over.  Do you get a prize?

What also unsettles me, on a more macro level, is how this all feels kind of clandestine and politically motivated.  I know no one put the gift cards in her hand to set her up.  If she did it, she did it.  She made her choices and she’s dealing with the consequences.  But doesn’t it seem like other mayors have probably Done Things, too?  This goes back to the disproportion, but it does seem kind of strange that all of this money and time and effort was spent on what amounted to $500, doesn’t it?  Especially in Baltimore.  Again, not saying we shouldn’t prosecute lawbreakers, but it’s odd to me that we suddenly have this seemingly endless pot of resources for this matter but there are open murders all over the place and people keep taking things from my car.  You know?  Who decided that this particular matter was this level of serious at this particular moment?  And if that person or group of persons benefits from this in any way, what way is that?  Does anyone in Baltimore feel like they really know the answers to those questions?

It just feels awfully disempowering – not to Sheila Dixon, who was the mayor of a big city and had plenty of power.  It feels disempowering to me as a citizen that it went down this way.  I have the strong sense that long before charges were filed, someone, somewhere knew what the desired outcome was, politically, and that we’ll start to figure that out in the next election cycle, but that we’ll never know for sure.  And I don’t like feeling like these decisions – about who is the mayor and who isn’t the mayor – get made someplace other than behind that little curtain in the voting booth.  Whatever this was, it wasn’t a democratic process, and I am left feeling, certainly not for the first or last time, that Baltimore and Maryland are both quite happy to collect a little of my paycheck but not hear even a little of my voice.

I don’t know why I need to note this publicly, but I’m gonna: right before my period starts, I just about cannot stop eating things.  I have been ravenous all day and for the second day in a row am having to very loudly talk myself out of making a batch of brownies at 10 p.m.

Ladies who hover over public toilets, y’all need to step up your balance game.  Or at least wipe up after yourselves, for crying out loud.  I have a hard time understanding the physics behind the messes I’ve been confronted with the last few days, or why it is really necessary to hover in the first place in any but the most egregious bathrooms… in any case, if that’s your thing, fine.  But if you’re disgusted by wiping up your own pee, what in the hell makes you think I want to do it?  Did you ever consider that you’re contributing to your own problem?

Inspired by the reading at Mass tonight, tomorrow is going to be Blasphemy Thursday.  Try not to stay up all night jittering with anticipation, because as you know, “writing in my blog regularly or at least when I say I’m gonna” was not one of my resolutions.

I’m not going to make a whole long list of resolutions for the new year.  They all fall under this one umbrella: I hope that in 2010, I will deal with my health and my circumstances within the framework provided by my current, observable circumstances more than I did in 2009.  You would really think someone of my advanced age (33 is totes advanced!) would not need to make full-on resolutions about such matters, but let me just tell you two of the things I have pretended are true lately:

I am not a person who needs to wear a mouth guard to prevent jaw-clenching that results in vicious headaches – this despite the fact that literally EVERY time I forget (“forget”) to put the stupid thing in my mouth at night, I wake up the next morning in life-altering agony and can’t focus on anything but the pain until it is gone, many hours (if not days) later.

I am someone who can mind-over-matter out of a migraine. This is patently ridiculous.  Maybe such creatures exist, but it has not at any point in the last three years been true that I can just decide not to have a migraine.  However, this has not stopped me from just trying to think really hard about not having one, again EVERY time, just in case that will one of these times cause the mysterious sudden subsiding of this thing that causes twelve different things to be wrong with my body at one time.  All while not taking medicine that I already know WILL make it stop.

Basically, my motto for my neurological and maxillofacial health in 2010 is going to be, “If [stupid shit du jour] was going to work, it would have worked by now.”  And also, “Since I already know what works, I’ll do that.”

I’m also going to try very hard to stop pretending that anything but my own taking of action is going to cause me to start waking up at the early hour at which I know I should be waking up.  And that I will magically become stronger and have more stamina without exercising.  Or that some designated (by God, I guess? the universe? my mom? your mom?) day is going to come along and that will be the day that I suddenly start reading books again, going to bed at a reasonable fucking hour, calling my Nonnie more, hosting dinners, and recommitting myself to all the other stuff I need and want to get done in the house (and out of it).  For instance, as far as I know, one of the many services God doesn’t provide (with all due apologies to fundies and a tip of the hat to Nick Cave, I am compelled to announce that actually, God isn’t in the direct-service intervention business) is picking my lazy ass up and driving it to church.  I mean, if you have information to the contrary, please tell him I prefer the Wednesday evening service and I get off work at 5:30 downtown, and I tip very well.  But observed reality tells me that if I want to be a person who goes to Mass every week, I’m going to have to… be a person who goes to Mass every week.

Matters of control are fascinating to me lately, in my life and in the lives of people close enough for me to observe their controllings.  Almost everyone I know is, to some degree, engaged in the same thing I am: spending a lot of time trying to control exactly the things they can’t, while exerting nothing like enough effort controlling the stuff that is almost completely (and often solely) within their control.  Maybe we all need some kind of 12-step program for nonsense addicts or something.  I spend so much energy trying to argue my way out of reality about my migraines – energy that could be used just controlling the symptoms, which I can do most of the time, and even the triggers, which some of the time is also totally possible.  And it’s amazing that someone with the amount and severity of control freakery I have going on isn’t living a significantly more regimented life.  It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand that I probably grind my teeth precisely because I’m a control freak, right?  Apparently I think I can just cast that away by sheer force of will… a will so strong that it can’t make my hand reach over to my night table, pick up a tiny piece of plastic, and stick it in my own face?  I can bend reality, but I can’t bend myself at the waist into a cab bound for church on Wednesday nights, even though I actually WANT to be there?  Really?  Fascinating.

So that’s my overarching resolution: the serenity prayer.  Change what I can, and as for the rest, suck it up, buttercup.  That is how that prayer goes, right?  Suck it up buttercup, amen.

And one more thing: I resolve to unabashedly love the complicated, challenging, genuinely mysterious (not the God of “God works in mysterious ways”) non-interventionist God I alluded to up there.  Because of all the realities I had a hard time accepting last year, that was the hardest.  Not the non-intervening; I’ve always known that part.  The reality that I not only believe in, but love, any God.  It’s been hard for the people around me to swallow, but harder for me than any of you probably understand.  And I’ve resolved to accept that truth for real this year, and to let it guide me where it will.  This does not mean I’ll be evangelizing or trying to capture your soul for God.  It means I won’t be shushing myself in conversations with myself.  Shushing oneself in private conversations with oneself is madness.  I’m going to go ahead this year and really believe that consciousness and God (whether or not they are the same thing, and maybe they are) are beautiful and redemptive and that I deserve and can have overwhelming beauty and redemption.  Or at least walk toward it without acting as my own hurdle/cop/brick wall.  (You may snicker at the juxtaposition of this with my resolution to deal more in observable reality, and I will “heh” right along with you.  None of this has to make sense to anyone but me, after all.)

Sunday morning I woke up for a few minutes, long enough to stretch out my arms, shift around a little so I was less blanketed, and then, suddenly feeling unbelievably comfortable, decided to go back to sleep for a little while.  As I was sort of melting into that space right at the edge of sleep, where you have your weirdest thoughts and also the ones you’ll later wish you’d written down, I had this vague idea that stretching just to nestle back in was probably a good metaphor for something or other.  And then I was gone, taking that little seed of a blog post with me.  When I woke up, I couldn’t get my head back around it.

Later we went to the market, me, Joel, and Ruby, and I waved to some guys we know from our old neighborhood who were slinging coffee.  We had some lazy, noncommittal discussions about which vegetables to buy and doubled back once after realizing we really did want pad thai and pork buns for breakfast (the pork buns were great, the pad thai less so, in case you’re thinking of hitting that booth for breakfast next Sunday).  I posted to Twitter from my phone that it was the eighth anniversary of Joel’s and my first date – which we consider our “real” anniversary and usually bother to celebrate, which isn’t the case for the anniversary of our quickie elopement – and that we were celebrating by buying vegetables, because we are exciting.

We made our way to what has become our preferred Sunday breakfast location: the plastic chairs next to the pit beef stall, and we talked about Thanksgiving plans and upcoming events at Ruby’s school and the tastiness of our coffee, and at some point during a rare silence (our kid is seven, and quiet does not exist), Joel said, “I think we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives.”  I joked about whether he’d been paying attention during our wedding vows, but I understood what he meant.  I felt it too, that day – nothing I could put my finger on specifically, but I too was thinking about the night of our first real date and the things we said and all the years and all the growing pains and all the plain old pain that has transpired since, and the contortions and bending we’ve all had to do to make things fit, and how there have been times when I think Joel and I have both felt like if we really were to totally stretch out our limbs, we wouldn’t fit at all anymore, and how fucking terrifying that felt for so long.

But on Sunday – and, I realized, for quite a while leading up to Sunday – it felt exactly, almost unbelievably comfortable to stretch just to nestle back in.  Like that blissful, supernatural feeling of finding precisely the right spot, right position, right clearheaded calm in which to melt safely back into sleep.