gremlins

I really connected to this HTMLGiant post by Lily Hoang, though I am not avant-garde, nor am I Othered."

I have this thing against cuteness. Cuteness is dismissable, cast to the side as irrelevant. And I suppose, to be fair, what was the last cute thing you actually took seriously? There seems to be something inherent to cuteness that begs to be cuddled and pet, smooshed and distorted. Taken seriously, though, nah. Nope.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been described as “cute.” And I admit, I have something to do with it. I’m short, compact, I have a collection second-hand t-shirts, brightly colored with some kiddie design on it. When I’m nervous—and I’m always nervous—I fold, make myself smaller, and my voice goes higher, “cuter.” And yet, I’ve tried to balance this with being an “adult.” I’ve changed my wardrobe. These days, instead of emerald green short skirts, I wear drab slacks. Instead of bright blue t-shirts, I wear black or grey. I’ve learned that as a woman—a young woman, an Othered woman, a “cute” woman—in order to be taken seriously, I have to dress the part. Being a writer certainly doesn’t help. If anything, it makes other people see me as more quirky, more “cute.”

I'm 5' tall, 24, female, and fighting the "cute" monster every time I go to a school board meeting or have interviews in which I am standing up and writing and straining my neck every time I want to make eye contact with the other person. People with whom I must engage professionally are, a little too often, prone to patting my shoulder like I am an earnest, adorable niece. I tend to overcompensate with serious expressions. It's part of why I love film noir and related dark things so much. All these stories of people taking each other far too seriously. I like putting teeth and determination into my art that I'm not quite able to make everyone see in person.

Coming soon to hermits near you

This has all been said before, and now I've said it, and now everyone can go home.

I think one of the things that makes me jealous of boys is their ability to radically change their appearance (and projected personality/social niche) just by not shaving particular parts of their faces for less than a week. These changes are both dramatic, and erasable. A friend of mine who is always good-looking somehow became more so between the weekend and Thursday just by dint of NOT shaving his jawline and kerpow! Novelty! kerpow! Force multiplier!

And at the same time, I'm thinking, "I really want to cut my hair short and see what happens when I make a dramatic change." And then I'm like, "Yeah, but the last time you did that you had no patience for styling crap, and just letting it drape made your eyes itch and you regretted for months until you had enough hair for a ponytail again." And then I'm like, "Yeah, but this time I would deal with that crap and learn how to make it look good." And then I'm like, "Really? REALLY?"

Meanwhile I shed doggily on everything I touch or get close to or see.

Lucille Clifton, 1936-2010

Lucille Clifton died Saturday. She wrote poems about uteruses and menstruation and Clark Kent and one poem with "yeti poet" in the title. She was smooth, she was sharp, her writing had such a quietly lovely way about it, even when about menstruation or lynchings.

I haven't read her in a while, I almost forgot I had ever, the book I was assigned in English 301 slipped through me like a boat on a river. I use this metaphor because the book was titled "Blessing the Boats." I went back to it, and here are the three pages I had dog-eared:

grief

begin with the pain
of the grass
that bore the weight
of adam,
his broken rib mending
into eve,

imagine
the original bleeding,
adam moaning
and the lamentation of grass.

from that garden,
through fields of lost
and found, to now, to here,
to grief for the upright
animal, to grief for the
horizontal world.

pause then for the human
animal in its coat
of many colors. pause
for the myth of america.
pause for the myth
of america.

and pause for the girl
with twelve fingers
who never learned to cry enough
for anything that mattered,

not enough for the fear,
not enough for the loss,
not enough for the history,
not enough
for the disregarded planet.
not enough for the grass.

then end in the garden of regret
with time's bell tolling grief
and pain,
grief for the grass
that is older than adam,
grief for what is born human,
grief for what is not.

shapeshifter poems #4

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world


wishes for sons

i wish them cramps
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves

Mine

"this was his anger,
they were mine, not his,
the unnumbered host;

mine, all the ships,
mine, all the thousand petals of the rose,
mine, all the lily-petals,

mine, the great spread of wings,
the thousand sails,
the thousand feathered darts

that sped them home,
mine, the one dart in the Achilles-heel,
the thousand-and-one, mine."

- H.D., from Helen in Egypt, 1961

Spoiler alert

Edit: why don't I actually link to the article in question?

There's an awesome piece up at Feministe today about the Golden Globes and how women directors (in this case, Kathryn Bigelow) have some pretty systematic biases to overcome in getting credit for their work. And for the most part they have not gotten that credit. Even if you haven't seen any of the movies Sady's referencing, it's an amazing piece of work and worth reading.

Spoiler alert: Avatar is dumb, and The Hurt Locker is not.

"Avatar is a movie that’s designed to be seen, and understood, by everyone. Everybody understands that dinosaurs are awesome and corporate goons are bad and when they fight and go splodey, you root for the dinosaurs, especially if they are really cool-looking. And that’s the level Avatar operates on, and that’s fine."

vs.

"The Hurt Locker has better characters and scarier action scenes and it can definitively establish a man’s character and make a statement about the alienation of modern life and basically explain what the entire movie is about with a shot of a dude looking at some cereal in a grocery store. It is a movie that gets you very excited even though there are no dinosaur fights in it!"

It is a truth universally acknowledged.

Conversations I have often and that never cease to amuse me.

Source/co-worker/other Baraboo local: "So how long have you been here?"
I: "Since July!"
They: "Oh! Got a boyfriend yet?"
I: "Nope!" Satisfied expression.
They: "...oh." Long pause. Clear conflict between wanting to comfort and wanting to offer empowering statement of solidarity. Awkwardness. Usually, a change of subject.

I forgot, it was on my moving to-do list. Buy car, find apartment, get internet hook-up, manhunt.

nothing on but a handkerchief

"Ida had a reputation of being a brilliant woman; this was because everyone knew she had migraine headaches. She would memorize poetry whenever she had them since she knew there was nothing else she could do then. She also had the reputation of being a good woman. This was because she belonged to the WCTU. In spite of it, she loved Charley enough to let him take a picture of her with nothing on but a handkerchief over her face."

"She died in 1924. On her deathbed she couldn't rest easy, she worried, she fretted. She said, "Oh, who'll make Charley change his underwear now?" She was right. No one ever did.

- Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip