Convention and Anal Retention

Well I got back today from the annual Texas Young Democrats convention. I've decided that the drive between Dallas and Hillsboro and Waco and Salado are both unbearable. Even more unbearable is the drive between Ft. Worth and Denton. Honestly, I'll take Dallas traffic over getting stir-crazy in my car driving through the middle of nowhere.

Convention was fun. Most of it was coming from young Democrats to other young Democrats, so that was a good time. I saw Boyd Richie speak, which was cool, and got to see a Q&A with some Young Democrat Super delegates.

Richie is a classic Texas politician. I hear him speak and my mind wanders to "Texian Decor" : offices with leather couches, star cut-outs on every lampshade, door handle and table, Texas Monthly and Texas Parks and Wildlife magazines on the table, backroom deals from the office and a glass of liquor to celebrate the deal. That's not really a bad thing, it's just the way it works here. (We wear "being Texan" on our sleeve most of the time, have you ever been to the Capitol? Yeah, and almost every lawmaker's personal office is that way too, I can assure you.) I got to see the big Texas Cheese, and it was cool.

There was a bit of a generational disconnect though. In one session we were encouraged to use facebook and other online social tools to recruit and gather information on potential Young Democrats. In another, the presenter told us to delete our myspace accounts, facebook profiles and stop blogging. Then he joked that it was already too late. Yeah, too late for an entire generation. Eventually people are going to learn to see the internet as a community, and not merely data on other people. Of course we need to not be dumbasses and put extremely personal information online. I don't think other people should know about intimate relationship details, or my address and what type of underwear I wear, either. At least, that's not my thing. I like reading other people's blogs on the subject, of course. But the thing that older people don't realize is, we don't judge other people for having this information online. It's basically accepted by our youth culture. In fact, it defines us as who we are. Differing values for differing generational cultures.

It boils down to the fact that previous generations have a bigger privacy bubble, and a smaller definition of community. They're usually limited to hometown, neighborhood, alma matter, and work for their social needs. I, on the other hand, dated a guy in high school that was from California. I met him through a friend I knew IRL (in real life, another example of change because of the internet), who met another guy through the internet, and then I met California guy through this guy. That wouldn't have happened a few years ago, and not just because of technological advances, but also because of cultural evolution. People were used to knowing the other person's 2nd cousin once removed, and the rest of their genealogical line, going back several generations.

While we are "strangers" in the sense that we can't really trace a bloodline personally, and that can be a discomfort because there is the quality of the unknown, as well as a bit of a risk, but our youth society as a whole is more likely to judge the individual in that way. I don't really care if you're the first person in your family going to college and your "ancestral manse" consists of a lot in a San Marcos, Texas trailer park. I care whether or not you're a nice person or an asshole, intelligent or stupid, whether you have a sense of humor or are a stick in the mud, curious or ignorant, well adjusted or fucked up, responsible or immature... I make those judgments based on what I know of the person, and they do the same for me.

I am fully aware that a person isn't who they are on the internet, and some people, I actually prefer their internet personas. We have time on the internet to process each thought as we type and post. I've probably deleted at least 1/3 of this post as I typed it, trying to most successfully get my point across without sounding like a slavering gibbering asshole. In conversation, especially over the phone, I am not nearly as articulate, but on the intertubes, I am a goddess of intellect with spell check and wikipedia at my side. I'm okay with the concept that people are different people in different contexts. It's just a part of how I grew up, and the experiences that shaped me.

So yes, I will continue to blog. I will continue to monitor my own interpretation of privacy, and to interact in my generation's version of community.

Literature

I just bought Maus II by Art Art Spiegelman. People are interested until I tell them that it's a graphic novel. "Oh." is usually their response.

"Oh." As in: "Oh, that's a comic book." "Oh, I thought you were smart and read things that were interesting and/or clever." "Oh, I thought you had better things to do with your time." "Oh, I'm going to stop talking to you now because you're a fangirl. Bye!"

Apparently literature has to be bound in leather, smell musty, have little to no pictures or illustrations, and nobody should want to read it.

Maus is a graphic novel. It is literature. Art Spiegelman wrote it about his father's experience in WWII during the Holocaust. The Nazis are cats, the Poles are pigs, the Americans are Dogs and the Jews are mice. Symbolism is cool. It wouldn't have come across as convincingly without the use of the comic medium for sure.

But Maus is not literature, because it has too many pictures.

Wortty Dirds

Everyone is freaking out at the midterm. People are freaking out about midterms, people are getting into drama, and I'm weary of it. I'm so tired of my own usual stresses that just being around other people's stress is stressing me out. 

It's contagious that way.

I'd go into more of the drama crap, but I'm not enough of a bitch to go into it on a public forum, or passive-aggressive enough to do anything else of that kind. Tensions are running high, and feelings are getting hurt right and left. It's a combination of females being females and natural miscommunication. It would play out as an awesome screenplay catfight, lemme tell you.

My hands are chapped. It sucks. The shingles rash itches and aches in turn. I've had to pop a valium or two to keep it from disrupting my sleep, and that's worked so far so that's a blessing.

I've decided that I was freaking out about aperson because she's everything I'm not and everything I wish I could be, or get away with. I'm never going to be petite, overly-attractive, vulnerable, and able to "get around" without people constantly becoming attached or being labeled and disliked as a skank. Never gonna happen, so I may as well get used to it. I still don't like her because of the way she treats me (and everyone else, really), but that's okay. Darling boyfriend says I need to let things roll off my back more, but that's a problem I've always had so it's not going to go away anytime soon. 

I'm trying not to curse as much either. I'm attempting to cut down on the "fuck" and "god damn" in my life. It's about 60% effective at this point. I've been dropping f-bombs right and left when I'm pissed, but it's all but eliminated from casual conversation, which is a good start.

Photobooth on Mac is fun. That is all.

Texas Weather is a Moody Bitch

In like a lion out like a lamb, then in like a lion and out like a lamb...

Eff you, Texas Weather, eff you!

Monday night I had an inch of snow on my car. Today I'm wearing short sleeves and I just saw Leah in shorty shorts. WEIRD!

Also not helping: I have shingles, which is basically chicken pox that has re-activated in my system and is now attacking a nerve cluster along the right side of my body. Grrrrrreat! So I have to use this cream, and a soak and take anti-viral medication like I have herpes or something, which I do, but it's a version of herpes that almost everybody gets. So yea, I guess I'm under some stress or something, huh?

Since I've had so many health problems lately I've decided that I'm probably going to forgo summer school, and probably go home. I have NO IDEA what I'm going to get up to in New Braunfels, but I guess I'll find something interesting to do, somewhere. Basically my plan this summer is to not get fat, or work at Target. How I loathe you, Target. I don't know what's worse, being fat or working at Target. I'm going to have to go for an even tie there. I'll make my mom get me a gym membership and then I'll get all kinds of hot over the summer and try to work somewhere that doesn't suck.

If I get the computer lab job at the end of the semester... then I'll have to try to find something in Denton, because I'll want to. Robin made enough over the summer to stay in an apartment, so I bet I can too. Maybe I'll take a math class at NTCC or something and get that out of the way. A few math classes per week isn't so bad, and I'll have plenty of time to do homework if that's the only class I'm taking. So yea, that's an option.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Seriously What the Fuck?

Today in Seriously What the Fuck:

Lesser Sean just told me a story about how his brother is "rock hard" when he passes out drunk. So brother of Lesser had a 3 hr erection and jammed it down his then-girlfriend now-wife's throat, causing her to throw up. Seriously, what the fuck?

My tonsils are the size of golf balls today. I don't have a fever, and they don't particularly hurt. Seriously, what the fuck?

Hillary wants feminists to vote for her, because she's a woman. So much for being egalitarian. Anyway, feminists are upset at her for resting on her husband's laurels, so they're not voting for her anyway. Most of her voters are less educated, older, white women. Yeah.

And chick lit. It pisses me off. I'm starting to see how demeaning it is, and we just lap that shit up. What the hell is wrong with us? Gretchen Wieners I hate you. I hate you with a fiery burning passion for what you've done to literature. What the hell happened to authors like Maya Angelou and Margaret Attwood? Why can't we take a page out of their books, so to speak?

Scott Pump and Jeffing. My love/hate relationship with denizens of Bruce Hall Lobby continues.

Late night musings...

I think I've developed a crush on Neil Gaiman. Not the physical "I want to tumble around with him awkwardly" sort of crush. More of an intellectual attraction crush. I want to talk to the man. He does sound a bit vain, sometimes, but particularly good writers are particularly known for that kind of thing. I guess maybe because he's "living the dream." Making art and being able to support himself and be considered successful. I have only one reader of my blog (mostly because I try to keep it that way) and my blog is just about as literary as I get these days, much to my mother's chagrin.

I'm frustrated that there are no real female characters of depth in comics. Mostly because 30 year old man-children can't handle it. I understand why basement-dwelling fatsos aren't interested in smart females (they'd only find another reason to reject them) but I still reserve the right to be pissed. If females are there at all they usually have giant breasts (see Power Girl) or wear fishnets (see Zatanna and Black Canary). Dinah has quite a good backstory, actually, but she's mostly depicted as the tantric-sex-having girlfriend and now wife of Green Arrow. Blondes and redheads are of course over-represented. There is a hispanic superheroine, the one that took over as The Question, but aside from being a hot latina lesbian (of course) and a former lover of Bat Woman (who is also an inexplicably hot-but-closeted lipstick lesbian), she's not that interesting. Boys suck. Next thing you know Granny Goodness will come out as a dyke. Of course the dyke would be a supervillianess, right? But I'm jumping ahead of the "boys will be boys" world, aren't I?

In happier news: Obama won the Iowa primary. Thank the lord. I will cry the day a black man is inaugurated. I will cry tears of joy and triumph. My mother says that America is not ready yet for a black man to be President. I think that we're ready for Barack Obama to be President and that it doesn't matter that he's black. It shouldn't matter that he's black. We will elect him as President. We have to.

If I kissed you where you're sore...

Would you feel better, better, better?

The sunlight was filtered through the windy clouds and through the waving branches of all the trees. Wind is strange in the Hill Country. It whips around all the rocks and the evergreens. The trees here look panicked when they sway with the gusts; it's not their usual experience here, unlike in North Texas where it's commonplace.

But the sun. It was cold in the sunlight, thanks to the wind, and the cold front that came through here along with thunderstorms at dawn. They blew over quickly, headed south, back toward the sea. I think they died down before they got there, but I was too busy listening to the all too rare sound of rain to really care about weather patterns, wind advisories, storm warnings...

It was blue skies and wind today.

The kind of blue skies that make me think of fall. Marching band, but later in the season. I can practically hear the toms echoing in my chest, the trumpets in their distant clumps shrilly trying to outdo each other, my heart swelling with excitement at a new season, a new show. Never again. That's something to mourn.

I also think of a carnival I went to with a neighbor girl.

(We used to be friends when we were young. Casey. I wonder what happened to her. What happened to us? It was never clear; all I remember is the hurt, feeling alone. We were just very, very different. I was cerebral, reading books all the time, watching the news. She read Seventeen, listened to country radio stations, wearing makeup. Now I remember...)

The images are seared into my memory somehow. I went with her family in their station wagon (this was before SUVs hit it big) to some Cajun carnival. We played carnival games, mostly. I shot a cork rifle into a bottle and won 3 pogs with Troy Aikman's face on them. I bought a pair of handcuffs for a dollar. They had real locks and two keys. (I kept them until my sister handcuffed herself to our bunk bed. My dad commandeered them after that. I have a strange suspicion they became a "marital aid" after that.)

The sky was so blue and there were no clouds, unlike today. It was just a big blue upside down bowl above us all the way home. It was hot in the sun, and cold in the shade if you sat still. Casey and I sat in the back of the station wagon. It was hot in the back because of all the sun.

We arrived home, lethargic from the heat. I walked down the street to my house, where Troy Aikman was on TeeVee playing football.

Now in the dark and cold I remember another friend and another friendship that fell apart. This girl and I bonded in one of our advanced classes in high school. She lived close to my house. We walked back and forth from her apartments to my house in the evening after school.

Girl and I were inseparable for months. So much unlike Casey and I... Girl and I, we were both cerebral, but still different. We butted heads. I felt cowed by her superior reasoning and gave way when she pushed back. Coward. I think I began to resent her for it.

But before it starts to sting too much here's a good memory:

Girl and I would walk. There was a park near where we lived, with well defined paths. But no, such paths were not for such as we were. We explored, we took the faint dirt paths, scorning the gravel lined ways, to new discoveries, and fancied ourselves mavericks.

We would talk, and talk on our quest for discovery. One day we followed the marked trail, until one or the other of us got bored and we branched off perpendicular, toward a ravine wall. We climbed, dodging cactus and nettles, sharp flint and slippery limestone along the way, until we reached a ledge just big enough for the two of us to sit facing each other, cross legged.

The sunlight fell through the tree branches all around us, lacy and still without any breeze. That ledge in the Balcones Escarpment was almost like it was made for the two of us, for that moment in the afternoon. She had me spread a tarot for her in the dust and we talked about life, mostly her life. I was perceptive enough to know at that point in time that she was troubled, just like me, and did try to give the best advice that someone could give. Either she didn't listen or my advice was terrible (probably a mixture of both) but she was unhappy still.

We came out of our shared reverie and realized it was dusk. The ground had begun to seep its cold back into our legs. The last few cicadas harshly called to one another, shouting their goodnights. Girl and I saw that it was already dark under the trees and that we didn't have a way to climb back down the limestone. There was only up and so we climbed. It wasn't far, and we came out close to the street. The sun had set. I walked her home in the dusk, and then walked home in the dark.

I've tried to find that ledge, many times. With her and without her, it wasn't to be found again. That time in the shadows is gone forever, but I still remember it fondly.

When Girl and I talked, we talked. We had such conversations... Philosophy, religion, tarot, literature, politics, sexuality, all those things eighteen year olds are fascinated with, don't you know. We were so very important, so very full of ourselves. She was going to rule the world. (I should have sensed trouble when she refused to "give me" Europe. I always argued that it was bullshit, I was her best friend after all. Bah, that argument somehow never got old, even at the very end.)

And too... she was older than I was. Although we lived a block or two away our lives couldn't have been any different socioeconomically, and in some ways culturally as well. She was raised Catholic and I was rediscovering my Quaker heritage. She lived in a small apartment with her mother, her brother, her older sister and her older sister's four kids. I lived in a small house with both my parents (although their marriage was just then falling apart, Girl grew up with the knowledge that her family was dysfunctional at least) and my younger sister. I was a virgin (all talk and very much still afraid of sex) and she was... not. (I envied her that...)

I honestly think she didn't understand my upbringing. I wouldn't go so far as to say she resented it, but she didn't really respect where I was coming from. In many ways she didn't take me seriously (not that I deserved to be taken seriously) and that's probably the most hurtful thing to an eighteen year old.

I remember it well. We were in a restaurant and the topic (of course) turned to sex. I tried to call her on her promiscuity. (I never called her a slut in so many words, but it was implied in the statement. Heavily.) She didn't take it too well. I'd like to say I meant it with only the best of intentions, but to be perfectly honest I wanted to cut her back, in my clumsy way. Did she mean to hurt me? Very few of the cuts she inflicted were intentional on her part, but me being me I counted all of them as hurt, and punishable, therefore.

Unlike with Casey, I can actually pinpoint where the friendship began to turn dark. It unraveled from there, that point, that conversation. Unlike with Casey I can say that it was mostly my fault.

However, I do realize that it was in a way unavoidable. While we clashed, we pushed our friendship inexorably away from us.

When I hear Regina Spektor's song "Better" I think of her.