season of the bitch

I wrote something for Global Comment today—should be up tomorrow—about the decade, the politics of it all, and how it was the decade that Americans woke up and got involved again.

Maybe that’s me projecting, though, because the arc of the last ten years for me more than anything else is the formation of my social conscience.

I don’t have any deep thoughts about that at the moment, though—I wore myself out on that.

Instead, 2009. It was a shit year for a lot of people I know, and a shit year sort of collectively, but for me it was an absolutely amazing year. I finished my master’s, saw Obama inaugurated, got my dream internship, moved to New York, met and worked with and befriended people whose work had helped shape me into the writer I am, found out who would have my back and who would go out on a limb for me, and got a job in my chosen career field that I absolutely love, working for a woman who is a constant inspiration. I got stories published in magazines I’ve been reading for years.

Not many people had this kind of a 2009, and it almost makes me sad to see it go because I fear that 2010 won’t be as good.

What didn’t I do in 2009? Pretty much have any sort of a love life. I went on a couple of dates that didn’t result in anything—nice guys that I just didn’t click with. I’m trying to remember if I even kissed anyone in 2009 and I don’t think so (that drunken moment does not count even if part of me did not want to stop it…long story that I’m not telling on the Internet, sorry). I had a series of crushes on absolutely wonderful men, some of whose friendship now I would never trade for a fleeting hookup. But as far as I know I won’t be kissing anyone at midnight, and that’s pretty much OK with me.

New Year’s resolutions? I don’t know if I have any. Maybe to take better care of my body—I eat too much crap and don’t exercise enough. I keep resolving to go dancing more, as it is good for body and soul (and is in fact magic), so maybe I’ll keep that one in 2010.

Tonight? I’m putting on a hot pink dress and I’ve painted my nails with purple glitter and I’m going out to the Lower East Side with some (new) friends. There will be booze. Hopefully champagne, because (hello blog title) it is like liquid happiness and also what is New Year’s Eve without bubbly?

Looking forward: I will keep writing, and keep fighting, and learn new things and meet more new people and love the ones I know better. I WILL kiss someone, and I hope as Mr. Gaiman wished for all of us, that it is someone who thinks I’m wonderful. I will work hard but I will play hard too.

I don’t know if those count as resolutions, or declarations.

2009 might have been good for me, but the past ten years were sort of shit. So let’s have a better decade, everyone.

A friend said on Twitter: 2010: Love, music, wine, and revolution. I think that’s a good plan.

Ms. Pop Feminist has, as always, an interesting take on the Bitch magazine “bailout,” which sounds so much stranger after the rash of bailouts of the financial sector. She makes excellent points about the way the campaign was conducted, the nature of print, and the nature of the Web, and I wrote her a small novel in return, which I’m reprinting here, since it was giant, and rather interesting.

As always, I love you for your willingness to put shit out there.

And here, you’re absolutely right.

The death of old media is in part the death of our need to be talked at. I say this with three print copies of The Nation next to me (home of several of my fave “public intellectuals,” including Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich).

A friend and I were discussing the lack of liberal public intellectuals a few weeks back. It was in the context of television and how well the conservative movement has done in funding think tanks and providing “experts” for television.

But especially in the feminist movement, you’re quite right that the desire to conserve print is the desire to conserve some form of authority. One that we simply don’t need.

Blogging is not journalism, but neither, for the most part, is what Bitch does. It’s also opinion writing.

The largest problem that I can see with the move to the Web is that it is harder to monetize. Much as I hate the word, the fact remains that Virginia Woolf’s argument from “A Room of One’s Own” remains true. I’m broke, I have to work to make a living, and that leaves me less time for actual journalism, blogging, reading, research, and creative work. If I cannot make money doing any of those things, then I have to find another way.

But rather than clinging to print as the last way we can make money (sort of) as writers and therefore dedicate ourselves to being if not public intellectuals, at least stimulators of the discourse (yeah, that sounds pretentious too, but I can’t think of a better word), we need to be figuring out how we can make a living as writers and artists in a world that gets its media primarily over the Web.

I had my first written final exam of graduate school–and, I hope, my last–tonight. My knuckles are still sore, like I punched a wall. Also hope I won’t punch a wall when I find out my grade. Shouldn’t, though.

I hold myself to different standards than most of my classmates, it seems. Wish I’d done so as an undergrad. But even then I graduated with a 3.75. OK, yes, I’m a nerd.

Not a big enough nerd, it seems, to actually be upset if people slag me off on the ‘Net. See, this is the cool thing: I at least have a bit of a life when I walk away from this computer. A few friends who actually like me for me. That always helps.

Tomorrow I am off to see the reunion of a band I totally love, Boss Hog, at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC. Because I’m just rock’n'roll like that. Not as rock’n'roll as Cristina Martinez, but I can dream.

I officially have one semester left on my master’s. God knows what I’ll do after that. But I haven’t been able to sustain a freakout for more than a day. Good feelings, somewhere deep inside, are carrying me through. That and self-confidence.

It’s been a long time coming.

So, my dears, the holidays are coming up and I’ll be attempting to spend some more time with said friends and family. I’ll still be around, and sans schoolwork will probably be blogging aplenty, here, as well as at Newsarama, Bust and Alterdestiny. And don’t forget Global Comment.

No wonder I need a break.

So I’m reading and idly thinking about the difference between a “scene” and a community.

A scene is a place to be seen. It is by the very choice of that word, a setting, something visual, spatial, artificial. The scene is the clothes you wear to the punk rock show–the community is the group you go home with afterward, or stumble to the diner to talk it all over afterward.

The scene can be a place for community to grow, but it can also kill community by creating the illusion that this is all there is. If all it appears to be is clothes and club nights, then you reject everything when you take off those clothes and stop going to the club nights.

If it means more than clothes–if it means music, art, politics, blood, bone and love–most of all love–then no matter what you wear or how old you get, your community will not fail you.

This is why modern hipsterism feels so damn empty. It is nothing but visual, spatial. You can’t be a hipster on the telephone. You can be on the internet, but only in pictures snapped at the cool parties, with the cool kids, in the cool clothes. You cannot be a hipster alone in the forest.

To write, create, you must go beyond hip. You must go beyond the scene. My writing prof is always nagging us to write a story, not a scene, to find something deeper, something meaningful, something that changes you.

This is why I have more love even for a book like Twilight, cheesy, occasionally inept and often laugh-inducing when it’s not meant to be, because it has not the slightest bit of irony. And this is why it has a rabid fan base (more later). Because to write, to create, you have to put yourself out there to risk being mocked.

And this is why books like that create communities, friendships, bonds, even though many people cheerily admit that they know it’s terrible.

The blogosphere is my new punk rock scene, but more than that, it’s my new community. As I grow older and hide my tattoos under sweaters and skirts and high heels. It creates communities because we cannot be seen. It is not temporal–once you put something on the Internet it is there for good, and you lose control of it–and it is not spatial, because where is the Internet?

While we may blog our bodies, perhaps, we blog those inner pieces that are not so easy to see or to change. Perhaps I would have been more accurate to say that we blog the experiences our bodies have had, have caused for us or been through. After all, would blogging as a Jewish woman be the same for me in Israel as it is in Philadelphia? Was I the same in Boston as I was in South Carolina? It is not just our bodies but the social construction of and around our bodies that really shapes who we are.

And we find community within those lines and across them. Because we put ourselves out there, not to be seen, but to be understood.

some thoughts

While an undergrad, I did a bit of research and writing on the idea of “writing the body.” It came from a feminist discourse, study of the so-called “French feminists,” Irigaray and Cixous and the like. And then of course our prof tossed in Butler to screw things up a bit more.

If I had/have the time to dig up Donna Haraway this might make more sense. But it is constantly interesting to me that in a virtual-world like the blogosphere, where one’s body is not visible or tangible through the array of technology that creates our little online worlds, so many of us choose still to write from the point of view of our bodies. I cannot be anyone but who I am, I suppose.

This may be why I resist the typical journalistic fetishization of “objectivity” as a good in itself, because it erases the speaker/writer from existence. The “objective” journalist must have no race, no gender, no sexual orientation, no ethnic background, nothing but language, which is presupposed to be masculine, right? (Lacan, I’m looking at you.)

I will not be erased. I don’t post a picture of myself next to each blog entry, but I am out here in the open, my real name on the page, easily linked to Twitter and Facebook and Flickr and any number of things that tell you more and more about ME.

So even though I could create myself an identity online that is not gendered, I don’t and many of us don’t. We could leave our bodies behind and write from some disembodied place that claims authority–the God trick, right?

But it’s not really possible, is it?

So do we write our bodies because they have constructed us, or in an attempt to define, construct, and reclaim them?

(feel free to ramble back at me in comments)

I’ve gotten good at traveling, at dreaming dreams on other people’s couches, splashing my face clean in strange bathrooms, packing light.

I know how to squeeze the last drop of gas out of my car, what to put in a carry-on, how many shirts will last a weekend. I sleep better on a couch than I do in my own bed when there’s someone else in it.

When people ask “where are you from” I laugh and tell them that’s a long story. I’m from lots of places, really.

But each time I pass through here, I remember where I’m really from. I’m from Boston. New England is in my blood. It’s in the way I walk and talk and thrill to first snows. I am in love with NYC but don’t know if it’ll ever be the right fit.

When I see my oldest friend here, we fall exactly back into how we were. So few people I can actually do that with, catch up on stories and laugh about memories. We never change.

Off to the train now to New Hampshire, family and friends and New England seafood and small-town hills.

This is home.

…and help me write.

Tell me a story of the last time you knew that your love was over. Did you look into their eyes and realize or did it happen when they took your hand and you felt nothing, and  you actually preferred your hand unheld?

Was it a touch in a spot that used to make you shiver or a whisper that failed to make the hairs rise on the back of your neck?

A kiss that you didn’t close your eyes for, or a kiss that you had to close your eyes for

One time I knew because I was thinking of someone else when he wanted to have sex. And I tried to make myself stop but then  I had to try to make myself keep thinking of that someone else to get turned on enough to go through with it. And yet when I tried to let things end I couldn’t stand the hurt in his eyes and I kept reaching out to touch him and once I did, it wouldn’t end.

Another time I simply knew, lying in bed next to him, that I wasn’t going to do this again. That it wasn’t that he was a bad guy or had done anything, but that I just didn’t care that much and never had and it wasn’t worth it to me. And that he deserved more than my indifference.

One time I didn’t know until someone else kissed me. Too late to realize, I guess.

What’s your story?

Sometimes I am prescient.

Other times I’m just tired and want to curl up on the couch with the dog, my fuzzy faux-leopard blanket, and Marlon Brando’s broken nose on the TV.

Certain things are always and forever comforting even when I’m not quite sure why I’d be in need of comfort. Retreating into my own little world, with work to do, yes, but not enough to make me feel bad for putting it aside except for the story brewing somewhere in the back of my mind. The story has a hand twisting a ring, red lights reflected on the rain on a cab’s windshield, whispers, and a space of inches that might as well be miles. I’m not sure how it’s coming together yet, but it will.

The books that surround me on the couch are all begging me to read them for different reasons. A collection of Neil Gaiman’s short stories, my Law text, “The Political Economy of Media” by my fave media scholar, Robert McChesney, a couple of Warren Ellis comics, and my notebooks full of bits of thoughts, research, quotes and more stories.

The dog missed me for the last two days while I was couch-hopping in NYC seeing my favorite people (many of them, anyway) and thinking and seeing the glitter of lights on tall glass buildings reflected through train windows into my eyes. Watching a pretty boy reading a magazine in the reflection in the window. Dreaming.

Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront is beautiful, strong, and innocent. A good girl that I’ve never been. A static character, sure, but one that thinks and feels and loves and hurts. She’s a rock that Brando can break himself against or can use to pull himself up to his feet and be a man.

I always believed I could be that person for someone. Now I’m not so sure.

I’m too foul-mouthed and cynical, too practical and too good at hiding my romantic streak. I hide my heartbreaks inside laughter and flirting and jokes about my tits. I am too willing to argue. Maybe once upon a time I was innocent and unscarred and willing to open up, but it’s been a while since I’ve even unscrewed the jar I locked my heart up in and poked at it to see if it still bleeds.

I write better when I’m half-asleep, lost in thought, barriers down. The passion my professor wants from me–yes. But if I let it out, will I be able to stop?

maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen and there are so many pieces of me that most people haven’t seen. Just a few who’ve seen me break down completely and still love me.

I resist and you resist and we resist and we end up alone.

The person I spent the longest time with, the one who heard me say “I love you” more than any other, never knew me. And only partly because he didn’t want to. The rest was because I wouldn’t let him. And yes, he would have left, and that would’ve been the right thing, because I faked it too long and too hard and I wasn’t going to be happy with faking it. But of course I kept it right up.

What’s wrong with us that so much of our lives are a performance?

I prefer the performance I give here. The bits of honesty. Then I don’t need to put on a brave face. I can put on movies and try to cry.

I cried when my cat died. I cried when a security guard yelled at me at the end of a long day. I cried at my friend’s wedding, and I cried at a memorial service in a hospital in Maryland for a friend who was still nominally alive in a room down the hall.

Lately I just want to cry to remember what it’s like to feel things. To remember what “I love you” felt like when I said it and meant it.

Searching for something to blow my mind again.

“To me, the real truth is always a bigger turn-on. Send me your most pathetic moments, your most anything, as long as it’s real. I want the size, the shape, the feel, the smell. I want blood, sweat and tears on these letters. I want brains, and ectoplasm and cum spilled all over ‘em. Hallelujah.”

I got a late-night text message the other day from a friend that reminded me that yes, Pump Up The Volume is still an excellent movie. (What happened to you, Christian Slater? Samantha Mathis?)

So last night I watched it myself, trying to get some sleep after ranting and raving about McCain’s hypocrisy and the economic bailout plan, and remembered what I loved about it. Of course, I like the idea of a pirate radio DJ fucking up the whole town to the tune of Leonard Cohen and the Descendents, but I also like the idea of just spilling your guts out all over the place, of telling everything and nothing all at once.

We’re the overshare generation, we don’t feel like anything’s really happened unless we’ve shared it on Facebook or Twitter. I wrote about all this a few days ago. Yet so little of it feels like honesty. Much more of it feels like public relations. Managing your image, putting up only the flattering pictures, the ones that show how cool you are with all your friends, telling only the best moments.

Real, unflinching honesty comes either with anonymity, whether it’s disguising your voice on pirate radio in an 80s movie or putting up a blog with a pseudonym and no identifying details, or with those moments when you’re actually looking someone in the eyes. Where the bullshit collapses.

Sometimes I feel like one big raw nerve that despite all my words, the pretty ones and the ugly ones, is hidden away from people, just below reach. Wrapped in a layer of something that dulls all the little sensations, just enough so I can think about ‘em.

I still have some secrets. I turn some of them loose in ‘fiction,’ making them into pretty stories for others to read, putting meaning behind events that I still can’t quite interpret, making people into characters I can understand.

More often, though, my scars and damage are on as full display as my filthy sense of humor and my willingness to debate issues with anyone. I prefer raw. I want to know all the mistakes, all the messes, all the problems, the things that hurt, that make you cry. I want to know what you think about when you’re alone at night, even if there’s someone there next to you (those moments can be worse than any when you’re actually alone, can’t they? When the person who’s supposed to get it just doesn’t anymore?)

Maybe it’s how I’ve kept myself out of therapy. Or maybe I do need therapy, who knows.

I know I’m a good listener in part because I collect stories. But it’s also because I like the messes. I screw up so often I can’t even count ‘em at this point, I break my own heart more than anything else. Perfect has little appeal to me.

Bring on the pain, the mistakes, the losses, the scars. I want to know. Tell me your stories.

I love my car, but I am starting to love the train more. I have fewer distractions than at home so I read faster, think clearer, can get work done, get good ideas. Or just enjoy a beautiful day’s slow end on the other side of the glass–a day so lovely that even New Jersey glows.

I sit here with my iPod playlist and think about being lonely being a good thing sometimes–being alone with my feelings that are both raw and yet strangely protected. I can’t remember the last time I cried.

I’ve been trying to draw it out of myself lately, too. Trying to evoke that feeling of rushing, gulping sobs or even just the catharsis of tears at the end of a great sad movie. Nothing.

So the loneliness I feel is just enough for me to dig into and come up with stories. To use those feelings to create, to inspire, to float.

To think beautiful thoughts tinged with sadness but not really all the way there.

The world is a sick, twisted, scary place, but it’s beautiful and I am oddly grateful right now for everyone I’ve ever loved and everyone who loved or loves me, in whatever way they’ve offered. Whatever beauty and happiness they bring to my life, whether a brief memory, a lingering dream, or a message in text from some piece of cold technology that nevertheless does help us connect.