Sunday, October 11, 2009 Okay, so, I wish those widgets weren't stacked on top of each other like that, but my desire for justice and equality is very slightly stronger than my desire for neat and tidy presentation. So, those are the links to sign the petitions for the mentioned LGBT issues, but on each of them, I would also strongly suggest you send an e-mail of your own to your representatives. With DOMA, which I think may be the most important issue on the list, I would suggest visiting RepealDomaNow.org to do so, they have a lovely convio-powered form that will allow you to automatically send your message to the relevant parties. This is a little trickier with the fight to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell-- the only site I found with a convio-powered form to do that is that of the Log Cabin Republicans. Don't be scared off by the name, my liberal friends-- the log cabin republicans are a group of republicans that lobby just on behalf of LGBT issues, and filling out the form will not send a letter with any secret conservative agenda-- it's just a very simple way to get in contact with the correct people about Don't Ask, Don't tell. The HRC has apparently also started PassENDANow.org, which I have just now discovered-- again, convenient, convio-powered for telling your representatives that you'd like to see legislation pass which would prevent people across the USA from being fired because they're gay.
Not a lot of time to write, and not feeling particularly motivated to, but I have to say that I was very moved by the president's speech to the HRC tonight. I know a lot of people out there in the gay community think that it was all just beautiful speech with no action-- I gotta tell you, I think they're underestimating the importance and power of beautiful speech. I'm proud to have a president who is willing to get up and say unequivocally how he thinks the LGBT community is equal and should be treated as such, and this kind of verbal leadership rallies the masses-- those of you out there complaining about his lack of action, take a note from another beautiful speaker and ask what you can do for your country. Many of you have already taken action, but can you do more?
On top of which, the president made some very valid points about how the issues he is working on every day are issues that pertain to all Americans, including the LGBT community. Okay, yes, I know that this probably seemed to the wary listening like he was just putting off the needs of the community, but he wasn't vague or indecisive about his intent to undo Don't Ask, Don't Tell, his support of efforts to repeal DOMA, his desire to see ENDA signed into law. Let's keep in mind, most of these are things that the president, himself, cannot actually do-- these are things that he can work with congress on, that he can voice his support of, that he can make priorities. But we have three branches of this government for a reason, and that makes it impossible for him to right all the wrongs with one swift movement. Congress has to be involved, and that means we have to get involved.
Send the letters. Sign the petitions. Tell your friends and families to do the same-- if you're like me (and married), you just sign all these things twice-- once with your own name, once with your spouse's. (No, I'm not trying to disenfranchise my husband. They're plenty of things we disagree on politically, but he's given me a blanket permission slip to act as him in LGBT issues.)
Anyway. Maybe take a moment to let the man's beautiful words sink in, to be motivated, and to do what this very small series of things, potentially to make a very big difference. Maybe take a moment to breath, remember that thi isn't the Bush administration anymore, count your blessings, and give the man with the silver tongue some trust, at least until he's given you a real reason not to. If he's working a little too slowly for some of your tastes, well, I'd rather see him blossom slowly than completely fuck it up, and then be defeated by a Republican in the next election. This upcoming decade is way too important for that.
Okay, maybe I was *a little* inclined to write. On with it.
Sunday, September 13, 2009 For posterity, and for those of you who don't know, I will preface this post by saying that I have now officially started attending classes full-time at Southern Maine Community College, working towards an associate degree in liberal arts, with a concentration in arts. This decision regarding my field of study was motivated by my strong desire to one day illustrate my own children's books , as well as by my lifelong interest in art and all things creative. So far, I am enjoying the experience-- I love the campus, and I like the challenge. The very, very real challenge.
Tonight, my assignment-- should I say, one of my many, many assignments-- is to do four cut-paper compositons focusing on line; diagonal, horizontal/vertical, curved/organic, and mixed. Black on white. And maybe that's the root of my problem.
Black and white are not colors I'm used to-- that stark contrast of one idea against another, of, let's face it, wrong against right. Maybe it's in my nature to strive for the familiar ambiguouty of grayscale; maybe it is through a psychological compulsion towards things that are hopelessly complicated that I find myself accidentally fraying the edges of the black paper against the white, creating the illusion of gray. I rub the dry rubber cement peaking out from under the sides of what should be neat-and-tidy edges, balling it up for easy removal and creating ugly little messes that I hate, but can never seem to clear away completely, no matter how furtively I try. Maybe I don't believe the art I create deserves to be free of them. Maybe I don't consider myself above this moral haze.
For those of you paying strict attention, yes, I am making a metaphor about my life out of my art homework. This is why I'm not an english major-- I don't need any more help with that bullshit.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where no one involved is really right, no one is the good guy? Everyone could be considered a villain in some capacity, but there's no hero to be found? The situation I've found myself in, there are no truly sympathetic characters, just a lot of people who are in constant flux, gaining and losing sympathy for each other in their oddly parallel weaknesses. I've aligned myself with the character who is, perhaps, the least sympathetic of all involved, and find myself almost violently defensive of his basic and inalienable goodness, despite the story building around him, determined to cast him as the weakest link in a paper chain. Defensive of him to the extent that it's put strain on relationships that should be absolutely uninvolved, maybe ended one. Depending on the point of view, I could easily be getting the silver medal insofar as blame and immorality, despite my efforts to hold onto the ever-vindicating (ha!) virtue of honesty, or at least, honesty in amounts directly proportionate to the sum of my affection and respect for the recipient. Coming in third-- again, depending on viewpoint-- is a woman I don't want to expound on, really. A woman who I doubt I could speak about with any modicum of impartialness, a woman I did not know at all outside the influence of this sphere of insanity which we've, all three, been sucked into.
I mean, some with a little bit more emphasis on insanity than others, but I digress.
What is, of course, compelling about this situation, wrought with vice, is that it does not exist but for the one perfect virtue. Love, the greatest motivator of our strengths, so often the backdrop to our most hurtful mistakes. Love, in it's brightest, burning red can't help but reduce the blacks and whites of this world to nearly indiscernible shades of gray. I don't go to or remain loyally and defensively at his side without it, nor is he compelled to mine, nor is she pushed or pulled by either of us. Nor are the bounds of our own quiet consciences violently tested without it, nor are any of us kept awake at night, nor are any of us compelled to wake in the morning. Nor are families built without it, tested without it, wrecked without it; rebuilt, retried, continued on without it.
Nor, it seems, are words written without it-- and not just by me, right now. Love, the great muse. Reading the words of my mirror, I am challenged to keep this ode to love so reverent, challenged once more to strive towards grace, challenged, as ever, to wipe desperately away at the mess to see what lies, and is beautiful, beneath.
On with it. You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 11:41 PM
Monday, August 31, 2009 With very little else I feel like sharing with the world at large (or, plenty that I'd be willing to share with a group of total strangers, but that simply is not the group I'm offered, lately), let's do this meme again. Here are the rules:
Put your music player (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc.) on Shuffle or Random mode, press Play, and list your favorite line or verse from the first 10 songs that it plays. Then get your friends to guess the artist and song title of each lyric. Fun! (You can skip instrumental-only songs, but no skipping of the embarrassing songs!)
Did this one last, on this site, on February 7th, 2008, then again on livejournal for Emily, who did not get enough of the answers the first time around. (I'm reading through some of the livejournal entries, which are all these quiz thingies, and thinking that my most eager vistor as of late is going to have a ball with them. Over and over again, I talk about how my biggest weakness is falling in love with people. One random question/Answer: "17. When do you know it's love? Too often. That's when.")
Anyway. On with the music quiz thingy (I keep wanting to call it a meme, but I've come to believe that's not actually what these things are. I guess that's one of those new-fangled words I just don't understand), since my collection has expanded greatly in the past year (to be something I'm really, really proud of. I really enjoy my diverse taste in music.) If I come up against a song that I honestly can't pick a good line out of, I'll skip it, but I'll tell y'all what it is I'm skipping. Also, I feel no reason to keep it to one line, if it turns out that the part I like best is really a few. It's my quiz thingy.
1. "Now that money comes and goes a bit faster than my confidence grows. Everybody knows there ain't nothing new about money woes."
I have to skip this song, "Theme From Pinata", by Bright Eyes. It's from one of the Bright Eyes CDs I kinda forgot I owned, and so I never added it to my iPod until recently. Thusly, I think this is probably only the third or so time I've heard it. It's a shame, though, it seems to have a lot of great lines.
2. "And why'd ya sing Hallelujah if it means nothing to ya? Why'd you sing with me at all?"
(I have to try to remember that this is the one of the songs that references 'Hallelujah' that I definitely want to include on the future Mix CD I've promised for Sam. That is, once I've written the song I've promised, to close it with.
Skipping "Time Won't Let Me" by The Smithereens. Great band, not their best song, no lyrical gems.
3. "Wears high heels when she exercises. Ain't that beautiful?"
(Grew to love that line when I was on my original "dance hour" kick, and I, too, would exercise in high heels. I also like "Her confidence is tragic, but her intuition, magic.")
4. "It's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all."
(I feel a little cheap; that's obviously the most quoted line from that song. But it's definitely the best. Maybe I could have gone with "Tears and fears and feeling proud, to say 'I love you' right out loud." Man, this is just a great song.)
Skipping "These Things" by She Wants Revenge. This song just freaks me out, as do a lot of the songs by She Wants Revenge. I've tried to make peace with that weird part of myself that they alarm, but it's just not worth it anymore. I'll keep "Tear You Apart" and take the rest of the iPod. I need the space, anyway.
5. "I catch the bad guys, well, most of the time. So it's a good life, a perfectly good life. Not exactly sublime."
6. "So take it off, like you home alone, you know, dance in front your mirror while your on the phone. Checking your reflection and tellin' your best friend, like 'Girl, I think my butt gettin' big.'"
7. "Now I do as I please, and lie through my teeth. Someone might get hurt, but it won't be me. I should probably feel cheap, but I just feel free, and a little bit empty."
8. "Your face like a vision straight out of Holly Hobbie. Late light drizzling through your hair. Your eyes, twin volcanoes."
Skipping "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees, because I can't come up with a line that I've ever actually bothered listening to other than the first, which would be a dead giveaway.
9."I do anything for you. Beat someone black and blue. Black and blue, and I'd do it for you."
(Never actually took the time to listen to the lyrics of the verses of that song before. Enlightening.)
Skipping "November 22, 1963" from the Assassins soundtrack, because, as moving as it is (I would have shot JFK with that kind of peer pressure going on.), it's not actually a song. And an instrumental version of "All The Pretty Little Horses".
Skipping "Simply Kind of Life" by No Doubt because I want to link to this entry that I wrote which featured it, but that'll ruin your chance to guess. Skipping Lit's "My Own Worst Enemy", because the song went all the way through while I was looking for the link to that last post, and then this next song came up, and I really love this next one, so it's more appropriate to end with.
10. "So I will find my fears and face them, or I will cower like a dog. I will kick and scream or kneel and plead. I fight like hell to hide that I've given up."
If you don't feel like guessing on that last one, and you happen to love my archives as much as I, sadly, do, read this post, the first in 2007. It's very musical.
I'm opening comments, if you'd like to take your guesses. On with it.
You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 1:29 AM
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
"And check out my hair. It's so unstyled, it's like a pile of stand."
~Casey J.
Looking through my archives, I find a link to Casey's old livejournal site and go. His last post to that site was in 2007, which would have been a year that I had very little to do with him.
I was about to write this whole post about how clear to me it was, while I was reading that, why I was crazy about him-- how smart he is, how funny, what a great writer. And there's something so sexy about his cockiness, and his dismissal. You know that cliché that women go crazy over the bad boys who act like they don't even like them? Casey is, like, the geeky journalist version of that.
But as I'm about to start writing this thing about how great his post was, about how his post made me feel, I realized that I didn't even read the whole fucking thing. That I couldn't bring myself to read it. There's a possibility that this somehow indicates that he's not as interesting as I'm giving him credit for-- more likely, it means that I'm still smarting from the way our friendship (essentially) ended, by the way it left me feeling utterly inferior to him.
I gotta get my shit together and learn things. Start reading Newsweek, listen to more NPR than I already do. Get some strong backing for my opinion on universal health care, and all of the other political issues. And other shit that would make me interesting to him again. Spend more time playing video games. Spend more time climbing fences. Start a fight club. Go seduce some more women. Write about fucking anything other than myself (and him. And other people in my life who I have all these bullshit "feelings" about.)
Maybe the coolest I've ever been in my life was when Casey Labrack still thought I was cool. Probably the least cool I've ever been was as I was typing that sentence.
This is not the way back to win back his respect, his attention, or his "ineffable fondness." Writing about vague ambitions to be better, do better, know more, but never really do anything about them. Just the fact that these ambitions are more about getting him back than they are about being a intellectually curious person, well, that sort of poisons anything I could accomplish. But he doesn't have to know that-- that is, if I could shut up about it for even a second.
I tell myself, don't be so hard on myself. One week from today (technically yesterday, since it's after midnight), I am going back to school, and this time, I'm going to go learn things that I want to know. I'm not being so career-minded, I'm not clawing and scratching my way out of a crappy job and a going-nowhere life...I mean, I am, but not quite as desperately, and with enough patience to make it more about the journey than the destination. This first semester, I registered for four art-related classes and, with a great deal of anxiety, music chorale. I just decided it was time to be brave-- time to ignore the people over the years (my sister) who have repeatedly told me that I can't sing at all, and just learn what I can, and be the best I can be at it, whatever level of skill that may be, because, frankly, I love singing. I always have. So it's time to just do it, incredibly scary as it might be.
That's kind of cool, right?
Maybe, one day, soon, I'll be publishing the children's books I've written and illustrated. Maybe I'll dedicate one to him-- or, better yet, I'll dedicate one to me, a little parable for the kids in the audience about being yourself, about not trying too hard to impress someone else. About having self-respect, about loving whatever it is about yourself that makes you special. And it'll sell a million copies, be an instant classic, and I'll be beloved, and successful, and I'll make millions of dollars.
Then I'll buy him a vintage El Camino, so he'll have to be my friend.
On with it. You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 12:00 AM
Monday, August 17, 2009
I haven't wanted to write in this for a few days, due to various circumstances that need not be discussed in a public forum. But a few things are backing up, just some little bits and pieces that probably don't make up a full post anyway, so let's let them out:
-Tomorrow, I get to go see Mr. L and have a head-on conversation about his advice that I sleep with another man-- which I didn't take. Which I'm not going to take. I'm going to ask him exactly what the fuck he was thinking, I'm going to write it down, if I can remember, that early in the morning, to take a pen and notepad. I'm going to explain to him all the various consequences of his just giving the advice, let alone what would have happened if I had taken it. And I'm going to find out, once and for all, what the old hippy thinks of marriage, and decide whether or not he's the appropriate man to be seeing in an attempt to rescue mine.
If he doesn't piss me off too damn much, and he might, then I'll schedule an appointment for Zack and I to attend together. Won't this be fun?
-My ideal form of celebrity: to be one of these hot, B-listy celebrities that gets to be on the cover of playboy without having to actually show anything on the inside. Last month, Olivia Munn was rocking the cover, but the one picture of her on the inside featured her in panties that she was sort of vaguely pulling down (but she hadn't revealed anything), with her nipples safely under her hair. This month, Heidi Montag from the hills looks so fucking hot on the cover, it makes me want to go out and shoot that douche Spencer (with the creepy, flesh-colored beard, if you follow the soup) more than I usually do, but her photoshoot on the inside is completely tame, there's only one photo showing crack, every other major hotspot is totally covered. These are the the kind of photoshoots you expect in Maxim, not playboy.
If I got the choice of which magazine to be in, and I mean, I never will, but if I did, I'd pick playboy over Maxim, but just barely. The bunny is what puts it over the top. Gotta love an iconic rodent.
-And now for a few public letters:
Dear Rachel Maddow:
I know you're supposedly very happy with your life partner, but if that ever changes, I'd like to go ahead and put my name on the list, or whatever. Somehow, I definitely think you're the sexiest woman in the public eye-- you've knocked Angelina Jolie, Eva Mendes, and Scarlett Johanson right down the list.
If the people's veto goes through, I'll move to Massachussetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, wherever. Say the word and I'll leave Zack, Rachel. Anything for you.
With Love,
Linda H.
-And, to Cosmo.
Dear Cosmopolitan Magazine:
What the fuck? On the cover of the August Issue (with the Katy Perry Cover), you tooted to have an article inside about "The Orgasm Whisperer", and how "every woman needs one." I spent a long month wondering precisely what that article could be about, fascinated by all the different possibilities--- could it be a hypnotherapist who rents out their craft to orgasm-lacking women everywhere? Instructions for chanting yourself into a tantric state of bliss? Some kind of bizarre audio device? What, what what?
I finally checked out the article today. It was about lube. Personal Lubricant. It claimed I could make my man into an "orgasm whisperer" by just using lube.
WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM, COSMO? GO TO HELL!
Bullshit false advertising. Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Linda H.
I've always hated all the assumptions that Cosmo magazine makes about it's readers. If you've picked up a copy, you must be a 110-pound career-oriented CEO who pulls in 250k a year, with fucking spectacular sex life and great fashion sense. How many women out there like that actually read Cosmo? I'm guessing two. And I hate them both. I hope they and there slimy orgasm whispering boyfriends fuck themseves off a cliff.
Hmmm. I may be bitter tonight. Towards everyone but my Rachel.
Kinda a wasted post, but it's a matter of staying in practice. See you soon, maybe even with something relevant to say. On with it! You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 10:00 PM
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
"Picture this, we were both buck naked, banging on the bathroom floor."
Man, I haven't heard this song in a long time. Totally had it stuck in my head the other day for...uh, no apparent reason. Right.
In attempts to get the information from my old computer onto the new computer, I'm finding a lot of old files that had somehow gotten lost. Lot of songs I haven't heard for a while. Maybe songs that it didn't occur to me I'd actually miss...actually, the evidence suggests that they were songs that I didn't, in fact, miss.
Talking to James, who I've previously spoken of as the benefactor who bought SuedeCaramel.com for me. As truly grateful as I am to him or that, it didn't occur to me that his generosity isn't without some, uh, provisos? See, while he has always made it so SuedeCaramel.com and, for the matter, LindaHild----.com come directly here, he never actually gave me control of the two addresses.
James: Well, I could do anything. For example i could point your name to midget goat porn.
Oh....oh yeah. I guess he could.
I oddly thought James was a fan of the site, from the way he will occasionally harass me when I don't update. Turns out, about two or three times a year, he'll come, read every post on the page, and leave.
Well, I'll take it.
James: have you thought about the next step after blogging?
Linda: is there a step you have in mind?
James: lifecasting
Linda: hahahahaa
Linda: what the fuck is lifecasting?
James: you setup a webcam, it runs 24/7
James: It's put somewhere like a livingr oom or central area where people are clothed
James: and you spend time with the lovely people of the internet when your online.
Linda: I don't think it's quite the obvious progression that you make it out to be. I'm a writer.
James: Right, but it allows interactivity with the world i guess?
Linda: well, no. Interacting with the world allows interactivity with the world.
James: Not nessisarially.
I know he doesn't come off as the smartest guy in the world in that conversation, but don't judge too harshly-- if you look closely, you'll see that spelling of necessarily works, phonetically.
So, thinking about LindaHil-----.com, I was compelled to type my nameinto google to see what comes up. Surprisingly, it's pretty hard to find this site by doing that, which is odd-- it wasn't hard, say, two or three months ago. What did come up were a couple of posts from the weekend of my wedding-- not on this site, but Emily's old diaryland page. This one was written the day of, this one, which talks about the wedding decidedly more, was written the day after.
Emily was possibly not as charming talking about my wedding as I tried to be when I wrote about hers-- oh? Jenn looked gorgeous? Great. Thanks. The bride is only mentioned as being "awkward" and "mildly obnoxious", but Jenn looks gorgeous-- but I'll try not to be bitter. The blushing bride that was me was not in the same league as the blushing bride that was Emily.
I guess, with things the way they are now, I'm a little sensitive to the fact that Emily kept describing the whole thing as being not real to her-- oddly, it kind of reminds me of those idiotic Birthers who think Obama is not the real president because "he was secretly born in Kenya." Wanting the story from a different source, I went to see what it was I thought to write about my wedding day.
Hmmm. Nothing.
The last post before my wedding was a lovely, Edna St. Vincent Millay-style sonnet that I wrote presumably because I did something horrible. The next was written in January, and it covers the wedding a little bit tersely. So, I guess Emily, in all her incredulousness, covered the day better than I bothered to. It's a real shame. I could really benefit from crawling back inside the mind of that girl, that girl who wanted him so badly, that girl who wore that dress, who walked that aisle.
Jenn wants me plan a do-over, which is what I've wanted since day one. I wish I'd gone ahead and planned it for our fifth anniversary-- it's a good, round number, and it fell on a Saturday. Seems weird to do it on the sixth or the seventh, weirder still to do it on a day that's not an anniversary at all, though mid-October isn't necessarily ideal for the location I, at long last, decided on: Salem Willows, the beautiful park on the water in Salem, Massachusetts. I look forward to going there every year with Zack during the summer, to feed the squirrels and pigeons. There's a place where we buy popcorn (delicious popcorn) and bags of roasted nuts for them. There's an amphitheater we could have the ceremony in, covered picnic structures for the reception, a carousel we could possibly rent. If the weather in October wasn't just slightly too cold, well, maybe I'd start planning something, maybe for the tenth.
Except, at this point, who knows for sure whether my marriage will make it to be six. Nobody whose been paying attention, that's for sure.
The shame of it is, if I ever got divorced, well, okay, I might one day get the benefit of a second wedding one day, maybe, but I couldn't do it there. I'd have to come up with a whole new perfect location. Salem Willows is our place.
Those are our squirrels, our pigeons. Our bags of peanuts twisted close at the top, our delicious popcorn. Our sun-covered days by the sea; everyone else there, they're just props. It's our tradition, our bliss, something I'd never do again, without him beside my side.
I can't think about it.
On with it. I hope.
You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 1:22 AM
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Harry: What does this song mean? For my whole life I don't know what this song means. I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot". Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them!?
Sally: Well may be it just means that we should remember that we forgot them, or something.
~Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, When Harry Met Sally
No, Meg Ryan. That's a bad idea. It's a horrible feeling. Remembering that you forgot.
"There's only one moment I need to write....I shouldn't write it at all. I should delete this e-mail once it's sent. I should forget, so I won't have the burden of remembering and knowing I said nothing. But what if I do forget?"
That one's me. The beginning and ending of an e-mail I sent to Emily on July 19th, 2009. I took at least part of my own advice, that night-- I had to search the trash folder of my gmail account to get that quote. And honestly, tonight, I'm glad that I wrote it all out. I'm glad I have the e-mail that I wrote with the sweat of that moment still fresh on my brow. I'm glad I have this black-and-white reminder that I am not black-and-white, that there are things and me that are blazing red. Right now, I am colorblind.
I won't say the old man was right, but he sounds distinctly less crazy when I get to that point where I'm just angry at the idea that I don't get to have what other people have. Angry when I think of the fact that sex is life-affirming, and angry when I get to that point where I can't even imagine how it could be. Angry when I see that episode of Scrubs where sex makes everything better in the end. Angry when people make suggestive jokes about what Zack and I must be doing tonight. Angry when I think of the entanglements that have built up, angry when I think of that one, thin gold necklace I owned that got into so many little knots that it was rendered useless, and I had to throw it out-- it was gold for christ's sake.
Angry when I think about how much I still love my husband, how attracted to him I still am on so many levels. Angry when I think that, maybe, they aren't the levels that matter.
Angry when I hear Mr. L's voice in my head, telling me that I "come alive" when I talk about my sexually charged encounters with other men. Angry when I think that he is the man that I feel has a chance to save my relationship, maybe the only person who can untangle the kinks in the chain, and he doesn't seem to respect marriage. I don't know that I ever realized before, but he's got to be...almost sixty if not, and he's single, and he's dating women much younger than him, always has been by the reports I've been getting. I know I mentioned this briefly in the last post, but I'll expound upon it here. I know he has kids, so he's probably divorced-- I have no idea why I've never just asked him this, I guess my fear is that, with the "daddy issues" he's eminantly aware of, he'd be concerned that I had those feelings for him. At any rate, I've been trying to justify the fact that he told me to sleep with someone else by the fact that he must want what's best for me. He says I'm co-dependent (I don't think he's wrong, but I've always been too scared to look up what that really means), and he thinks my relationship is doomed (we have been struggling since day one), and he wants to stop me before I go down with the ship, I guess. Surely, it's not that he doesn't respect marriage, it's just my marriage that he feels has run it's course.
Except the guy he told me to sleep with? He's married too.
I keep telling Zack just slightly too much truth about the things Mr. L says, making Zack incredibly angry at him. He has violent fantasies, and I can't, frankly, blame him. Problem, though: my only real shot at making this work, one thinks, is couples therapy, which is a service I frankly don't trust. But I know from one pseudo-session that Mr. L can get Zack to talk, and he already has -so much- of my backstory; this could work. Except I, being an idiot, (That would be a great new title for the blog, if I were looking to change it again. "I, being an idiot...") had to go and give Zack all the reason in the world to distrust and feel betrayed by this man. Super.
Linda: He asked which one of you I think would perform better cunnilingus.
Zack: What? Why??? What the hell kind of a question is that???
Yeah...what the hell kind of a question is that?
But, like I said, it's hard to blame him when I feel like I do today-- frigid, broken, useless. Someone who'd better find some satisfying cause in life, because she's never going to find any satisfaction anywhere else. Someone who, like so many retirees, might as well close up shop down south and come north for the summer--that comparison, howevever, would have worked so much better if retirees came north in the winter as opposed to be the summer, because my life is shaping up to be one long winter, as it were. What's that crocus poem by Jean Little in "Hey World, Here I Am?"
Surprise
I feel like the ground in winter,
Hard, cold, dark, dead, unyielding.
Then hope pokes through me
Like a crocus.
The crocus, that's what I remember that I forgot. The crocus that poked through me on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday. I know that it was there, I can visualize the-- jesus christ, I use metaphors too much-- beautiful petals, imagine the sweet scent. But I can't remember how it felt to have that crocus pierce through my frozen soil, a harbinger of new life to come, of the hopeful days of spring, of the sweltering heat of summer. A theoretical harbinger, at any rate, since the summer never came. Just more winter.
"In winter time, the roses died.
Her blood ran cold, and then she said
'I want to love, but it comes out wrong.'"
~The Smithereens, Blood and Roses
Also, I have no idea what a crocus even looks like, in real life. Time for a google image search.
Oooo, pretty.
On with it.
You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 10:37 PM
Friday, August 07, 2009 A minute ago, I had few scattered moments of believing that I had done the right thing, as evidenced by the tweets that I will leave up, for the time being. That confidence, it wanes.
At four o'clock today, I got a message from you on my phone with one simple request-- one that I was, apparently, destined to ignore. At four o'clock for you, I shed the first tears that were exclusively for you. They weren't the last. I haven't yet seen the last.
At twenty minutes after midnight or so, my entire right leg fell through the hole in porch, twisting my left foot as I fell. I screamed aloud in the night, letting it seem that it was for the pain of the fall. It might have been a little, but as I lapsed into sobs, even Zack knew that it was for you. He'd be a fool not to; I've been acting pretty crazy all night; I told him what I did. I told him why I did it.
At maybe 7:45 this morning, I was fuming mad at Mr. L. I was calling him anything insulting that vaguely fit. I was calling him a hippy (there's a tweet on that one), a new-aged joke. I was railing at the idea of a sixty-ish, unmarried man who sleeps with women right about half his age and undermines the important of marriage-- sure, he wants me to get mine now that I'm twenty-something, but by the time I'm his age, I'll be worthless, having avoided marriage my whole life at his suggestion, and found myself unmarketable to a world of men who want only younger women. That's what happen to girls like me when we listen to men like him. Sure, he wants me and my superior genes to join his free love movement now (not for himself, mind you. Even angry at him as I was, I can't allege that. It's just not true.) But once I grow up, I'll get put out to pasture.
Not everyone has your particular set of problems, Mr. L. I could leave Zack now and spend the rest of my life bedding anyone who I find mildly interesting and still never have the problems you talked about in session today (edited for content on August 20th.) I'm gonna have some owning up to if he actually reads this, but whatever, fuck him.) So maybe we shouldn't be as concerned with the pursuit of Linda's perfect orgasm-- this bullshit idea that, in reality, may never, probably will never happen-- and focus on Linda's semi-charmed life.
I love my husband, goddamn it. Even if, as you (Mr. L, not you-you.) pointed out, I'm currently in love with someone else. I'm not gonna blow every blip on the radar. Was this whole thing some sort of bizarre, sick reverse psychology thing? Because, if not, remind me to bring a paper and pencil and make note of your justification of this advice next time. Because everyone, everyone thinks you're fucking crazy.
For those of you who aren't able to keep up, Mr. L said that I should sleep with another guy. The other guy. The one I've just gone through a pseudo-breakup with, mostly out of fear that, with the infallible one's blessing, I would give in.
So yeah, Mr. L. Fuck you. And yeah, I'll see you on the 18th. Trust me. I'll be there.
Maybe you won't read this ever again. Maybe I won't be able to make you understand how hard this is for me-- the way I typed out that last text message and stared at it for maybe twenty minutes, floating my thumb above the "send" button. When I finally hit it, I instantly had no idea if I had done it on accident or not. I waited and waited, hoping for some further protest. You probably have more pride than that. And then, there's the possibility that I got you into some serious shit on your end. If that's the case, then, christ, I'm sorry. I wish I could have waited. In that moment, I didn't feel like I could.
It that seems selfish, you'll have to understand that I was somehow paralyzed by the earlier conversation which ended so suddenly. I could do nothing but wait for the situation to resolve itself. I couldn't write my damn essay, I couldn't watch TV. I didn't eat. I did masturbate briefly, and to no happy end-- Mr. L would be satisfied by my dissatisfaction, as proof of his point. (Didn't I say fuck you? Fuck you.) I had things to do, and I had no interest, no will to do them, till I found some sort of closure. I was hoping it would just be closure to the conversation...I guess it wasn't. I guess by the time I finished typing it out, I guess by the time I maybe-accidentally hit "send", it was more definitive than that. One way or another...I don't know. There's part of me that keeps saying it "had to happen."
But I shouldn't have risked getting you in trouble. I'm sorry. And it should have been in person. I'm sorry. And it should have been a thousand years from now. God, I'm sorry.
I want to see you again. I want to discuss it in person. I want us to find whatever comfortable place we're going to get to, to be sure that you'll make good on that promise that you'll care about me even when I'm not half naked and halfway done. Or, if we're never going to find someplace "comfortable", then fine. I want to search for it and miss. I want to know definitively that we're always going to be holding back some deeper connection, some seed that longs to take root, some ever-streaming tail of a firework, always maybe about to burst. (That must have been the description you were talking about the other day...the firework one.)
Without my noticing, U2's "With or Without You" has come on in background. Again, one of those moments where I suddenly love a song. Maybe more profound if I'd realized it was happening earlier.
"Sleight of hand and twist of fate,
On a bed of nails, she makes me wait.
And I wait without you."
I hope you come here again. I hope you read this. I want to see you...I know it won't be soon. If I could have accepted that, if I weren't so fitful at the thought of it, maybe none of this would have happened.
On with it. You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 2:20 AM
Wednesday, August 05, 2009 It has to end. It has to end. It has to end.
I was blunt, I was cruel, and I was right. I was straightforward, I was consistent, and I was right. I was hurtful, I was hurt, and I was right.
It can't go on like this. This loneliness that can only be tempered by one person, that stings ever more harshly when surrounded by a sea of people that are not the right one. This torture that is a problem without resolution, this sick melancholy which is addiction to melancholy.
It has to end.
I don't like who I am in his absence, what I do to those who represent a lack of him. And anyway, it's not safe anymore-- that was part of the appeal initially, was it not? I am scared by intimacy, but so drawn to it despite that I go and press up against it, caged, like an animal in a zoo. Some fierce predator that I long so long to touch that I stretch my fingers through the chain link fence, but would dare not approach in the open savannah.
Poetic bullshit. Where's Casey to slap me silly?
It's not safe anymore, with the building of the desperation. With Mr. L's approval. Having explored every other option except those with are entirely taboo. It's not safe anymore, and, because of that, it will become safer-- I will lack response to it. I will pull back, into myself, fingers intact.
Or will I?
It has to end. It has to end. It has to end, before I can find out.
I will pull back into myself and be safe, be intact, be worthless. I will pull back into myself and waste the rest of my life being safe. I will pull back into myself until the ennui makes me crazy again, until I fall back into the same patterns and find some other cage, some other large, powerful beast who will ignite my imagination from a distance, who will make my fingers ache, and the pattern of the Zoo, it goes wildly in circles like the rides they have there: merry-go-round, ferris wheel, roller coaster.
Round and round. Up and down. Over and over, ad nauseum, quite literally.
"Something here will eventually have to explode."
Am I talking myself into or out of something? It's hard to tell anymore.
If I can manage a paradigm shift by the next time I see him, I might get out with my awful little life in tact. Maybe I will have gotten out without breaking anyone's heart. Maybe I won't have.
I don't know what I want. I don't know how to get it. I know I can't follow Mr. L's advice. I know I can't keep trading hours of misery for a few scattered minutes of...a different kind of misery, the kind that would be like joy if it could sit still for a minute, if it could relax. A relief tempered by the knowledge that the pain comes on again, and soon.
I can't trade all of these hours for those minutes, and I can't trade the rest of my life to turn those minutes into hours. It has to end. It has to end.
Tell me what I want. Be here, to change my mind. Tell me that getting rid of you doesn't actually make my life easier or better, it just lets me fall into these same patterns again. Tell me that even if Mr. L wasn't right, maybe he was pointing me in the right direction. Tell me to spend just a little bit longer with you. Take a lesson from me, and don't let me leave.
Except that you can't do that from where you are.
On with it.
You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 10:31 PM
Friday, July 31, 2009
As of late, there has been a lot of comparison between me, in a sexually aroused state, and a cat. A kitten, more acutely, but for the purposes of this post (this eventual metaphor), we're gonna stick with cat. Those of you who know me well can imagine how turned on I would have to be before I found the kitten comparison anything but completely repugnant.
And that's what it is, or what the word "kitten", in this context has come to mean: me, in a state so worked up and in the moment that I suspend my cynicism for that kind of drivel, and really, my criticism of really anything at all. Me, getting beyond that state of endless thought, fast-moving analysis, the sarcasm, the defensiveness, the stress.
I'm sure, for most of you, such a state isn't terribly hard to imagine. Myself, I have one definite account of it in recent memory, and I'm dubious that there'd be more than that if I looked farther back in the records. But then, I have a tendency to forget, quickly, how something felt, and only remember the facts and figures, some of the conversations and the visuals (though almost always in a third-person, movie-camera angle.)
I really think my sex life would benefit incredibly from learning how to meditate, how to shut off the go-go-go of my head. I bought a Psychology Today magazine a few weeks ago, an issue on sex and attraction. It sits, crumpled, on the floor of my bathroom, open to a page that has one of the oversized quotations from the surrounding article: "When a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent." I feel like the further information that must be in the article would be illuminating, if not entirely surprising, and I feel like I should read it, but by the time I get around to actually picking it up, I'm generally done with whatever I was in there for in the first place.
I do think it's interesting how often science seems to be running to catch up with things that seem completely obvious to the new-age set, though.
So, I've found another comparison between my sexual self and a cat tonight, because heaven forbid I should witness some natural phenomenon and not find a way to make it about me. Riding my bike tonight, I come across a cat toying with some small, helpless prey. Hypocritically, I ride up to stop it. Unlike the two or three other cats I've done this to on my late-night excursions in the past few weeks, this one didn't seem at all perturbed by me. I rode the bike up until I was a foot and half away from it, then had to get off to deal with it at closer range. The mouse it was toying with must have been injured by the time I got there, it would have been easy enough for me to scoop it up and bring it somewhere safe, but not wanting to get bit, I put my hand between the cat's head and the rodent. I expected, finally, for this to spook the cat, but I found the cat's head pushing resistantly against my hand. At first I thought it was stubborn, then I realized that it just wanted my affection. I pet it at length to distract it and give the mouse a chance to escape, and I remembered I that I know this cat-- not just metaphorically, either. This is the same cat that's often on this stretch of road, often comes up to me and demands my attention. Every time I pass it, it comes to greet me, it's colleague.
So there it is. I didn't find a delicate way to put it, but it's obvious, non? Both of us cats, catching and toying with prey, injuring or killing it, and for no good reason. We're both well fed, well taken care-of. But it's in our nature, to chase and destroy. It's in our nature to make a life into a plaything.
"I've been a bad, bad girl.
I've been careless with a delicate man.
And it's a sad, sad world.
When a girl will break a boy, just because she can."
There's probably more on my mind-- more about how much today sucked, how many little conversations have backed up in my system and will die before they have a chance to get out, like so many seedling maples, growing in a gutter. About missing my muse, the man who, if nothing else, has given me the will to write again (Talk to me in person, world, if you want know where to send that giant thank-you note.) About things he's got me thinking and talking about-- what I really want out of life, why I won't let myself have them.
But I have to finish my English homework, and get this damn mix CD done, once and for all. For him, of course. I do this as a token and a labor of love, finding just the right combination of songs, just the right order so that it builds and falls appropriately. I bet the cat never did that for the mouse.
In the end, I guess, that's what separates us from the animals.
On with it.
You've been struck by a Linda Hildonen at 10:55 PM
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