Big Things Are Afoot

Can't say anything yet, don't want to say anything yet. After the first of the year, hopefully. Big news. Keep your fingers crossed for my partner and I.

My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose

Yes, I do get tired of being this depressed all the time.

My thanksgiving was lovely, filled with much less stress than is usual, and I am now back in Charlottesville. I discovered when I returned that I have kind of missed it, much like you would miss a puppy that you don't particularly like, but hey! it's a puppy. It's got charm, even if you hate it.

Here's a list in a blatant attempt to make you forget how strained that metaphor was:

Things My Mother Actually, Literally, Unironically Believes:

* You need a recipe to make a sandwich
* Sitting on the toilet seat will give you STDs
* The greatest danger from eating fresh fruit is not the pesticide but that "bugs might have sat on it"
* A single electronic appliance left on will burn the house down the instant the key clicks in the lock
* I should probably not be selling my body for science because the "rays" might hurt my unborn children. (Note: the "rays" in question were magnetic. Apparently I should also stay away from refrigerators and MRIs)
* My dad's hair has always been shorter than the hair of any boy I have ever dated.
* "I didn't fall off the back of the coconut bus last week!" is a saying in the common vernacular

Can We Start, Start Over?

Lately, and by lately I mean "since I moved to Virginia," I have not been interested in men. Not interested, for me, means barely flirting with some, and definitely not pursuing any. Nor have I been imagining myself in love with ex boyfriends, or looking to pick up some casual sex along the way. I'm just plain not interested, and I finally know why.

I'm not happy. I'm depressed, I'm way stressed out, and I hate nearly everything about where I am and what I'm doing right now. I haven't been this angry and miserable since a long-ass time ago. And while in college I would usually solve these problems by sleeping with a few inappropriate people and stirring up some interesting drama, I know better now.

I know that won't fix anything. And I know that no one but me can solve my problems. The solution is pretty simple, too: wait it out. Classes are bullshit. There's a ton of artificial pressure on us to learn things we'll never need to know again. I'm doing rotations in labs I know I won't join. I have finally, finally, finally found my calling (or at least some more specifics of my calling) and I'm forced to wait through protocol before I can get in there and actually cure some fucking cancer. I'm surrounded by the kind of people I used to make fun of in college--you know, the bio majors who ask what's going to be on every exam--and what's worse, I've become one of them. I ask what's going to be on the exam.

But it will all be worth it the day I can tell my father and brother they never have to worry about their prostates going nuts and spreading through their blood vessels to attack their other organs, which will probably be in ten or fifteen years. It will be worth it the day this virus is sequenced, and that's likely to be in the next year and a half. I just have to beat the Clinic to it. It'll be worth it the day I can walk into my PI's office and tell him I'm working for him, and he'll have to drag me kicking and screaming out of his lab, which will be five months. I love my future boss. I love my future project with an intense breathlessness I usually associate with poetry and caffeine.

I hate nearly everything about who I have to be right now, but I cannot wait to be who I'll become.

Random Trains of Thought That Are Far Too Context-Laden for Actual Conversation with 99% of the People I Know

I was thinking today about what if we got married, and what if you succeeded. Then I'd be in the lab while you toured, and we'd have a long-distance marriage. Which I might be okay with as long as you promised to be very, very good. And then I'd have some work function which you would inexplicably be in town for, and I'd go in a pretty dress and you'd go in, like, leather pants. And everyone would be like:

Oh, she's married to that guy.

Is that song about her?

The one that's kind of about the lesbian? Now that you mention it...

Who?

I don't know, my daughter would know.

Do people even wear leather pants unironically anymore?

In Flanders Fields The Poppies Grow

How do you say 'thank you' for something this enormous? How do I, a member of the spoiled/protesting generation, look honestly at my grandfather and talk to him about the sacrifices he made?

Thank you, Grandpa, the other members of the 37th division, and all veterans; thank you for putting your life on the line so that I may still have the freedom to think, question, challenge, and support. Thank you for preserving this country that all of us, even those who don't think about it, love so much. Thank you for not taking America for granted, for stepping up when needed instead of running away mumbling something about "someone else's problems." Thank you for putting your life on hold so that I don't have to. Thank you for saying that sometimes right is right and wrong is wrong, and sometimes you have to fight to prove it.

I lose sight often of how powerful the founding principles of this country are. That people are born endowed with inalienable rights--that money, the color of your skin, or your genitalia don't make a lick of difference. These rights weren't just some philosophical discussion. They were set in stone so that no future generation could take them away without one hell of a fight. In context, what a radical idea. No more whims of rulers--just a piece of paper that can never be erased, only added to.

We forget how much we have not to fear, and we forget who we have to thank for that. Whichever way you spin it, your right to stand on the street and say whatever the hell you want has been defended by someone who acted instead of speaking. That makes me feel a lot less like talking.

Assorted Nightmares from the Past Week

My best friend is directing Phantom of the Opera. She casts me as Christine despite the fact that I can't sing or dance, and I never show up to rehearsals. My parents come to see me opening night and it is a nightmare, dancing girls and elephants all over the place, and I'm pulling from my eighth grade memory of Phantom, here, I hate this show. I am wearing a tutu and hiding in the wings when I notice that R is the Phantom, and just then the show is over and my best friend comes towards me, lying through her teeth about how good I was.

I am driving away from Charlottesville. I crash my car into a tree, and then lose it in a lake. I escape from the car by doing exactly what the internet and the nightly news tell me to do--open the door a bit to relieve the pressure, then open it further and get out. I think, "good thing I have my parents' van." I back the van into the lake as well and then cannot get out. I drown.

My roommate and I are standing on a rocky beach. A man approaches us, and I recognize him as a wanted serial killer. (This is what I get for watching all of Dexter in two or three days) He follows us back to the library, where he whips out some powerpoints, telling us that he studies biology too. His slides are wrong, full of grandiose and misspelled statements like "miosen gives rise to not only contraction but also consciousness" and when my friend sees him, she cannot help but try to instruct him in the correct pathways for muscle contraction. I steal away to alert the fat, apathetic security guard about the serial killer--with the slicing, and the dicing, and the bodies--in the library. He, of course, does not believe me, and I race back down the stairs, thinking to stall him here while my roommate calls 911, only to find that he, my friend, and my roommate are all gone. I stand on the bottom step and hope that they are teaching him, but I know they are dead.

I am in Cleveland. No one I know is there, in fact there are not many people anywhere, and the Algebra is gone. My apartment is gone. All of Case, in fact, is gone. I see someone who looks like Ellis on the street, walking in the snow with his hands in his pockets. He looks me full in the face and then walks away. There are no cars on the streets, just snow, calmly catching the sodium lamps in the way I have admired so many times. I sit in the snow, on the corner of Euclid and Cornell, and wonder what to do next.

Waiting for Godot

A long time ago I posted about the word for something that would have hurt you in the past but no longer does, and I just found this close analog: Rasbliutto, the Russian word for the feeling you feel for someone you once loved. Close enough.

Damaged Goods

I know this isn't really news anymore, but it came up again recently on one of the other blogs I read, and upset me all over again. In addition to being totally batshit fucking crazy on the topic of birth control and abortion rights, the conservative Christian movement is also encouraging daughters to pledge their virginity to their dads, and their dads to pledge to protect it for them. One of the ideas behind this movement is that a properly loved little girl won't seek out other male attention, because she's getting it from her Daddy, thus enabling her to save it for marriage. Article and Video.

Now, I come from a conservative Christian family, and although my dad is a good man, a man that I like and respect a lot as well as love, I can't help but think he had similar ideas about my sexuality, that it ought to be repressed until a suitable time came for its expression, i.e. marriage. In my house, there was no talk about sex, ever. Everything I learned, I learned from books. We didn't talk about protection, we didn't talk about how to say no or why one might want to say yes, we only talked about WHY to say no, in the vaguest of terms--the idea being that sex before marriage made you a bad, weak-willed, dirty, damaged person, and no one would want to marry a vagina that someone else had been in.

Then, of course, I went away from home for the first time and got myself raped six ways to Sunday. Funny how this never fits into the talks, although it certainly fits into this paradigm of sexual activity: that it is the exclusive domain of males, for male control and male initiative. And afterwards, of course, I did two things: I set out to regain my sexuality for myself, by having a lot of sex with people I wanted to have sex with, and keeping it away from my parents. Then they found out, and the shit really hit the fan. As far as I'm concerned, they relinquished any say in my sex life when they failed to provide me with all the information I needed OR step in and rescue me if they wanted me to remain innocent. My mom has said to me in the past year, tenatively, because talking about sex is tantamount to admitting that we both (she, married, and I, 23) DO IT, "well, if you felt like...it needed to be yours....well, don't you feel like it is, now? ...Can't you stop?"

And the answer, of course, is no. No, it still isn't mine. Although I have gained control of my sexuality and sexual activity, I still have a lot of confusion and anger about everything sexually-related that is going to take a long time to figure out. I'm still unsure if it's possible for me to be loved without the sexual persona I've created for myself to hide the fact that sex still scares me, a little, and it takes very little for me to shut down completely. And no, Mom, in some ways it will never be mine, because there are some things you never completely get over, and for you to sit there and tell me to be over it because the thought of me having sex keeps you up at night is so wrong on so many levels.

I have come a long way with this, but I have a long way to go. And thinking about what's going to happen to 1 in 4 of these girls, and how their fathers will react to their loss of "purity"--whatever that means--breaks my heart in advance. I think my parents do feel that I am damaged goods, goods that willfully continue damaging themselves. But as long as distressed denim is still in style, I'm not worried. There's always going to be a market for women like me.