So, it turns out that standing up and walking out of a class - after telling the professor exactly what you think of his pedagogy - is not the diplomatic route.

And my mother, she told me always to take the diplomatic route.

This professor says he's not mad at me at all. Right.

love,
alex

Oh wow is this more personal than my blog usually gets. Though it's been headed there lately.

See, this child I want some day - this child I would desperately want now, if economics and society permitted - this child who thankfully did not choose to be created this month, despite my stupid forgetfulness with bc-pills - I already love this child more than I love my own life. I've already got myself convinced that the apotheosis of my life will be motherhood, and I say this after two years of dealing with toddlers all summer. It's hard, and isolating, and boring, and involves a lot of vomit and pee and diapers that look like the La Brea tar pits. And I want that to be my life.

How is this different from the search for a soulmate? The idea that there is someone in the cosmos you already love more than yourself, and you will not be complete until you find them? I despise that sort of thing in romantic thought, I really do. It cuts off all the various kinds of love into an oniastic hunger for self-completion. But what if that's what I'm doing with my maternal thoughts? What if I'm cutting off all the various forms of nurture and creation, in this desperate love I feel for this creature I will hopefully some day gestate?

I've been known to talk to him or her. Especially this last week. Thank you for not making me your mother right now, I've said. I promise, some day, when I can take care of you.

This is particularly acute, as I just had a long fight with a friend about my newfound discovery that I might not, in the case of unplanned pregnancy, be morally able to abort. This friend helpfully, painfully, miserably dragged out all the possible consequences of that choice. And those possible consequences are really scary. The idea of failing this little person who isn't even born yet - who may never be born - is worse than anything I could imagine happening just to me. It was an AIM conversation this happened in, and I spent a good twenty minutes crying over my keyboard, because it's really disconcerting when you acquire a whole new level of 'worst thing that could ever happen'.

I just thought I'd share. Overemotional? Me? Never!

love,
alex

I have been walking around like I'm blind and deaf, not using my senses, making up the world. I don't know how that has changed, or for how long, but the sun is bright and the air delicious on the mountainsides, and I feel much better.

love,
alex

And now, your ten-minute rage.
also, more about sex!

The pro-abstinence website Truth4Youth.com offers us the following dose of empowerment:

"So there you have it, girls. Nobody wants to marry someone who has been the loving, meaningful relationship of 17 other guys. If sexual experience was necessary for love to grow between two people, everyone would want to marry a prostitute."

I guess I'll go throw my polluted, whorish self in front of a train, then. Thanks, Truth4Youth!

Other nuggets of pure right-wing fecal matter wisdom from their site:

"Sex is the "in" thing to do, right?" (as it has been for tens of millions of _years_, as demonstrated by our continued _existence_)

Under "Could I have an STD": A lovely chart in which they explain how condoms don't protect you from anything, nope, nope, doctors the world over are LYING.

The desperation with which they explain that two girls pictured together in their "faces of abstinence" section are just friends. Abstinent friends. Not lesbians. Even abstinent lesbians. My god, these people have filty minds.

Anyway. I'm late for class. Next up: AbstinenceRocks!.com. It's out there somewhere.

All I'm saying is, nobody should get to tell you what you do with your body except you. And anyone else directly involved, of course.

love,
alex

And now, some words about sex.

Don't get too excited. It's a media rant. Specifically, a media rant brought on by the ortho-tri-cyclin ad, with the perfectly manicured hand holding up the smooth pink compact/pill-case. Now, this has confused me for a couple years now: despite watching five seasons of sex & the city, I still don't understand how someone with perfect manicures has sex. I don't understand how someone with plastic-smooth, shiny pink lip gloss has sex, or someone with six-pack abs, or someone with perfectly hairless legs. I don't understand how someone that prissy could even literally let their hair down long enough. People who color-coordinate? Invest in fresh-smelling products? People like Jenna Jameson, who does the prissy little walk with one arm all bent up in the air like her bicep has atrophied? I'm not trying to insult these people. I just don't understand how they come to be sexualized. If anything, they seem asexual as a paper doily.

To me, people of either gender who imbue sexuality have big walks and big laughs, have bellies that curve out a little over their hipbones, have tangly hair that's not so blond, bitten broken fingernails, large feet. They have red red mouths and no tan, or the kind of tan you get hiking. They don't spend a lot of time thinking about cars. They don't shop, or carry little purses. They look straight at you when they're talking. They sometimes don't use deodorant. They tend to be musical, or revolutionary, or vegetarian, or something else real and inalienable.

I'm not insulting the other kind of people. I just can't see them as sexual creatures. I suppose I'm totally missing the point on some level.

love,
alex

I. Hate. This.

This is what killed it the last time we broke up. The only person I really want to talk to in the wierd vertigo of post-breakup and life going onward is _him_, the one I just broke up with. He's the only person who can do anything for me when I'm just plain miserable. But this time, we're staying broken up, and so there's nothing I can do but be miserable by myself and alienate a dozen friendly aquaintences who want to know what's wrong.

I suppose the internet always lets me weep on its shoulder. Its cold, silicone-and-plastic shoulder. Don't worry, kids, the bad poetry will start soon.

love,
alex

Copied from Rin, without permission, by Rilke:

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...

Back out in the world, believing, half-hearted, pained, alive. There is not much to say about it.

love,
alex

I just spent forty-five minutes filling out a survey for this thing & then deleted it all in a misclick. That's pretty descriptive of my mood anyway.

love,
alex

Spent a long day in town and bought yucca root & pan at the tienda in Carrboro, "irresistable vegetarian abalone" in a can at the asian food mart, a spanish bible at the used book store, and cloth to make myself some flannel handkerchiefs. It was a good day, clear and sunny, and I didn't buy anything, but spent a long time at, Rebellious Books Inc and the health food co-op. I do like my hometown.

love,
alex

I am afraid that love annihilates the world. Lover and loved, complete in themselves, looking for nothing except each other, caring for nothing except each other, watching the world die, comfortably, apathetically, from the closed circle of each other's arms. I am afraid love annihilates the self, throwing it again and again at the closed door that is another human body, face, mind. I am afraid that love twists up the ego into a perfect spherical we-ness, an invincible ego because it is convinced that it is not closed in on itself, a black hole of endless self-absorbtion.

I have PMS. Can you tell?

love,
alex

Here is what I thought about, lying awake in the half-light before dawn on a musty mattress on the floor of the stove room of a house in the county:
Beauty has no utility. Life has no utility. Friendships, loves, enjoyment - the burning, ecstatic blueness of the winter sky - colors, flavors, birds wheeling bright shapes over the snowy meadow - these have no intrinsic usefulness. Relish of life has no usefulness. I think my problem has been that I've been scheduling my life full of usefulness, and assumed that enjoyment would come of efficiency. I have been stopped in my tracks, for a while. I have some life back, and it doesn't need to be useful at all.

love,
alex

So yes, the hipster boys are obnoxious first thing in the morning. They go lurching across the floor of mattresses to check their email, stepping on my pillow, talking loud in their braying voices, overconfident in their long thin arms and carefully disheveled hair. Arrogant, jarring, with the sun cutting through the window and the ache of cheap red wine behind my eyes. But it is all worth it for this friend or that friend, for a boy with high cheekbones sitting quiet, luminous, sleepy, the glow of sunlight on his face, the glow of an everyday god looking out through his eyes. It is all worth it for the long noisy night of finally breaking through. Of mundane, glorious conversation; of life happening in all the corners. Some of these people are wonderful; some of them are obnoxious too. All of them are gods looking out at the world, like me, like all of us. All of them are beautiful.

There are not words for the glory I feel, just over a simple thing, a bottle of red wine and a houseful of friends and a long snowy night dawning blue-white and sunny over the mountains and the fields. We talked, we listened to music, I went to sleep to the sound of the boy on the mattress next to me reading poetry to the girl with the long brown hair. It was a simple thing. That's all. I finally did it.

love,
alex