the announcer

a few days ago i was in the locker room at the gym with one of those announcing people. i reserve my last nerve for these people. this woman was absolutely certain that we all had spent our lives up until that point wondering about her and wishing we could know more. you know the type. she's having a conversation, kind of, but she is the only one talking and the person she is talking "to" is just her pawn in the universe that is her own voice. just an objectified word target in her ambitious quest to share her thoughts with strangers. the fact that she had a friend near her gave her all the permission she needed to be a complete wall of sound from the time i saw her in the fitness center until we both entered our cars in the parking lot. circling the track, showering, primping, dressing, everywhere i went by necessity, there was the voice. how do i end up on the same schedule as people like this? there was a time that i would not have been able to handle it. i would have had to walk away or risk shouting at her or kicking her or sawing my own ears off. but these days, i just find moments like this blog-worthy and interesting. while she is still talking, i am already beginning my description of her and my assessment of her behavior in my head.

this woman made a declaration about everything. she was walking fast around the track so the trainer (not her trainer) wouldn't think she was slacking. she clearly had a good workout today because her hair is frizzy. she doesn't like the television show that is on the tv in the locker room, so obviously no one is watching it. her commentary included her muscle strain, her bathing suit, the size of her feet, how many friends she has who are runners, how her jeans were fitting that day... it just didn't end. i have no idea what her friend's voice sounded like.

what makes a person act like this? it goes beyond privilege, because most of the people i know experienced some degree of racial/economic/religious privilege. and most people i know would recognize this as problematic behavior. what this woman has going on is definitely impacted by her placement on the social stratosphere, but it can only come from something deeper and more exclusive than that.

shouldn't it be socially acceptable to respond to these individuals accordingly? i don't think that her behavior is normative, so i should be able to bend the rules a little. i should be able to ask her things like: do most people find you much more interesting than i do? can you use your inside voice? why do you talk about everything you think about? have you ever met anyone else who does that?

i should be able to ask questions like these. and she should have to answer them.

where have i been?

i see that it has been a while since i last blathered on for an anonymous public "audience". i should have some time today, so here i am.

some fantastic things have happened since i last graced blogger. some really dull and stupid things too. naturally i am going to talk about all of it. among the highlights of the spring... two days ago i won my very first ebay auction. i first lost 4 and was becoming excessively irritable. i am not designed for the kind of anonymous cut-throat rivalry that ebay offers. if i am going to lose in the final seconds of a race, i need to know who to hate at the end. i was fairly scowly and slouched by the time i won. then, like the child that i am, i was overwhelmed with delight. jumping up and down and clapping and announcing to everyone in the coffee house that i won!!! it's embarrassing. it's who i am. the best part is that the item i was bidding on was my very own laptop computer. dude, i'm gettin' a refurbished dell. i have wanted my own laptop for some time now, but the price was just way out of my league. duh. ebay. and the clincher? jan bought it for me. she's the best partner ever! so in a few days, i will have that laptop i have been dreaming of. and i might never go to work again!

in other news... i watched my first marathon yesterday. it was actually quite interesting. i wasn't quite as moved to consider participating in next year's event as some of the people around me, but i eventually came to view it as one of those things that i have never done and can't think of a good reason not to try. i can think of plenty of reasons not to do it, but they all include things like laziness, lack of motivation, disbelief that i could actually do it. no good reasons really exist for not trying it. a few hours later i got home and chased my dog across the yard--approximately 40 yards. i immediately began to re-think the marathon plan. it's a lot to ask of a body to attempt to recover from 15 years of smoking AND think ahead to a 26.2 mile torture trail.

i do love a hard physical challenge. (that just reminded me of Double Dare...what a fucked up show!) i like to start a new fitness regimen and watch as the changes begin. it's fascinating to me how the human body grows and shrinks and morphs from one shape to another. love it. so far, that morphing has occurred exclusively in the weight room. my meager attempts to make things happen cardiovascularly have left a bit to be desired. namely, cardiovascular fitness. i think there is a very simple psycological reason for this. not psychological as in disordered but psychological as in deeply-rooted, long-standing, part of one's self-understanding.

along the twisted, permutating path of life, i believe each of us receives messages about our own capabilities that stick and last and become a part of how we perceive ourselves. i don't mean to suggest that this occurs maliciously; it's just how we invent ourselves. here are a few of the things i picked up and used to craft what i have come to know as myself;.
--i can't wear red. don't know why, mom said it when i was very young. i always thought it to be true. interestingly, three of my first 4 studio portraits as a very young child, my mom had me dressed in red. apparently it was an ability i once had, but lost along the way.
--i am athletic, not smart. i finally outgrew this one in college, but it took that long. i guess when siblings interact with the world, they must be categorized. i could throw a ball and lift heavy things, so i lost out on the intelligence designation. expectations were low and i met them for a very long time. sad, but at least i got to play a lot of sports.
--from my track coaches, i learned that i have "fast-twitch" muscles, making me an excellent sprinter, but useless for anything longer than 400 meters. i took this very seriously. i haven't tried to run for any significant distance since i learned this. and it is entirely possible that i never will.
--i got a bit of a complex from my volleyball coaches through the years that short kids can't be hitters. so i didn't really try. i just threw myself all over the floor picking up the digs that the tall girls didn't block. at the age of 30, in city league play, i learned that if one has a decent vertical, 5'4" is plenty of height for a power-hitter. but i am still kind of afraid to try. i will work on that.
--"boys won't want to date girls who beat them at arm-wrestling". this from a history teacher who observed a tournament during study hall. turns out this one has no bearing on my life. but for the record, i think some boys would.
--a few teachers and coaches, in a very misguided attempt to address what they must have thought was a low self-image problem, informed me at the age of 12, 13, 14-ish that i am "not built to be skinny". huh? don't know, no longer care...
--staying with the body-dysmorphia theme... a man once told me that women's abdomens have to have a curvy protrusion at the bottom. that's the uterus. i learned a few years later from my gyno that when it isn't full of fetus, the uterus is about the size of a walnut. why do people just make shit up?
there are so many more, but let's move on...

to be fair, i do have fast-twitch muscles, but i no longer sprint; i have no idea how i look in red, not different from how i look in pink or yellow, i think; i am not nor have i ever been "skinny"; and i am only familiar with my uterus as an empty vessel. some of this shit may be true, but most of it seems very much like the kind of stuff that just doesn't have to be said.

just for fun: a friend told me when we were 9 that i "pee loud". that didn't have much of an impact on how i perceive myself, but i do recall being incredibly confused. is urinary loudness a variable controlled by individuals or by toilets? you tell me.

not a secret

as always, post secret is providing plenty to discuss in my little corner of the web. there is a card this week in which a person confesses to hoping for another terrorist attack in manhattan so that real estate prices will drop. (read that line again...let it sink in for a minute.)

this kind of attitude reveals a whole new kind of self-centeredness. i almost can't even discuss it, it's so gross. but, naturally, i am going to try.

one of my primary observations about post secret has been the frequency with which thought patterns/personal pains/tragic desires are repeated. often these revelations are self-centered in a self-destructive, overwhelmed, dismal sort of way. many of these people seem to be so enveloped in their own pain and fears that they can hardly open their eyes wide enough to be reminded of the world outside of their own minds. that makes sense to me. i can feel compassion for that kind of solipsism. but this guy... (i am deeply sorry for the implications and fully own the injustice of this, but i am going to go ahead and assume this card was crafted by a man.) this type of self-absorption has nothing to do with genuine emotional or physiological pain. this is purely venomous opportunism. this guy doesn't want something about his current state of being to improve for the sake of his psychological quality of life. he wants people to die so he can buy an apartment at a more reasonable price. to the extent that this anonymous narcissist deserves defense, i will say that he included on his card an acknowledgment that he will go to hell for this desire. i kind of wish that i believed in antiquated mythological constructions like "hell" just so that i could get some satisfaction out of picturing him there.
this guy is a bastard. everyone wishes that real estate prices in manhattan were lower, but this guy has a plan for how that might happen and it is a grotesque one. but his submission begs a question... how common is this kind of thing? as common as many of the other sentiments revealed on the site? as common as cheating or lying to "get ahead" at the expense of others? as common as employing race or gender privilege to maintain power or success? is it as common as sacrificing human lives to protect a political career? is it really any different from killing for oil?

where do we live?

secrets revealed

i continue to read post secret every week and i continue to find the world of kept and unkept secrets absolutely stunning. i wonder sometimes how common some of our best-kept secrets really are. i have secrets that i believe i will never reveal under any circumstances and some that i long to divulge as soon as i find a person who seems interested in having that kind of conversation. some of these secrets have been on deck for years. maybe that is where most of our secrets reside: on deck for disclosure, waiting patiently for a trustworthy recipient. i think that is also where most secrets remain. many finally find their way out through art or literature but that doesn't seem to carry the same degree of impact as the face-to-face revelation of the guarded information we keep so desperately entwined in our souls.

but what is it about the rush and relief of revelation? why does it feel so liberating to tell someone something that begs for the contrary? those who write in to post secret often attempt to discuss an ineffable sense of freedom following their anonymous disclosure. do our stigmatized choices and experiences really carry this much power over our psyches? over our bodies? i think so. adolescents often propagate their own brand of weirdness by not knowing what kind of information is expected to remain concealed and what is free to share. teenage girls are notorious for telling everyone everything and then annihilating each other with that information. as adults, we know how to name only those things about ourselves and our experiences that will allow us to present as fully socialized and safe for interaction. and we know the kinds of things that will create cause for suspicion. but what if we didn't care? what if we just decided that facts are facts and the past is the past and we chose to be free to tell the world everything? would any of those things be stigmatized? would we all be crazy? or would we all finally be liberated by the knowledge that we are all just as fucked up as our friends and neighbors? i generally believe myself to be a functional and stable adult, but given the free and practically universal access we have to things like the DSM-IV, one must be careful around those who liberally associate patterns and quirks with diagnostic criteria. and that is why we are all as careful as we are, right? it doesn't take much to raise an eyebrow. and there is nothing more entertaining than comparing an acquaintance's behavior to an inventory of personality disorders, right? anyone with a DSM-IV close by has done it.

all of this is circulating in my mind right now as i contemplate the many potential fates of our "secrets" in popular culture. hundreds of thousands of people are submitting anonymous secrets to a man named Frank, whom they don't know, in maryland. and it seems that daily there is a new book published as autobiography or memoir or thinly-veiled fiction. these books reveal secrets about the author's life that are potentially devastating to one's future and career. do these writers simply take the plunge into publication hoping that this genre will maintain it's voyeuristic appeal and continued publication of private psychosis will earn enough money to pay the bills, thereby voiding any future need for gainful employment? there is also, of course, the antiquated method of unearthing the past and the truth known as psychotherapy. but that is expensive and carries the enormous burden of diagnosis. not to mention the presumption that some kind of work or healing is required by those who have contained their secrets for extended periods. i remember exercises at church camp that encouraged us to write down our secrets on paper and then toss them into a fire. i know that it registered high on the teen-drama symbolism meter, but i honestly don't know what that was supposed to accomplish. i remember wondering if this was supposed to make the secret go away so that we felt we would never have to deal with it again in any capacity. and i wondered what people were writing on those pieces of paper. especially since i had sat up all night the night before listening to those same kids tell me all about their private sinful ways and the shit their parents would never know about. what could these kids still have to call a secret? sometimes at church camp, people forget that these are still our classmates from school and even though you had a bonding moment while leaning over a candle at devotions, it is highly likely that your "friend in christ" is still going to tell everyone in the locker room that you had sex after a football game last fall. i was so boring during those talks. i didn't have sex then and i rarely did anything my parents wouldn't approve of. so i tended to be very quiet during the disclosure talks and i always wrote the same thing on those little pieces of paper: "i stole nail polish from target when i was 11." i burned that secret so many times! and the truth is, i never really have felt all that guilty about it. everyone steals from a store at some point and most of us get away with it. i never did it again, because it took me a long time to stop shaking and rid my mind of the belief that someone was watching me all the way home. but by the time i was old enough to hear the stories that i heard at camp, my guilt was long-gone. but i burned it over and over because i could never think of anything else.

denying, burning, trusting, therapizing, mailing, publishing. so many ways to treat a secret. i choose blogging.

we know drama

i wrote an episode of Law and Order: SVU the other day. when i say "wrote" i mean that i sat on my porch smoking cigarettes and performed the role of the lead guest star. but i made up all of the dialogue as i went, so that is the same as writing. i was terribly impressed with myself in that shining moment. my dialogue, my gripping performance. my role was that of a tough, jaded, hopelessly enraged lesbian with a serious nicotine addiction, hanging outside of a girl bar on houston street. my encounter with benson and stabler was enthralling. i could hardly wait to find out what was going to happen! i decided that i definitely have to put this show idea on paper so i can keep tangible evidence of my own brilliance. then i decided that i shouldn't limit my creative genius to someone else's project-- i should think bigger. so i contemplated using my gravel-throated bitter dyke as the central protagonist in my politically polarizing forthcoming novel. so far, this entry is the only writing i have done related to this moving, dramatic nugget of literature. and of course, i rest assured that i will spend the next four years thinking daily about how incredible my novel will be. i will jot down ideas for chapters that become progressively more intriguing and inspiring, before finally tucking the idea quietly into the corner of my mind where i store all of the fading memories of unfinished plans and dashed hopes for things i wish i could have actually done. at least these things give me trifling opportunities to blogmock the person i am behind closed doors as well as the person i have never had any intention of being.