She's Writing a Novel

When you were a little kid, introductions weren't necessary. You could play for hours with strangers and never even care about learning so much as their name.
When you got a little older, you needed to learn names, and "favorites." Do you like this and hate that? And you banded yourself into tribes based on pop albums and shoes and tv shows and sandwiches. By high school, you weren't talking to anybody so introductions didn't matter.
But in college, you came out of it, and introductions were the cliche, "So, what's your major?" And you stared baffled at math majors and flirted with lit majors (but if you had it to do over again you'd reverse your approach, knowing the average salaries of math majors and lit majors). Then you left college, left the world of study altogether, and found yourself meeting people and being asked the question "So, what do you do?" and grateful that your answer isn't "work at Barnes and Noble."

"Publishing," you always say, being sure to mix it with just the right notes of enthusiasm, boredom, pride, and indifference.

And almost without exception, the response from people is excitement and respect and maybe even envy. Some of them are would-be writers, and take you as The Big Break or The Connection they've been waiting for. Some of them work listlessly in service or retail, and admire you for managing to work in an office building and getting yourself health benefits and a business card. Some of them retain a vague idea of publishing as something glamorous, and think you must be terribly cool. Some of them hate their jobs and "publishing" sounds more exiciting than whatever they're doing. Some are lit majors who work in Barnes and Noble, and wish they could say they worked in publishing instead. Some are people who know that publishing can be hard to break into, and respect you for the achievement or suspect you of whoring your way through life.

In any event, announcing what you do generally earns you points with strangers. And usually you try to leave it at that, evasive about what you publish and what it is that you actually do. You like the idea of leaving strangers with the assumption that you publish a glossy high-fashion magazine, or cutting-edge books, or novels by undiscovered authors. They don't need to know that you publish extremely specialized high-science articles you can't understand, and that you mostly push files around to people and tell them "do this" and later check to make sure that they did. They don't need to know that for the most part it's boring, and you don't do much actual "editing" even though you are an "editor." They don't need to know that publishing doesn't really pay, and you'd make more money as a waitress.

They don't need to know that the best part about working in publishing is telling people, "Me? Oh, I work in publishing."

Today I became aware of a new and scary trend in fundamentalist Christianity. As if there were other kinds of trends among fundamentalist Christians.
First, they kissed dating goodbye. Then, they rounded up teenagers and made them pledge to wait for their true love (because of course people with no dating experience are going to be able to know true love when they see it. who needs practical experience or rational thought when you have revelation? From God?) Now we have Purity Balls.

As a woman raised in America, and raised as a Christian, I have come away remarkably sane and intact. By intact I do not mean that my hymen has survived. No, I mean that by all accounts I have been able to sustain a healthy and realistic sexual attitude, despite the efforts of so many to rob me of that.

I was taught the biology of sex at a young age. At the same time, it was emphasized to me that sex was for people who were married. I remember sitting alone in a bath at about the age of 7 and thinking, How can this be? I lay there and thought and thought as hard as I could about the reason WHY sex was just for the people who were married. My child mind could not come up with any reasons. This is because I was thinking rationally, and from a rational persepctive this whole paradigm is nonsense; even a child's mind could understand that. I decided then and there that I would make up my own mind about when and where and with whom I would have sex, and that "sex is for marriage because God said so" was not a sufficiently peruasive argument.

Of course, this was before my reason had been hijacked by religion. By the time I was an adolescent, the fear of sex had been fully instilled in me. Sexual play was "a slippery slope;" presumeably with a cliff at the end; therefore, any kind of sexual exploration was to be discouraged. Intercourse could just sneak up on you and get you, and then you would have committed the worst of sins, with murder maybe being a little bit worse but probably not.

As a teenager I discovered orgasm quite by accident, by following a slippery slope of my own alone in my bed. It was the second most exciting discovery of my life; the first having been learning to read. I enjoyed years of innocent self-gratification before the purity people in this country rallied in full force and started to get into my head, thanks to youth groups and youth conventions and special assemblies at my religious school. Suddenly, what had once been as lovely and enjoyable as a good book on a warm afternoon had become...a thing to feel bad about, a thing to try my hardest not to do, a thing to not even think about. Instead of associating orgasm with curious delight, it was now associated with a wave of shame. Instead of loving my body and the pleasureable tricks it could perform, I began to hate it for being the source of my temptation.

I did not have a boyfriend until college; partly because I was shy, partly because I didn't have the adolescent charms to attract adolescent boys, partly because I always fell in love with boys who would never reciprocate (my gaydar is working much better these days). By this time my sexuality had all but gone into hibernation; my mind being unable to support both a thriving libido and a paradigm in which a libido was a liability, the former was burried. So the boyfriend's sexual advances were terrifying and mystifying and altogether exhilerating, awakening things in me I didn't know were there. In my innocence of experience, I was torn between my eagerness to explore and the awareness that exploration was dangerous.

It was about this time that the paradigm started to crumble. I learned that my boyfriend was not "sexually pure" and I had been so steeped in the purity culture that I had never considered the possibility that a man I could be serious with - a man I could even marry - would not be a virgin. I felt betrayed by the man, but more and more by all the people who had told me to "save myself."

Save myself for what? I began to wonder. And what was the point of my saving myself if that act was not reciprocated? How was that good? The facade started to crack with that first intrusion of reality, and became further weakened when the people who had pushed the purity lie started to ammend their approach. In particular, my mother had done her best to perpetuate the myth of two wedding night virgins, and I had adapted this as my expectation. And now, as I lamented de-virginized boys, my mother admitted that it was unrealistic to expect that my future husband would be a virgin as I would be.

Excuse me?

I could not have been more outraged - at the lie, and my own naive place in it. For years I had squashed my own desires for the good of some future man, and now I must accept that he had gotten out and around at will?

So I allowed myself the freedom of exploration with the boyfriend, and no longer tried to thwart his seduction but actively encouraged it. I would be a woman with knowledge and experience, not a frigid and timid girl. Unfortunately, the purity cuture had gotten to the boyfriend and warped his mind. He was so guilt-wracked by his previous "transgressions" that he could not engage in sexual activity without berating himself (and therefore by proxy, me) afterwords. Instead of having the pleasures of my new sexual awareness validated, they were rebuked. Each time my sexual ecstacy reached a new height, it was met with a new condemnation. "Wrong, bad, no, stop, shouldn't" was the vocabulary of my first experiences with sex. I was told that sexual desire was like a "disease" he had "spread" to me; that he had given me a "taste" for sex, the way a dog gets a taste for blood (I'm not making this up) and now I was ruined. As if having sex and liking it was something that "ruined" a woman, instead of validating that she was healthy and normal.

That first awful relationship lit up for me the reality of the sickness in Christian attitudes toward sex. The poor boyfriend thought the sickness was in the sex; in him, in the desire for sex, and in the fulfillment of the desire for sex. The sickness was in the Christian suffocation of sex by the purity culture, which tried to control it and hide it, tuck it away in the narrow context of a Christian sacrament (marriage) and therefore not only have total control over the minds of the faithful, but their bodies as well.

Because this religion (as with all religions) is about control. Christianity tried to convince me that abstinence was about self-control, self-discipline; that starving off my sexuality was a personal choice and a good thing for me. The truth is that sexual abstinence is a good thing for Christianity, keeping me in the mind and body of a child as long as it can, and keeping me from finding any rival pleasures in life to that of religious ecstacy. And if I do transgress, the guilt I feel will keep me close to god's bosom seeking absolution.

As with all religions, Christianity seeks to create problems that it can create exclusive solutions to, so that I will become dependent on that security and that certain knowledge. It will try to place limits on the pleasures of life - not in the name of moderation, which any reasonable person will do - but in the name of keeping god's (and the religion's) rivals at bay. "Temptation" is frequently just another word for the impending realization that god might not be the answer; that there are things and experiences in life of intrinsic value and interest.

Now, back to the "Purity Ball." This is a more insidious evil than anything I've yet seen done with sexuality in the name of religion, and it smacks of the female "ownership" in Islam we are all busily decrying. There is really nothing to say about the father as the "high priest" of his house bit; if that doesn't disturb you, I'm afraid you are too far gone and there may be nothing left to do with you but put you down like a rabid animal.

No, what is awful about this is that it tells innocent little girls, in some cases too young to even know or understand the joys of their bodies in a sexual sense, that their sexuality does not belong to them. It belongs to a god, it belongs to their father, and some day it will belong to a man they call husband. But at no time is it theirs to do with as they wish; at no time is their body their own, and therefore, at no time do they belong to themselves. They will always be submissive chattel - from daddy's girl to chaste wife - they will always be defined, both sexually and existentially, in terms of a man's concern. They may never feel the exhilerating freedom of knowing your body to be your own, of knowing your mind to be your own. They may never understand the pleasure their body was made for was the pleasure they choose; they may in fact never find sexual pleasure at all. They may never find the joy of being cherished without being posessed, and that is perhaps the most heartbreaking of all.

What is angering is how blatantly misogynist this ceremony is; how it cages and crushes female sexuality before it can even bloom, and then portends to dictate whatever survives for the rest of the girls' life. Perhaps if there were a complimentary "mother/son" ceremony, I could see this for anything other than what it is; a binding of women's sexuality for the purposes of retaining power over them in the name of love and god. I gag as I write that; I had so hoped that this would not happen here. Soon enough we will be stoning adulteresses (but never male adulterers) again, I'm sure.

I suppose some people will think I protest too much; I think for all the fuss religion has made about sex, I should make an equal fuss in rebuttal. I cannot imagine why religions have decided that it is evil to allow girls to explore their bodies and their sexuality; in effect, to know themselves. To gain experience, and through experience, to gain knowledge. And through knowledge, to gain confidence and wisdom. And through confidence and wisdom, become capable and vocal agents in the world, able to stand on their feet and able to change the world. Maybe change the world in ways that involve ridding it of the excesses of religion.

Ah, now I see; this is what religion has feared all along - women who turn out like me.

If you take away our sexuality, you take away a fundamental claim and validation of self, and you take away a foundation of self-possession upon which so much can be built. I can only hope that some of these girls find their way and find their selves...and also find their clitorises.

Tonight I'm going to try and get over my fear of the kitchen. There is a large slab of beef in our freezer, which apparently the Russian mother had plans for; however, these plans were never realized and so the beef remains. But now I have plans for the beef.
Dinner is usually a reflection of what is abiding in the freezer; or rather, whatever the Russian has thawed from the freezer when I get home. The Russian lover does 99%, which is to say all, of the cooking in our house. Yes, he's just that good. He's ruined most restaurants for me forever; now whenever I wind up at a sub-par place all I can think is What is this crap they're trying to pass off as food? His stuff is so much better than most of what restaurants serve, and that's when he's not even trying. I fetishize his mushroom soup, his citrus marinated salmon, his fine-chopped salads; all of which he just whips up like it's his job.
But all of that has made me terribly insecure about rolling up my sleeves and having a go at it myself. The first time he watched me peel something I swear...he stood over my shoulder and tried to make sense of what he was seeing. "It's as if you determined the most ineffective way to take the skin off a potato and proceeded to adapt that as the method" he said. Or something like that. In any case, my general ineptitude is easily overcome when I have the persistance to try; I just rarely do. Besides, our apartment kitchen, like all apartment kitchens, is made for one, and that one should be the one who can make some delicious food before tommorow.
But lately I've been feeling sort of...lame about my culinary reticence and ashamed about my apathy in the dinner department. And a slab of beef...well? That is something I can do. Because this girl, even this girl, can surely figure out how to make a stew. How hard can it be? Some potatoes, some carrots, some onions, a splash of red wine, a few dashes of this and that...ignore the simmering pot or stir it idly while reading about the dubious origins of the Koran and Voila! Dinner is served.
I think once the oven is fixed I'm going to introduce the Russian lover to the casserole. He does not know what a casserole is, really. Can you imagine? We Mennonites were raised on casseroles; if you can't throw it all together into corningware and bake it, I probably never ate it growing up. We are the one-dish wonder people. If you try to serve a Mennonite food in the form of a main dish and sides, they are going to mix it all up together on their plate and then stir in some gravy for good measure. Once it looks like something that has come back up, then and only then are they ready to chow down.
Such is my gastronomic heritage.

I haven't made a New Years resolution, I mean a proper one, in three years. Like any normal person I go around thinking, "I should really start doing this/stop doing that, accomplish this, take up that, etc etc." My days are paved with good intentions, but I usually run out of steam for the road. Which is not to say I don't have moments of progress - hey, I made a stew the other day! And a creamy tomatillo sauce the day after that! (ok, it was supposed to be a salsa and then it became a sauce; tears were involved) And guacamole the day after that! So, sometimes the small efforts add up to life changes. Sometimes not. Sometimes the spontaneous, non-ceremonial changes are the biggest. Mid-year I resolved to drink more water, and just like that I bought a water bottle and started drinking 64 ounces a day at my desk. At some point last autumn I resolved to start a daily skin care routine, and wear facial sun screen every day; I've done so ever since. Well actually, that last one was thanks to the prodding -- no, manipulation -- of the Russian lover. He's figured out that if you tell me I should do something, it's unlikely to happen. I'll say "Yeah, yeah, whatever." However, if you tell me "You know, you're right, this just isn't something a person like you can probably do" I will flip out inside and vow to prove you wrong. So when he just gave up on suggesting I work on improving my complexion and agreed with me, "yeah, you're right, it's not worth it for you to spend time and money on taking care of your skin since you're not a professional model or anything" I went nuts. Silently nuts. And went out the next day after frenzied research on the efficacy of various potions and lotions and dropped some cash and started a morning/evening routine that I took up without fanfare or mention as a silent daily statement of "you are SO wrong, buddy."

Sometimes we refuse to change for the better because we think unconditional self-acceptance is pyschologically healthy; I have come to believe that unconditonal self-acceptance is bullshit and the equivalent of living your life like a dinosaur in a tar pit; stagnation is nothing but acquiescence to a slow death. Unconditional self-acceptance is the reason why kids grow up and don't know how to accept criticism or pay their bills or fix anything about their life, and therefore, it is the reason i have to put up with surly hipsters serving me coffee. Surly hipsters who love themselves and can't understand why that isn't enough to get them out of their coffeeshop job and give them the fame they know they deserve. Surly hipsters who give me attitude because I am someone who worked their ass off to get out of shitty counter jobs NOW GET ME A LATTE!!! A SKIM LATTE WITH NO SUGAR NO CREAM NO ATTITUDE OR SO HELP ME GOD I WILL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT YOU MELANCHOLY FUCK.
I think this lingering cold is making me peckish. Where was I? This was supposed to be a post about flossing.

So this year I totally forgot about the whole new years resolution tradition, and pretty much skipped that whole New Years drinking tradition; basically, I slept through the whole thing, thanks to the aforementioned cold. Last week someone was trying to work up the balls to ask me out, but he didn't get very far past the icebreaker "so did you make any new year resolutions?" And this reminded me that, in fact, I hadn't. And I decided I would make a belated one, that it had to be simultaneously something really hard and really simple because I just don't have the resources or energy for a big production of a resolution, but I should make up for that by the magnitude of the sheer annoyance of the change required. Which is how I settled on flossing.

For 15 years, I have been promising myself and my dentist that I will start flossing. And every year it has been a bald-faced lie and we both knew it. And because I was blessed with a lifetime of good dental care and good health, I never really felt the NEED to floss. But it has been two years since my last visit (ammendment to the resolution: make dental appointment. do this..tommorow. or sometime.). And I realized that, hey, I'm getting older and youthful optimism is not going to remove the food substance stubbornly lodged between my teeth. Anymore.

Sooo...over the weekend I purchased these lovely little disposable flossing tools; I mean, maybe if I'd known about these before I would have been more enthusiastic about the whole process. I can floss without cutting off the circulation of the fingers about which the waxy twine is wound, and I don't have to shove my knuckle into my throat to reach the back teeth. Brilliant! I was so thrilled I even bought some fancy mouthwash to top off the oral care improvements. Next there will be whitening! Maybe porcelain veneers!

The only problem with self-improvement is that it's awfully hard to stop; like plastic surgery or home rennovations: there will always be something to tweak. But hey, it keeps things interesting.

And when I tell the world that it needs to change? I'm not being a lazy hypocrite.

I left work early on Thursday, due to the copious amounts of phlegm moving through my respiratory system. I was miserable, so I decided to give up and go home.
It was the lunch hour, and the streets were crowded with pedestrians. I was making my way through the crush of people on 15th street when I got that weird sense of having my personal space invaded. I promptly ignored the feeling, because it was a busy street in the city. Duh.
And then I felt someone step on the back of my heel, the way that clumsy kid behind you would do sometimes when you were walking in line in primary school. I didn't think much of it at first - crowded street, people hurrying, some of them careless: it happens. But I cast a glance over my shoulder anyway, just to see who the klutz was. And then I realized that a man was following thisclose behind me; he was so close he was literally touching me. Now, the streets were crowded but not THAT crowded, and I immediately panicked. I pulled my purse around to the front of my body, and picked up the pace. I darted around a few people until I was sure I had lost him and chalked it up to some guy walking around high or absentminded, or just some typical Philadelphia racial power play, a cowardly attempt to intimidate a little white girl.
And then. And then! I saw the guy jogging up from behind me and jog up ahead of me. Well, this was odd. But I figured hey, I guess he's just in a preoccupied hurry. Until he stepped to the side of the crowd and stopped, waiting for me to pass. And as soon as I had passed, he stepped in line behind me, following on my heels as tight as ever.
I was sick, tired, and not in the mood for games, intimidation, or whatever else. So I stopped cold, turned around, and said in the tone of voice I learned only after moving to the city (because a nice surburban Mennonite girl never has need for this tone of voice, except for maybe on the phone with insurance companies or Verizon customer service)
"What the hell is your problem?!?"
And he said:
"You're not going to hit me, are you?"
I guessed that I was not the first girl he'd pulled this stunt on, but that I was probably by far one of the more polite ones in my confrontation. I didn't say no, because I wasn't yet sure whether I was going to have to hit him or not.
"Why are you following me like that?" I asked, still with my angry face and tough-girl accent.
"Well excuse me but you are gorgeous and can I get your name?"
I don't give my name to guys on the street; if they are relentless and I am feeling nice, I will give them a fake name to make them go away. But this guy had me spooked; he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, and not only was he not making eye contact but his eyes had that distinct unfocused quality which signals substance use.
"I have a boyfriend" I said curtly, thinking this was the kind way to directly end the conversation.
"I have a boyfriend? So if I see you around, then I just say, 'Hey, I have a boyfriend! How you doin', I have a boyfriend. You're lookin good, I have a boyfriend.'"
I just sort of stared at him.
"Yes, that's my name. And my boyfriend's name is 'I will break your kneecaps.' Now I have to go, excuse me."
And I cut down Chestnut Street abruptly, leaving him at the intersection a little more confused than he was already thanks to his drug of choice.

I was a little shaken and confused myself. There are all kinds of odd people in a city; some of them harmless, some of them not. It's enough to make a girl want to be invisible sometimes...