feminist blogs

I’m so excited about The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse Within Activist Communities ¹(Editors: Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha), I pre-ordered it about three months ago, even though it’s not expected to ship until March 3, 2011!

Its topic has been ignored for far too long, and I’m hoping this will be an important contribution to the literature.

If you’d like, you can pre-order directly from (the consistently awesome) South End Press here, or from Amazon. (It’s also listed at my beloved Powell’s, but they don’t yet have a pre-order option.)

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¹ In some places, the title is listed instead as The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities.

Hey y’all! Long time, no blog. (Your patience is appreciated while I’m working on my own book, letting off smaller amounts of verbal steam here and here as I go.)

I have, as far as I know¹, a whopping total of 55 words in the above anthology, all originating with Twitter. I didn’t send anything in particular to the editor, but told him he could use whatever he wished from my posts; I’m told this post as well as this one made it in.

But there are several hundred more contributors, many of them writers and comedians you may have actually heard of (even if all you know about Twitter is that it’s something CNN won’t shut up about), such as John Hodgman, Margaret Cho, Diablo Cody, Neil Gaiman, Paula Poundstone, Eugene Mirman, Susan Orlean, and Ana Marie Cox.

AND if you’d like to get your mitts on a copy, you can do so while also benefiting Team Lucy Kate for the March of Dimes. Rad, huh? (More on Lucy Kate, who is presently recovering from heart surgery, here.)

Go, Team Lucy Kate!

Lucy Kate, August 24

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¹ Going here on what I’ve been told made the book, by someone who had an advance reader; haven’t received my contributor’s copy yet.

• "Where two or more are gathered in God's name, at least one will be an asshole" – the retired clergyman's wife #
• Riding through Victoria, Virginia. Meta! #
• Stealing the kids' bubble bath, like the gangsta I am. #
• RT @EZF_TopMoms "Hey everyone! I'm an auto-retweeting, dirty spambot that should be blocked!" #
• I want there to be a sport called Competitive Napping. #
• Attending National Night Out in an area we like because screw our neighborhood. (Doing it wrong?) #
• If I had a magic wand, I would transform every "top marketer" and "top mom" on Twitter into a "top bottom." #
• You guys keep saying "NEVER FORGET" but either I *did* forget or I never knew in the first place so you can stop lecturing me now, geez. #
• On my deathbed, I doubt I'll count among my great regrets that I did not spend more time analyzing who said what about whom on the Internet. #
• An outdoor braying contest between the beagle, the nine year old and me. Because our neighbors didn't hate us quite enough. #
• Non-M.D. shrink says I must find a new psychiatrist, since mine died of a heart attack. Whatevs, I still have a few hoarded benzos from '06. #
• My Quaker kids' Amish jokes are making me crack up all the harder at @HotAmishChick's Mennonite joke. (SHUT UP, athiests.) #
• J/K athiests! You know I love you! (And so does… well, you know.) #
• Oh, fat pants. Thank you. #
• This time last week, I was taking a huge emotional risk. I'm so glad I did. #
• The GOP is little more than a modern death cult. #
• Me to husband (with kids present):
  "You may need to tie me down."
  "?!"
  "I mean, after 4 shots of espresso & a Red Bull, I may levitate." #
• The expression "ass over teakettle" is now replaced with "butt over beagle" because guess which hound I just tripped over. #
• Oh, honey. It's not because "he's the rock star" that people don't favor you when you're together at parties. It's because you're a bitch. #
• "One of the memes today is about scratching @tj's ass." I don't want to know. Also, someone please take away my husband's Twitter. #
• The teenager freaking out over her sister's newly visible cleavage is as hilariously hypocritical as me freaking out over the teenager's… #
• "Blacken the cursed sun!"
  "You're not the only one!"
  We quote Lamb of God lyrics to each other in complaining about the weather. #
• Email is so amazing. You can attach photos, documents, and even distortions that give the recipient that special knifed-in-the-gut feeling! #

• Today I learned that a kick-ass thunderstorm will not so much "take care of" dog poop as much as it will "liquefy and evenly distribute" it. #
• I'll bet the Victoria Marinelli who's a Facebook "fan" of marriage inequality, anti-choice, and "Jesus Extreme" LOVES being mistaken for me. #
• Well, at least with my husband gone this long I've achieved "Inbox Zero" if by that you mean the punchline to this joke is obvious. #
• Anyone still hung over from what the PUMAs inflicted on feminism before, during & after Obama's election should read this: http://tr.im/urvM #
• Y'all, @superfantastic is all her username implies, and then some. Mothafuckin' follow. #
• Filling in blanks for my Google profile results in a one-line summary bio: "Writer at AS IF I can hold a day job; Student at Hard Knocks." #
• "Insert joke here." "WHAT did you call my penis?" #
• "If you're going to wiggle your leg against one of my body parts, could it please not be my bladder?" Couch cuddle time can be contentious. #
• Just learned a girl with whom I went to high school went missing years before me, was never found, is likely dead. There but for the grace. #
• Managing simultaneous episodes of constipation and allergy attack requires more coordination than I have. #
• If kids had to be caught in traffic w/ their cranky Republican grandpa, at least it was in Obama-stickered car that chanced on a gay parade. #
• I am as awkward as an obese ballerina's stage dive into a mosh pit whose revelers part like Red Sea molecules only to realize I'm no Moses. #
• NYC tweetup-ers are asked to goose each other on my behalf. (I'll let you figure out who gooses whom.) And take pics! (Not just of goosing.) #
• We are arguing, via text message, about pie. After eight years, a marital first! #
• "Oh, you are. No doubt about it. You're a fucking trainwreck." I like a shrink who doesn't sugar-coat. #
• The problem with having severely impaired short-term memory is I can never remember if I've already tweeted a particular joke. #
• The problem with having severely impaired short-term memory is I can never remember if I've already tweeted a particular joke I AM SORRY. #
• I'm not qualified to assist in the healing of this nation's racial divide, for I'm allergic to barley, hops and malt. DRINK FOR ME, AMERICA. #
• Q: What's more tiresome than my jokes about Tiger Balm finding its way to the wrong muscles &/or membranes?
  A: Having that ACTUALLY HAPPEN. #
• Today, I'm less animated than the gray-faced actors of the "depression hurts" ads. Espresso and a Republican sex scandal would be helpful. #
• It seems appropriate that Nickelback released one of its albums on September 11, 2001. #
• "If you weren't married, I would SO be flirting with you," he said, before DMing a link from RedTube. #
• I couldn't possibly say who is the funnier between @badbanana and @CranberryPerson, but I'd totally pay to watch them arm-wrestle. #
• I'll clean for tomorrow's guests just as soon as I feel vaguely validated by something that happens to appear in my mobile web browser. #
• Cat objects to me treating her like a neck pillow. HELLO! Walk across my boobs and then stick your anus in my face much? #
• ""Putting things in double quotation marks to make it seem as if I am doing something much naughtier than I actually am"" #
• We love you too, @fedge. #
• "I even cleaned the toilet in case you need to destroy it!" Other people address breakfast guests this way, right? #
• I am eating the HELL out of @CcSteff's…

  …yogurt/fruit concoction. (What?) #

• It's great our new neighbor's husband was finally able to join her! A bit awkward, though, that his first view of me is in my tiniest towel. #
• I LOL at PUMAs screaming about healthcare reform Obama has not yet accomplished in months, which the Clintons failed to accomplish in years. #
• "The South shall rise again!"
  "…In the manner of vomit." #
• Being more terrified of succeeding than of failing is the oldest, stupidest, most familiar story I know. #
• Facebook friend request from shrink. Okey-dokey. #
• "You know how to get to Highway 360?"
  "I can lead you in circles, if that's what you mean."
  Out-of-towners should not ask me for direc … #
• En route to visit elderly preacher friend. Getting the goddamn motherfucking cussing out of my system now. P.S. Shit. #
• Sometimes it takes dinner with a retired clergyman for me to remember that "throwing up the horns" is not a universal gesture for "awesome." #
• In the countryside, where Favrd stars scarcely stick, but celestial stars appear ever more proximate. It's pretty badass. #

• Breakfast is food bank pastry toasted to offset its signature staleness, with filling made from cream cheese and regret. (Still, tasty!) #
• Say it in a sweet, sing-song voice and he'll assume good news. "Who's going to lose his balls as soon as possible? THIS PUPPY!" Wag wag wag. #
• If childhood is infrastructure for adulthood, it's no wonder all my bridges are either eroded, submerged in toxic waste, or collapsed. #
• Decades from now, the daughter who is now nine will still be talking about the psychological scars she incurred in the Towel Drop of 2009. #
• Paralyzing security "updates" to uninstalled Microsoft software : poison-laced letters from ex against whom one needs a restraining order. #
• I'm pretty sure Hemingway would have pilloried the modern cult of the Moleskine. #
• When I was 15, an aged ex-Munchkin from the Wizard of Oz showed me stills from his glory days, then hit on me. It was icky. #lameclaimtofame #
• Kate Millett, the feminist author who once graced the cover of Time Magazine, once threw an end table at me. #lameclaimtofame #
• Sanjay Gupta unfollowed me on Twitter shortly after I made a joke involving his nipples. #lameclaimtofame #
• I talked shit about Slipknot in front of some (out of costume) members of Slipknot, backstage after a Lamb of God show. #lameclaimtofame #
• I am named after the granddaughter of the founder of Southern Comfort, who later went missing in Africa. Yes, really. #lameclaimtofame #
• Had my copy of _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ confiscated by a surly psych ward nurse named Tyrone. #lameclaimtofame #
• Have both been in FBI custody and, seven years later, caused someone else to be in FBI custody. #lameclaimtofame #
• Fave #lameclaimtofame posts: @gordonshumway, @kmwalsh, @slackmistress, @highindustrial, @irreverend and @TheBloggess. P.S. I'll shut up now. #
• Cosmetics tip: Wash hands between smudging waterproof eyeliner and blending in foundation, or risk having an especially stubborn soul-patch. #
• RIP my puppy's balls. #
• The bigger the ass, the greater the potential for butt-hurt. (Well, at least I can sob *comfortably* in this unyielding bathtub.) #
• Note to self: He's not amused by jokes like "Whee! Lesbian party time!" when he's en route out of town for 5 days. (P.S. lesbians: CALL ME!) #
• Beagle Testicles Zero™ (I am sorry) #
• "Don't mock me!" "I'm not mocking you, I'm mocking myself! It just happens that you've been imitating me for fifteen years." #
• My Fox News-addicted father in law is due any minute and I have no Olbermann or Maddow episodes saved on the DVR. DAMMIT. #
• I like that the two reasons I'm even aware that Comic Con exists are 1) an episode of Weeds and 2) Twitter. #
• Oh, SHUT UP Eric Cantor. #
• When the husband and kids are gone is a great time to let my hair down & do crazy stuff they'd never understand. Now eating brussel sprouts! #
• "I don't mind anonymous ladies hoisting my boobs onto a plate of glass." – @kellydeal on mammogram. See also: lubed wand vaginal ultrasound! #
• I might be hormonal, but hearing Digable Planets' _Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)_ in a Tide Coldwater™ commercial has me near tears. #
• After having finally made it into the 2000s, Twitter's apparent spammer sweep has had me reliving the 1970s and 80s. Just like in real life! #
• (Just to clarify, the preceding was not a "follower count whine," but a PTSD joke. It's… a challenging genre.) #
• With the family away, I can finally tackle major housecleaning projects! Phase 1, "Cower beneath covers, weeping from migraine" in progress! #
• Considering a visit to the minister/estranged family friend who married my mother to my (fleeting) stepfather. Awkwardness potential: high! #
• Dear everyone who complains of relatively dull lives: I am painfully writhing in my envy of you. #
• I was about to concede to the athiests that God doesn't exist since we have no Pop Tarts but I just found the Cocoa Puffs so screw you guys. #
• My trail of broken hearts left behind runs eerily parallel to my path of lapsed and languishing domain names. #
• I'm pleased to report that, more than six months into his first term, I remain deeply grateful and happy that Barack Obama is our President. #
• The puppy is chewing on my Imitrex packaging. Metaphor. #
• I'm not being lazy. I'm perfecting my napping technique. #
• "Wallowing is sex for depressives." By this standard, I have an extremely active sex life. #
• In the weird, once-merry punchbowl that was my feminist community, PUMAs are its floating turds. #
• A book on "sacred sex" by a dude who'll neither confirm nor deny having slept with one or both my parents, whom he introduced? Sure, Amazon! #
• Note to selves: Tame the voices. #

Note: I know I haven’t blogged here in forever, and this is a weird place to start again, but the following started as a short post on Tumblr, and just got a little too long for that venue, so I decided to actually post something here.

The above is a notation from my 11th grade prom date, Kiko Bukoski, in our senior yearbook from Kapa’a High School (class of ‘88). I will never know exactly why he asked me to go with him – he was an extremely popular bad boy, and I was a huge nerd; his regular girlfriend was one of the cheerleaders; while they may have been broken up at the time he asked me to the prom, he was very clearly still with her by the actual event.

This is to say, I ended up being sort of his second date. Like, I was the one he drove to the event itself (in some rented lavender sports vehicle – I couldn’t make this shit up), and there is a ridiculous official “prom portrait” taken of us, but once there he was basically with her and all his friends who wanted nothing to do with me.

I have speculated that he envisioned (yes, seriously) some sort of Carrie prank for me, but didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Or maybe he’d asked me on a dare, never expecting me to say yes, because all I did in class was give him shit. (He was one of those with bigger, deeper ideas than he liked to let on, due to whatever burdens popular people imagine they have – namely, that they not be mistaken for nerds.) But I figured it’d be a good participant-observer sociological research opportunity (this is how I treated most potential social interactions), so I’d said yes when he asked me.

Or maybe (though I doubt it) he actually liked me. Who can say? All I know is that we all ended up skinny dipping in Hanalei Bay, and that, just to fuck with him, I stole his underwear from where he’d stashed it (in a canoe, I think?). I don’t remember how I got home, and I don’t think we ever kissed or anything of that nature at all. It was hilariously stupid.

(The only fun part of the night – before the skinny dipping – involved dancing by myself to a hired band’s lazy version of Louie Louie; my stoner friend Dave was in the band, and we kept looking at each other like Why the fuck are we even here?)

After the event, Kiko continued dating the aforementioned girlfriend and we proceeded as if nothing had ever happened between us. (Which it really hadn’t.) But his note in my yearbook made it seem far more salacious.

I’d still love to know what the hell he was thinking.

[the last one having been discovered in my underwear drawer, at which time I was delighted persons still in Olympia shared my delight.]

This flier:

Queer Nation flier, Olympia, WA, ca. 1991

…was from the first meetings of Queer Nation in Olympia, hosted by my roommate Tod Streater (RIP). With him, I attended said meetings - along with the first local meetings of ACT-UP, which was hosted somewhere else. I have to confess, though, that the only clear memory I have from the Queer Nation meetings was the time Tod answered the door, took one look at the guy who’d just knocked, and said “Why hello, FBI! You don’t belong here!” And then he cackled in his most gloriously queeny voice and slammed the door. (As for whether the Olympia chapters of such groups were, indeed, under any sort of government surveillance, I have no idea - but Tod, as one of the loudest voices around in terms of AIDS and queer rights activism, had every reason to be suspicious.)

The fliers were placed on bulletin boards at the Evergreen campus and the like. The phone number was for the campus queer rights group. The address was our rented household, affectionately then known as The Dreary Biscuit (one roommate - Julia, I think? had once lived at another Olympia household called “The Sunny Muffin”).

I forget sometimes that there are some folks who still read this thing, who do not also follow me on Twitter, so for the benefit of these 3 or 4 people, an update: my husband has a job! (Or will, in 11 days. It’s temp-to-perm, but still promising.)

I’ll edit the paypal link in the right hand column accordingly later, but for now, this will have to suffice. (In any case, know that while we’ll still be struggling for awhile - anyone know any trustworthy bankruptcy lawyers in Richmond, Virginia? - there is palpable reason to have hope, here.)

Thanks to all for your incredibly kind support over this difficult period, material and otherwise.

(Such haters being rather epitomized in this tweet by my pal tj, who actually knows plenty about matters of hunger, poverty, and benevolence, and so, I trust, will not take personally my using him as a playful example of Anti-Oatmeal-Raisin-Cookie zealotry.)
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Note: Want to skip the personal story (conveyed though it may be through an oblique discussion concerning the relative virtues of the oatmeal raisin cookie), and get right to the point? Leave this blog and go here.

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Hey, folks. Long time, no blog. Have had a few things going on, not least of which has been anxiously shuffling piles of debt from creditor to creditor in order to help keep a roof over our heads, as we continue to cope with my husband’s extended unemployment. We have two children, ages 14 and 9; we are not homeowners (have never owned real estate); our sole car has nearly 200,000 miles on it; we have no savings; and we are hanging on by thread. (But, yes, hanging on - by the grace of God and any number of gracious human beings.) Through FAMIS, a program of low-cost health insurance for children here in Virginia, we are grateful that our kids receive all necessary medical and dental care; however, my husband has no health insurance, and my own coverage is limited. (My medical and hospital visits are, thankfully, covered after a copay; but my prescription copays are high enough that I routinely go without medications I’m supposed to have on a daily basis, to save money for utilities and the like.)

Incidentally, when I refer to my husband’s “extended period of unemployment,” I mean that my husband has now been laid off since April 22 of 2008. For all 11 months since his job was eliminated, he has been diligently applying for new positions, but the competition is fierce. He hasn’t collected unemployment benefits for the entirety of this period (or they would have expired by now), but we are nearing the end of our eligibility, and frankly, we’re terrified. The employment sector - most broadly: consumer electronics and the cable industry - which constitutes the entirety of his work history, has taken major, repeated blows in our community, most recently with the closing of Circuit City, which had been headquartered here in Richmond, Virginia. (More on this - with bonus awkwardness! here.)

But back to the truly critical issue at hand: the esteem in which various factions hold the oatmeal cookie.

I just wanted to say that when I recently posted this to Twitter, it was no joke. Nor was this, as long as we’re discussing the economy. (Post continues below image.)

Oatmeal cookies, 10 weeks expired.

You will note in the above picture: there is but a single cookie remaining in this container. This is to say, we eated¹ them. (And after this post, I will eat the last one, unless one of the kids calls dibs.)

Would we have preferred chocolate chip? Sure. Would we also have preferred that these cookies not have an expiration date in 2008? Obviously.

But we eated them anyway, and we were grateful.

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So, what’s my point today? Only this: if you are able to donate to the Central Virginia Food Bank, please visit here. (We are fortunate to receive help from them via one of their partner agencies here.) As you may have heard, they have had to turn away volunteer assistance in recent months due to a lack of actual food donations - so to be clear, what they most need are donations of actual food and/or money.

If you are in the U.S. but outside Virginia, and/or you would like to locate a hunger-fighting organization in another state, please visit Secondharvest.org. Thanks.

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¹ We are also aware that ‘eated’ is not a real word, but we like it. As has been (haz been?) already established, we are a family already ruined by LOLcats.

Some time ago, I tweeted, “I really need to find a way to sort out which of the voices in my head I should be listening to, and which I should ignore.” Lest anyone imagine I was joking, I present the following, composed, yes, entirely on my blackberry this morning (with a few edits/link and file insertions) - or, shall I say, afternoon - after long, fitful dreams into which I could not, finally, collapse until well past dawn (the insomnia thing is killing me lately), because it was too important then, for me to wait for my computer to fire up. (Which is happening a lot lately. I swear I’m doing 80% of my writing entirely on my phone, and when I choose to share it, posting directly from there to my Medium Sized Blog - relative to the bloated largess of this one - on Tumblr.)

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Image: Tears spilled listening to Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers & reading email, taken with the crap phone I had back in June.

Pertains to a different album by The National than is referenced here, but image is still apt.

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Some notes on waking, early one Saturday afternoon

Why go to your shrink, when you have the song that’s been stuck in your head for going on 72 hours, which, even though you love the voice of the man who sings it, is getting excessive, so finally you Google the lyrics and then freeze, with a certain horror of recognition, on reading this (on your blackberry, while you are still on the potty)?: If I were a spy in the world inside your head/ Would I be your wife in the better life you led?¹

For context: In 1990, when I was first with my future husband (whom I’d first met when we were ages 3 and 4, respectively, and again in 1984, when I was 13), we had a romantic date at this Mongolian and Japanese restaurant in a strip mall, anchored by a K-Mart².

When we got our fortune cookies, his said “Friends long absent will be returning to you.” (Through the seven years following - through each of our insane girlfriends, which in my case included decidedly non-awesome confrontations with the law - he kept it in his wallet, along with a picture of me he’d taken of me, in the yard of my now-estranged aunt.)

We laughed then, on reading his fortune, because that was how it had always been with us: rotating in and out of each others’ orbits.

Then I opened mine, which read, “You and your wife will be happy in your lives together.” We laughed at that too, because I was entirely out then as “bisexual, erring on the side of women.”

Coming back to him, seven years later, was, among other things, an admission that my fortune had been very, very wrong.

It took awhile for us to figure out that perhaps our fortunes hadn’t been so much “wrong” as “switched.”

Even so, I’ve had moments of ambivalence, in which my brain takes leave of my body, aimlessly wandering its “less traveled” roads. (Or, perhaps more accurately: “roads traveled extensively, but finally abandoned out of dire necessity.”)

And that’s when I need to get back into my own head, cutting through the static of last night’s drinks and dreams, to figure out what that persistent melody is trying to tell me, so I can pull myself back from the detour, and remember “this is the person I married, for all kinds of good reasons stretching far beyond the necessity of abandoning those other failed, landmine-infested roads, and I truly love him.”

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¹ The song is Bitters & Absolut, by The National (from their eponymous record). You can hear it and read the lyrics here here, and/or buy the mp3 from Amazon. No, there’s no affiliate link giving me any kickback from purchases (not that I couldn’t use kickbacks! See pathetic note in column at right, unless you’re reading via RSS!), because I’m too lazy to figure that shit out.

² Said mall having been built over the literal rubble of one of my numerous, vaguely remembered childhood homes. Only clear memory from that address, on or near Williamsburg, Virginia’s Waller Mill road: when the stepfather I had for a brief period stepped on a nail in the yard, which may or may not have gone all the way through his foot, but there were weird and, considering his artistic rages and otherwise erratic behavior, nonsensical and scrambled allusions to Jesus that, still, I somehow associate with that moment. (And a further tangent: Since the restaurant still exists, we celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary there, in 2007.)