feminist blogs

I get on a plane for Orlando on Saturday.

It's currently 81 degrees in Florida.

Oh yes, I shall come back with a tan...

OK, seriously, it was a lot of squats and lunges. But DAMN.

There's something far less appealing at the idea of lifting weights in the morning when you feel like you spent all night... lifting weights.

But I'm doing it. Cause, well...

Also, I just got another $256 hospital bill. Where are all these coming from? (OK, well, yes, *the hospital*)

I woke up at ten to five from a nightmare of blood, plane crashes, cannabalistic women, and this guy who gets his hands chopped off.

I really need to start writing lighter books.

We did so many lunges and squats tonight that when I stepped up onto the bus for the ride home, my legs nearly gave out on me.

It was a tough class tonight, and it shouldn't have been. I was in Indy for three days last week, and had to deal with a storm of personal emotional issues when I got back. I've very, very bad at talking about my feelings, at dealing with the intense emotions of others, at expressing my own emotions, and hours and hours and days and days of that take me out.

I've been on edge all day. This morning I realized I had nothing left in my tank, and I started getting edgy and anxious, and my sugar was all over the board; stress will do that. By noon, I had a sugar headache, and I was desperately fighting off the urge to crawl into the bathroom at work and cry. My sugar was too high at lunch, and then dipped too low right before class, and clocking that low on the bus on the way to MA class, I nearly lost it again, and I went through the same bullshit bullshit crap: Why don't I have a fucking pancreas? What the fuck did I do wrong?

I ate a protein bar and stepped off the bus and let all the pain and anger and sadness wash over me, and then I put it into a little ball in my hand and squeezed it and thought, "It's going to be OK. It's going to be OK. It's all going to be OK."

And I could straighten out my walk, and I pushed away thoughts of needles and pain and anonymous nurses from when I was in the hospital, and I went to MA class, and I hit things and burned through the rest of the anxiety. But my stamina was for crap, and I had trouble concentrating, and it felt hard again; I felt so behind, so weak.

There is this thing that I usually do in these posts that I call power priming, but apparently, power priming isn't saying, "Things are crap, but I will be OK because I'm strong," it's saying, "Here is a time in my life when I was powerful."

For some reason, there are people who believe that I believe all this bullshit, that I live in this happy fantasy world where everything *is* OK and "fine" all the time.

Of course I don't. Don't be fucking retarded. I'm well-a-fucking-ware that I'm not always fine, that the world isn't always fine, and that sometimes, life is fucking hard.

But I get up every day. When I say, "I'm fine" that's as much me convincing myself of that as it is convincing somebody else. Most of the time, "I'm fine" means, "Change the damned subject. It was all I could do to get up this morning."

You know, some nights I want my goddamn beer and my goddamn cheese fries. Some days I want to be able to do a fucking work out without worrying halfway through that maybe I'm literally about to pass out. Some days I wish I didn't get hit with a fucking shovel. Some days I wish I wasn't pear-shaped. Some days I wish I was built like a dancer, with the gift of coordination. Some days I wish I was rich! And didn't need glasses!

And some days, I like to be fine. I like everything to be OK.

Those are the worst days. Those are the days I have to ball everything up, crush all the crap into something harder and better and prettier, like getting diamonds from coal. You just do it. Because the alternative is to sit in your room and hide and go and live with your parents the rest of your life because you're too scared of living to actually do it.

And I spent a good long time desperately afraid of living. You get tired of being scared all the time. It doesn't mean you're not scared, of course. It just means you do what you want to do anyway. Because the alternative is not to do it anymore, is to just go to sleep like I was doing the night I nearly died, and not wake up again.

That gets old.

And if this is me telling myself I'm stronger than I am and that I'll get through and blah blah blah and that somehow makes me a bad, delusional person, well, fuck that. The alternative is to turn this into some kind of emo LJ that talks about how I cried into my cornflakes this morning because no one loves me.

Now I'm going to go to bed, because it's too late for beer and the only writing I've got any brain left for tonight is this slap-dash blog post.

It sure is a good thing I'm fine.

Which is carb and sugar free. Oh my.

I have some things to say about writing novels, and courage, and strange television shows like How to Be a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader.

Someday I may even write all those things up and post them! What a day that will be!

Gawd, am I looking forward to going to Orlando next Saturday. And World Fantasy at the end of the month.

Really, really looking forward to it.

I realize things have been really quiet around here. This isn't a permanenet state of affairs - I'm just putting a lot of energy into my personal life right now, and everything I've got left over from that is going into writing up the sequel to GW, Black Desert.

The hope is that someday I'll have something like a life back, but for now, things are pretty wild and exhausting and overwhelming.

When I have some breath back, I'll expend some of it here.

For those interested, it does look like I'll be at WFC this year - I need to go and hang out with writers and socialize.

I can't afford, it mind you: but then, when has that ever stopped me from doing anything?

The new Carnival of the Feminists is up at I See Invisible People. Go stroll the Midway, ride the roller coaster, eat some cotton candy. You'll feel smarter by the time you're done, I swear.

They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children. 

--Ann Richards

If you're looking for reasoned analysis, read no further.

I'm too fucking tired. I think I'm just going to take to my fainting couch and have a case of the vapors. I'm going to gather my lovely children around me, and instruct them in the gentle, moral arts, so that both my daughters grow up to be fine mothers, who recognize that despite their intellects, their ambitions, and their dreams, when push comes to shove, (and a lady never shoves,) their jobs are about putting their children above all.

The fate of Western, elite, white society depends upon it.

All else is pure selfishness.

You can call me paranoid, but I don't think that it's accidental that at the same time that we have a virtual war going on against women in the United States (and that war is spreading throughout the West) --just one example among many--over the right to privacy, at the same time, another assault has been re-launched. It's all part and parcel of the same meme: women are selfish creatures. We cannot be trusted.

Here is the collar I'm eyeing for Lugh. Here is the kind of tag I want to get for him (the site gallery is great). I just returned from five days in NYC with Phaon, Lugh, and the friends we...

There's been some tremendous writing by Caliberal and Bluebird about poverty. Liza has written about the mommy wars at home. It has gotten me to thinking about a time, not so long ago, when I experienced first-hand what happens to a lot of single mothers in this country. I've been working for almost 3 years now at a job I hate. I was thinking this morning of how much I hate my job, thinking, once again of quitting. The time for me to go is approaching. I know myself well enough to know that when I've reached this point of despair, there will be a period of bitching and moaning, but eventually, I'll leave.
This piece was written in May of 2003. It's not polished, and ultimately, it pulls back and lives inside my head, but it's not hard for me to remember what hunger feels like, what fear feels like, and, ultimately, what a belief in self feels like.

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I am a few days past my 40th birthday, out of work, a writer who can’t seem to get published recently, a mother who doesn’t have custody of her children, a woman who frequently does not eat meals because she is completely out of money. May I mention my two advanced college degrees? May I mention my feminist faith in self-sufficiency? May I mention how difficult it is to maintain my dignity, let alone faith, in the face of failure?