feminist blogs

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This shot taken, as best I can remember, in one of the stalls at Alley Katz. (I know, I am a walking cliché.) The three different versions of same (rendered via Picasa because I still don’t know Photoshop or whatever it is the cool kids are using these daze) are intended to reflect the double- & triple-vision I would experience later that night, as well as to highlight what, once I was sober, I found most amusing about it: that I seemed to resemble the zombie on my shirt (band T for the much-beloved and missed Alabama Thunderpussy).

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Earlier tonight I was complaining that my husband was going out to a show tonight (Hatebreed /Halo of Locusts), but I wasn’t. Not his fault, since I’d known about it for awhile and could have arranged childcare in advance, but I spaced it.

Here, by the way, is the poster for the show I’m missing. (Like you care, right?)

(Also, if all this seems incredibly excessive, please understand that I am extremely sexually frustrated right now. Certainly, there are worse ways I could be coping with this problem than by blogging about some drunken evening last month, right?)

So to cope with my irritation, I finally went through the photos (from my crappy camera phone and Jeff’s slightly less crappy cameral phone) from the last night I did get to go out. Since I don’t do that terribly often, I tend to make up for lost time when I do; that is to say, I might get completely snookered.

That particular evening (August 16th/early AM of 17th), I had my phone handy and, with it, sent a variety of inebriated messages to Twitter (you can follow me here, but note warning about my posts being not always funny, and never for the faint of heart). So here’s the story, as best I can reconstruct it:

• Commence project “Banish Cramps By Any & All Means Necessary” so I can catch the RPG show @ Alley Katz tonight. Overnight childcare, people!
• Also: predominantly left-sided abdominal cramps (when I no longer have a left ovary or fallopian tube) kinda freaks me out. Related: Vicodin
• Tampon in at slightly wrong angle; also wearing high heels. Physical comedy FTW!
• Cute, portly drunk chick seated on pavement hugging cute, skinny drunk chick not *yet* seated on pavement. Pass the popcorn.
• Sign in bar says “No Fighting, No Tagging.” First thought: “Flickr.” Second thought: “I should tweet that.” Third thought: “OMFG I’m a nerd”
• Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to reconstruct how I ended up in a discussion of lingerie catalogs and website statistics with RPG’s drummer
• Holy… duck I’m frunk.
• Show’s over. If the room could stop spinning now that would be totally awesome.

This, by the way, was RPG’s set list from that night. That’s Mike Marunde’s foot in the picture.

(It should surprise no one that the song that was ringing most clearly in my head, both that night and all the next day, was Alcohol, which can be heard at the band’s myspace page here.)

Finally there were the reflective tweets of the following morning:

• When you find yourself justifying that you’re not *too* trashed since you can still control the direction of your vomit, you’re too trashed.
• “Rashad! I haven’t seen you in ages!” I said, throwing my arms around him. “I’m not Rashad, but thanks!” he replied, with a big smile. D’OH. [Note: See also "The expanded truth about this anecdote" on my Tumblelog.]
• It’d be just awesome if today’s accomplishments end up including things besides “napped,” “tweeted,” & “kept down Excedrin and ginger ale.”

As I continued to repair from my hangover, I noticed a post from Jay Hathaway, aka @strutting. He no longer follows me on Twitter, but had seen at least one of my tweets that evening, as it had appeared on Favrd.

His post? “I’m flotally tabbergasted that “duckin frunk” made it onto Favrd.”

Well, I dimly thought, excuuuuse me!

Sadly, I was indeed so drunk at the time that it never occurred to me that my spoonerism of “holy… duck I’m frunk” was anything but original. If I’d heard anyone use it before, it was buried deep in my the snookered recesses of memory. Oh, inebriated hubris!

So I replied thusly:

• @strutting: In my defense, 1) I really was that drunk, & 2) This hangover should be considered more than enough punishment.

Thumbnails from the photos appear below; the full photoset (such as it is) appears here.

My Allie, my sweet tortoiseshell of love, is missing FOUND! . Last seen on Lakeside Avenue. (See update here.)

If you see her, please email me at vmarinelli@gmail.com. (You can put “cat” in subject line, and it will automatically forward as a text message to my phone, so I’ll be able to respond quickly). Or, of course, call the number on her tag (blue, as shown below, on pink and black collar).

Thanks very much.

It’s been a weird week. Sunday, I saw what was, perhaps, the best show of my entire life: The National (playing, as it were, at the Richmond venue called The National). That show deserves its own post (delayed though it may be), but what I want to convey here, as efficiently as possible, is what happened afterward.

Namely, I kind of fell apart, for a laundry list of reasons I won’t elaborate on here, except to say that for me, extraordinarily awesome moments are often followed by the sense of getting bitch-slapped by the Universe (sorry, I mean Universe). Also, I become excruciatingly aware that certain of my (mostly verbal) excesses can attract strangers, while alienating friends.

That’s always going to be a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, but on Monday, after deciding to go on a week-long hiatus from Twitter (where most of my excess verbiage gets spilled), I started keeping a running list of things I wasn’t “tweeting” (in the peculiar parlance of the medium).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the list of things I wasn’t posting there became far more unmanageable than if I’d been posting them as I went along. In a way it was good, because while I have certainly erred on the side of non-self-censorship on Twitter, there were some things that were really freaking me out (some of them devastatingly sad, others just as devastatingly - and inappropriately - hilarious) which even I wouldn’t have been comfortable with posting publicly. That stuff had to go somewhere, or I was gonna lose it.

I made it all of two days into my intended week-long “hiatus” before realizing it had been rather ridiculous of me to even try. So, after a few friends had seen the crude list (crude in the sense of raw, but, yeah, there was certainly the other crude, too), I came back, I’m pretty sure, for good. I hope that in doing so I don’t alienate or overwhelm the people I care about most (on and off Twitter), but if that does happen, I’ll be a big girl about it and just deal.

And now, thanks to my pal Mogrify (@mogrify on Twitter, main website here), I have discovered Wordle, a tool via which I can share with you (at least a visualization of) the 74 things I didn’t post to Twitter. Without, you know, actually saying what all those things were, and causing all sorts of undeserved discomfort for the people I love.

Here, then, are some of the relevant words that arose (from which y’all had best not infer any particular thing or things)*:

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* You can also click here for a larger image with easier to read words.

Folks, at the end of this month we will be, I’m afraid, moving.

Granted, it will only be next door, to a house owned by the same landlord (with marginally more room, so finally the girls will have separate rooms and, therefore, can hopefully avoid killing each other), so there will be no specific inconvenience or expense of a moving truck, for example.

However, we’ve been living here for a decade now, and the amount of life’s accumulated detritus is positively staggering. Efforts to pare down the loads of completely useless crap we own are… floundering.

But every now and then, going through boxes, I find some super awesome prizeworthy shit. Like this children’s book, an acquisition from Diversity Thrift (where the cool people in Richmond shop, thank you very much). (Coincidentally, I am of the thinking that the “cool” contingency of Richmond consists of broke ass people like us.)

(Click through to Flickr for larger images/detail)

Some teenagers would kill to go to a Lamb of God show - never mind the luxury of VIP access and such, since we’re friends of the band members, in particular, vocalist Randy Blythe (as discussed recently) and guitarist Mark Morton (whom my husband has known since the seventies, and I’ve known since 1990). Here’s my girl at her first (and thus far, only) such show:

Now, contrast that with the same teenager’s reaction to a Jonas Brothers’ show? No contest!

The funny thing? At the very event where the latter show occurred (Virginia’s State Fair, 2007) we also hung out for awhile with Randy, who gave our daughter some good-natured grief for her lack of enthusiasm for the metal genre.

Well, no one can say we’re not exposing the kids to a… variety of cultural experiences.

From my pal D. Randall Blythe:

I am sitting outside in Paris @ cafe Les Deux Magots (waaaaay Hemingway!) having an espresso and getting ready to walk over to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ house, then on to where Joyce wrote a good part of Ulysses. There’s your geek stuff for the day. XO, DRB

Can I just say? How rad is it that one of my dearest friends in the world not only throws down as lead screamer for Richmond’s own Grammy-nominated metal band, but also gets me as the literature dork I am. (And who was also my very first regular reader, in this blog’s first incarnation, in 2003 or so.)

Love you, Randy. Have fun out there and get your butt back home to RVA safe and sound. (And note that I waited a full twenty-four hours before posting this. Wouldn’t have wanted you to get stalked by Parisian metal fans or whatever.)

Because I have about fifty other things going on, including a few stalled blog posts and an increasingly urgent need to pack for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (my BFF is treating me to the Amtrak fare and a long weekend’s mutual writerly support, yay!), but I also feel like shaking up the uber-serious mood of this blog ever since that last piece posted, and finally, because I have been inspired by a dear friend’s adventures in (ahem!) ‘art’ criticism, I give you… this.

Please understand that I do not, in any way, endorse the practice of taxidermy. (FFS, I’m a vegetarian!) But I happened upon this… thing in a bookstore near VCU (which, in keeping with its catering to eccentricity, is open sometimes, closed at other times, with no predictable pattern to it), and I just didn’t quite know what to do with the surreal image. So of course I’m foisting it upon you.

…And, what was even more inscrutable? The other end (business end?) of said chipmunk¹:

(Note: If you couldn’t make that out, the lettering says, The rule of consciousness is near. Um, okay, WHAT?)

Which, to me, doesn’t make me a lick of sense, but maybe I’m just not enough of a ‘real artist’ to get it.

I suppose this would be called, by aficionados of the form, either ‘mixed media’ or ’sculpture.’ (And/or ‘animal cruelty,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘OMFG what drugs was this person on when they made this thing’ by others.)

Let’s say we agree to call this ’sculpture.’ (For the purposes of argument. C’mon, just play along.)

If, indeed, it is sculpture, how did it get there? Is this ’student work’? And if so, is it, by any bizarre chance, the work of a student in VCU’s Sculpture Department, ranked again by US News & World Report as the top program of its kind in the country?

(Clearly, stranger things have happened.)

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¹ Unless it’s actually a squirrel and I’ve got everything wrong. It’s not like I’m an expert in differentiating between varieties of taxidermied rodents, okay?

On Monday it was my great fortune to have a coffee date with a new friend, one Ms. Jennifer Jane, a.k.a. @peeppeep, found via the social media wonder that is Twitter. (My profile: here.)

Allow me to provide you with a sampling of her posts on Twitter that quickly established her awesomeness, and made it clear to me we were actually going to have to meet in person. (Besides her reply to my message, “Beck’s ‘Lost Cause’ makes me feel better about being one,” with “that song got me through my last breakup. best played while lying in bed for the third day in a row.” So true, so true.)

• bought jelly shoes today. can’t wait until my sweaty feet make those farty noises. i am a sex bomb.
• @ the mall. Person in next dressing room either having sex or an asthma attack. Kind of worried.
• running only on caffeine and a bite of chocolate bunny. ears, natch.
• If you are one of my customers and i am rude to you today, i am sorry. It’s just that i hate you.
• is it okay to tell someone that you’ll have sex with them if they promise not to talk before during or after?
• my last customer was an old lady who totally farted while standing in my line.

See? Awesome.

So we arranged to meet on Monday, and predictably I was running late because I couldn’t find my ass with both hands, much less stuff like keys, driver’s license, and sunglasses. Once I finally found the first two, I gave up on the third and headed out the door. Of course it was incredibly bright outside, all the more so to me because I had just pulled a writing all nighter. (This post. Worth the effort, but still, oof.)

If you’re not in the habit of pulling writing all-nighters and then walking out into the blazing light of day, let me assure you it is an uncomfortable, squinty experience. Then, once in the car, I scrounged around to see if my husband had any abandoned sunglasses laying about. His head is unnaturally large, so whenever I do swipe his shades (like when I steal his socks; he has boats for feet), they tend to fall off me, but they’re better than nothing when I am in need. Alas, I found nothing.

What I did find, however, was one pair of 3D glasses from when my husband had taken the girls to Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds (in Disney Digital 3D! says the promo). At which time, blissfully, I had been writing, exempt from both the added expense (the tickets were $15 each!) and the emotional overwhelm (see this photo for some indication of how I felt about getting dragged to a Jonas Brothers concert during our last State Fair). See why I love my husband?

And while thinking persons might question the wisdom of wearing 3D glasses for driving, after an all-nighter in particular, I have to say they did the job just fine, tamping down the impossible glare, and enabling me to make it only ten minutes late to my coffee date.

And of course, I made a dashing first impression:

…And we went on to have one of the most pleasing conversations I have had with another human being in quite some time, the actual substance of which would be impossible to recreate here, but suffice it to say, we have enough bizarre stuff in common, and enough about our respective life experiences that is radically different, that we totally bonded, talking nonstop until I had to finally dash off to fetch the youngest girlchild from school. (Also, she has teenagers. All our local friends who finally decided to breed did it late enough in the game that my own teen is always the oldest kid in the crowd, when we have family-friendly parties. The idea of getting our respective offspring to hang out too is pretty fab.)

I go through a lot of angst over friendships, because so many of the people I love (outside the network of friends I pretty much married into) are largely out of state. When I meet people locally, so many of them have no context for the whacked out kind of life I’ve lived (geographically, politically, whatever). When I make connections online with people whom I might, ostensibly, meet face-to-face at some point, it’s much the same, with a few brilliant exceptions.

For example, there has been the wonderful Joriel, whom I first found via the Blogger listings for Richmond (before we both moved to Wordpress). Even without having a (by my standards) particularly insane personal history, she somehow understood me (because she is a real, honest-to-God serious writer, and that’s an altogether unique breed). But then she and her equally wonderful honey moved away, to the very place where so many of the people I already love and miss terribly live: Seattle.

And there is the equally brilliant Jane, with whom I have almost as much radically in common as I have radically not in common, which makes our interactions edifying, stimulating and fun (particularly given her wicked sense of humor). (Also, she is a kick-ass photographer. Go buy some of her Etsy stuff, seriously.) And while she is, at least, here in Virginia, she’s still far enough away that we have not yet been able to make good on our threats to go hog wild someday at Ikea¹. (Don’t ask me why this possibility appeals to me. It just does.)

But Jennifer? Not only gets me (a tall order for any human being, seriously), but she lives right here! Less than a ten-minute-drive away! And it makes my heart go pitter-patter, and feel significantly less angstful about my place in the universe.

Richmond just got a lot better.

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¹There has also been a proposal that Jane and I might someday see Molly Hatchet together, but when the celestial bodies might properly align to make such a thing come to pass, I couldn’t possibly guess.

Dear Dr. Gilliam,

I was stunned to learn only tonight of your passing. I had just worked up the nerve to make a new appointment after having not seen you for months; Linda Love from your office called with the news.

If I understand correctly (not a sure thing, as my sharp, jagged sobs punctuated that conversation), you were at Mardi Gras - one of your favorite celebrations in this world. You’d had a fine meal and some ice cream, followed by a third course of Massive Heart Attack. You died instantly, moving straight into the next mystery. (Your schedule always was pretty busy.) I can only imagine that realm’s cuisine and music and art. Or, if it’s too formless for that, then its textures and resonances, faintly echoing sound waves. Whatever it is that might characterize that place (or lack of place), I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth.

If you found God, please verify for me that S/He has an offbeat sense of humor. S/He might appreciate, perhaps, that just above where I’ve written “I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth,” that at first, I accidentally wrote “death” instead of “depth,” which would have been fairly horrifying to me had I inadvertently uploaded such text to the guestbook accompanying your obituary (we are so modern now we have online funerals!).

I want to say here that I’m grateful to you on quite a few counts:

• You were objective. When I told you about certain events, where you had knowledge of some parties involved, you did not let that knowledge color your judgment; you listened to me and you believed me. (Also, you’ll be proud of me: today I finally worked up the nerve to consult with a lawyer. This time, I’ll follow the process through, however far I still can, given the various statutes.)

• You didn’t try to cram the complexity of me into any kind of one-size-fits-all treatment model; you were fine with discarding what wasn’t working (for example, the course of Ambien that had me driving to Wal-Mart and making strange vegan casseroles in the night - not to mention leaving long, loopy voice mails for various friends and ex lovers), and adapting stuff that seemed like it might work. You gave me the space to work through things at my own speed.

• There were, over the last 3-4 years, various gaps (sometimes lasting months) between our appointments. You pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed. And backed off when pushing wouldn’t have helped.

We speculated, once or twice, as to whether we might be some kind of distant kin, both our families having roots in the Appalachian segments of Virginia and Tennessee, and with the name of “Gilliam” having made at least one appearance in my own family tree. It may or may not have been, but it did not matter nearly so much as the fact that I felt safe with you, at a time in my life when I felt safe with almost no one. (Linda gave me a few names of other doctors to call. Already, I feel sorry for them, considering the tests I put you through.)

If you carry into the next world some C.V. concerning your accomplishments in this one, please feel free to include among the numerous details this item: that you helped to save my life. S/He can call anytime for a reference; I haven’t moved and am not likely to, until such time as my living here might also come to a natural rather than unduly hastened end. Perhaps also in the context of vacation. (The grammarian in me feels compelled to note, here, the root of ‘vacate’ in this word; damn if you didn’t take this most recent ‘vacation’ quite literally.)

Rest peacefully, Dr. Gilliam. My best, also, to your partner Roy (another fine and gentle soul), and to your children, friends, colleagues, and patients.

We were all quite fortunate to know you.

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More on Dr. John Hilliard Gilliam:

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Obituary
Bipolarity: The mental health community has lost a hero
Dr. John Gilliam: Memorial page

Today we went to a rally held near VCU, outside a fundraising event for the Democratic Party of Virginia. The event itself was attended by both Senators Clinton and Obama, but outside that event, the rally quickly turned into a massive rally, attended by both Clinton and Obama supporters (though there were approximately twice as many Obama supporters present - no surprise considering Obama’s huge lead in Virginia). Generally, it was a friendly affair, but the respective candidates’ supporters were not shy in expressing their enthusiasm, and there was a bit of jockeying that went on, with Obama fans working to upstage Clinton’s, and vice-versa. (See for example woman with green “Go Hillary” sign in front of the giant multi-letter Obama sign assembly below.)

Exceptions to the “generally friendly” category included one woman holding a Clinton sign, who repeatedly chanted Fuck Obama, and some moron with a Bros before Hos shirt. Thankfully my husband was the one who witnessed both the Fuck Obama chanter and the Bros Before Hos shirt wearer, or I would likely have gotten in both of their faces in a pretty aggressive way.

My sign, for the record, read Feminist for Obama, which got a lot of cheers from numerous women, which was pretty awesome. I don’t have a still of me with the sign (several other people took pics of me though - should you be one such random individual, email me!), but I did snap this pic of another woman with the same signage:

Now, I should specify here that within our family, we all think Clinton is an excellent candidate, but three out of four of us lean more toward Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination. (Which is to say that if Clinton wins, she will be supported by us in the general election with every bit as much enthusiasm as most of us now feel with regard to Obama’s quest for the nomination.) The lone Clinton holdout is my daughter Annalisa (who turned eight today - Happy Birthday sweetheart!), and it was important to all of us that she get her Clinton buttons and signs just as we were decked out in our pro-Obama gear. Here are Mariarosa and Annalisa, then, representing for their respective candidates:

(Though toward the end of the event, Annalisa was less than enthused, complaining that her feet hurt… we went home a few minutes after this was taken:)

One more anecdote (if you were looking for deep analysis, I’m going to try to have something more in that vein posted before Virginia’s primaries this coming Tuesday): There was a point when I was talking with two other women who were holding Obama signs, and they were looking curiously at Annalisa’s and my signs - so I explained what was up: that Annalisa wanted Clinton to win, and I wanted to support her in expressing her ideas even when - or especially when - they were different from my own. I had taken her aside earlier that day, when she’d felt some hesitation about carrying a Clinton sign in an area of the rally that was 95% pro-Obama. I’d told her how proud of her I was, that it was important to be willing to stand by your beliefs even when others don’t share those ideas - the important thing was that we listened to and were respectful of each other. The women I relayed this to thought that was fantastic, and each of them personally assured Annalisa that she should hold her sign proudly (while also wishing her a very happy birthday). And then there was some discussion about how maybe she could be President one day, which got a big smile from my girl.

I’m glad I live in a world now where the two chief candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination are both very viable and brilliant, and represent a major paradigm shift away from white male supremacy. I’m glad my daughter knows it’s possible that she, too, can aspire to that office someday - as glad as I am that her best friend Mariko (who, like Obama, has a white mother and a black father), with whom we attended the event (pics forthcoming), can know this in her heart, too, without ambivalence or qualification.

Yes We Can. It means something, people.