feminist blogs

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.

___
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.

Yesterday I wrote a long post about fragmentation in women’s lives, as magnified and, in some ways, healed through developing technologies. When I wanted to make an analogy concerning false assumptions that have been made about me based on some political and social justice work I’ve engaged in, I turned to the matter of sexual identity.

In retrospect, that section of the narrative would have fared better as a stand-alone post; in the post (where it was only intended as a reference for comparison) it gets a bit lost. And I realized earlier tonight it’s actually one of the clearer (and mercifully succinct) things I’ve written on the matter, addressing my irritation with people who:

assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

(This, in turn, had developed after articulating on Twitter last week, “It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED?” - Which is one thing I appreciate about Twitter; through the articulation of what are, in themselves, mere fragments, one opens pathways to deeper considerations of the same material later.)

…And now, twenty-four hours later, I’m cleaning out the comment spam from the Askimet filter, and lo! There was the following item (relevant link removed)

As a member of LGBT, I always keep my eyes on the matter of gay and lesbian. “There is no difference between LBGT and straight people when it comes to true love. We know how to love and cherish a person.”It is what we all bisexual get after the discusssin at [STUPID SPAMMY SITE] . And all these words is what we would like to let others know for the bottom of our heart. We only hope don’t make it special for us LGBT. We do love others as you straight do.

Now I know that no one from the website that attempted to place the above spam on my blog didn’t actually read what I wrote (actually, the quality of their prose - and spelling - suggests that improved literacy could do much to improve their marketing prospects) - their processes, such as they are, are automated and rely on keywords in the text of the attacked site, but fuck all, y’all, this is exactly the kind of stupidity I was railing against in the first place. (I held my nose and briefly visited the site; it was, of course, not about the lofty ideas and community dialogue suggested in their scrambled spam-text; it’s a porn/dating site.)

Oh, but they did say it was from (oh wait, for - for?!) “the bottom of our heart.” Well I guess that makes it all just dandy, and I should allow their links to appear here out of dedication to “the matter of gay and lesbian.” “We all bisexual” “love others as you straight do.” Sheesh.

• Sad to learn some friends are going thru Marriage Bed Death. We’ve been married w/ kids for longer than any of ‘em & still fuck like bunnies #
• @acomputerpro Dude. I could twoosh about my navel lint, but I don’t. Desperate to retain that perch, are ya? Sorry, you’re an easy target… #
• @acomputerpro Okay, that had at least a modicum of Funny. I’d use my invented word here, but from my mobile, I can’t use special characters. #
• @mommystory Zounds! That was perfect. Hope it took some of the edge off your wholly appropriate rage. I’m angry on your behalf. Is that odd? #
• Mad props to @theberrygirl & @mommystory for rocking "rat bastard fuckwit" challenge. By comparison, @beanqueen’s haiku efforts totally suck #
• In belated reply to @theberrygirl’s query (http://xrl.us/bgeor), y’all can pudding-wrestle without me. I’ll stand by & narrate in 140 chars. #
• Child, afflicted with hiccups, burps (which hurts). I poke fun & she laughs - again mid-hiccup - & burps again (which hurts more). Poor kid. #
• Me to huz: "Dude, I gave up WOMEN for you. I’m not going to give up Twitter." (& I can give up Twooshing whenever I want, thankyouverymuch.) #
• @girlinblack Jesus. That’s really awful, I’m sorry. #
• @misc I do want to hope Clinton wasn’t behind this ridiculous effort. Any half-awake campaign staffer should have known this would backfire. #
• http://homegrownhawaii.com has the clear advantage over Classmates.com in being free & not sucking ass. Might actually go to Kapa’a reunion. #
• (Would be good if something similarly un-sucky existed for The Evergreen State College reunions. Though TESC experience WAS disillusioning.) #
• I doubt any old friends from Kauai are on Twitter, but have found some nice HNL strangers, & am enjoying the language & cadences I’ve missed #
• (Tweeted in event @hawaii, @sonecessary, or @waialuadakine notice I’ve followed and are wondering just who the hell is this Virginia woman.) #
• @sonecessary - No, only lived there 4 years (84-88) but at the time, it was the longest I’d ever lived anywhere; crazy nomadic upbringing #
• @sonecessary Have complex relationship with Kauai that won’t fit here… working on a blog post now. Partially inspired by Haunani-Kay Trask #
• Working on new blog post tentatively titled "The impossibility of this vision is paradoxically made more viable by its fragmentation." Ooof. #
• (Slightly clearer: It’s a shout-out to the mamas of Twitter, a testament to how we maintain and further develop connections despite it all.) #
• Of course, said post began percolating against my will; I was TRYING to write a post re: Kauai, once my home & missed, but with ambivalence. #
• @misc Yeah, that’s a bit surreal! #
• @QueenofSpain So you ARE going to Ohio! I’ve only been there for a prostitution conference & Ozzfest(!) Good luck-I’ll look fwd to yr tweets #
• @fncll I HIGHLY recommend Lore Sjöberg’s Alt Text (via Wired): http://www.wired.com/commentary/alttext. It’s hilarious, pithy, and succinct. #
• Finally going to bed - @ 4:44 AM. Can’t believe I finally finished the blog post re: Twitter, its asstd. merits, why it’s relevant to women. #
• I truly appreciate stories about Amtrak & terrorism being in the news the very day I’m planning my next train travel. Really, warms my heart #
• Hoping 8 y.o.’s drop-in after school care will have room for her today (she can only go when they aren’t at capacity). I’ve got stuff to do! #
• Someone on literary listserv I’ve been on for 6 years finally worked up the nerve to de-lurk and introduce himself; HE’s been there 7 years! #
• (Since this list is a lot like a large family, this is sort of like finding out I have a long-lost e-relative. Who is fascinating and sweet) #
• (So he knows our histories: who underwent cancer treatment, got married, had custody issues, published, returned to school, or changed jobs) #
• (And weirdly, from one brief intro, we know almost as much about him: PhD in Physics, "born in India to crazy commies," etc. It’s endearing) #
• WRIR (Richmond Indy Radio) is running an OLD news feed for Pacifica Headline News (unless the Potomac Primaries are being held again today!) #
• Twittermamas: My girl’s Algebra teacher moves between scolding kids for "not asking enough questions" & belittling them when they do. Ideas? #
• Thanks to @sarahgilbert and @GeekMommy for the ideas re: my daughter’s Algebra teacher; @MrsStranahan: if only I had the patience/fortitude! #
• @pratim - And we’re so glad you did! (Also FYI, two other Cafe Bluers on Twitter can be found at @fncll and @phaedral. Both wonderful guys.) #
• @blogdiva Because you’re awesome, that’s why. #
• Thx @pratim, @meontwitter 4 following & @divabat, @cyclothymia_ktk, @misc & @Amyloo 4 following back. I’ll try not to twoosh you to death #
• Emails w/ subject line: "You have no events scheduled today" make me sad. Google Calendar, why not come right out & say, "YOU HAVE NO LIFE!" #
• @misc Oh that’s terrible. Funny, but terrible! I did my part, FTR, & texted my one friend in Wisconsin 2 make sure she’d gotten to the polls #
• @Robguy All hail the magnificent Bean! No, seriously, I’d be up shit creek sans paddle w/out coffee. Aetna should be subsidizing my espresso #
• @Remiel Bwahahaha "vurbiew." You should Urban Dictionary that. No really, go. We need insane people like you to turn Language on its head… #
• @Remiel Just realized that last @ reply from me ended in dreaded ellipsis (per your earlier tweet: http://xrl.us/bgfv9); so sorry about that #
• Twitter peeps, please stop being clever, amusing, &/or relevant; I have stuff I was supposed to be doing. DH soon to return; MUST LOOK BUSY! #
• @sarahgilbert If you can’t find other option, I might be able to help. I live in Richmond (not too close, but not impossibly far) Good luck! #
• @acomputerpro CLUE: "Avoidance" & a "lack of any compelling motivation to engage" are not the same thing.Stop embarrassing yourself, please. #

Or: Not to worry, I’m as sick to death of my blog posts in the “Fragments” category as are you.

Or: An answer to the question, “Just what in the hell is this thing called Twitter?” (A feminist literary mama’s excavations of this technology’s relative merits.)

__

Hi there, I’ve been ensconced in the realm of Twitter for a while now (wherein users exchange messages of no more than 140 characters); if you know of what I speak, then you do (feel free to follow); if you don’t, go read Clive Thompson’s article in Wired, which will give you the gist.

Still with me? Cool.

__

Recently I characterized Twitter as being “like the alternately idealized & never-good-enough lover you can’t help but be infatuated with at all times.” On one level (I’ll get to the other level shortly), it’s genius: social media at its best, connecting people in variously casual and profound ways across all sorts of divisions of geography, politics, lifestyle, and identity. One thing I’ve been amazed by is the prevalence of moms on Twitter, which seems particularly apt. In the course of a day, a mama has to deal with a lot of crazy, inherently fragmenting stuff. That cliché about a woman’s work never being done? Well, it’s not a cliché; that shit is real.

So what are a mama’s options for staying in touch with the world, between the phone ringing and the baby crying and the husband whining and every other damn thing? (Note: sadly, this may apply almost as often to moms who work outside the home as to stay-at-home moms, given the unequal sharing of domestic duties between male and female partners, which persists despite the necessary gains of feminism and even when both partners have paid employment.) Maybe you don’t have the luxury of Virginia Woolf’s rightly-recommended “Room of One’s Own”; or maybe you had that room once, but then the baby came along and you had to make a nursery somewhere.

Now, it’s not impossible for a woman writer who is also a mother and who lacks certain resources (time, solitude, individual space, money, etc.) to develop engaged, sustained narrative; Ariel Gore, founder of hipMama, nails that truth in the first three sentences from How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: you need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and a room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom…”

So: not impossible, except in the existential, miraculous sense that for us mamas, everything can be pretty impossible, but we figure out ways to pull it off anyway. And we do it, every day.

And of course, we struggle. And much of what we struggle with is the matter of fragmentation. For the same reason that many women gravitate to poetry over prose, many of us, these days, gravitate toward mediums in which we can express ourselves (and connect with other mamas) even in the milliseconds between erupting crises - whether those crises are deemed “domestic,” e.g., involving the material needs of the bodies of those with whom we cohabit, and/or if they concern our broader engagements with the Body Politic. And Twitter is rapidly becoming that medium, to an even more influential extent than blogs individually.

This is true not least because, in Twitter, one may exchange not only individual, succinct observations, but one can also share links to more sustained narratives elsewhere: whether in blogs, online news media, or audio, video and photo sharing sites (not to mention “mashup” venues which braid such forms together, into fresh amalgamations which, when successful, are worth more in value, by far, than the face-value sums of their parts).

What Twitter does, for many of us, is create the possibility of an alternative to silence. People who have been reading this blog over the years, in its numerous incarnations (from “My So-Called Writer’s Life” in 2003 through “Perpetual Exile,” “Southern Discomfort,” “Vortex(t)” and now this most recent inscrutable moniker “Anachroclysmic“), through its umpteen template overhauls, usually only 25% realized (often with disclaimers posted about the run-down state of the thing, the ever-borked blogrolls and so forth): you know how I struggle with silence.

I might stay up for a few nights in a row, posting stuff that’s incredibly difficult, complex, huge.

Then I’ll shut down, and I won’t post anything for days, weeks, or even months.

Twitter is the technology that has been helping me to stay connected (and keep my sense of humor, which, if you only read my Deep and Serious posts here, you might not know I had) between those rare days of effusive, often brutally honest communiqués. Because, of course, life doesn’t stop just because one is (whether for internal or external reasons, or some combination of both) unable to write about it.

And the feature of the WordPress plugin I use - Twitter Tools - enables me to post a digest of each day’s Twitter entries (”tweets”) in the form of a bulleted list.

The good news: This does, indeed, fill in significant gaps between my other writings here. And, perhaps, gives you a fuller sense of who I am. I’ve had my share of miserable fuckwits take a passing glance at some of the very volatile issues I write about (particularly those pertinent to the sex trade) and make flabbergastingly inaccurate and bizarre assumptions about me which, depending on the extent of their fuckwittedness, they otherwise might not be quite so quick to make. That is, if they understood that the woman here who writes, occasionally, about pimps who are richly deserving of some very swift comeuppance (if not in the form of a prostituted woman personally dispensing righteous justice, then courtesy of the perpetually-imperfect Law), is the same woman who writes joyously and unapologetically about what is, after all, her absolutely marvelous sex life. (Or, alternately, complains bitterly if she’s not getting any.)

Which is not to say that I owe anybody - least of all the pro-sexcapitalism fuckwits - any explanation.

But, just as I am driven apeshit by people who, for example, assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix*), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

…So to am I driven apeshit by people who make other sorts of baseless (sometimes quite innocent, but at other times quite malicious and misogynist) assumptions about me.

So, with these accumulated “tweets,” whoever is still reading this blog (all 4 of you, I think it is) have some opportunity to have a clearer sense of where I’m coming from.

And here’s another merit: It’s a wonderful, fun, geeky challenge to see just how much meaning one can pack into 140 characters. Indeed, a game called “Twooshing” has developed among the particularly hardcore Twitter users, wherein the challenge is to express oneself in precisely 140 characters; yours truly is, at this moment, at the top of the Twoosh Boards. There is levity and, of course, significant triviality being indulged with this activity, but the compressing challenge of the form - as with strict poetry forms - can also lend itself, sometimes, to art. (No, really! I’m completely serious.)

And, it’s good practice; one becomes extremely proficient in cutting away whatever is extraneous in narrative, so that even when one is writing something of more length and complexity, it has a better chance of packing a nice, walloping punch. (And then, whatever adjectives you do choose are like precious delicacies, distributed with care throughout one’s prose which has already been trimmed down enough to convey descriptions well.)

And sometimes the 140-character form is just wonderfully pragmatic. For instance, I recently went to see Cloverfield. I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested enough afterward to write a substantive review of the film - but I did want to weigh in with something, given its present popularity. So, while still in the theater (using my cell phone), I did:

Shorter Cloverfield: Post-9/11 anxiety + generalized fear of unknown + patriotic iconography + fuzzy dialogue/ barf-inducing film technique.

(And really, that’s about all you need to know about that film, in my humble opinion.)

And now, the bad news: (the above-referenced other level): If you’re not on Twitter, some of what gets posted (particularly the items beginning with @[username]) in this manner isn’t going to make a lick of sense to you. (And if you are on Twitter, then you’d probably rather follow all that stuff via Twitter’s own UI, and reading anything here is a bit redundant.) And of course, because individually these “tweets” can only pack in so much in the way of nuanced communication, I do run the risk of being seen as suddenly trivial and light (me!) when I’m writing about certain issues. Do I wish, for example, I’d had more time to develop a fully-realized essay on why I’m supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination? Of course. But if you were reading here and trying to ferret out the basis of that support, you might not be particularly moved by 140-character crystallizations that, necessarily, can only communicate so much.

So that’s it, my imperfect system du jour. (Which I may well turn upside-down tomorrow.)

Tweetcha l8r.

__

*This was on a short-lived blog called Queen of the Bean; someday I’ll recover and make some substantive use of the old posts.