Echo

I fell asleep at work today and dreamed someone shot me.

In the afternoon, I went to see an eccentric, hippy-ish but adorable podiatrist who looked like a Pacific Northwest trail guide transplanted into a sterile doctor’s office in the middle of polished Los Angeles. I loved it! He was working on me and asked me about my experience in PR/Marketing. I said I’d be happy to do some PR work for him and asked if he was looking for a freelancer as opposed to a full-time person. He said, “I need a freelancer. [pause, turns away] I need a freelancer for my wife.” I was taken aback for a moment cuz I thought he was saying, he needed someone to sub-in as his wife and I thought, WHAT THE HELL??? (Yes, the collective hindsight of my wait-a-minute moments of obliviousness with creepy old men has made me very jumpy.)

But then he went on to say that his wife was starting up a practice and would need PR.

This world confuses me. I don’t know whether to be really onguard with people or really trusting, because the world definitely keeps me guessing.

My physical therapist is the bomb. (I know you love your gyno, Amber, but I bet my PT could kick your gyno’s ass. Yes, I am seven). She makes me laugh and makes me feel less bummed about my back, and reminds me of those great times back when we were all kids, when things were still simple, and how comfortable it felt to be around other kids who you absolutely trusted because they were still young and so open and just decent.

God. LA can make a person feel so cynical and spiritually isolated. But for every hundred people I meet who are the selfish, self-centered kind, the ones who are always taking advantage of other people, are motivated by ulterior motives and are, just generally, people who don’t appreciate or care about other people, all it takes is interacting with one decent person to make me feel good about people again.

This is the thing that I hate so much about religions. You can meet the nicest, kindest people at churches. But you can also meet the most judgmental, closed-minded people. And sometimes, those really nice and kind people are also the closed-minded ones, and that really confuses me. If you go to a place of worship to feel ultimately connected to a greater power and your fellow human beings, then how can there be any place in your heart, your soul or being to feel condescension towards anyone or anything? I don’t understand it. That people have the ability to turn their kindness on and off, to be capable of withholding kindness from anyone in dire need. It makes me feel socially retarded, but I really can’t understand how that works.

I would love to go to a church to meet good people, but I can’t stand the dogma, the potential for small-minded human judgment and oppression. I just want to meet spiritual people who believe in the power of kindness without trying to influence me to feel power over anyone else. I honestly think the people who are kind are our angels, because small reminders that they exist are enough to stave off anyone’s feelings of drowning in existential loneliness.

I think I’m feeling good because I’ve got my brother here whose gear is stuck on kind, and I got phone calls today from Rie (a good friend getting married), and the boys from Starbuck’s (calling from the store).

Thank you so much for your kind email today (Subject: Make your scallywag massive!); I can’t tell you how much it means to have a stranger take such interest in my vanity and be willing to help me make the improvements necessary for me to be an outstanding member of society. You have hit the nail on the head when you asked me if I dream about adding inches to my scallywag. In fact, just yesterday, I showed my mother my scallywag shortly after we exited our shower together, and she said, “Julia, you have a beautiful scallywag. But you know what would make it a GLORIOUS scallywag? More inches.” The universe must be synchronized, or God is looking out for me, because I opened up my inbox this morning and like a miracle, there was your email!

My only concern is that you say your product only adds 2-3 inches, and I’m afraid that 2-3 inches would still leave me with a below-average sized scallywag. Do you have a maximum strength version of your product? Or prosthetic accessories that can be purchased along with your product? I would not need anything drastic–Lord knows that I don’t want to go around with a bigger scallywag than those on the people I date. But just a big enough scallywag to give me a respectable bulge in my pants.

I would greatly appreciate more information on your product, as I think this is the very thing that could improve my quality of life! By the way, would you happen to know CuM_N_YoUr_PaNtS? He sent me an email yesterday (Subject: Horny Housewives Need Big Cock Now), but I accidentally deleted it instead of spam from that damn Christian Dating site that somehow got a hold of my email address. Sick motherfuckers. Anyway, I wanted to introduce him to steve b who sent me an email (Subject: Sluts Love Horse Cock). I thought those two might be able to join forces and help each other out.

So please get back to me ASAP. The more I think about it, the more I’m feeling inadequate about my scallywag.

Some quick notes before I’m out for the night to watch Love Actually…

The only thing that can really make me lose it–my Achilles Heel–is the abuse of power by authority figures. Injustice and unfairness, as much as they terrify me, make me crazy with rage.

When a person grows older and faces all the things that frightened her as a child, she comes to realize that many fears are irrational, rooted in the limited perspective of a child pulling away from an existence defined by utter defenselessness and dependency. I had thought that I had confronted all my major fears and understood the realities/irrationalities of them, until my run-in this weekend with a nice, hick-town police officer who found the courage within himself to bully a defenseless woman on a dark road in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Bravo, Mr. Police Man. Your friends must marvel at the size of your cojones.

I have one thing to say to him, before I write an official complaint letter mailed certified to every single person up his chain of command (and believe me, I DO have the time and tenacity):

Ah, yes. “More Intensity.” The pivotal line of one of my favorite scenes in Lost in Translation, a film so simplistic, it’s (brilliantly) near-bombastically cerebral in its dissection of the complexities of communication. Intensity, the inherent human trait, the syntax of the very instincts that successfully dragged human beings through the annals of evolution, has become an almost esoteric expression diluted by a phlegmatic society adamant on a collective Paris-Hilton blase-ness serving as a way of life. Somehow, I really don’t think this is what the ancient Eastern Zen Masters had in mind.

What has inspired me to speak so pretentiously, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Right Said Fred. Yes, Right Said Fred and its tongue-in-cheek one-hit wonder about being too sexy to do anything or be anything, managed to divert my attention from the difficult quandary of whether I wanted to eat a cup of yogurt before I worked out or after, to my annoyance at the way society sends mixed messages about people taking life by the balls and ripping them out its throat via its tiny little pink asshole.

When I played sports when I was younger, the hardest thing was walking that fine line between throwing myself into a competition to challenge my body and my mind’s ultimate potential and willpower, and adhering to what the coaches deemed “lady-like competition” while fighting the attitude of many of the participants that sports were just a form of afterschool social club (aka orgy of conformity and viscious cattiness). Maybe the problem in my day was the lack of prominent pro women’s sports associations, so the most us girls could aspire to was getting a varsity jacket and being called a “dyke” behind our backs. Nevertheless, I found girls’ sports to be as much about the politics of gender roles as about athletic competition.

The best games I ever played were when we felt entitled to go all out and assert our full potential. It was all about the game. We weren’t girls playing sports. We WERE the competition. For those few hours during the game, the win was all that mattered. We could hate each other off the field and have plenty of shit to say about each other, but on the field, we were parts of a whole and we respected each other for the role we each played, and in those intense stretches, outside of life and death, we shared the strongest currents of willpower and emotional bond.

I love watching the Olympics because the women competing are paradigms of athleticism and focus; they are proud of their intensity. But I’d like to throw in something to think about. These women who made it to the highest level of competition are not only outstanding athletes, but have managed to stay true to themselves and their focus despite the social pressures that cause so many talented female athletes to drop out. Yes, all athletes face external pressures coming from a variety of sources. But women really have to develop a great deal of inner strength and personal pride to work against the invisible gender barriers that society unfairly holds dear.

I think the biggest shame that playing girls’ sports taught me, was that even in an arena in which intensity is appropriate, it wasn’t encouraged enough and due to peer pressure, it was often discouraged. I think this attitude is reflective of a bigger problem in society, in which women, other than in certain arenas such as performance arts, can’t go all out and do things to the extreme–ie. show extreme displays of anger, joy, sadness, aggression, etc–without being deemed frightening or crazy. Intensity is equated with extremes which is equated with instability. It is the nuclear explosion, the small seed that can wield so much power, that its power must logically be destructive.

I am an intense person. In sports, I went in shoulder first into every catcher; I crashed the boards for every rebound and I dove for every ball. I have five knee surgeries to show for it but I always found my way back to the competition. I fought for my teammates on the court, even took punches for them, despite absolutely hating some of them for the backstabbing things they did to me off the court. And now that I’m older, I know that intensity doesn’t dissipate with age. It’s still there and those who are closest to me have felt it, simmering under the surface. It’s in the things I do, my writing, my work, my philosophies, my relationships. But I know I don’t feel comfortable showing it to people, thus my love of and my need for stretches of time in which I have the freedom to be alone to allow myself to encompass the full potential of myself.

I love being a woman, but for better or worse, we are the underdogs. Yes, society dictates to men how they have to maintain the ideal of being the strongest, the smartest, the best. But to say that men have it equally as bad as women in terms of gender roles is like saying that a championship basketball team that has to play as well as it did the year before, has it as rough as the last place team whose best player has to play blindfolded JUST BECAUSE he plays for the last place team. One is hampered by the pressure of meeting high expectations while the other is blighted by imposed impediments.

That said, I believe that while men may be the physically stronger sex, women are the internally stronger sex. We have learned to sprint with braces while others ran free; we have learned to fight with daggers while others fought with swords. And despite these challenges, we have succeeded. We have faced the amorphous shadow of grievance nicknamed “human suffering,” tasted it, and learned to give it a name and use it as an ally. And when the physical battles are not enough to defeat certain enemies, it is the spirit of the woman who knows how to weave the suffering into the fabric of the universe, so that, like children, we can be soothed by knowing that everything in our world is still where it should be, and all is not lost.

You give a boy a cape and a plastic helmet and he thinks he’s a superhero. But everyone knows that just by believing things doesn’t always make them so. I have seen a “man” crying on the floor, screaming about the pain of a minor injury like a spoiled child with a paper cut, and I have seen a woman with sharp, jagged bone piercing through bloody skin, asking if she could walk off the field rather than be carried, for the sake of her dignity. And you ask me to buy into chimerical social constructs?

I’m sorry, but HELL no.

Fuck you, misogynistic men who perpetuate this cycle of women being the lesser sex. You are the very ones I have seen bawling on the floor, demanding to be taken care of. And fuck you women who allow this cycle to perpetuate–those who flaunt your lack of self-worth through boastful promiscuity and pathetic caricatures of sexual dominance; those who turn on other women and destroy them in hopes to be the only one left standing in a barren, antagonistic landscape; and those who sit by passively, squandering your potential and letting your life add up to less than the sum of its promising parts. You, who do not make the most of yourself, who avoid the challenge and do not live and love intensely to the most of your potential, are the ones who lose the most in this brilliant but short-lived game.

I bought a tent off a woman on Craig’s List. It’s pretty much new and I got it for $60 so I’m glad, even though I don’t know how much a 3 person tent is supposed to cost. We’re going camping this weekend and it’s my brother’s first time.

I took him to a Moroccan restaurant tonight to celebrate his job and because we wanted to try a new restaurant (he actually wanted Ethiopian food, which I eat once every few weeks, but I told him I’d take him there next week). I think couscous is a gift from the gods. I love that stuff. But the bill came out to be $53 for two entrees and I thought that was way overpriced for okay food in very small portions. The dining room, with all its couches and incense, reminded me of this sex club I went to once where I saw this magazine editor that I had once had drinks with, in a disgustingly compromising position. I don’t think I will go back to that restaurant.

In other news, work was intense today so I managed only 2 blog entries. If work is going to start cutting into my blog time, I’m just gonna have to quit. No, I’m just kidding. Oh, god. Please don’t take away my sweet, sweet paychecks.

Some great great resources for you guys:

My computer
My laptop
My computer at work
My alarm clock
My Site Meter
My Blogger (the publishing side. Any of you guys getting a crapload of error messages too?)
My vibrator
My car CD adapter
My CD burner
My IPod
My company’s telephone system
My attention span

This has been a BAD one.

Girls, girls, girls. And I know you’re girls because gay boys have standards.

This story is morbid, but still, I giggled.

This script’s soundtrack:

1. Harmony -Clinic
2. Your Ghost -Kristin Hersh
3. Into the Night -Angelo Badalamenti
4. At Least We Tried -Moby
5. Shine -Operatica
6. Unmarked Helicopters -Soul Coughing
7. Little Drop of Poison -Tom Waits
8. Eyepennies -Sparklehorse
9. Inertia Creeps -Massive Attack
10. About Her -Malcolm Mclaren
11. My Life -Dido
12. Weather Storm -Craig Armstrong
13. Sweet Song -Blur
14. New Favorite Thing -Alison Krauss
15. A Rush of Blood to the Head -Coldplay
16. Haunted -Poe
17. Exit Music (For a Film) -Radiohead