Echo

Just got back from a trip to the bay area with Jake. It was his first time to San Francisco and I did a pretty crappy job of showing him around since my family can’t get it together and out the door by early afternoon. I took him to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is neither golden, nor a bridge. Talk amongst yourselves. No, wait, it is a bridge. But it’s red. Or rust. Or a more descriptive color whose name I would know if I had more gay friends. Anyway, we looked at it. Paused for as long as what felt appropriate to mimic reverence, then spent a few hours trying to find parking in Chinatown. The Chinese New Year parade was going on and that was really cool. For as long as we’ve lived in the bay area, none of us has ever been to this parade. My mom kept saying that just hearing the beat of the drums makes her heart quicken, thinking about her childhood. It’s amazing the way we’ll miss the things we leave behind.

We had dinner there and then went to meet up with Aubrey and Candice in North Beach. My mom only drove the wrong way up a one-way once. We had my brother with us and since he’s 19, he can’t get into bars, so we planned to meet at a restaurant and grab dessert and wine. As we drove up the main street in North Beach, with huge neon signs advertising strippers and XXX Adult Movies- The Nastiest You’ve Ever Seen, my mom started mumbling somewhat jokingly but very anxiously, what is this?…where are you taking us?…is this the right place?…are those strippers?

Walking up the street to meet Aubrey and Candice, we lost my mom and my brother in the crowd. We waited and after a few moments, my mom hurried up with my brother in tow. She grabbed me and whispered, He was standing outside the strip bar and wouldn’t leave. [Story follows: my brother so wants to hang out with the “big kids,” that he’s really conscious that there are a lot of places he’s excluded from because he’s under 21. So when he walked by the titty bar and saw the “18 and Over” sign, completely missing the towering photo of a near-naked woman straddling a pole, he vehemently insisted on going in there because he was old enough. He had no comprehension whatsoever of what this place was. Yes, friends, car alarms are indeed, very sensitive.]

We met up in a quaint, intimate little Italian restaurant decorated with such classical aesthetics as a topless Mona Lisa on the wall and a seated female statue wielding an American flag with the flag stick propped up in her ceramic crotch. And Candice enjoyed an unobstructed view of the men’s room toilet from her seat. We were real low key…just had desserts and chatted. I really wish those two lived closer because they’re such beautiful people and I miss them so much.

This morning, I met my mom in the bathroom and the conversation went as follows.

(I don’t remember what she was saying right before this conversation because I wasn’t listening).

Mom: …yeah he was so excited to find a place that would let him in. [pause, then wistfully] but one day we’ll need to let him go.

I stop rinsing off my face and look at her in the mirror, cleanser dripping into my eyes.

Me: Go where?

Mom: He’s going to need to find out sooner or later.

Me: Are we talking about the titty bar?

Mom: The place where women dance.

Me: He needs to find out sooner or later that women strip?

Mom: No! You know. What men do.

Me: That men watch women strip?

My mom is already gone, having gotten distracted and left the room.

I am:

25 year-old, single Asian female, non-smoker, social drinker, non-allergic to most furry animals. Basketball fanatic, Sunday static, braving the world on a whim and a prayer. Born psychic, hyperactive, cycle goes depressive depressive optimistic depressive (optional rinse and repeat). mellow-mellow tantrum thrower, I’m-not-yelling-who-says-I’m-yelling, I’ll beat you if you start to blubber. Broke a mirror then never got laid, spent college thinking I hope I’m not gay, ate plant food once cuz it was out in the sink (mama said, you’ll put anything in your mouth). Speak Chinese, Spanish and limited Bosnian, my tongue is longer than yours I swear. Systematic mental erratic growing pains never felt so good. Corey Haim is better than Feldman but Feldman is better than Haim plus Hart. Please don’t eat me said the cheese, so I shaped him into a little man and kept him in my freezer. Dreams in color, sometimes three-act structure, but every once in a while I think they’re memories. Got no ass, but a shitload of class, my potty mouth can get me in trouble. Gasoline will kill an ex-boyfriend’s rose garden, no officer I was not trying to burn down his house. Spastic, yeah, and got no balance, yes that was me that ran into the wall. Walked into men’s rooms six times in my life, only once was intentional and no one said thank you. Passionate, obsessive bleeding heart, but closet loather of fat people at buffets. Cry or laugh myself to sleep, please cuddle with me, I’m the make-out queen, I haven’t been the same since the Giants lost the World Series. Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head pulled the trigger now he’s dead, i am not a robot i am a human being.

I am looking for:

Hail Mary
1 : a Roman Catholic prayer to the Virgin Mary that consists of salutations and a plea for her intercession
2 : a long forward pass in football thrown into or near the end zone in a last-ditch attempt to score as time runs out

According to Ron Z.:

Hail Mary

If you get a chick pregnant, you tell her, “Baby I love you and I wanna marry you, but if you get an abortion, we’ll have a big wedding, buy a house, get financially stable and then have kids.”

I love rainy nights. There’s a peace to them. A safety. It seems as though rain is one of the few things that can keep the darkness at bay, the darkness that creeps in from under the cracks of the doors and crawls along your skin, resting its cold, oppressive head on your chest. Darkness doesn’t so much have claws as a subtle weight that drags you down from the inside, so slowly, that you don’t notice it’s taken you until the emptiness collapses you from within like a hollow shell.

Tonight, I am thinking about a boy I knew in the 5th grade. He was a really nice kid and always treated me with respect and kindness even though I was a very angry person.

I had transferred to a public school for the 4th grade when my family moved. My parents had discovered my brother’s condition and decided to move us to another town, into a house on a hill in a very isolated neighborhood, away from the potential scrutiny of neighbors and friends. I went from being well-liked at a private Christian school, to a soft, easy target for public-school bullies. I was angry…I hated my parents for ignoring me, I hated my brother for causing the slow disintegration of my family, I hated the other kids for the way they treated me and I hated the teachers for looking the other way. But most of all, I hated the loneliness–the silent poison that tinged every single waking moment and seeped through my body during the abandonment of night.

This boy sat in front of me in Mr. Banfiel’s class. We’d talk every once in a while and he struck me as someone with so much warmth. Sometimes, when he walked by and knew that I was having a bad day, he would give me a comforting squeeze on the shoulder. I could never react in a way that showed appreciation, as by then, I had learned that showing vulnerability meant getting attacked. But it goes beyond words how nice it felt to have him reach out to me in that way, to show me that someone acknowledged my existence and was willing to reach out with kindness rather than with cruelty and destruction.

He also showed me how a person could cut himself. How, if you used ice cubes to numb a body part, you wouldn’t feel the needle tear away at your skin. How, if you were brave enough, you could create scars that made up homemade tattoos with single strokes to produce crisp, clean lines, rather than having to slowly carve away at yourself.

We stopped talking to each other when we moved on to junior high. By high school, he was cutting class and getting into all kinds of drugs and trouble with the crowd he hung out with. Meanwhile, I had pretty much checked out mentally, with my only goal being just to get out of high school alive.

Tonight, I am sitting in my posh Los Angeles condo, nearly 15 years later, with the rain pounding away at the windows as my rumbling heater emanates a cozy warmth. And I’m thinking about him. I’m wondering where life took him and how he’s doing, and I hope that he is also somewhere out of the cold. I pull up the left leg of my black work slacks and run a finger along the inside of my ankle. By the glow of my computer screen, I can see the smooth skin of my leg–soft, even and unblemished. But I know what was once there.

In hindsight, I can see that he was a very troubled kid, just as in hindsight, I’ve come to realize that I was as well. Could anyone see the hurt in these children? Did people notice and not reach out a hand? Did my friend manage to make it out of childhood intact? They say that life is about getting over the traumas of childhood. Some can do it while others are overtaken by it. Sometimes I think life is about refusing to replay the tragic films of your past once you’ve recorded them. Because you spend too much time in the darkness experiencing a painful loop rather than creating better mementos.

Well, I’d like to address that. I would think that of all people, MY ROOMMATE who nearly shares the same astrological chart as I, would be more sensitive to the fact that I just got out of an intense, extremely meaningful imaginary relationship with an imaginary boyfriend, and the pain of this separation still hurts me beyond words within my deep, vulnerable, imaginary places. It is not every day that you meet an imaginary soulmate who makes you feel like such a strong, imaginarily black woman as this amazing imaginary man did to me. And when I found out that he cheated on me with that damn whore who works at the DMV, with the hot body but ugly face and over-compensates for it by acting really slutty and talking non-stop about her prowess in kinky sadomasochistic situations to anyone who will listen when in truth she’s just a scared little girl rebeling against her overbearing, Bible-thumping mother, it pretty much broke my imaginary heart. But when I found out she gave him a not so imaginary STD, well, that made me imagine giggling uncontrollably for hours. And hours and hours.

So lay off me. I’m wallowing in imaginary self-pity and I’m lucky to have imaginary friends who are willing to be supportive.

Currently in my CD rotation:

Holy mind fuck. One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. I’ve been wanting to see this since August after a psych professor recommended it. It’s amazing and tragic and frustrating. The filmmakers do a really great job of showing many perspectives and not influencing the audience through the filmmaking, so that even at movie’s end, you have no idea what happened or who to believe. But does it matter? It’s not for me to judge. All I know is that many lives were torn apart by the accusations, and it’s impossible not to feel immense compassion, particularly for Jesse. And even if the things that they were charged with didn’t happen, there was definitely dysfunction in that family’s life and some highly inappropriate and devastating behavior. There were also definitely many grievous actions and judgments that went on within the investigation. Complete witchhunt mentality, which was frightening in itself. The home videos capture some incredibly naked moments. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND renting this on DVD and watching all of the extras. They’re almost better than the movie. This movie…seriously…it’ll be on my mind for a while.

In the past few months I’ve been drawn to the issue of sexually inappropriate behavior within families and the psychological aftermath these things have on children after they become adults, particularly between a parent and a child.

I really want to take an opportunity here to talk about something I’m very serious about. There are many things that go on behind closed doors that people never talk about, because they are afraid, because they are ashamed, because they feel a sense of duty to their aggressors despite being victimized or because they are in denial and/or have no memory of the incident (s). In particular and quite unfortunately, sexual abuse, to its varying degrees, is not uncommon.

I read an eye-opening article a few months ago…

The Pyschological Impact of Sexual Abuse: Content Analysis of Interviews with Male Survivors (David Lisak, Journal of Traumatic Stress, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1994)

When I found this article, I was particularly interested in male victims with female perpetrators, since this is a very taboo subject and few men are willing to come forward due to fears of the social stigmas; I feel that so much work has been done from other perspectives, that it is very important that men victimized by women also have understanding and an outlet. This article was extremely powerful and heart-wrenching, especially when I read the quotes from survivors. I hope, to those who read the following, that this article will promote more understanding, and to those who have experienced forms of abuse, that they know that life does not have to be such a dark struggle, and that many things that are carried inside are things that do not need to be carried. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, a light that matches the light that resiliently burns deep within you, and which you deserve to be embraced by. Together, we need to break this cycle of hurt.

The stats (24 cases):

Age of onset: avg. 7.6 years old(range of 4-16)
Perpetrators: 7 mothers, 1 father, 5 siblings, 3 aunts, 2 uncles, 1 priest, 1 scout leader, 3 neighbors, 6 strangers (some were abused by more than one perpetrator). 53.8% were abused by intrafamilial perpetrators
-family environment often characterized by disruption and/or violence:

42.3% came from families of divorce, separation or parental death.
46.2% were physically abused
34.6% witnessed violence between their parents
50% had at least one alcoholic or drug abusing parent
80.8% have history of substance abuse themselves
50% actively thought about suicide
23% attempted suicide
69.2% have received psychological treatment
31% have victimized others at some point in their lives (this includes sexual abuse of children, rape of adult women, battery of female intimate partners, sadistic physical assaults on adult men)

Some interesting themes described in the article which pervade male survivors’ experiences and lives:

Anger
Anger emerged in the men’s autobiographies in many different forms. They talked about the experience of feeling overwhelmed with rage, of being afraid of their anger, of suppressing it and of discovering its existence…For some [the anger] seemed to conflict with their view of themselves, to make them see themselves in a less favorable light. Others expressed their fear of their violent fantasies or of losing control over their anger.

[SUBJECT]:If they knew what I thought, they wouldn’t let me in society. No way. There’s an incredible amount of violence and stuff that runs through my mind. And I’m really scared of it.

The fear of this anger, or confusion about how and when to express it appropriately, caused some men to actively suppress it. However, control and suppression of anger does not always work and some of the men described what several of them termed, “snapping.”

Betrayal
A subject’s sense of having had their trust or faith in someone violated by this person, either directly or by the person’s perceived actions or thoughts or feelings…Most frequently, men expressed these feelings toward a parent, and most often because the parent failed to protect them from the abuse.

Fear
Men described fear pervading their lives, during the abuse, in the childhood aftermath of the abuse, and throughout the rest of their lives into adulthood. They described fear which could be a dull, ever present reality, or a dizzying experience of abject terror.

[SUBJECT]: I remember the first night I spent in there I screamed just to get out of there. Because that’s where I had been molested. Though I didn’t know that’s why I was screaming. I was just terrified of the room.

[SUBJECT]: I started having panic attacks and I was afraid to have anybody in the house and I was afraid to go out and socialize with people.

[SUBJECT]: And I was afraid I was going insane.

Some men recalled a specific fear which gripped them in the aftermath of the abuse, the fear that they would be “discovered,” that the secret they harbored would be revealed:

[SUBJECT]: And I would be petrified, utterly petrified that somebody might find out about me.

Helplessness
One of the most crucial aspects of the experience of abuse is a fundamental loss of control: over one’s physical being, one’s sense of self, one’s sense of agency and self-efficacy, and one’s fate. The profound helplessness inherent in this loss of control was one of the most deeply felt, yet also difficult to articulate aspects of the abuse experience for these men.

[S]: It’s like my reoccuring dreams like I can’t run. I always have dreams of the same thing. If I’m running, I can’t move my legs and my arms. And somebody is coming down on top of me and I can’t get up. And I’ll wake up and jump out of my bed.

[S]: The world was evil, it’s coming to get you, and you could do almost nothing to defend from it.

[S]: I just had to put up with it. That’s the way she was. They were her rules. If she said I have to kiss her, I have to kiss her. If she says I have to hug her, I have to hug her. It was like I kept trying to fill her cup and it just kept running out. And she’s standing there screaming “fill it, fill it, fill it!”

Particularly for men who were abused by adult women, the helplessness characterized their sexual encounters with women:

[S]: The defeat that I felt with my mother comes back often. I find it in my sexual relationships. A lot of times I allow people to be invasive because I’m used to it. And I’ve had a hard time
setting up boundaries. I’ve had a hard time believing that my boundaries wer worthwhile, that they were worth keeping. I guess I often felt like I was the property of somebody else. And that anybody could just do whatever they wanted. And that I didn’t have a right to have feelings about it.

[S]: All the scenes in college where the girls would seduce me, and I’d just kind of let them do whatever they want to do. Or I would do for them whatever they wanted me to do. And then just get out.

Another common expression of helplessness emerged in men’s need for control, in their descriptions of emotional consequences of feeling out of control, in ways they compensated for the underlying feeling of helplessness:

[S]: I’m not going to be that vulnerable. And I know that’s all part of the control thing I have.

[S]: And sometimes if I lose the slightest control, I think I’m going to die inside, I really do. I feel like I’m going to lose it, I’m going to die.

For a minority of men, the need to feel in control drove them to victimize other people:

[S]: The joy of seeing other people hurt, maybe not hurt…I guess it’s hard to describe. Feeling that I was in control of dominating somebody. I had control over them and they were below me.

[S]: So I always felt somewhat powerless in sex for awhile, except with the younger kids, where I felt in control.

Isolation and Alienation
One of the most destructive legacies of childhood abuse is the stigma which attaches itself to the child, separating him from his peers, robbing him of his sense of belongingness, and seeding the potential for a lifelong struggle with alienation from other people. This sense of differentness, almost always linked to a deeply ingrained feeling of inferiority, interferes with the survivor’s ability to seek and accept intimacy with others, sometimes resulting in a history of problematic relationships and chronic isolation:

[S]: But we had talked about intimacy and pain. And how I equate intimacy with pain. The people that I was intimate with from childhood, I went through incredibly painful experiences. Who would want to get intimate with someone….BAsically if you get that intimate someone could kill you, if you make one false move.

[S]: Nobody cares, nobody loves me. And no matter how much people tried to care and love me, I always said nobody did, because I couldn’t feel it.

[S]: I didn’t have anybody to talk to. There was nobody I could confide in. Or nobody I thought I could confide in. Nobody I thought would be able to understand or do any good. And I thought just to reveal this secret to anybody would just kill me.

[S]: I didn’t feel like everyone else. I felt different. I was different. I was different because I had done this weird thing with [someone] and I don’t know what that’s about but I did it. And definitely no ordinary person would do that.

[S]: I remember clearly being on the playground and just not fitting in. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about being on the outside looking in. That was me.

[S]: I was alone. I was drifting. I would go from one social group to another, and just never stay anywhere enough time to develop any kind of deep relationship with anyone. I felt very isolated and alone.

Legitimacy
Many of the men struggled to acknowledge to themselves that they were in fact abused, and that the abuse had greatly affected them.

[S]: I feel like I’m just defective and a depressed person and that’s why I feel this way.

[S]: This is the voice that goes on in my head. It makes me think I made it up. And it’s subtle, because I know that I didn’t make up the abuse. I think I’m making the memory. I know that happened, but I think I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, is what I tell myself.

Masculinity Issues

[S]: I worried a lot about the size of my manhood or whatever, the size of my penis. I did. I was always comparing. I’d ask my girlfriends. And then I felt like I was going to die when they told me no, you’re not the biggest man I’ve been with. You felt like a piece of dog shit.

[S]: I hate violence. I was always the wimp or the pussy to back down in school. I always shied away from violence. I even get nervous if people are yelling. Like somebody being mad at me for whatever reason. It’s all interrelated.

**********************************************************************************

The entire article can be found at:

Brian, sensing a plausibility issue within this story, stopped him and asked, “Michael, did the woman really say that?”

Michael went silent, quickly flipping through his mental files of the event.

“No,” he said, pausing, then adding quietly, “But she could have.”

Brian responded patiently, “But she didn’t.”

Michael contemplates.

“No,” he said. “But she could have.”

Brian: “But she didn’t.”

When someone dependent on porn experiences or witnesses something that has the emotional/spiritual passion to it, be that from watching a movie, glimpsing it between two strangers or within his or her own personal experience, it’ll probably make this person feel somewhat uncomfortable because there’s an emotional rawness to it that’s scary. There are various causes but the bottom line is that something hurts them when it comes to sex. When someone “needs” porn (in that, they are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of not having porn immediately available), it definitely denotes problems related to sex and sexual intimacy, but also indicates a defensive ploy to protect an emotional wound. Just as with drugs and alcohol, I really worry about people who use porn to detach their emotions from sex or realistic relations with the opposite sex. It makes it much more difficult to be able to relate to someone from the opposite sex in a realistic and satisfying way. People who use porn to numb themselves will find it very difficult to relate in a healthy fashion. Because they already have an emotional/psychological issue but have dealt with it in the worst possible fashion, they will only attract experiences or people that actually hurt them. They’re really shooting themselves in the foot. I would even bet money that if people did a psych survey, they would find that a high percentage of people who need control in their lives also watch porn or have issues with sex. For some reason, sex is problematic for the control freak.

Yes, the road, like countries and corporations and gay porn sites, is ruled by assholes. It seems like every day, something happens that makes you wish you had a gat in your glove compartment that you could pull out and wave around, if only in hopes of making an offensive driver wet himself just a tiny bit into his tan, suede, manually-adjustable seat. Just a tiny bit. Is that so wrong?

But let’s face an undeniable fact. We all do assholic things when we drive. No one is innocent. Hell, I bet if Jesus had a license and had to brave the streets of Los Angeles, he might be prone to, every now and then, accidentally cutting off an SUV-driving heathen or two while busting through two lanes of traffic to pull a screeching right into the Del Taco drive-thru. Who says it’s not possible?

My point is, it’s so easy to fall victim to road rage because driving is impersonal. We’re all in our cars, and have no idea who the other people around us are. They’re just machines to us. Big, poorly-directed, braking-too-early, not-running-yellows-when-they-should-be-freakin’-flooring-it machines. And it’s easy to hate a machine.

But imagine this…you’re driving in your car. Your day’s starting out dandy cuz your 18 year old college gymnast girlfriend who only wants sex with no strings attached, woke you up with a mindblowing hummer and you’re all rosy and glowing and your head’s buzzin’ from the quart of steaming coffee tucked between your legs. You’ve managed to hit every single green light on your way to work and the DJ at your favorite radio station has had a heart attack and collapsed with the door to his booth locked so you’re favorite song, REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” has been on repeat for the last twenty minutes. So you’re singing along in that high-pitch voice you get when you’re in a really good mood, thinking about rainbows and puppies and butterflies against blue skies, when SOME MUTHERFUCKER IN A SHITTY OLD VAN damn near takes off your bumper when he swerves into your lane. You’re SO FUCKING PISSED that you can’t even find the horn. Then your steaming thermos of coffee tips over and floods your crotch, napalming your pubes through your new white cargos. You hit the gas and swerve into the next lane intent on having some WORDS with this ma’fucker. AND YOU ARE GONNA HAVE SOME WORDS WITH THIS MA’FUCKER! As you pull up to the offending van, murder boiling in your veins, you realize to your chagrin that the driver is no other than Sister Bonita of St. Joseph’s who taught you music back when you were a wee tot and once donated a kidney to your beloved Auntie May when she was on her last legs. Sister Bonita, about 90 years old and just about swimming in her nun’s habit, is driving a van full of bug-eyed special ed kids who are waving at you happily and feverishly through the windows. Sister Bonita notices you staring, and offers a kind smile. So what are you gonna do, tough guy?

Right. Nothing. Probably smile back and feel a little bit embarrassed. Because when you realized that the car that offended you is another PERSON, possibly someone you like and respect, then it’s so much easier to be tolerant and forgiving and suppress that road rage.

1015 Santa Monica Building Memo
Date: January 30, 2004
From: 3am Wanderer
To: Hot English Guy Who’s At Least 10 Years Older Than Me

Dear Hot English Guy Who’s At Least 10 Years Older Than Me But Sometimes Rides The Elevator And Small Talks About Being Used To Colder Weather But Liking It Out Here And Has A Really Nice Smile And No Wedding Ring,

We ride the elevator together sometimes. And you always small talk about the weather. I’m the Asian girl who mumbles to herself. And compulsively presses every button.

I think you’re cute. In a, at-least-10-years-older-than-me kind of way, not in a I-want-to-go-out-and-go-through-all-the-tedious-first-date-formalities-before-taking-you-back-to-my-place-for-crazy-raunchy-sex-that-may-include-my-suggesting-that-we-turn-on-the-video-camera-in-the-corner-of-my-bedroom-but-that-i’ll-probably-just-turn-on-when-you’re-in-the-bathroom-and-then-lie-about-because-I-don’t-want-you-asking-for-a-copy-of-it kind of way.

I like to look at you. In a he’s-really-cute-in-an-at-least-10-years-older-than-me kind of way, not in a I-wonder-what-he’s-wearing-underneath-those-jeans-and-if-it’s-leopard-print-or-crotchless-and-how-hard-would-it-be-to-remove-that-undergarment-with-my-teeth-as-I-writhe-my-rear-end-to-Donna-Summer’s-Love-To-Love-You-Baby kind of way.

I notice that lately, you’ve been standing in the hall outside my window and chatting with coworkers. I would like to suggest that you do more of that. If it’s helpful, I’ll be happy to put some tape down to mark your spot in front of my window so you know exactly where to stand in order for me to get the best candid view of you without reconfiguring my work station or straining my neck. Please let me know.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Kind Regards,