Liberated from the Tyranny of My Hard Drive

Kids, I have important naps to take, so have a blog entry from deep in the bowels of my computer.  It dates back to the summer after I graduated from college, when I was unemployed and spent my days fruitlessly emailing resumes and watching paint dry.  It’s about exploding bread.  Enjoy!

Rite of Passage

During the endless hours I spent waiting at stoplights today, I thought about the fact that I didn’t really have anything to post about.  I had a lot of fun ideas, but they all seemed like they would be fun to work on a few days from now, not, like, now.

“Oh, well,” I thought.  “I’ll just have to force out a review of The Blackstone Key whether I want to or not.”

And then I got pulled over.

No, sorry, it’s more like and then I got pulled over.

Wait, I meant AND THEN I FUCKING GOT FUCKING PULLED OVER.

What’s the big deal, right?  Happens to everyone occasionally, right?

Guys, I wasn’t driving.  I was riding this:

HOW THE FUCKING HELL DOES SOMEONE GET PULLED OVER ON A VEHICLE THAT CAN ONLY GET UP TO 40 MPH WHEN IT’S HEADED DOWNHILL AND JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF WILLS IT TO GO FASTER?

The Long-Promised Book Review(s)

Hi kids.  I’m about to spoil everything in here like woah.  But considering the fact that both books are at least fourteen years old, I think you’ll get over it.

Karleen Koen, Through a Glass Darkly and Now Face to Face

I’m not going to lie to y’all:  I enjoyed the ever-loving shit out of Through a Glass Darkly.  The writing was rather uneven, especially in the first hundred pages or so, and if I had taken a shot every time the heroine tossed her head or stuck out her chin, I would have died of alcohol poisoning, but oh!  Rapture!  This one stars Barbara, the granddaughter of a duke and the daughter of a disgraced Jacobite earl, who must marry well in order to repair the family fortunes!  Her wicked mother, Diana, is pushing her toward the Earl of Devane, but Barbara doesn’t mind, for she has loved him ever since she was a child!

I should probably mention at this point that Barbara is fifteen.  And that the earl is in his forties.

My Vagina Is Not a Universal Translator, and Other Stories

DISCLAIMER:  I’m not writing this to embarass anyone.  I’m not writing this because I want to drag up anything or start anything.  I’m writing this simply because it’s been on my mind for over a year now, and I need that brain space for other things.  Like French military history.  Or Snapple facts.  Anyway.  On with the show!

A long time ago, a blogger I respect put up a post about how a bunch of women in her scene were making asses of themselves—drinking too much, flashing their boobs whenever there was a camera within a fifty foot radius, you know the deal.  And after she finished the litany of their misdeeds, she wrote, “You are fucking up my revolution.”

A lot of people wrote to congratulate her, to thank her for saying what they’d been thinking but hadn’t had the words to express.  I didn’t write anything, because I was cowardly and because my thoughts were far from complimentary.  They basically boiled down to:  my revolution starts with not being held responsible for anyone else’s behavior simply because we both happen to be female.

Mama’s in a Bad Mood

…so no real post today.  Instead, a poll.

Testing the Waters

A few months ago, I started up a Vox account for a particular project.  And then I summarily abandoned it, not because the project wasn’t going anywhere, but because I am really bad about keeping up with things that are not on this website. 

Seriously.  You should see my house when the Boyfriend doesn’t step in to save my ass.  It can get pretty icky.

Emotional Self Defense Class

During my senior year of college, I had to work on an Honors project so that I could wear a stupid-ass white tassel when I graduated.  I chose to start work on a memoir about my experiences with the Dreaded Ex, thinking that a book like that might help other people understand emotional violence a little bit better.  Since I’d never written narrative nonfiction before, I spent a lot of time workshopping the manuscript with my coworkers at the campus writing center.  I got invaluable feedback from the various women who looked at my writing, but one session will forever stand out in my memory.  I read a passage aloud to my friend DiAnna; it was about how I’d told my ex-boyfriend that I’d had body image issues, that I’d binged and purged, that I particularly did not like the size of my rear end.  At the end of the reading, DiAnna shook her head.  “Oh, Deb.  It’s like you said, ‘Here, take my power!’” she said, holding out her hands to me.

I was offended at the time:  was she insinuating that the situation was somehow my fault?  But now that I’m older, wiser, and infinitely more deadly, I know what she meant.  It wasn’t my fault; abuse is never your fault.  But there are things you can do that make you more or less attractive to predators, and I’d essentially stood there with a sign around my neck that said, “Please Kick Me Here.”

Nothing I did was wrong.  Nothing I did made what he did to me okay.  Nothing you do or say will make what he does to you all right.  But like the good Brownie I once was, I believe in Being Prepared.  You can take self-defense classes to better handle physical attacks; well, there are some things you can do emotionally to better handle emotional violence.  And we’re going to cover them in this here entry.

In Which I Break the Capslock Key

To begin with:  In Which I Reveal Several Unpleasant Aspects of My Personality keeps getting spammed by ads for Viagra.  I find that funny on a number of levels.  Also, sad.  Not being able to get a boner isn’t a personality flaw, people.  It’s just a matter of blood flow.

Moving on.

Briarwood Is the Pretty Poison

When I was in college, I had quite the crush on this guy named Josh.  The reasons for this crush were many and myriad, but it endured largely because he JUST.  KEPT.  BEING.  AWESOME.  One time, when he saw a group of prospective students walking by, he turned to the friend he’d been talking calmly to a moment before and screamed, “You stole my fucking watch!”  They then proceeded to chase/beat the crap out of each other in front of a group of horrified seventeen-year-olds and their flabbergasted parents.

“Why would you do something like that?” I asked him later.

“I figured we didn’t want anyone who’d be scared of a little brawl coming here” he shrugged, grinning evilly.

Big Red Helmet

There are two things you need to know about this entry:  A.) I’m writing it with the song “Jizz in My Pants” on constant rotation inside my brain; and B.) I’m writing it directly after waking up from a three hour nap.  So if this sucks, blame Andy Samberg.  Or my ridiculous sleep schedule.  But more likely Mr. Samberg.

Anyway.

When I was a teenager, any number of things could have caused my immediate death by humiliation.  A boy knowing that I liked him?  IMMEDIATE DEATH.  Me knowing that a boy liked me?  Also, IMMEDIATE DEATH.  My father being my father in front of anyone other than my immediate family?  Just measure me for my coffin, already.

I was so easily embarrassed, and yet, I willingly wore pink plaid capris to school.  Logic, where are you?

So yes.  I was unbelievably, heartrendingly easy to humiliate as a teenager, but somewhere in the middle of college, I lost ALL SHAME about making a spectacle of myself.  I don’t know how or when it happened, but essentially it’s like I went to bed as a mere mortal and woke up as an argumentative old woman.

IT IS AWESOME.