Things we can do without.

1. People politicizing the Newtown massacre, if only until after the holiday season. Children were hatefully murdered; please acknowledge & respect that.
2. The entire culture surrounding mental illness in America. Predominantly, I focus on its automatic association with any undesired behavior. Treating every undesired behavior as a symptom of mental illness leads to undesired cultural behavior: anywhere from granting depressed people a get-out-of-work-free card, to violent people a get-out-of-jail-free card. Does no one else find it condescending that people's personalities are being reduced to their psychiatrist's prescribed DSM-pickings?
3. For that matter, we can do without any cultural doctrine that limits the control people believe they have over their own brains. The other day, I read that some people actually believe that it's impossible to fully consent to heterosexual vaginal intercourse, because it's an act women are coerced into by the patriarchy. Now, I don't care if the patriarchy coerced me into feeling this way, but I love me some vaginal intercourse.
4. Everything that happens to one's vagina in the latest stage of pregnancy. All of it. It's like I can't see down there no more so Muffy's decided to have it her way all over the place.
5. I think the dumbest thing in the world is when a girl wears high-waisted jean shorts and a partially tucked-in shirt. Why does some of it get tucked-in?
6. When people use the phrase "look" to describe a woman's clothing & makeup choices. It makes us sound like dolls. You've done something different to your appearance; I love that look on you! I assume that you assume that my shirt has velcro all down the back center, and that my face is frozen in time.

I'm up at 8:43 AM. Do I want to be? No.

     And the post ends here.

Also, while we're at it...

... I think Jemima Kirke is a cool lady, for the most obvious reasons in the world.

Also, I found Not That Kind of Girl's proposal in .pdf form. And it's completely legal. Tee-hee-hee.

Masturhation. Or, How to be justifiably jealous of a girl who's making money writing about herself all day long.

Lena Dunham's lousy book proposal was leaked.
Lena Dunham's lousy book proposal was leaked.
Lena Dunham's lousy book proposal was leaked and I fucking missed it by a goddamned day! Ugh!

Today, I invented a slang: masturhation. A noun--the verb masturhate being derived from said noun.

Everyone does it, but no one's brave enough to talk about it.

Oh come on, like you've never done it. You've never drawn the shades, locked the door, and slipped an extra Xanny-Bar into your boyfriend's mouth for good measure. You've never felt this burning need to just let it all go and feel good and let an explosive release of passion ride out the waves of your fingertips. Believe me, reader: you have masturhated, perhaps in public.

     Masturhation is simple, pleasurable, and personal. Maybe you've been slacking off at the gym, so you go to Wal-Mart and see one of those haggard scooter-souls and think, At least I still walk upright. I unabashedly admit that masturhation is one of my favorite hobbies in the world. Life is a competition that can be easily won with lowered standards. When I clean my house, I watch Hoarders.

     So, naturally, when I heard that Lena Dunham's 66-page proposal for a book she hasn't even written yet was leaked online, I grabbed the Astro-Glide and drew the shades and slipped some Xannies in Sam's mouth--only to find that Dunham's legal representatives requested the proposal be removed. I was preparing for the exact labor-inducing orgasm I need, and now I'm so frustrated I think even my daughter's balls might be blue.

No!

Okay, here's the part where I attempt justifiable jealousy toward a middle-class female creative writing major who's managed fame & fortune by Being Herself all day long:

     Amongst the adjectives used to describe Dunham's proposal was frank. Frank, meaning "direct and unreserved in speech." This woman has made a career scrutinizing her own self, poking fun at her own privilege and creating a character other characters she's created describe as "spoiled." She makes a living off of being completely aware that she would otherwise be incapable of making a living if people didn't pay attention to her. To her credit, there is something admirable about that type of honesty.

     However, what does it say about her "brand" when a gossip website leaks her thoughts, criticizes them, and she has to hide behind litigation to prevent any more people from reading them? What, exactly, is Ms. Dunham afraid of?

     And how, exactly, is threatening to sue Gawker an example of being frank?

Moreover, the fact that I can't find a single Torrent of her proposal, or a page it's on or anything, says something somewhat appalling in this social networking B-story. Everyone was relying on Gawker--and, to a lesser extent, Buzzfeed--as the proposal source. Did anyone save a copy for themselves before it was taken down, or were we just dependent on Buzzfeed for our masturhation?

Lena Dunham needs to not take herself so seriously. You can't portray yourself as someone who writes honestly of what it's like to be a member of the twenty-something creative class, while being too embarrassed of your own book deal to not sue someone when they scrutinize it. Her reaction to the leak only serves to reiterate how she represents a generation that attempts to be provocative but shies away when it actually provokes anything, especially if "anything" happens to mean being called out.

     Ms. Dunham, you are not a representative of my demographic. I would not like to be associated with spending hours self-analyzing and immediately shying away when analyzed by others. I do not want your image to come to mind when I tell people I'm a twenty-something with an interest in creative writing.

But, please, don't go away; I will continue scouring the web, seeking to masturhate to pictures of you looking down your belly-button.

Re: Muncie.

A few days ago, I was at an alt-country--read: hipster country, replete with a folk cover of "All I Need" by Radiohead--show at the Be Here Now, when I ran into a guy named Justin who was personal childhood friends with the guitarist from Butt Funnel. After gushing about how amazing a show their bearded, faux-German ensemble puts on, we got to talking about Madison. Justin, who'd just returned from the idyllic capitol, had no idea why someone who'd been raised there could enjoy living in boring-ass backwards-ass Muncie, Indiana.
     Well, today was why. Here's how someone raised in America's Europe could fall in love with a lousy Rust Belt town:

Today, Sam & I took our buddy Jim to scope out an apartment for him to consider leasing. He found a place on the Southern outskirts of town, in a neighborhood overlooking both horse stables and old abandoned warehouses. The flatness was distinct to the two of us who hadn't grown up with it--and the neighborhood itself was the kind of community where people had cars & campers rusting in their yards, but well-trimmed trees and maintained lawns. It screamed Rust Belt real loud into your ear. It screamed Fucking Muncie.
     The place itself ended up being well-maintained and Jim decided to look into it, but I couldn't get over how delightfully sad-novel the setting was. I said, "This is the kind of place where I'd climb onto the roof, get drunk, and write a bunch of sad Rust Belt novels," and then Sam made fun of me, and we went to my doctor's appointment for this week.

Siren and my snatch have been very business-as-usual. Apparently, when you're as far along as I am, you start losing fluid weight though your baby continues growing rapidly. Debbie the Nurse Practitioner put her fingers up my birth canal and thanked me for being an easy patient. People have conniptions about vaginal exams in the days leading up to them giving birth? She & I then discussed my options for anesthesia.
     On my mother's side, there has only been one woman in my family who received any anesthetic--local, general, or otherwise--during childbirth: my niece weighed over eight-and-a-half pounds at birth and her mother required a c-section. Following that tradition, I've been practicing Bradley techniques at home and am thus far determined to do this Childbirth Thing medication-free. Debbie reminded me that, good health permitting (and likely), I'd be allowed to practice positioning & movement methods, use birthing tubs & showers, and eat light foods during labor. Moreover, being Baby Friendly, the hospital adheres to WHO standards to encourage breastfeeding, unlike so many other hospitals servicing low-income communities.
     In Madison, this wouldn't be an uncommon childbirth--but, in Madison, the cost-of-living is twice what Muncie is. Women who've given birth in Indy & Louisville have told me their birth stories: systematic, clinical, and not without encouraged epidurals. For a woman living around the poverty line, intervention-free childbirth planning can be almost unheard of. In Muncie, it's welcomed by Ball Memorial with open arms.
     I thanked Debbie and the nurses and the secretaries, and Sam & Jim for putting up with me. (You thank a lot of people when you're pregnant.) And the three of us headed to Pop's Junk N' Stuff, where crackheads can sell broken electronics for fifteen cents a chewed-through cord and Jim can buy a television for twenty-five bucks.

My question stands: where the hell else can a punk kid live that overlooks rust and warehouses and horses, buy a pawned-off crackhead television, and receive some of the highest-quality progressive prenatal care in the country? Where? What other community manages to not equate poverty with being impoverished?
     No, I can't buy artisan bread at every stoplight--I can think of only one stoplight, and this might be the whitest sentence interruption ever--and I can't go to a punk show every other night of the week, but I can live simply with the love of my life and our daughter in a way that is both low-cost and low-stress. Someday, I might get real bored and want to leave. (I probably will get real bored and want to leave.) But will I resent Muncie for it? No, and I haven't been able to say that of any other place I've been.

I also learned a new parenting skill today.

My kid could kick your kid's ass! ... or could she?

Today was my thirty-seventh week checkup. In nasty, medically-official-sounding news, my cervix is 80% effaced. Good job, cervix. I'm glad we're on the same page.
     When the nurse practitioner went to measure Siren's heart rate, she got startled and developed a case of the hiccups, which pissed her off so hard that her heart rate shot up and she kicked the Doppler. Okay, there, Courtney Love--I guess hiccups can be pretty frustrating when you live in a warm little bubble and eat all your food through a tube attached to your belly.
     I told my mom about it and we got into a conversation about what happens when your kid is the kid that kicks other kid's asses--and how to teach your kid to kick other kid's asses if they try to kick yours. She never had to deal with this; I was a little bitch all through childhood and partially through adolescence.
     There were a number of factors: Madison doesn't really have the same Castle Doctrine culture of self-defense that, well, the rest of the world has--and I weighed no more than fifty pounds until puberty. Being one of those precocious high-IQ pieces of shit didn't help the situation, either. Basically, I was the skinny, dorky Asian kid who liked throw-up and virtual reality chat clients, until puberty finally hit and I could compensate for my utter lack of social skills with being extremely good-looking and excellent at sex my personality and varied interests.

I don't want Siren to grow up like that, though. Being beaten up with your own skateboard before having it stolen from you kind of sucks. I may have been gangly and into throw-up, but someone could've stepped in and taught me how to defend myself. My father was very physically protective of me, primarily because of my size, and my mother worked sixty-to-eighty hours a week for most of my childhood.
     In retrospect, I wish my mother would've been the one to step in. Apparently, being a hood rat skips a generation. (This bodes well for Siren!) During our conversation, we compared polar-opposite levels of confrontation; my mother, because she is way more sure of herself than I am and always has been, described only tenacity in her early years.

It totally is.

Siren, someday you'll find this blog, so here's something to take from it: don't be a little bitch like I was. Don't instigate violence, but don't let other kids beat you with your own skateboard before stealing it. Be like your Nana: defend yourself & your loved ones when you see that the time calls for it.

How to be an apartment homesteader... for poor people.

I don't write anymore. My hard drive--which contained years of bits & pieces of my writing, and portions of a chapbook--is dead, its files hopefully to be exhumed tomorrow.
     Oy. And I'm still fucking pregnant. Ce n'est pas juste.

One of the things I wanted to move from spiritually when I moved away physically from Madison was taking its idyllic city charm for granted, such that it obscures any sense of reality for those who don't live like how people live in Madison. Why don't people shop locally? Why don't people work for small businesses? Why don't people just grow their own food and live self-sustainably?     Well, because growing food is hard--especially when you try to do it on a large scale the year you accidentally get pregnant and a massive drought overwhelms the Midwest, oops--to juggle in between a full-time job and less resource-driven interests (like feeding poetry to your hard drive). And because small businesses, due to nepotism compensating for lack of resources, are less likely to hire strangers. And because Wal-Mart's right fucking there, and I just got off work.
     I don't advocate people make excuses for making lousy lifestyle decisions. No, "I'm too poor" is not a good excuse to eat fast food instead of cooking for yourself; go spend that $5 on ingredients you could use to make two meals. But, and this is so hard to realize in a city where dumpsters are treasure troves of bakery goods and last-gen electronics, saving the world is the last thing on your mind when you first get home from work.

I came across a post about apartment homesteading on Pinterest. To be honest, I haven't fully grasped the "urban homesteading" concept craze. It sounds like a lot of ways to make yourself feel better about living in a city while still living in a city. Living in the country is hard, but I've done it; if sustainable homesteading becomes the direction I want to head in with my family, I'll do it again.
     The point the post makes is that the country lifestyle I describe will, as population increases, become less sustainable than urban homesteading. That's an extremely valid point--as is the point that good home habits can be cultivated early on, even with limited space & resources. That said, reading further down the post at the suggested ideas, I get the impression the writer takes a blindly-privileged perspective on the matter.

First of all, I don't even have a porch. Even if I did, I live in a part of the country where food-growing & clothes-drying aren't feasible outside choices nearly half the year. (As do millions in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, D.C....)
     The proposed urban homesteading lifestyle coupled with the inevitable urban responsibility of a forty-hour-a-week job means constantly working--and, forty hours out of the week, working for others. One of the most disgusting aspects of our culture is that it equates service & servitude with personal resources, depleting people of the motivation necessary to actually provide themselves with personal resources (such as home-harvested herbs). The irony of this is that the less motivated people are to take care of themselves, the more they rely on the service of others, who then become similarly sucked dry.
     Like I said, I don't want to make excuses for not doing. I'm just having a hard time putting together the words "urban" & "homesteading" in the same sentence, much less the same phrase. The city as an institution, fueled by its illusion that the institutions you work for will take care of you if & when the time comes--hey FMLA, nice shot--seems a perfect contradiction to the concept of homesteading.

Poor advertising.

I just got an ad on Facebook asking, "Got stretchmarks?" To which I replied, "Lulz, no." Truthfully!

I feel kind of like a piece of shit; my pregnancy has been sinfully easy. Sometimes I fear Siren must be at risk for birth defects, just because being pregnant with her is so abnormally normal. Yeah, my back hurts--especially where my spine starts headed eastbound from scoliosis--and I'm always way hungrier than I have room in there for, and Siren's options for in-the-womb playtime seem to involve either my cervix or my ribcage, but I feel like those discomforts are par for the course. I did sign myself up to sublet my uterus to a first-time roommate. (She probably leaves all the lights on in there before I get home. She definitely eats all the food.)
     The traditionally-associated discomforts of pregnancy, though--the stretchmarks, the unshakable extra pounds, the swelling feet & ankles--have all escaped me. My mother was the same way: she remained relatively small throughout her pregnancy, and (like myself) had no need to buy bigger clothes. We do come from an island nation where nearly one-hundred million tiny Asian people share land.

That said, there are a few things I wish Facebook had bothered to waste their poor advertising on--many of them things no one tells you before you decide to keep your kid. Among them...

1. "Hey, is your snatch really itchy for no reason?"
2. "Actually, come to think of it, is the rest of you really itchy, too?"
3. "Are you hairy as fuck? Like, moreso than usual?"
4. "Do drunk dudes try to hit on you by asking if they can touch your belly?"
5. "Were you on birth control when you got pregnant, and want to choose a form of birth control for after you give birth, in a pathetic attempt to prevent this from happening to you in another year-and-a-half?"

I really gotta get rollin' on number five. I thought it was just poverty, poor family planning, and religious fundamentalism that dictate why Filipinos automatically associate sexual activity with pregnancy. Boy howdy, was I wrong as shit...