Thanks for the Memories

Nostalgia is a funny thing. The most insignificant of objects can send you down the nostalgia highway – a signed yearbook, a prom tiara, a box of pictures, a hand-written letter, a token of someone’s affection – all ticking time bombs of evocative sentiment just itching to send you merging into bumper-to-bumper traffic.

As I general rule, I maintain, women are more nostalgic then men. Whether that’s because we’re more affective beings, have better memories, or just emote more efficiently, we venture down this road more frequently than our male counterparts. Maybe it’s just the men I know, but, with a few exceptions, many of them like to live in the “now” without much regard to the “then” or the “will be.” It’s true, some of their “nows” largely resemble their “thens” and maybe that’s part of it, but for the most part they seem content and, well, forgetful. The women I know are much more reflective on where they’ve come from, what they’re doing, and where they want to go. This concept is pretty much at the forefront of my mind every single day of my life. I always joke that my mind is a sponge because I remember very minute details about things that were trivial in the first place. Maybe that’s why I’m such a nostalgic person.

I, myself, find myself involved in some sort of nostalgic process on a daily basis. It’s not that I’m unhappy with my current lot in life; on the contrary, I’m really quite pleased with the way things have been going. My issue is that stupid, everyday things make me nostalgic. It’s that damn sponge. Things like yellow Post-it notes, coffee creamer, and candied popcorn conjure up a whole batch of memories that inevitably push me into a larger sequence of reminiscence.

I simply cannot look at a yellow Post-it note on a wall without thinking of my freshman year of college. My roommate and I used them to decorate the wall above our telephone (yes, land line) with people’s phone numbers and messages for one another. This quickly evolved into a forum for the comers and goers of our room (ah, dorm life) to leave pithy comments, cryptic notes, and perverted dialogue to entertain us. We let them cumulate, and after a year’s time we had a rather impressive collection. I’m pretty sure I saved a few of the more disturbing ones, but then again, I’m a sucker for sentiment. I’ll bet you my roomie doesn’t even remember this; it was pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things a college freshman has to deal with – I’ll have to ask her and get back to you.

A similar chain reaction happens to me every morning when I systematically retrieve my non-dairy creamer from the break room at my office. I simply cannot do this without fondly remembering a morning ritual a good friend of mine and I had while working at a casino in Las Vegas. I would arrive, 5 minutes late as usual, and we would immediately retreat to the Employee Dining Room to steal mugs of CoffeeMate. Now this was completely against the rules, so we’d have to sneak these mugs halfway across the casino back to our office and into our coffees, and then surreptitiously dispose of the evidence. Did I mention we worked in HR? Our boss would not have approved.

A recent stint with nostalgia (well, aside from this morning’s run for coffee creamer) was during a conversation with my ex-honey, and I started to get those same funny old feelings about a city that I came to practically abhor in my final six months living there. The funny thing was that it was a conversation about “sweet popcorn” that made me nostalgic. Lately I’ve become accustomed to getting beer and actual cooked meals at the movie theater (yay, Drafthouse!), but in that moment I wanted nothing more than to go to the Southpoint Casino and go to the movies for the sole purpose of sharing a bag of overpriced, disgustingly sweet, candied popcorn with said ex-honey. Imagine that, after five years of living there, all it took to muster sweet feelings about Las Vegas was a memory of candied popcorn. Go figure.

Nostalgia doesn’t necessarily mean you are yearning for the way things were – I have no desire to live in the dorms, work in a casino, or move back to Vegas again – but it does make me feel fondly about these times. Through the reflective lens of hindsight, the negatives fall away and all you remember are the good. It becomes too easy to forget that the dorms were impossibly cramped and noisy, and our neighbors constantly piped smoke into our room through the conjoining air vent. Coffee creamer runs become more important than the tyranny, 12-hour work days, and abject fear that casino life subjected me to. Sweet popcorn becomes paramount to a society devoid of culture except for the extravagant indulgence of the strip set against an insipid background of identical subdivisions and desert scenery.

My nomadic tendencies have caused me to leave so much behind over the years, so I suppose nostalgia is my only means of holding on to the good stuff. It reminds me that I have a past full of rich experiences and good memories with friends and family and loved ones. But I fear that nostalgia can also be destructive. If you’re not careful, it can cause all the “what if’s” and “what if not’s” to emerge from the framework until that’s all you can see. If you are trying to move forward and find yourself unable, nostalgia may just be your culprit.

It’s a fine line. If we are too quick to forget, any lessons gleaned from our past are lost with it and we are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. If we hold on too tightly, it can blind us to new ways of thinking and the opportunities presenting themselves to us in the present. Nostalgia may be an exercise of the memory, but it makes us forgetful too. That which was bad no longer seems as such, the mundane and quotidian suddenly seem “charming” and charged with new meaning, and any pain you felt is replaced by a pang for “simpler times” because it just doesn’t feel real any more.

The jury is still out on whether I think nostalgia is ultimately a productive or destructive process. Taking a trip down memory lane may seem harmless enough, but be careful; one wrong turn and you might miss your exit.

Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

Let me start this post by saying: California’s Proposition 8 can suck it! Thankfully, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker agrees. Hopefully by now it’s no news to you that California’s ban on gay marriage was declared unconstitutional and overturned yesterday. And guess what? I couldn’t be happier. Well, that’s not true. I would’ve been happier if this ridiculous bill was never validated in the first place. And I certainly would be happier if headlines covering yesterday’s decision weren’t paired with pejorative phrases such as “for the moment.” I understand that the battle is not over for gay-rights advocates, and that the proposition will unquestionably be submitted to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but why not let those of us who are celebrating the decision revel in this momentous victory for a minute before shitting all over it? The judge responsible for the reversal even went as far as to freeze his ruling until it is determined if same-sex marriages will be allowed while the case is in the appeals process. What is the effing point of ruling that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional if it has no practical bearings? Since the same-sex marriages that were conducted before Prop. 8 was passed are still honored as legal unions, why not allow them now?

I have always held a “to each their own” mentality and am a strong believer that an informed, well-formulated opinion, no matter what that opinion is, is a valid one, so I don’t usually get on the ol’ soapbox when it comes to most political/social issues. Don’t get me wrong – I have pretty strong opinions about a lot of things; I just choose not to trumpet them, especially not around some of my more “passionate” friends, and certainly not in mixed company. My momma raised me better than that. Most people already have their crystallized viewpoints and are just looking to reinforce a belief system that is already in place. Not to mention that, in my experience, many of these people are not interested in hearing what you have to say.

However (and of course I’m going to add a “however” here, or else what would be the point of this post?), I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone would want to restrict another human being’s lifestyle and regulate how they build that lifestyle based on some archaic notion of what ‘family’ should look like. I find the idea of anyone, whether it be a family member or a politician, categorically restricting my ability to choose human companionship to be absolutely preposterous, especially when that restriction is based on a blanket assessment of the presumed quality of an entire style of relationship. It’s not even about being “in love” or “religious” or an American; it’s about having command over one’s lifestyle and not acquiescing to society or the law on what is deemed “acceptable.” It’s about having the capacity to make one’s own judgments and decisions that serve one’s own best interests. If the choices we make are not impeding anyone else’s civil liberties, why on earth should our private lives be subject to public regulation? Why should anyone else even care? Like I said, I’m not expecting to convince anyone with my little mini-rant, and please do not feel it is necessary to convince me that a marriage between a man and a woman is sanctimonious and somehow superior to a same-sex marriage. I truly wouldn’t mind having an educated conversation with someone with an opposing viewpoint, but if you want to spew blind hatred at me, please don’t bother.

The future for Proposition 8 will be an interesting one to follow. An appeal could thwart gay rights efforts or ultimately pave the way for equality on a national scale. Regardless, I’m feeling pretty good today about what this ruling means for the advancement of equal rights. We still have quite a ways to go on the road to equality, but at least for once I feel like we’re moving in the right direction.

It Hurts Me Too

Sometimes I find it absurd what people will deem acceptable and what people choose to be offended or outraged by. What’s even more interesting to me is how these standards ebb and flow, constantly in flux and being redefined each time we encounter something that resides outside of our rigid comfort zones. Maybe that’s the way it should be, but the double-standards that result are what I find to be the most absurd of all.

Yes, I’m writing a blog post about True Blood – it was bound to happen sooner or later. More specifically, I’m talking about the sex scene that spurred such venomous/outraged/disapproving/disappointed online and offline discussion amongst Truebies and Non-Believers alike. So if you haven’t seen this episode or read the book yet and plan on it, stop reading now because I’m going to spoil the shit out of it.

For those of you don’t already know, the scene in question is one in which everyone’s beloved Vampire Bill rips a chunk out of his maker Lorena’s neck, twists her head around 180 degrees, and then proceeds to pound the [un]living bejeesus out of her while she bleeds out onto the floor. Ok, ok, yes, it was violent, I agree. Shocking? You betchya. Sexy? Not really. Offensive? Puh-lease.

Some critics are saying the scene in question promotes violence against women. Sure, I can see that, but where were these critics when Bill sets her on fire and watches with morbid satisfaction as she screams and crumples to the floor while her skin melts off her face. They didn’t even bat an eyelash. Others say it depicts Bill as a misogynist and rewards him for his behavior. But wait a minute, isn’t Lorena the one in control here? She incites the whole scene, enjoys the violence, and even confesses her love for her “rapist” as he performs the very act he said he’d never do with her again. Not to mention that, as his maker and an older vampire, she could overpower him if she wanted to. Another argument is that True Blood has gone too far and that the scene was gratuitous, crass, and meant only for shock-value. They’re saying that like it’s a bad thing! This is an adult show about vampires people! Not the sparkly, brooding, I’m-dangerously-handsome-but-not-evil Twilight vampires, but the animalistic, impulsive, murderous kind of lore. I think maybe too many people have fallen in love with vampires and forgotten that they are supposed to be scary. They’re not angsty teen puppy dogs with a bad rep; they’re primal monsters of death.

No, it’s not the violence that’s bothering them; it’s the fact that the violence happened during a sexual act. But deviant sex acts have always run amok on this show, and that’s one of the reasons we love it so much. Before we called it sexy, but all of the sudden it’s snuff. My question is why? This is not the first time we’ve seen such violence and sex paired together on this show. I don’t remember an outcry when Tara and Eggs beat the hell out of each other and then bumped nasties in front of a gleeful Mary Ann. Nor do I recall people being upset when Bill and Lorena ripped a woman’s throat out and then got busy next to her corpse in a bed soaked in blood. Even good ole boy Jason Stackhouse leaves a woman for dead after he chains her up and chokes her during one of his more adventurous sexcapades. Sure, he didn’t kill her, but he thought he did. And we still love him, don’t we?

Let’s also not forget that in the book this season is based on, Club Dead by Charlaine Harris, it is not Lorena but Sookie that gets raped, and she doesn’t enjoy it the way Lorena does. As a matter of fact, Sookie struggles, tells him to stop, cries, gets drained, and then proceeds to never mention it again and ultimately forgive him. A classic “he didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t mean it” excuse put forth by the delusional, love sick abuse victim. Why didn’t anyone have a problem with that?

I for one applaud Alan Ball for continuing to push the envelope and make this series as dark, dirty, and raunchy as possible. His rendition of people and vampires alike is complex, gritty, and more plausible than the alternative. Violent sex exists. There. I said it. People can be sick, twisted, malicious, and cruel, so you better believe a vampire would be tenfold. You can bet your tuckus that if vampires did exist, they wouldn’t delicately lay you down in a bed peppered with flower petals and oh-so-gently make sweet, sweet love to you until the sun came up. On the contrary, they’d probably rape you, murder you, eat you, and then dispose of your body, not necessarily in that order. It would be violent and it would be tragic. Because they’re vampires. Of course, this is assuming they’d even want to have sex with you – you are food after all.

So will someone please explain to me why two vampires having mean, vicious hate sex is so much more offensive than any of the other effed up stuff we’ve seen on this show? Is it because the audience feels an emotional connection to Bill as a sympathetic character? Is it because Bill hates her? Is it because Lorena loves him? Is it because he’s being unfaithful? Is it because they’re white? I must know what makes this scene any different than the others. Just don’t tell me it was because it was too violent.

It’s not the Heat, it’s the Humanity

There are a lot of things on my mind today that merit a good “talking about.” Take, for example, the Isner/Mahut 3-day match heard ‘round the world. The longest recorded tennis match in history is not something to be taken lightly, especially not for us that actually watch tennis, and I missed it. But do I really have 8 hours to watch the famous 5^th set showdown? Yeah, no. Especially not for one that doesn’t involve one of my “boyfriends” (for those of you who don’t already know, I’m saving myself for Rafa). I can’t even commit to watching an 8-hour set and these gentlemen played for 11 hours? I think I just redefined lazy. But did anyone out there actually watch this match in its entirety? No really, I want to know.

Another interesting thing on my radar today is the impending establishment of a top-level domain name for pornography sites. If ICM Registry LLC gets their way, you’ll never have to wonder if you’re on a pornography site again! I can see where this would come in handy, as I often make this mistake. Thanks for taking the guesswork out of surfing the Web for questionable terms like “sandbox!” Honestly, I’m surprised this is having such a hard time getting through the ICANN. I don’t see the harm in this, and though the petitioning company clearly just wants to make wads and wads of cash, the spam/blocking argument holds solid ground. Don’t you think?

Of course always on my mind is the ever-sickening saga which is the BP Oil Spill, but I will not talk about that here for fear of spewing angry word-vomit all over my shiny new blog.

So instead of making one of these trending topics jealous, I choose not to speak about any of them in depth. Instead, I will talk about the weather.

Most of my Austin friends know this already, but lately I have been living on a steady diet of “my own words.” Moving here from the sweltering 110-plus desert heat of the badlands, I have always (very vocally I might add) asserted that “a dry heat” does not hurt any less than … well, what would you call it? Wet heat? In parts of New Mexico and certainly in Las Vegas, it is so dry that you can actually feel the moisture being sucked out of your body. Your nails break, your hair is brittle, you get the occasional unexpected nose bleed, and there’s always the chance of dehydration paired with heat exhaustion. Pretty painful, right? Right. However, there were a few things I failed to consider.

To all my desert rat comrades out there: your skin may not crack and peel in the humidity, but instead it swells up. This could be a good or a bad thing, you can go ahead and make that judgment call. But in my world, puffy face equals bad. Also, your hair refuses to stay dry, and if its texture is anything like mine, pin curls emerge in the most random and unwelcome of places, i.e. in your newly coiffed Justin Bieber bangs. You also find that you sweat in fun new places, such as, hypothetically, under the eyes. Factor in that 85 degrees in wet heat feels like 100 degrees and I think we’ve got ourselves a winner!

What conclusions are to be drawn here? It must be humid in hell.

Blueprints

Optimists like to say, “When one door closes, another opens,” or some derivative of it that is supposed to aid you through your life’s path as you search for your ultimate happiness. Sentiments like these are intended to lend purpose to even the bleakest of moments.  They are those little roadblocks and detours and redirects of endless possibility that ultimately get you to your final destination. Your telos. (Assuming you subscribe to that notion, but we’ll save that discussion for a later date).

What they don’t tell you is that when a door opens, another closes. You may have witnessed this phenomenon. The pressure in the room changes and affects the airflow ever so slightly and a door on the other side of the house swings shut. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you cannot, for the life of you, keep these two doors open at once. An optimist may call this a “glass half-empty” point of view, but I would disagree. If you consider space and time to be constraining variables (I had to throw that in there to ward off philosophical argument from the transcendentalist in you), you simply cannot go through two doors at once, and the one we choose to pass through forfeits the other. Even if we are later to return to that room and choose the other door, what lay on the other side is invariably different than it would have been if we’d chosen it in the first place. Such is life.

We also don’t have any control over the other people that come into our houses and pass through the doors contained within. They may choose to close a door or open a window without asking us. “No!” we may shout as they innocently crack the window for a breath of fresh air. We dive across the room to stop them but it’s too late, and we hear the door slam shut from across the house. There’s nothing we can do about it but reopen it again, but that changes things, doesn’t it?

Enough with the metaphors. It may come as a surprise to you that I am often called upon for advice on matters of the heart, life, trust, truth, whatever. Yes, me. The girl who likes to throw her life into upheaval for no other reason than to watch the pieces fall where they may. The girl who can’t even commit to a menu item until a query from the server forces her to panic and choose the first thing that pops into her mind. The girl who typically champions a “glass half-empty” perspective. Regardless of how ill-suited I may be, this is a role I have become familiar with. I try to take my own advice as I navigate my way through my own life, but those of you who know me pretty well know that making decisions isn’t exactly my forte. I’d like to call it “flexibility” or “adaptability” but others may call it “indecisive” or “reluctance.” To-may-toe, to-mah-toe I say.

Either way, I soldier through. Decisions are made (or not made, which is a decision all in its own), doors open and close, and the path in front of me is restructured on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute, second-by-second basis. And I’m ok with that, because that’s where things get interesting. To those of you in my thoughts today as I write this: I may not be a life coach or a sage or a maestro, but I do know a thing or two about change. It is inescapable and it is certain. Do not deceive yourself into thinking things will remain as they are. Whether we are immensely happy, desperately sad, or relentlessly apathetic, our sentiments are fragile and teetering on a nib. The slightest move – or the failure to make a move as the world changes around us – could send us over the side. So I say embrace it. Be prepared for it. Change isn’t always good, but it’s reliable. And it’s forthcoming.

Ass Naked

Someone recently asked me why I still don’t have a blog, to which I responded without giving it much thought, “Because I don’t have anything to say on a day-to-day basis that could possibly interest the faceless masses.” What she said in return really got to me: “Well, how do you ever expect to sell a book then?”

Jane, we’ll call her, thought she was joking. But she’s on to something. Not that I had an earth shattering aha! moment that caused me to abandon my lifelong passion. Far from it, actually. It did make me realize two things, though. First, I’ve never let anyone read any of my work, aside from a few academic pieces and my master’s thesis (which is another story all on its own). It scares the hell out of me to put myself out there like that, opening myself up to criticism on the one thing that I absolutely love to do and consider myself to have a moderate amount of talent at doing. Heaven forbid someone tells me I’m a deluded two-bit hack with a serious misunderstanding of the craft. I’m not going to lie, that would hurt. And that’s the real answer to Jane’s question. Day after day, millions of people pour their hearts and souls out into the public forum for all to read. And some of them write about some pretty stupid shit. So why can’t I do it? Am I really so insecure?

Second, if I expect to be able to write a book that others will want to read and pay good money for, I need to be honest. Honest with myself and honest in my writing. Stephen King wrote that it doesn’t matter what you write about, as long as you tell the truth. This is where I get stuck. To be a writer is to be vulnerable. Every character, every scene, every reaction comes from within ourselves. Even if it’s the opposite of what we would actually do in our ‘real’ lives, everything contained within a piece of writing says something about the author. How we see the world, how we perceive those around us, how we feel about certain matters, both trivial and consequential – it all emerges from the page in one form or another. Because I’m aware of this, I (knowingly and unknowingly; willingly and unwillingly) filter and dilute a lot of what I write because I’m weary of what others might think it says about me. And that says something about me. But that’s not honest, and it’s certainly not good writing, no matter how stylistically and grammatically correct it may be. Basically what I’m saying is that I need to get the hell over it.

So that is the purpose of my little online experiment. It doesn’t matter what I write about, just so long as I’m putting myself out there, doing what I love, and being honest. If it offends someone … well, let’s face it, someone is always going to be offended. If it embarrasses me, good. I’ve spent too much time hiding, and a little embarrassment would be healthy for me. If someone likes it, wonderful! That would mean I’m making progress, and that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? And if nobody reads it at all, then no harm no foul. It’ll still a good exercise in discursive authenticity.

So that’s it. No more hiding. This is me. Think more or less of me for it, or don’t think about it at all. But know I’m there, ass naked, streaking through the virtual streets of the blogosphere. Let’s say that I’m waving my arms and screaming too, just for dramatic effect.

See you out there!