| 12:23pm 05/05/2009 | |||
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Why create art? It's a good question. The world doesn't need it to continue to spin. Reading a great book or seeing an incredible film or listening to music doesn't feed you, in the literal sense. Art does not fall into the realm of the practical, and is often overlooked by those who don't feel any pull towards it. I feel that same pang that characterizes humanity's eternal struggle: the world is a cruel, confusing place without explanations. Mulling over those oft-repeated questions of existence only leads one to two divergent answers-- that there is order of a complexity beyond our comprehension, or that it's a chaotic accident. Naturally, the first answer is the one in which most people find solace, but the questions linger and the doubts persist. We want importance. Man ascribed himself as dwelling in the center of the universe until astronomy undermined that ignorance. We're way off to one side of an enormous galaxy, which is in no place of particular geometric importance in an enormous universe. We take in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. We have children. We shit. It's a crass business and there seems to be no divine meaning in it. And yet we have this rich layer of consciousness that seems to distinguish us from the other living things around us. We can feel a wide range of intangible things; we have a sense of justice; we find things to be beautiful; we can think and feel like no other creature. It is true that in our limited exposure we are quite important. But the ugly question remains: what does all of this feeling and thinking amount to? How important can it be if we die? I don't know. I certainly don't want to die and seep back into the earth, but I never asked to live and rise from it either. In my opinion, art is the manifestation of what makes human beings, and life, amazing and beautiful. Expressing those thoughts and feelings so unique to humanity shapes the society we live in and may provide comfort to someone lonely and miserable who's wrestling with these same feelings. For me, at least, art has always made me feel as though I am not alone, and that's important. It's easier to face the gaping abyss of eternity when you've got some support. And maybe someday I'll create something that will affect someone like I've been affected. That won't alter the inevitable, but it will be my small indentation on the ever-changing world. |
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| Read 2 - Post | |||
| 02:02pm 20/03/2009 | |||
| ( my aunt sharon died yesterday morning. ) | |||
| Read 8 - Post | |||
| 08:41pm 09/02/2009 | |||
| ( in drawings ) | |||
| Read 2 - Post | |||
| 08:37pm 09/02/2009 | |||
| ( my trip, in pictures ) | |||
| Read 2 - Post | |||
| 08:26pm 09/02/2009 | |||
| i think that, for the first time ever, one could accurately describe me as "competent." | |||
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| 03:11pm 17/01/2009 | ||||
Up until a couple of months ago, I had never considered breast-feeding as something that I might personally do should I ever have a child. I was fed exclusively formula, and consider myself to be a perfectly viable human being. The topic came up with a close friend, who reacted to my declaration with horror and insisted that it was wholly selfish not to breast-feed, and that denying my children my own milk would be detrimental to their livelihood and intelligence. After some time, I irascibly snapped that the conversation would necessarily have to end. That my friend had lambasted my personal choice angered me, but the greater cause of my annoyance was the fact that my friend was a man. Men may freely express their opinions on the necessity or lackthereof of breast-feeding-- the article, in fact, quotes men such as Carl Linnaeus, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin-- but they don't share its burden. Pardon my being a feminist bitch, but men can never attain real expertise on motherhood. If I become a mother, no man is going to make me feel like I'm doing a poor job of it, no matter how I choose to feed my child. It is true, though, that breast-feeding does benefit the nursing child in a number of ways that formula cannot. The article continues to discuss recent public efforts to raise the percentage of mothers who breast-feed immediately, in hopes of raising the percentage of those who continue to do so until the six- and twelve-month marks. Ms. Lepore transitions in the later portion of the article into corporate practices that discourage women from continuing to nurse. "To follow a doctor's orders, a woman who returns to work twelve weeks after childbirth has to find a way to feed her baby her own milk for another nine months. The nation suffers, in short, from a Human Milk Gap. There are three ways to bridge that gap: longer maternity leaves, on-site infant child care, and pumps. Much effort has been spent implementing option No. 3, the cheap way out." It was with that sentence that I became skeptical of her stance. The sad truth is that working women are constantly balancing between being bad mothers and bad feminists. The issue of whether a woman should sacrifice her career for her child is still one that remains heavily in contention. To become a stay-at-home mom can be painted as throwing away all the work our foremothers did for us, while to put the kid in daycare and commit to a full-time job can be similarly chastised as negligent. Women are stuck, to put it simply, between a rock and a hard place. The pump is a product of its time; if a woman wants to have a career and a family, here is something that allows her to do both. And to me, a woman who can have a job and raise a child is one who is enormously admirable. To criticize her is not just to be unappreciative of the chaos that she must routinely work through, but to ignore it entirely. And if the pump is her method of choice, I do not feel that anyone can legitimately call it the "cheap way out." I agree with some of Ms. Lepore's other arguments, primarily that all of these options should be available and the choices surrounding breastfeeding, therefore, should be entirely the mother's to make. If breast-feeding is going to be encouraged by the government, the very act must not be considered publicly obscene. Women should be able to have their children nearby in the workplace, if they please; I think daycare centers within a corporate office building are a wonderful compromise. "Lactation rooms," which are private rooms in which a mother may pump her milk within the workplace, are becoming increasingly common; in fact, the article points out, Oregon was recently the first state to require them in companies that employ over twenty-five people. Motherhood is about making these sort of personal decisions, and I believe all of these options should be readily available. To decry one as inferior to another, however, is a disservice to these hard-working women and undermines the sagacity of the mothers that choose that particular route. What really makes me angry, however, is a small comment in parentheses that Ms. Lepore makes that almost entirely discredits her. "The National Organization for Women wants more pumps at work: NOW's president, Kim Gandy, complains that 'only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breast milk for their babies.' (When did 'women's rights' turn into 'the right to work?')." I blinked in disbelief at that statement, thinking I must have misread it, but there it was, in the same black ink as the rest of the magazine. Ms. Lepore, are you kidding me? Can you possibly be serious? Is this some sort of ineffective satire on your part? "Women's rights" have always included "the right to work." The right to embark on any career path. The right to be a doctor instead of a nurse or a professor instead of a school-teacher. The right to keep your job even if you're pregnant and unmarried, the right to make the same amount of money as your male counterpart, the right to go into your workplace every day without fear of harassment. Perhaps Ms. Lepore hasn't heard of the glass ceiling. Perhaps she's been disconnected from society for decades. Perhaps, as a successful woman contributing to the New Yorker, she hasn't felt the effects of workplace discrimination herself. But oh, it's there, and to ignore it is to promote dangerous complacency or worse, ignorance of the arduous work that's left to be done. I do not want money automatically deducted from my paychecks for the presumed maternity leave I may or may not take, and I do not want to be denied a promotion because my male bosses think my ability to bear children is a liability to the higher position I will not be getting, and I don't want any other women to suffer those same injustices. And I don't, Ms. Lepore, want women who do pursue their right to work and their right to have a family, both under that same umbrella of "women's rights," to endure jeers from people like you who question their authority, their motherly integrity, and their ability to do both. |
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| 02:25am 09/01/2009 | |||
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basic worldview: candyfromhell: i love it, the hipbones and all of that candyfromhell: the skinny match-like legs candyfromhell: there was a point where his pant leg rode up and his bird-like meatless ankle flashed candyfromhell : and i near died candyfromhell : oh well candyfromhell : what'd you do on new years? delusionofagurl : are you fucking kidding me delusionofagurl : julianne, I love you. |
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| 11:10pm 04/11/2008 | ||||
While I've had more than enough wine this evening, I can't give myself to euphoria until the results of Prop 8 are announced. Last I checked only 11% of the votes were in and the results were heart-breaking-- 55% in favor, 45% against. I don't understand how we can make such great strides as a nation and still be so bumblingly slow when it comes to living up to the promises made in the Declaration of Independence. If all men are created equal, it is utterly unAmerican to withhold and distribute certain rights to certain groups of people. This seems obvious to me. And yet my cousin Marsha's numerous "No on 8" signs were stolen and vandalized. Prop 102, a similar but somewhat less significant proposition in Arizona, passed by a large margin (nearly 60/40). And my own father didn't vote on the proposition at all, because he "doesn't care about gay marriage." I didn't speak to him while we waited in line. When we got home from the polling booths I found a Yes-on-8 pamphlet in our mail. I blearily scanned it before passing out. One thing that caught my attention was the bold-lettered sentence declaring that "this issue has nothing in common with the Civil Rights movement." The distinction between the Civil Rights movement and this impudent, heretic ploy of the "Extremist Gay Agenda" is which groups are being injustly targeted for the granting or denial of rights, rather than the fundamentally unequal distribution of those rights. Pigmentation of the skin is meaningless and we're evolved enough to realize that banning interracial marriage is wrong (as of forty years ago), but the "choice" of homosexuality is the choice to forfeit conjugal happiness. What really gets me is the ghastly hypocrisy of these fervent proponents. Support comes from prominent organizations such as Focus on the Family and, the most formidable of the opposition, the Mormon church. How can people claim to "focus on the family" when they are actively denying the rights of millions of citizens to have a family? How can the Mormon church be seriously advocating "traditional" marriage, when the Mormon church is best-known for being the last American bigamist institution? How can a key argument against gay marriage be that such a practice would destroy the "sanctity of marriage," when over half of American marriages end in divorce? And how can the "indoctrination of school children" really be used as a valid argument that is, even more outrageously, incredibly effective? It wasn't long ago that I was a Californian second-grader and I don't recall being taught about marriage values alongside cursive and multiplication tables. These people who have so passionately campaigned to uphold marriage as a purely heterosexual institution fail to understand that families take on many shapes. My own family was relatively unconventional. Neither of my parents have ever married, and were separated before I was born. I went back and forth between houses and was essentially raised between my father and mother's boyfriend, with my mother maintaining a large presence but being, to say the least, less than nurturing. My grandmother used to give me pitying looks and tell me that she felt terribly for me, and wished I had been blessed like my cousins who had both been born unto wedded parents. Never mind that their father cheated on my aunt and both of their parents remarried and moved multiple times throughout their upbringing. I don't want to speak out against tradition, but it's meaningless if it's followed without thought or consideration. It's a new world-- tonight proved that. All families should be respected by the law and the citizenry, regardless of religious creed. That's all I really have to say, other than that a lot of us Californians are frightened tonight. I've got to sleep but I'm afraid to wake up and find my hopes dashed by pervading intolerance. I have faith in this country, in this state, and in these people, and that faith was somewhat reaffirmed tonight. I'm hoping California will live up to its promise as the social leader of this nation. |
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| Read 4 - Post | ||||
| 12:43am 04/11/2008 | ||||
really, though, i was looking for some peace of mind by coming here-- i have been having an extraordinarily bad time, lately-- and if anything i leave feeling more disturbed than ever at the stasis of my life. i'm so fucking confused. i know no one has an instruction manual, no one naturally knows how to go about it, but i think for my whole life i've fought feeling like i'm way behind the curve. today over tea kabir and i were talking about my future academic plans, and he was asking for basic, germane information like, oh, say, what are the transfer deadlines for these schools i'm interested in attending, and of course i had no idea. i wanted to throw my arms up and say, i don't know, i don't know what to do and my hard drive just crashed and the meager portfolio work i did have has fuck-all vanished, and i don't know how many years i'm going to spend in undergrad, and the only thing i do know is that i love and want to make cartoons, but i honestly just want to get out of school and get a creative job and move back here or to portland or anywhere, really. now can we please stop talking about this. but i was only able to choke out the last sentence. but there it is, in print: i have a rough idea of what i want and am too spastic to obtain it. i should really sleep (it's 1:21 now) but if i enter delta sleep and then try to force myself out of it it's going to be a really hellish schlep, moreso than it's already bound to be. speaking of weird sleeping patterns, i had a strange dream last night on kabir's floor mattress underneath a paper-thin blanket. i had a gun and i was in a hotel room in the middle of some private sting operation, and i shot a man point-blank who had angered me tremendously. another man, one of his associates, came in and i shot him too out of surprise or gut-reaction or to rid the world of witnesses. he was sputtering blood and asking for help and i struggled between my humanity and my deep fear of being sent to prison for double-murder. i watched him die, watched his face turn white and his lips turn blue. i've never seen a real dead person and i don't know how my subconscious knows how to recreate one so well. anyway, i spent the rest of the dream agonizing over my guilt, wondering about the grieving families of these men and the pain i had caused them, trying to scheme up a plausible alibi, and panicking about jail. i continued to rent the room (the hotel had no room service, it seemed) and left the bodies there, revisiting them after school each day to try to figure out what to do with them. in one particularly strange scene i confided in naomi and joe, and we played cards in the room a few feet away from the bodies. i realized that my fingerprints were probably all over everything by this point and was sick with fear when i woke up, and breathed a huge sigh of relief upon the realization that i was, in fact, not going to have to redefine my life in the wake of a double-homicide. i considered further that i had just dreamt up the plot of crime and punishment. kabir, unperturbed by the macabre details, agreed that this was pretty cool. one more thing: autumn is beautiful. yesterday i hauled my ass out to madison to see victoria. i really didn't want to take the trip out to new jersey but i did want to see her, very much. i missed my train by two minutes because the guy at the information counter gave me erroneous information, for which i tearfully screamed at him before walking outside to west 34th street and sobbing and panting repulsively into the phone that i was a mess. i drew to calm myself down before boarding the next train. i'm so glad i went; the trees were these eruptions of color that i know everyone who isn't from southern california takes for granted, but i had never seen autumn like this before, excepting central park two years ago which is wholly different. it was romantic and beautiful and crisp, and i was very happy, very briefly. |
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| 11:20pm 20/10/2008 | ||||
i realize that i've always been very good at escapism. i've limited how much i've dealt with my problems head on by shoving so very many of them under the proverbial rug, by [in the past] smoking weed or spending time with people i don't like or burrowing myself into someone's chest. i will change this. i will no longer think of sources of comfort and how to obtain them when i'm placed in a situation that requires some distress. adulthood isn't about shunning the most trying parts of life. i know, even through the filter of the constant self-abuse i subject myself to, that i am a strong person. i have gotten through a lot and i can get through more. i worked for eight hours today (i got a paid internship where i drink a lot of coffee, make stickers, and file an endless paper trail) before going to aet to hear a rhythm and hues animator lecture. naomi and i managed to get seats very close to the front, but unfortunately i was seated next to a gentleman who felt it necessary to say, "mhm," "right," "uh huh," "yeah," and other statements of agreement at everything the animator said as if it were an open discourse, even when the speaker related personal anecdotes. after about an hour of this, i told naomi rather forcefully that "we are absolutely not sitting next to forest fucking gump anymore. he can conduct his little symposium far away from me." i don't know what it is about aet. it must be the combination of art and community colleges that attracts this veritable freak show. one out of every three students there has got to be afflicted with some form of psychosis. as much as i appreciate it and enjoy myself there, i wish very much that some of these people could return to the circuses from whence they came. not a whole lot of other news to report. i'm going to new york for halloween and i finally got my rosie the riveter costume in order. it'll be really good for me to get out of the city, if only for a few days, to see some best friends. lord knows, i need them right now. |
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| 01:25am 17/09/2008 | ||||
i had a brief, tame, and inconsequential encounter a few months ago that meant a lot more to the other person than it did to me. it was a kiss that seemingly ruined his life for the following three months. bored in class last thursday, i did some internet sleuthing and discovered a series of forum posts, detailed descriptions of the weeks of infatuation and months of misery that i caused this person. i had immediately realized in the aftermath that what i had so casually done reaped enormous consequences on his end, and exercised what little prudence i am capable of by honestly and frankly explaining to him my point of view. it's old news now, but like i said, i just found out that this woebegone tale is recounted in shocking detail to a group of strangers. indeed, some of it is exaggerated, but many of them dismissed it with the simple reasoning: "she sounds like a slut." now, i use that word. i use it jocularly and it is used by many of my friends in the same fashion. and whenever it comes up, i smile, laugh, and often wince. i don't hate the word, but i utterly loathe what it represents. on the one hand, there has never been a better time or place to be an independent, sexual female, and all of us women are privileged to walk these roads paved by the second wave of the feminist movement some forty years ago. but there is still an extremely ugly, pervasive attitude towards female sexuality-- that it is somehow sacrosanct. it is highly debatable what sexual practices are considered virtuous, because a woman who has sex at all-- or in my case, even kisses someone unceremoniously-- risks being called the word in question. there is a long-standing conflation of sexuality and morality that is ineluctable in american society, and there's a lot of confusion because of it. people struggle against the omnipresence of sex, oscillate between their natural longing for sex and their desire to be good people, and deal with the subsequent shame on what i consider to be an unreasonable basis. i think a lot of ashamed people have to begrudgingly admit to themselves, regardless of moral or political standpoint, that sex is an inescapable part of life, but nevertheless regulate what are and are not acceptable sexual practices, particularly for women, in order to maintain virtue. a good woman (or more befittingly, girl), is one who has sex (if at all) for the sake of emotional intimacy and closeness, for love, rather than for pleasures of the flesh. a woman need to merely enjoy sex, it seems, to be counted as a slut in some circles. men are not held to this standard. as a woman's number of sexual partners increases, her value diminishes; as a man's increases, he is exalted. the epithets for sexually promiscuous men are much more flattering than "slut;" "player" comes to mind, or "stud." a man might boast about having sex with many people in a short period of time; on a woman it is a disgrace. i was having a conversation about this with a friend a few months ago who was reading some literature on the subject of gender-specific mating practices. some of the arguments listed were that to have sex with as many women as possible is at little cost to a man, and increases his chances of producing healthy offspring; a woman gains nothing from having sex with many men because she can only be impregnated by one. a woman who has sex with many men is of particular liability to a man who wants her because he risks being saddled with a child who may or may not be his. my argument against these points was the simple fact that we are not beasts. our species has the unrivaled privilege of intellect. to recognize such behaviors within ourselves is a way to distance ourselves from them, intellectualize them, and ultimately change them. "fair" and "just" may be arbitrary, abstract concepts but they're powerful and compelling, and people have demanded them for as long as we've had our ability to embody and express arbitrary, abstract concepts. my friend laughed at me, told me you can't go against "nature." but there are a number of survival mechanisms and impulses we've recognized and limited-- our knowledge of the world in which we live allows us to change our behavior while living in it. we stop ourselves from overeating, for example, even though we are inclined to eat as much as possible in case of a paucity in food supplies. and really, i hate to quote evolutionary theories, or any social theories for that matter, like they are the final word on human behavior-- they are trends, not rules. human beings are entirely too culturally and individually variable to be so rigidly defined. it is my hope that true social equality of the sexes is realistically obtainable and the obstacles against it are cultural. culture is dynamic and evolving and can be changed towards a greater good. i worked at victoria's secret for almost a year and the message there was perfectly clear: a woman's achievement is to be sexy, to possess and flaunt sexuality. everyone in america knows that sex sells. go outside and tell me how long it takes to find a billboard with a half-naked woman on it, whether she's advertising jeans or gossip girl. when i was in san francisco last february, i saw an interesting piece at MoMA: the artist had made two busts of herself, one of soap and one of chocolate, both representing how women are expected to behave (that is, pure versus sensual). it's amazing to me that these simultaneous, contrasting pressures exist so hugely in one world. the forces that govern how a modern woman should behave in the 21st century are as implacable as they are impossible to fully ignore, and to be a slut is to be without value. the stigma surrounding female sexuality is, in my opinion, nothing short of tragic. it's unsurprising that so many women i know are ashamed, so many girls i know count their "number" with great embarrassment and rarely disclose it so as not to compromise their social standing, that so many women have voiced this grave concern to me: "am i a slut?" aside from being a feminist, the only thing i can really do is consciously not subscribe to these ideas which i so vehemently contest, and are, to a degree, instilled in me by the culture in which i live. i have felt this same disgust for sexual women without thinking about it; my solution is to think about it, and divorce myself from it. i said to my friend the other night, verbatim: "i am a woman who loves sex. i am also smart, well-read, and have a skill set most people don't have. i will not be made to feel ashamed by people who are not as comfortable with their sexuality as i am with mine." |
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| Read 7 - Post | ||||
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| 01:23pm 19/08/2008 | ||||
(woohoo.) |
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| Read 5 - Post | ||||
| Writer's Block: Six-Word Story | ||||
| 11:50am 14/08/2008 | ||||
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