pretty dumb things

just ask hester prynne

Slut-shaming is a new term, but it’s an old premise. Being a woman who has rarely let the roaring crowds define my life choices, I’m relatively accustomed to being called a slut, and I’ve certainly matured immune to people making me feel ashamed for behavior they see as sluttish.

It’s my belief that I’m free to kiss, canoodle, make out, grope, hump, frottage, finger, fuck, suck and otherwise fornicate with as many humans of whatever gender as I wish, as often as I wish, to the extent I wish, and with the frequency I wish. It also is my belief that I’m free not to. I’ve got the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in short, and in no small part the way I’ve chosen to express those rights is sexually. I am, therefore, fairly impervious to sexual shame.

And yet people try.

To be honest, while I always operated under the sneaking suspicion that I had the right to have sex as much or as little as I wanted, I only fully came to inhabit that credo as an adult. As a teen, I still bought a bit into the good-girls-don’t dominant male-monkey-motherfucker culture. As a teen, I felt shame; people would try to make me feel it, and they succeeded, or they succeeded and failed in equal ratio. It was a war within myself, but that battle has long since ended. I don’t feel shame for sex. I feel shame over the actions I’ve knowingly taken that have hurt someone. Only one or two of those actions are sexual in nature. Real shame comes from treating others badly, not fucking great big swaths of humanity.

So it was, then, an odd experience to have that age-old shame waved in front of my eyes like a pair of dirty cotton panties.

Last Thursday, I had a visit from the last dude I dated. We saw each other from just after the first of this year to a couple of weeks into March, when it became abundantly clear that I found him annoying. Our parts didn’t fit in that ineffable emotional geometry. And despite the fact that he gave, hands down—a phrase I use fairly literally here—the best head I’ve ever gotten, I dumped him.

It was a dumping that he required me to do again and again. I didn’t want to dump and redump. I wanted to dump once and be done. I did it as gently as I could because this man was clearly walking wounded. His narratives didn’t make sense, and not in that lying, prevaricating way; they didn’t make sense in that way that his head was muddled with lingering hurt. He was nice enough; thus, though our relationship had been spiked a bit too prickly with Moonlighting-screwball-comedy skewering, I wanted to let him go gently into that good night.

He wouldn’t let me. I had to break up with him about four times, but then it finally seemed to stick, finally.

This dude came over to drop off my copy of Deadwood Season 3. I lend out my books and my dvds. It’s just a thing. I’d lent him this final chapter of the Deadwood, and though I would’ve chalked that one up to the loss column, I was happy to get it back. This last week, the dude came over to my apartment, DVD in hand. We kissed hello on the cheek, we made uncomfortable small talk.

He asked what was new.

Nothing, I said. Really, nothing.

My mind was kind of a blank. I could dredge up stuff, but I knew everything would make this dude feel down. It didn’t seem to make sense to tell him about the t-shirt with the Molly Crabapple illustration of me in my skivvies being on sale, for example. My mind white as a clean sheet of paper, I seized on something I could tell him.

Oh, I said, I’m going to my thirtieth high school reunion.

“Yeah?” He said and grinned lop-sided, “Are you going to fuck everyone there for old time’s sake?”

Yeah, I said. I’ll text you. I’ll send you pictures.

I looked him in the eye and smiled broad and scary.

On the inside, I was calling him a limber-dicked cocksucker. Because dude was trying to make me feel shame about my past, a past I made peace with a very long time ago, and a peace toward which he clearly felt anger, resentment and even a soupcon of bitterness. This dude was one pissed-off dude and, thank all things perverse and profane, that anger was not my problem.

I ushered the dude out the door. He had in that one question shown himself not to be worthy of an iota of my attention and caring. I knew that I could have taken the opportunity to call the dude on his full ration of crazy and bitter, but to do so would be to engage with him. Fuck him and the shame he rode in on. That wasn’t my pony, and I wasn’t going to hop on it.

See, the thing is this: when people try to make you feel bad about something that you didn’t do to them, when people try to make you feel bad about behavior that has nothing to do with them, when people try to make you feel bad about behavior that never hurt anyone else, those people are showing you who they are. And who they are is small, petty, frightened, angry and threatened.

It’s a strange gig when a full-fledged adult tries to raise the specter of adolescent sex shame from the dead. It’s a weird vertiginous sensation to see your fears waved again in front of your eyes—for I’ll admit that part of my trepidation over going to my reunion is revisiting the people who heaped such abuse on me for…what? Making out at keggers? Giving blow jobs? Having fully protected, fully consensual sex? I have avoided seeing these people for three decades, though now I feel quite proud about attending my reunion. I look good for my age, and I have stories to tell. It’s nonetheless canny of the dude to recognize my trepidation.

But it was mean and a low-down dirty dog move to try to make me feel like crap. For that, he should feel shame… and I can feel consoled with the knowledge that one thing he will never, ever feel again is me.

Shameless, proud, spectacular and irreplaceable me.

object lessons

 Last November, I stood dressed in my tattered skivvies for Molly Crabapple. She sat on the floor with her legs folded under her looking like a wayward flower-seller. She drew me, pausing periodically to hold up her brush mathematically to capture the angle of my arm or my thigh. We talked about the healthcare debate and academic life, and when I tipped a pot of ink over onto her carpet, she was kind. I blotted up the mess, and she said the shadow blotch added character.

Two of these illustrations are now available on t-shirts. You can buy them at Fred Segal, if you live in LA; you can buy them at Atrium starting in mid-June, if you live in Gotham; and if you live otherwhere, you can buy them online. I have bought one of each of the t-shirts myself so that I can wear myself in stereo. I can, from time to time, endorse my own narcissism, a quality I like to rebrand á la Gala Darling as a tepid flavor of radical self-love. (I can’t quite call my self-love radical; it remains timid as weasels and twice as unpredictable.)

 Molly’s drawing of me called “Strut” by Dirtee Hollywood is at the framing shop. Soon it’ll sit bright and shiny and new on one of my old and dingy walls. It’s art, and I love it, and I know few people who can say that they have adorned Fival Stewart’s chest. I have, or an image of me has, anyway. I am one degree of separation away from Twilight franchise teen-tart tit. Che Guevara and I now have something in common, presumably.

Make no mistake about it: posing for an artist is gratifying in profound ways. It’s fantastic to stand for five or ten minutes, to take pride in holding a pose, to feel your muscles quiver tight as a racehorse, to keep your chin tilted just so, to hold tight and hold tighter, and to see at the end yourself represented through someone else’s gifted eyes and talented hand. I’ve modeled for artists only a few times in my life, and I’ve never felt anything but a rarified form of aerie elation. It’s a bit high-making, in all honesty. It beats drugs because rather than a hangover and a headache, you inevitably get a lovely two-dimensional parting gift rolled in your hand.

Which is to say, in short, that there is joy in being an object. I have loved the slipping feeling of turning into a thing and losing my being. I spent so many years as a stripper in a happy vague state of bland awareness, and I enjoyed much of that time. Consciousness is a curse, I’ve often felt, and felt keenly, bright and sharp and shiny as an expensive German knife. My consciousness has often been unkind; it has lit my life in the unforgiving gaze of overhead fluorescent lighting. I have been grateful for the Lethean waters of objectification.

Though I’ve not known why until recently. At the beginning of March, a team of researchers from the New School for Social Research released their findings from a study of objectification of women. The study, as reported widely on the web, suggested that women are objectified, their cognitive abilities falter. The researchers suggest that this decrease in cognitive function is due to a splitting of self—an awareness both of oneself as viewed and as viewing one’s self being viewed—and that this splitting of consciousness makes it, well, hard to think.

Objectification is hard, let’s go shopping.

The research leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, it acts as if women’s objectification of women is inconsequential. For another, it acts as if women’s objectification of men doesn’t exist. It also studied only 25 women, and the methods of the study—filming women from the neck down, asking them to fill out a questionnaire about their own self-objectification, and then subjecting them to cognitive tests—seem to this layperson to be a bit fragmented. There’s no question that the study leaves a lot to be desired before we take it as anything more than an interesting cocktail niblet.

And yet. My experience as a professional is that there is a delightful slip-sliding of self that happens during an attenuated moment of objectification. I can’t speak for all strippers across all time, but I can say that one of the things I most treasured about becoming CiCi (at least in the first few years) was how much it made my mind go blissfully blank. I felt like a silver screen, a blank spot for the projection of fantasies, and I liked it. I called it "my blonde lobotomy," and I still hold it close with nostalgia, even as it cloys with the scent of too much perfume and tanning lotion.

I miss that blonde blandness. Granted, not all the time—and certainly that was one of the many reasons why CiCi died that long slow death; I grew to resent the object-becoming, I fought the fugue, and I stayed more solidly myself—but when I’m with my lover, I like to be an object. I like to feel my mind go blank, white and flat, clean as a clean sheet of paper. Ready to be drawn upon, or merely drawn.

I write today as I wrote yesterday as I will write tomorrow as a feminist. Yet I can’t say that there isn’t value in being objectified, in losing yourself to those sublime blank moments. The problem isn’t becoming an object; it’s staying one. That’s what I’ve learned from my time in two dimensions. You can choose to be three-D in a shiny neuro-second. In a moment, you can take back your presence. I’d be interested to see these sociologists study a passel of strippers. I’ve no doubt they could turn off and on the objectification faster than a strobe light

These are object lessons, and they’re illustrative. Pretty pictures don’t tell the whole story, neither being one nor making one. Speaking as a sentient carbon-based life-form with an insatiable need for lip-gloss, I quite like being an object from time to time, even if I enjoy being a fully embodied person most of the time. Nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

one lone gunperson aiming from language's grassy knoll

In an interview last March, German magazine De Spiegel queried Secretary Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about her choice to replace the term “terrorist” with “man-caused disasters” when she addressed Congress:

Spiegel: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

This linguistic shift has been termed “Orwellian” by many neoconservatives, while Peggy Noonan archly commented, “Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Certainly, whether an adherent of Fox News or a devotee of MSNBC, you might feel the new term seems at the very least to be engaged in a warm and fuzzy obfuscation. We ought not to be fearful of terrorists, Napolitano’s suggests; rather, we should be afraid of men and the disasters they can cause. This linguistic re-habbing by Napolitano—and, by extension, the current administration—longs to place the responsibility on individual people who take destructive actions and to equate their destruction with the seemingly senseless abandon of a natural disaster, a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake.

The linguistic prestidigitation that turns “terrorism” into “man-caused disasters” does seem to deflect the looming Code Orange fear. We don’t live in perpetual terror of natural disasters. We watch the weather, we hope for the best, and when the worst is coming, we do our best to plan accordingly (or not, in the case of Hurricane Katrina). In effect, the administration seems to be saying, it’s time to take the same approach in the face of terrorism. It may work, it may not, but what interests me is less the softening, humanizing touch of Napolitano’s phrase and more the thorny issue of the word “man.” Because in this shiny, new phrase, it’s a word that is problematic, political, and just plain wrong.

stepping onto virgin territory: a tale of friendship

I have an unlikely best friend. Most of my friends are very much like me. We misspent out youth in an array of anti-social and vaguely creepy manners. We have long and tortuous histories with sex, drugs and/or rock ‘n roll. We fucked at least a handful of strangers and at least one of them was most likely a stranger of our own biological sex. We flopped about aimlessly in various professional pursuits, and only after throwing many fistfuls of mud at the wall did we finally find something that stuck in an artistically arresting position. When young, we stole stuff, and though we’ve given up the practice the thought remains. We vote Democrat, reflexively.  We are not always kind to strangers. We tip overly well because we worked in the service industry. We distrust the mechanisms of culture: marriage, religion, corporations, suburban housing developments and their lawns. We’re the ones voted “Class Weirdo” at graduation, if we bothered to formally graduate at all.

Standing apart from my usual band of miscreants, malcontents, low-level addicts, and tattooed love children is my friend Elizabeth.

new post, other place

I wrote a new post on the other site I blog at, PNN, the Global Water Cooler for Women (that phrase always prompts a Serengeti visual complete with giraffes, zebras and lions to arise like an oasis). It's about my pernicious stalkers. Read it here, if you feel like it.

I would be the second Blue Wildebeest on the left.

on the dollhouse dilemma and joss whedon's body of work

It’s no secret that I worship at the altar of Joss Whedon, and the irony of that statement, given Whedon’s avowed atheism, is not lost on me. I am one of the legions of people who are autodidacts of the Whedonverse, those who will from time to time exclaim, “Shiny!” when pleased, who can sing along not merely with “Once More with Feeling” but also “Commentary! The Musical,” and who secretly lust after a Smile Time Angel puppet. I am a shameless Whedon geek. Should Joss Whedon cross my path, I would be reduced to a blithering idiot and be overcome with my need to kiss his, well, anything, really.

Which is all a preamble to my explanation of both why I find Whedon’s new series Dollhouse not very good and why, despite recognizing that I don’t like it very much, I’m still watching it.

a period piece; or a call for the end of bloody segregation

I am a menstruating woman. Which is both to say that I am a woman who menstruates—and therefore neither one who has not yet started nor one who has ceased to menstruate—and to say that right now, this moment, as I write this piece, I have my period. Now 46, I’ve been getting my period approximately once a month for the past 33 years and seven months; I’ve had something around 395 periods, give or take a couple for pregnancies, anomalies and bad math. Factoring the length of my average period of five days, I’ve spent 1,975 days or just under five-and-a-half years on the rag, as it were.

Thus I know of what I speak. A lot of time has passed since my very first period at the age of twelve in August, 1975. Yet I still remember it as I remember very few specific days. I know that then, as now, my period appeared at around 5:00 p.m. I know that I was lying on my belly watching some program on my family’s tiny black-and-white television. I know that I felt an alien low-grade fire deep in my underbelly, a strange and unparseable pain that remains strange and unparseable to this day. I remember getting up, going to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and finding that crimson smear in my white panties. I remember sighing heavily and then pragmatically and reluctantly donning the belt-and-pad contraption my grandmother had bought me some months earlier.

I remember feeling exactly how stupid that thing was with its weird bra-strap elastic and its strange little buckles. I remember hating the thickness of the pad and fretting over its visibility. I remember hating the whole kit-and-caboodle, this-girl-is-a-woman-now stupidity of it. I remember telling my mother, and I remember asking her not to tell my father, and I remember that she did anyway. I remember finding out about her betrayal when, after I said something to my dad about having a stomach ache, he turned to me from the driver’s seat of the car and said something along the lines of “Some ladies when they have their periods feel pain” and then launched into a disquisition about how female clitorises were actually larger than penises and I shouldn’t feel badly. I remember feeling absolutely mortified. As well as angry.

I remember the next day that I was supposed to go to the beach, and I remember spending at least two hours in the painful and ultimately triumphant endeavor of stuffing my mother’s super industrial-sized tampon into my twelve year-old vagina, something that took so long we never got to the beach. I remember crying with anger and pain in the process, and I remember crying with anger and pain later when I discovered that tampons also came in “slender,” the size I still use to this day. I remember the week of my first period as I remember few other swaths of time. Perhaps only one other week in my life retains the color-saturated details of my first menstrual week.

I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone in my ability to summon this specific memory, even without the aid of a sanguine Madeleine. The breathy anticipation surrounding the release of eighteen-year-old Rachel Kauder’s My Little Red Book, an anthology of first-person first-period stories, argues the power that these memories hold for women. The truism that we all are born alone and we all die alone might be modified to say that we women all go through our first period alone too, even if we are surrounded by people. On a fundamental level, it’s an experience that every woman has on her own, as much as it forms a bond between us.

I don’t have an issue with this book—it’s a fairly brilliant premise. I may read it; I may not. I don’t have a whole lot of patience with narrowly themed anthologies. But I can see the value in telling stories. Narratives provide frameworks for the ways we experience our lives, for the ways we can make order out of chaos, and for the possibilities we might change. With these points in mind, I do have a problem with this book being cordoned off as a women’s book, a book that needs to be passed around under tables like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was in middle school, and a book that—above all—needs to be kept out of the hands of men.

Such is the way that New York Times reviewer Dr. Abigail Zuger treats it in her review, “In The Open At Last, A Secret That All Women Share.” Giving the context of private dressing rooms in Victoria’s Secret, the presence of segregated “men’s and ladies’” bathrooms at the musical Hair, and the continued acceptance of teaching Sex Ed to both genders separately, Dr. Zuger seems to want to keep period-talk within the confines of the red tent.

“At this point,” Dr. Zuger says about a third of the way through the review, “male readers may want to go outside and toss a ball around for a while. No matter how sympathetic, how curious or how deeply interested in life’s little yuck factors you are, this collection is unlikely to hold more than the mildest intellectual appeal for you. But it is hard to imagine any woman, from the most straitlaced and body-denying to the most uninhibited and body-embracing, who will not read right through it with pure enjoyment, small flashes of recognition and the urge to buy it for every female preteen in sight.” Oh, dear.

This is the part where I get angry with Dr. Zuger (although to be honest I'm already peeved by the end of the article's title). Because she assumes that men need to be protected by the “yuck factors” of our mysterious women's bodies. Because she suggests that men—the very men who may become fathers—ought to busy themselves with masculine activities centered on balls, rather than worry their tender little heads with our “female trouble.” Because she seems to argue that nothing—nothing—illustrates the difference between men’s and women’s bodies like the fact that once a month for most of women’s lives, we bleed, and that it’s our job as women to hide that bloody light under an absorbent cotton bushel.

It’s actually kind of ironic that Dr. Zuger feels the need to perpetuate the hoary gender separation that generations have constructed around menstruation—especially since she chooses to mention by name Gloria Steinem’s essay “If Men Could Menstruate.” Our culture has come up with a colorful run of phrases to sidestep the point-blank utterance of “I have my period.” Whether “Aunt Flo is here to visit,” or we’re “riding the cotton pony,” or we’ve “fallen off the roof,” or we’ve simply “got our friend,” we chicks perform linguistic loop-de-loops to hide our ever-present embarrassment over our “monthlies.” Even “feminine product” advertising employs the ubiquitous and incongruous blue liquid in their ads. Should I ever peer down at a pad or a tampon and see the cool blue of radiator fluid, I’d be fairly alarmed. Our culture, like Dr. Zuger, M.D., likes to euphemize menstruation—as goes death, constipation, and incontinence, so go periods.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll not be shocked to discover that I, like Steinem, am really tired of treating menstruation like it’s some kind of sacred, if twee, rite. I don’t furtively buy menstruation gear. I have no problem sending my boyfriends out to pick up a pack of O.B. tampons for me. I’d like it if the world just grew up and got over their collective pool of ooginess about what women’s bodies do. For that reason, I think that if you do buy a copy of My Little Red Book for your pre-teen, as Dr. Zuger suggests you do, you should also buy one for any man with a close personal relationship to a woman. For the sake of women everywhere, and for the possibility of change in the future, your boyfriend, your daughter’s father, even your dad should probably read this book. Even if I don’t.

(You can find out-takes of My Little Red Book here, and you can even tell your own story, should you have one.)

girls gone gross

“Oversharing is in,” said Rebecca Traister yesterday in her Salon column, “The Great Girl Gross-out,” thereby summoning the inherent chic of women’s writing graphically about their own bodies’ grossness, a genre of writing whose omnipresence sure makes it seem like all the red, moist, fusty rage.

Drawing a lot from websites, magazines, and books, Traister points to the trend of specifically female “oversharing” about specifically female parts. She quotes from posts on Jezebel that deal with the stink and agony of lost tampons and the stink and agony of garlic as a cure for yeast infections; she looks at Miranda Purves’ Elle article on the psychological horror and the genital gore of childbirth; she dwells on the recently published Little Red Book, an anthology of stories of first periods; and she briefly takes a peek at Charlotte Roche’s novel Wetlands, which begins with the sentence “As far back as I can remember, I’ve had hemorrhoids,” and which was recently released here translated from the German into the English. (Jezebel published a reaction to the piece, which you can read here.)

Traister’s column reveals that her reaction to this trend is a polyvalent stew of admiration, revulsion, empathy, wonder and irritation. Reading it, I got a sense that Traister couldn’t quite get past the shock and awww that signals a complex mixture of disdain and reluctant respect combined with a soupcon of condescension, a reaction that she cops to at the end. Somewhere in the middle, Traister writes, “for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much ‘too much information’ as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body.” She has a point.

As hard as it may be to read some of this writing—and maybe I’m showing my age here, but I do find it hard to read narratives that, as Moe Thacik’s did, liken the smell of a tampon to “a fermented tofu renowned for smelling like rotting fish meets sewage meets Black Death” and the look of it to “bloated like a corpse in the harbor.” However, you can’t negate that it is political, and in a very specific, very powerful, and very empowering way.

boobs!

There are two truths that are inescapable: one, I have big boobs, and two, I chose to have them. Currently, my bra size is around a 36-D, though I could probably wear a 38-D or a 36-DD, were I into investing in new bras (I’m not). Suffice to say that as of today, 24 July 2008, my D cups are full, and it may be only the power of meniscus that keeps them from running over.

Sometimes, when I’m really skinny, my cup size is closer to a C. Before I got implants (and parenthetically, my li’l silicone bags full of saline are celebrating their fifteenth anniversary this month, so happy belated birthday, kids!) my bra size was a 36B-, or a 36A+, depending on whether you take the point of view of glass half-full or glass half-empty. My implants, therefore, radically changed the size of my bust, and I’m glad I got them.

I love my breasts. They’re pretty and perky and they bounce and jiggle and crush and do basically all the things that breasts do. I do not regret, not for one moment, having chosen to go to Dr. Eisenberg in Maitland, Florida, having picked implants roughly the size of halves of a large peach, and having paid the former to slice me open like a trout and slip the latter into my chest. I have thoroughly enjoyed having glorious, bodacious tatas.

It goes without saying that my big-ass fake titties helped me when I stripped.

When I was teaching college, I treated my bust with an ironic detachment. Standing before a classroom chock full of hormonally challenged, sleep deprived and often hung-over eighteen and nineteen year-olds with a big rack was for me an ironic kissing cousin to when my friends taught class in Arrested Development tee-shirts. I just thought it was funny to be quoting Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Pope while rocking the righteous rack. I felt like “Hot for Teacher” come to life and went with it. Having breasts whose size were exceeded  only by my IQ felt subversive and fun, and I reveled in it.

That said, now that I’m working in an office, I’m confronted with the great cleavage conundrum. When I get dressed in the morning, I find myself suddenly regarding my bustline with an appraising eye. Suddenly, I find myself wondering how much cleavage is too much?

According to the experts, pretty much any at all. But what is less surprising than the acceptable number of cleavage inches (that would be, if you believe the expert who thinks pantyhose is de rigueur, none) is how riled up women get when they write and or talk about them. I could send you to any number of links to show you exactly how strident women get when they find themselves having to discuss visible boobs. I begin to wonder how much of the great cleavage divide has to do with women, women’s anger at other women, women’s anger at themselves, and women’s anger at culture in general  than the three or so square inches of flesh that make up cleavage. I begin to wonder just how little of it has to do with men, and their mythic lack of control.

It’s a hotly contested little area. It’s like Jerusalem. It just sits there meaning so many important and dangerous things to so many people. As much as I’d like to exclaim with naïveté, But it’s just skin! I know that it’s more than that. Because cleavage is power—except, of course, when it isn’t.

The one thing that lots of business attire experts harangue on about is what seems to be the cleavage equivalent to the Scarlet Letter. Like bobbysoxers in a Leader-of-the-Pack/My-Boyfriend’s-Back world, chicks in business need only make one sartorial mistake to be branded forever Inappropriate. It’s a short step from saucy to slutty, the articles all seem to suggest, and it’s best to watch your footing.

I’m fortunate that my rack really doesn’t bear on my work evaluation. I don’t exactly have a boss, other than the man who owns the company, a man who hired me to write for him based on my blog, a man whose wife and I have chatted about depilation while watching burlesque. I still, however, worry about my coworkers whose judgment of me might not be so catholic in panorama. My boobs are formidable, and I have, more than once, like the Cry-Baby girls, considered my bazooms to be my weapons.

Maybe I just need to find a girl gang to drive around with in the desert while trading secrets about our cone bras while looking for men in madras pedal-pushers to wrestle. There I could inhale with freedom, thrust my chest out with pride, and rest easy with the perfect assurance that there, in the desert, surrounded by my own kind, my cleavage would be completely apropos.

all a-twitter, but still not a twitterer; or i also {heart} susie bright

I don't mean to be treating this blog like it's a Twitter account, but I've not finished the post I'm writing and all these delicious titbits keep on being thrown in my general direction.

The latest? The awesome human soufflé that is Susie Bright has reposted the interview I did with her last summer on her blog. She's also given the link for her free iTunes podcasts, so you can even download play Susie (though not my interview with her...yet) on your iPod.

Neat, huh?