pretty dumb things

happy valentine's day, now sign a petition

I'm going to put the heavy burden of my heart-singed cynicism aside and celebrate, yeah, love. In specific, I want to celebrate the love of my married gay friends Tom and Dimitry who got hitched in sunny California before the passage of Prop 8--and whose marriage is now threatened to be nullified because of legal briefs filed by Ken Starr. If Ken Starr is successful, over 18,000 same-sex marriages will be rendered illegitimate and these couples will be forcibly divorced.

Don't let this happen. Forget the flowers and the chocolates. Just hold the hands of the person you love, look in his or her eyes and say something loving. And then watch the video and sign the petition.

The right to marry is a civil right. Do what you can to keep Ellen & Portia, Melissa & Tammy, Simon & Jonathan, Tom & Dimitry, and all those other loving humans married. Support the freedom to marry and show that love is important to you every day, in every way and for everybody.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

single for good?

Today I’m wondering what my life would be like if I never date or, possibly, mate again. It’s a new and peculiar sensation to consider living my life swimming solo. I’ve always felt as though one of the things I should have on hand, like toilet paper and cereal, is a man. I never once thought about choosing not to have a man. I have understood that there would be necessary periods in my life when I would be manless, but I always considered those periods to be finite, and sooner or later I’d return to my formerly manned position, fully coupled and therefore right.

But now I’m thinking, what if I don’t? What if, rather than consider my default position in the world as coupled, I see my preferred state as single? It has, quite frankly, a lot of advantages.

In the past when I’ve been single, I saw it as a state that required correcting. It might be a compulsory state, one necessitated by a recent break-up and the grieving thereafter, or one made mandatory by the sheer impenetrable business of my life, but it was one that I resented and fretted over. It was a state about which I felt angry and one that made me sad as I bought single cans of soup and rented videos for the weekend. Being single was not a joy; it was a sorrow. I bore it with all the stalwart nature of a toddler separated from that shiny, shiny toy.

Now, though, I’m finding a lot of advantages to my singledom. I am responsible for no one’s emotional state but my own, and I like that. I had to tend the emo garden of my ex-boyfriend/fiancé/whatever with tremendous care. He leaned on me like a tomato on its stake. It was a lot to keep up. I loved Donny very much, and I liked being able to support him, but it did make me feel a bit cowed. I’m enjoying cultivating my own garden, and I say that in the most Panglossian sense.

I like dressing up when I feel like it and not when I don’t. I like feeling free to go out, stay up late, sleep when I wish, wake when I do, and not hearing anyone criticize it. I like spending time with my friends, and I really like spending time by myself. I like having a messy house when I don’t feel like cleaning (which is often) and having a clean house when I do (which is rare, but it happens). I like staying up until 2:00 a.m. writing. I like feeling unentangled. Disencumbered. Free. Alone.

Mostly, I like living my life in the way I like, and not having to suffer the condescension of men who feel like they know better than I, that I can benefit from their superior experience, and who let me know in no uncertain terms what I should do. I don’t miss having to nod politely while wishing silently that they would just shut the motherfuck up. I don’t miss arguing the point either, when I could stand their advice no more and told them to shut the motherfuck up, if usually in more polite language.

I recognize that I have been through a hell of a lot in the last six months. I realize that my heart feels strangely anaesthetized. I realize that loneliness may just not have set in yet. I realize I still mourn my last relationship for all of its faults. I also realize that being single is really kind of cool. And I realize, for the first time in my life, that being alone with myself is a pleasure.

donny 3.5

Undoubtedly, there are some among you who, however inexplicably, want to know where things stand with Donny, my one-time near-fiancé, recurrent X, and near-constant boyfriend of the last 3.5 years, give or take.

To be honest, I wish I could tell you in any language that would give the semblance of solidity. I don’t believe words really exist for the state of Donny and my relationship. He remains stuck as a triceratops in a tar-pit, frozen in matrimonial phobia, unable to move much forward and unwilling to let go. I find myself an uncanny fighter who is not ready to toss in the towel; for no logical reason, I appear to have a faith in and a love for this man that exceeds even my ken. It’s not that I haven’t questioned my commitment to him; it’s more that I have taken a leap of faith that I have waited my whole life to take and now that I’ve crossed that abyss, I can’t jump back. We are, I guess, seeing each other, Donny and I, though that phrase feels pallid and weak, like children’s tea, when held up to the tongue-curling brew that is our unutterable union.

Donny’s fear of marriage is palpable. Whenever we make plans to move forward—to buy a ring, to plan a move-in date, to edge closer to a more committed status—he starts spitting sweat like those little orange-pit elliptical dots in comic books. He stutters and paces, his eyes turn white and wild as a horse’s staring at a barn fire. His heart beats hummingbird quick. His white-knuckled, blue-veined matrimonial fear is something to see. It makes me feel for him, for he is trying really hard to confront it. It also makes me want to slap him across the face whilst shouting Snap Out Of It! and then hope for my parents Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia to get back together as Donny goes off to the family bakery and makes up with his estranged brother and La Boheme plays in the background.

It’s complicated, in short. We are both hanging in there. We spend time together hugging and kissing and occasionally indulging in passionately earnest sex.

The sex doesn’t make much for narration. There’s almost no toys or ties or games. I’ve not been spanked or tied up. We don’t gutter talk. I’m not his little slut or his willing fucktoy. I’m just me and he’s just he and we are just together, interlocking our bodies in the messy joy of release and expression of our pained and equally pleasant love. We find ourselves coming together without much strategery, and after we come, we lie in a petting mound, reluctant to uncouple.

Here’s one thing. We’ve tossed out the condoms. The last time we fucked, Donny asked if he could come inside me, something generally reserved for that rare, red seven days of menses.

I have a 5% of getting pregnant every other month, I said to him. Go for it, I said, and if we get pregnant, we’ll sing a Hallelujah chorus and hope for the best. He met my gaze; locked in like a tractor beam, he smiled, and he grimaced, and he came. After, we lay tangled together for an uncharacteristically raunchy long time before cleansing our bits.

I spent Christmas with Donny’s family. They gave me some lovely gifts, and I reciprocated in partnership with Donny, giving gifts we’d picked out for them. It was fine, spending the holiday with the extended Donny tribe. It was certainly better than going home to Vermont where my family is embroiled in an emo imbroglio that includes the following elements in no particular order: my sister’s schizophrenia, her eviction, a pending case for her assaulting a cop, my father’s paternal and hangdog guilt, my mother’s buzzing anxiety, and sundry other family strife. I was glad to have some family other than my own to welcome me.

Which is pretty much what is at the basis of my desire to marry Donny. In the past few months, as this whole drama has dragged its tattered chiffon ass, a few people have queried me in comments about why I want to get married at all. Simply put, I want a family other than the one in which I was raised. I want someone who claims publicly that he loves me and commits to me, and I want a legally binding document from whose difficult extraction would necessitate a delicate if steely reconsideration of packing bags on either of our parts. In this culture, this commitment between two heterosexual people most often takes the form of marriage. I’m not going to live with another man with whom I’m not engaged. I’ve done it too many times, and I’m not doing it again.

Plus, there’s the fact that I love Donny and I chose him and I currently remain committed to that choice. I could write a whole piece in defense of marriage, and perhaps I will some day, but now is not that day. I never thought I’d find myself in the madding crowd who wave as one the big foam finger for marriage, but I do live to be surprised. I’m just whimsical that way.

Donny and I, for the most part, find ourselves engaged in the daily business of living, and in the persistent, if not perpetual, choice to work things out, a decision that if I get my way will end decisively only when one or the other of us dies.

I’ve said this before: the metaphor of falling in love is particularly apt. To love—I mean to really love—is to lose control. We may look for love, or we may run away from it, but we almost always find ourselves in love in a state of complete astonishment. We do not step mindfully into love. We fall into it, as we fall asleep, as we fall from grace, as we fall apart. And yet, when we find ourselves deeply in love, seemingly inextricably entrenched in it, stuck up to our armpits in love, with love tangling our hair and making our skin sticky and sweet, we make the choice to remain there. We are no longer hapless victims who have succumbed to the gravity of love; rather, we are mindful participants in it. We choose to make the best of this strange situation when we look across that unfathomable abyss that will ever separate any two people and see that person stuck there with us, in love as we are, tangled, sweet and sweaty, stuck and hoping with a fervent and illogical beauty that this love will keep us aloft and moving forward.

sanguine

“Sanguine” is a bloody brilliant word. I admit that I have a big love on for contronyms in general, being that I am both unapologetically lexiphanic and profoundly ambivalent. Sanguine, while not strictly a contronym, trips close to having two opposing meanings. It’s no cleave, which means both “to split” and “to join,” nor is it lurid, which means both “pale” and “glowing”; it’s not even wicked, awesome, sick or bad, whose oppositional meanings are pretty well known.

Sanguine, though, is unquestionably polysemous, and you kind of have to hand it to a word that means “optimistic and cheerful” as well as “murderous.” I suppose one could be a cheerfully optimistic murderer. And that cheerful homicidal maniac could even look ruddy, another meaning for the word. Certainly, a murderer, whether cheery and/or ruddy or not, could also be bloody, or merely colored blood-red, “blood” being the root of this very fluid word. I also like the word “exsanguinate,” which means to drain of blood, though I so very rarely have occasion to use it.

Right now, today, I’m feeling sanguine.

About ten days ago, the Sunday before last actually, I told Donny, my previous boyfriend/once fiancé/now X, that he had to either ask me to marry him or let me go and that he had two weeks to do it. Some followers of these pretty dumb things might think it pretty dumb of me to continue to entertain Donny in the wake of his recent spate of inaction, projection and general wussiness surrounding his previous implied promise to marry me and his subsequent weaseliness about said promise. Others may be just sick of the whole story. I know how they feel; I certainly am sick of it. Hence my desire to put a period on the drama in one way or another.

disengagement

It’s not as if I wasn’t expecting a big Donny tsunami after the seismic shock of commitment fully hit his emotional center. I had been. My boyfriend has a history of pulling the glowing red emergency stop on our relationship as soon as our commitment train edges farther along the track. He has done this braking in one form or another—breaking up with me, having phone sex with uneducated women of color, fomenting large and point-free fights—with alarming regularity in the three-plus years we’ve been together.

So I was expecting something, some kerfuffle, some dust-up, some rift, some kind of emo-based passive-aggressive, or even aggressive-aggressive, reaction to our engagement and its eventual culmination in our nuptials. I was anticipating it. And yet, it didn’t come.

We started talking the specifics of my moving in. It didn’t come. We found wedding and engagement rings. It didn’t come. We discussed the location of the wedding. It didn’t come. We made plans to come up with provisional wedding budgets and loose invitation lists. It didn’t come.

It didn’t come. It didn’t come. It didn’t come, and I slowly began to believe in Donny’s not exactly verbalized, but not exactly unspoken either, commitment to me. I began to glow incandescent with the roseate halo of my love for him and our commitment to each other. I began to go—dare I say it—public.

This past Friday night, we went out to dinner with my friend Becky Sue and her boyfriend, and both of them congratulated Donny. Discussion of the wedding arose. Donny answered politely and wittily. I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief, having held my breath around his undoubted mounting anxiety. I felt his body tense, though, under my hand. It seemed like the storm clouds were gathering, and, indeed, after we’d left my friends, it came: the storm broke.

“We have to talk,” said Donny with all the cliché tight-mouthed drama of any David E. Kelly show. Talk, he did. He told me in one endless stream all of my visible faults—my paucity of interest in having a full-time job, my past bankruptcy, my financial difficulties, my lack of health insurance. Donny laid out the soiled garments of my freelance life one by one, a neat and steaming pile of seamy financial underthings. He prefaced it all with a nod toward his insecurities and his emotional “baggage,” but mostly what he did was lay a clear and incontrovertible case of why I was an irresponsible wastrel loser.

I sat on my couch staring at the twitching pile of snakes that was my fingers and listened. When he finished, I looked Donny in the eye. Fine, I said, I’ll get a full-time job, I said. If it’s really important to you that I get a conventional job, I will, I said to him and meant it.

“No,” he said. “That’s not it.” Which flummoxed me. If the problem was my not having conventional employment, then I could solve the problem by getting conventional employment. Clearly, the problem wasn’t my finding a job. Clearly, the problem was something else.

“I’m not ready to get married,” said Donny, “and I’m not sure you are either.” I told him that I was, in fact, very ready to get married. He then told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to marry me.

I wish I could say that I comported myself with flawless grace in the fact of all of this information, but I did not. I did manage to avoid stepping directly on the landmine of my roiling confusion, hurt and anger, but I didn’t avoid every grenade lobbed at me. I did have one dramatic moment wherein I pointedly threw both of the wedding guides into my trash. But aside from that moment, I don’t recall doing anything particularly operatic or saying anything excessively theatrical, but I may have just blacked it out. Mostly, I remember telling him that I wasn’t ready to discuss anything and ushering him out of my apartment.

Now that it’s two days later and I’ve had some time to process what happened, I have to say that how I’m feeling is, to put it in clinical terms, ripshit. I’m really angry because, to paraphrase Madonna, I’m not Donny’s bitch and he shouldn’t hang his shit on me. I am not suggesting that entering into a legally binding relationship with a person such as myself who has a chequered financial past isn’t an issue; it is. Donny certainly has every right to air his fears, to bring up his concerns and to have a discussion about money with me. However, he wasn’t doing that. He was throwing ammunition at me to defend his emotional self, and the best place he could find to throw it was at my finances.

If the real issue were my not having traditional full-time employment, then we could solve that problem relatively easily, while not immediately. That, however, wasn’t the issue. The issue is that my boyfriend hasn’t dealt with his fears about committing to me, and that rather than deal with those fears, he lashed out at me. And that’s a problem. What it comes down to for me is this: either Donny thinks that I really am an irresponsible wastrel, or he is projecting his issues on me. Either way, it’s not pretty. And as unequivocally unambivalent as I have been about marrying him—and I am a deeply ambivalent person; in the kingdom of ambivalence, I wear the royal skort and eat with the royal spork—I neither want to be with someone who hasn’t any faith in me, nor do I want to be with someone who won’t take responsibility for himself.

I recognize that I pressed this marriage issue, and I probably did it unconsciously to make my boyfriend commit for real. I have a history of loving men who disapprove of me and who want nothing so much as me, only different, eradicated somehow of that nasty blot that irks them so. I think I wanted to hear Donny’s enthusiastic acceptance of me. I think I pushed Donny into confronting the commitment through seeing the details of the wedding. I think I pressed this crisis point now because I didn’t want it to come up later, after we’d moved in together, after I’d sublet my apartment, after I’d uprooted my life for our relationship. Apparently, my unconscious can be quite efficacious.

Today, I’m not yet ready to talk to him. I’m still too angry to trust myself not to tell him to feel free to generously blow it out his ass. My anger will diminish, but the hurt will remain. I’ll be able to be articulate, clear and compassionate, but not quite yet.  In the meantime, I hope my boyfriend is busy figuring out what he really wants. If he doesn’t really want me, then I need to know it soon so that I may begin the long and elliptical process of grieving and healing that my loss of him will entail. And if he does really want me, then we have a life to look at, and to plan, together.

on looking for the first time upon a special, special hell

You know, I had an abstract notion that this was a big deal. Somehow, even with me, a woman who’d never really envisioned this sort of thing in her life—I just never really thought it could happen to me; I never thought of myself as that kind of girl; I was too young for this; I had so much living to do—but somehow, even with me, the slimmest shard of cognizance had permeated the dense overgrowth of my bushy consciousness.

I knew it was, you know, kind of a big deal. I just didn’t think it would be this big. This epic. This, you know, humungous. I quail, I blench, I recoil, for I stare into the abyss that is wedding planning.

It’s only the second day, and I’m already to throw myself on pointy objects. I could impale my sternum with my pen. I could rip the spiral coil from my spanky new planner and jam it into my carotid. A flash of pain, a few bright spurts of primary-colored blood, and done. No more emailing venues. No more quick-patter sales pitches from women named “Andrea” and “Porfira.” No more scanning menus for edibles. No more price points. No more worrying about locating an officiator to validate the  plighting of my undying devotion to Donny for all of my natural life until we are nothing but dust and the faded sepia memories of our adopted offspring.

And most importantly, no more having to look for a band to play at my reception.

I love remakes. I hate covers. (Unless it’s Television’s lugubriously slavish reproduction of The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” which is something altogether another thing.) Wedding bands do nothing but slavish covers. It makes me break out in aural hives. I’m just a modern girl; of course, I’ve had it in the ear before. Is it too much to ask to find a band that a) doesn’t suck and b) will play something other than “At Last” and the hits of the seventies, eighties and nineties? It seems it is.

In the sojourn that is this wedding, I am Odysseus, and I fear to cross the river not Acheron but Styxx.

I console myself with these two thoughts. First, I hold close to my breast the secret knowledge that one of my ex-students is busily transposing The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” for her chamber music ensemble to play as my processional song. And, second, I chuckle all evil-like with the knowledge that Donny will not recognize the song when it plays and we glide separately down the aisle. It will be my private Idaho, my funnish pun, my joke that only I and a handful of my closest friends will get. I giggle even now.

Mostly, I’m hoping that it will keep me from weeping as I walk. (Update: I have discarded my concept of a $129 Target gown for one in which I wear something in a fetching arterial crimson. That image helps me with my almost completely inevitable weeping too.) I am an abundant crier. I wonder how a judiciously placed Zoloft would go down.

Seriously, I’ve been weeping listening to the MP3s of the various wedding bands attached to sundry sites. I can’t tell if I’m weeping from embarrassment or emotion or both. Probably both. This whole thing is so surreal I fear my head will simply implode like a television set. Or explode like one of Gallagher’s watermelons.

See, the thing is that I’m utterly unprepared for this. I never was the kind of girl who imagined her wedding, beyond a vague Barbara-Walters-hazy lens way. No details have ever been in sharp focus. I’ve only three friends who have themselves married. I was once a nominal bridesmaid in a traditional Thai ceremony. Now, were I in a space to pick four of my closest friends to be the four pillars of the gold and the silver gates, or  were it necessary for me to explain the joining Donny’s and my hands with flowers or to ask the congregated to bless us with Rod Nam Sang, I’d be all set. I’d be all over that shit, yo.

Sadly, that is not the case.

And if it’s not already bad enough that I feel unequal to the task of being a traditional bride, I also find myself unable to be a very good non-conformist bride either. There will be no Ewoks, no Renaissance dress, no head-dress of ribbons and multi-colored ponytails. I don’t plan on a goth wedding cake, and I most likely will not be wearing black nailpolish. I will probably be wearing high-heel boots. I would like Donny’s and my dance to be a tango. But other than that, I’m feeling relatively conventional.

Which brings me back to the wedding band issue. It always comes back to the band.

I should note that Donny has already nixed the following wedding concepts: choosing the New York Aquarium as our venue; using our dogs as ring-bearers; providing shiny cockrings as both napkin rings and wedding favors; and having two wedding cakes—one to eat and one to walk through barefoot. I don’t know how he expects people to have fun with no walruses or squished icing. But I guess we’ll make do.

At the end of the day, that’s all I want—fun for everyone, even if it all passes me by in a blur. And good food. And some passable music. And maybe a stripper pole on the dance floor. Nothing says “festive” like drunk folk and centrifugal force.