Quietly spoken words.
Soft gentle caresses.
Hands on my hips.
Mornings full of you.
Whispers in my ear. Whispers against my lips.
Tell me how you feel when you see my face.
Tell my how you feel when you hold me close.
Calm my soul and soothe my spirit.
Tell me that you need me.
Show me that you love me.
Category: Uncategorized
In Which I Don’t Even Know Where to Begin
I was harassed on the internet.
twice in the past week.
Something that hadn’t happened since I was on Xanga and I had commented on a guy friend’s blog. It was a girl who attacked me. I don’t remember exactly what about but I remember feeling betrayed that my friend hadn’t stood up for me.
Given the way our friendship ended I am not surprised that he hadn’t.
I learned that the girl who attacked me liked my friend. He was ambivalent about her. Called her crazy.
Men are always quick to call a woman crazy.
Last weekend I went to Comic Con. A friend of mine on twitter has a huge nerdy, geeky, account and he was re-tweeting my cosplay tweets. A mutual follower, a girl that I found to be a little strange and seemingly obsessive with my friend started tweeting about how she found cosplay weird and cringeworthy.
I figured she was talking about me. It seemed like anytime I tweeted something that she didn’t like or agree with she would then tweet something snarky in response.
I asked her simply why she thought cosplay was weird. I don’t remember what she said, but I left it at that. I found she had blocked me.
I got a little upset.
She spent the next day talking about how she had blocked me because I was a crazy person and just insane.
It all started with a guy and some cosplay pics.
He also did not defend me.
The other day I had tweeted that I didn’t like when men who never interacted with me private messaged me to compliment my pictures.
I take a lot of selfies and am unapologetic about them.
A few people commented about them confused.Compliments are nice, aren’t they?
They are. I appreciate them, but I’ve found that men that like to compliment me in private spend most of their time tweeting at other, hotter, sexier, more under dressed women. You can tweet at them? You can tweet at me too. You do not need to take this into private.
Is it embarrassing to tell someone like me they’re pretty?
Possibly.
A guy I follow tweeted at me, “I wonder, woman. 😉 ”
I suppose his girlfriend didn’t like the small the allusion to me being a Wonder Woman cosplayer? Or maybe alluding to me being pretty? I don’t know, but she then spent several hours calling me a vain bubblehead, who wanted tons of nobodies to lavish her with attention. And didn’t want anything to do with intimate private messages.
She also said, “you know you don’t have to post pictures of yourself on Twitter.”
What if I fucking feel like it?
Let’s go back to the first girl. She seems obsessed with hating women who post selfies.
She made a poll asking why the reader thought people posted selfies, three out of four of the response options were negative.
Attention seeking.
Vain.
Insecure.
For fun.
Then she spent the whole day bumping it trying to get people to have the same opinion as her.
My initial, angry, response was to be like, “you don’t like selfies because you’re ugly and jealous that people feel attractive and confident enough to post their face and their body.”
But because I don’t actually like being cruel to people I just watched how it played out.
Which leads me to wonder, why do you care so much? And why do you want to make people who post the dreaded selfie, feel badly?
Let’s go back to the first girl. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know my history. She doesn’t know that every man that I’ve been with has treated me like a secret, an embarrassment, someone not fit to be with in public.
I have my own emotional baggage. I feel constantly that I am someone to be ashamed to like.
Which is why for me private messages, instead of replies to the actual post bother me. She said turn off my DM option. Why? I have friends I like to have long conversations with. These men are not my friends. Their compliments are not kind, they are the starting point for what they hope will be me being pathetic enough to show them more of myself in private. I know because that’s what always happens.
Let’s go back to the selfies. I am in a place where generally the only part of my body I’m happy with is my face. It is a sad fact. So I feel pretty or want to feel pretty. I’ll take a picture of myself when I look my best and remind myself that I am not as ugly and horrible as my brain likes to remind me every day. Every hour.
So if I want to take a fucking selfie and post it, then I’m going to take a fucking selfie and people can just ignore it or unfollow me.
I think that we as women need to stop tearing each other down for finding ourselves attractive. You want to call a woman who posts pictures of herself insecure and vain? which one is it?
Who doesn’t have trouble with insecurities?
Stop hating other women for trying to love themselves.
I’m done.
Pathetic
Against my better judgment I tried speed dating this weekend at comic con.
I bombed.
Twice.
Out of 60 men 3 gave me their number.
I’ve never felt so absolutely hideous and unappealing in my entire life to be rejected by several dozen men all at once.
On “Real Women”
In Chicago there’s a theater my friends and I liked going to when we were in high school. It was a “dollar theater.” Cheap tickets for movies that were already out of the regular theaters and on their way to DVD.
The Logan Theater was a relic of classic old cinemas. A bit out of date, dusty, but decent enough if you were broke yet had at least three bucks on you for a movie– A staple of my childhood. It was recently renovated to cater to the influx of hipsters taking over the Logan Square neighborhood and I’ve found myself avoiding it like the plague. Also movies now cost seven bucks and I can watch new releases for four at the ghetto theater by my house.
In my high school, once a week we had a half day built into our schedule. On those days we were given the opportunity to take two one and a half hour seminar classes on different interests and then have the rest of the day for ourselves.
I remember one half day sitting in the Logan, empty save for myself, a few girlfriends, and the maître d, and watching “Real Women Have Curves.”
This was America Ferrera’s break out role as Ana Garcia, the young Mexican-American girl, coming of age in Los Angeles, trying to live her dreams, trying to stay true to herself, her family, and her culture.
Trying to make it in the world as a fat girl.
I loved that movie.
I loved it.
My girlfriends loved it.
“Yes!” I remember thinking, “real women have curves. I’m not an anomaly, something gross and wrong the way TV, movies, advertisements, the boys on the playground had led me to believe.“
I was not disgusting. I was a real woman.
In the movie Ana meets a boy who thinks she’s beautiful in spite of her body. They start dating and finally they have sex. Suddenly she’s body confident, she decides she’s going to go to a good university instead of working in the sewing factory and she loves herself.
Yes! Go Ana!
I’m oversimplifying things, of course. There’s more to it, it’s been years since I thought about this movie, I just remember what teenage me felt at the end of the movie. I wasn’t fat. I was “curvy.” Real women weren’t Victoria’s Secret models or Kate Moss, they were women that looked like me. And I remember thinking things would be better if I could just find a boy that liked me and could confirm that.
I think in hindsight, that was the saddest thing I took away from that movie.
Recently a tweet by Catherine Tydesley bringing up Calvin Klein’s decision to use a “plus size” model, brought some controversy to the twittersphere and it trickled down my tl.
Myla Dalbesio: Size 10
She’s absolutely gorgeous there’s no question, and her body is beautiful.
But it’s not plus sized.
If she’s plus sized, then I’m Jabba the Hut. And I’m real tired of feeling like Jabba.
I watched some people on the interwebz argue about what it meant to be a real woman.
“How about you use real women instead?!” One person asked, outraged in the same way that I was at seeing Myla being toted as a plus sized model.
A friend of mine brought me back to the reality of the issue by the way she reacted to the word “real.”
My friend is thin and gorgeous. She’s the kind of thin I would never be able to achieve in my life time, even if I stopped eating till the day I died.
But her body size is not what defines her the way my body size is not what defines me.
“Stop using the word ‘real’ when describing people!” She tweeted.
And I completely agreed.
Thin versus fat–and the whole spectrum in between.
Is one person more real than the other?
Are my feelings and emotions more validated than hers because the fashion industry sample size is a size two and I’ve been left out my whole life?
Does that mean she never feels any sort of body image issues? Because in my eyes, and society’s eyes her body type is the one that we would like to obtain?
Here’s the question I’ve started to ask myself as I’ve gotten older, ” what the heck does it mean to be a real woman? And why does it always have to do the way she looks?”
And if we’re honest with ourselves, nothing in the fashion industry is real.
It’s an illusion of an unattainable beauty that even the women in those magazines can’t achieve without the aide of Photoshop and the kind of airbrushing that makes Cher and Madonna look younger than I do.
We are all REAL women.
And I don’t say that in the rose tinted sunglasses, happy go lucky way that we’ve grown accustomed to hearing. Being nice for the sake of being nice.
No.
We are all REAL women because, we are living, breathing, thinking human beings. We are real people who have our own thoughts and opinions, interests and ideas, pleasures and dislikes. We have feelings and quirks and characters that make us unique and imperfect.
We all look different.
We all have different bodies.
We all have different features.
And that is what the world needs to showcase, different bodies, different people.
We need to stop letting men and even other women pit us against each other in the battle of being real and thought of as beautiful.
Enough looking for real, when “real” is all around us.
Patterns
I keep falling into these patterns.
Men who pursue me and then get me accustomed to their desire and attention to a point that I can’t bear to live without it.
And in that instance it’s gone.
I’m no longer the object of their attention.
And I’m left crushed and confused.
The Secret Life of Pandas 