Ever since I was 16-17, cruising around in my El Camino, (er, being independent with my own car ‘n stuff) I started absorbing the pieces that would eventually become my current view and its application to my life on feminism. I would drive myself to the nearest overpriced bookstore, chill out in the magazine section with Bitch or Bust or in the women’s studies section with Bell Hooks during the rare down time in my fifty+ hour work week. Feminism, third wave, herstory, riot grrrls, girl bands, dyke writers, sex workers — all of it, all of them, coming at me in waves. It was my own niche. To this day, eight years later, I still don’t know women who enjoy the same subscriptions or authors as me and this drives me to share my findings with anyone willing to listen and always always always wanting more.
I have a habit of highlighting well written sentences or facts I find fascinating or any part of the written word that strikes me. A lot of my books are streaked with bright yellow. In Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class one of the contributing authors is Tara Hardy. Her 8+ page addition to this book is almost completely struck through in florescent yellow. She single handedly unknotted some of the biggest tangles I’ve found in my own version of feminism/feminist application and I could not appreciate her words any more than I do.
GIRL
KICKS
ASS
“…my mother had the ‘privilege’ of putting her infant, my brother, into day care and going to work. Unlike the women in the suburbs who could choose the age at which they’d leave their children nestled with nannies in their comfortable homes, for my mother, being liberated did mean the ‘opportunity’ to get a job. For her, true choice would have meant the option to stay home with her new baby without having to wean him. At first, my mother tried to make it to the baby sitter’s during her breaks but my brother was too hungry in between. Left no other choice, she spent night after night rocking him back and forth, trying to get her desperate baby to take the bottle. She was desperate herself by the time he finally did. During all of this, I was desperately home alone with my father.
So, excuse me for not trusting feminists. For not trusting the bourgeois movement of those with enough time on their hands to actually feel dissatisfied. My mother didn’t have time for dissatisfaction – she had time for labor. Far from being fulfilled at her job, she was imprisoned by it. And so, by association, was I.”
“Some of us who are claiming what has been mistaken as ‘traditional femininity’ are doing so precisely because it was not part of our cultural, familial traditions. Those of us who aren’t middle/upper/owning class, who don’t wear suits or don pearls with our New York haircuts, and who haven’t had the privilege to buy our genders at fucking Nordstrom. Those of us have cleaned other people’s shit off their walls, and I’m not speaking metaphorically here, in exchange for a wage that forces us to ruin the ledger of moral character known as the ‘credit rating,’ because we can’t afford the cost of living and have the gall to need a phone, heat or a pair of goddamned shoes anyway.”
AMEN, SISTER.
On remaining femme in the face of contradiction (in the bra burning, hair growing sense) of feminism and the need to blend in:
“My questions is this: Does it ever occur to the privileged that we don’t actually want to emulate you? My god, the staggering arrogance! Does it ever occur to you that we think you’re filthy? And maybe, just maybe, we don’t ever want to be mistaken for one of you?”
*heart-happy sigh*
-CJ
But, gay ice cream!
More er less.
“As if gay marriage weren’t sweet enough already, Ben & Jerry’s and Freedom to Marry have teamed up to present us with Hubby Hubby, a renamed version of their popular peanut butter & pretzel-y ice cream…”
Happ-eeeeee.
-CJ
Approximately 1,000 good things added up at the same time today and churned out a fucking FABULOUS mood in me.
On track & money are rarely seen in the same context when it comes to my life. I am built of financial woes and have found myself buried up to my neck in debt, with no one to blame except myself, since roughly age nineteen. And I am still very, very much there, struggling for air beneath oppressive APRs and late fees, etc. But with today came surely a temporary boost, not in the form of any unexpected cashflow, just timing and patience and hoping and limb crossing. Little things are paying off, which makes me think I’ve done something right. To keep this in forward motion, I’ve re-subscribed to my monthly donation sites – a couple bucks toward two things I’m very, very passionate about. I entertain the notion that my little bit is a big contribution because that makes my stomach warm and my skin glow.
If you don’t, I encourage you to send off five or ten bucks to a worthy organization… really, it takes all of two or three minutes and the good karma is like a multi-vitamin for the soul.
Suggestions: Human Rights Campaign (five dollar monthly minimum), Bitch Magazine (support kickass non-profit publication and get a subscription with your monthly contribution!), ASPCA (consistent income helps contribute to life saving programs – plus PUPPIEEES!), or Women’s Funding Network (one of the largest collaborative philanthropic networks in the world.. supporting women’s foundations that span public charities, private foundations and funds within community foundations).
I’m off to bask in myself.
-CJ
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. – Maya Angelou
Ree can attest I was definitely feeling queer about moving to Orange County. (And not the good kind of queer.) It wasn’t specifically about the county (so much) because I’ve lived spittin’ distance from it my whole life. It was moving twenty whole minutes away from my parents and ensuring that I would be using freeways everywhere I went as there are 17.5 entrances in a one mile raduis of the abode. I presumed the traffic was worse and I would be far from all of my favorites (Mexican restaurant & take out, eyebrow lady, dive bar, etc). I could list a whole hell of a lot of reasons I was scared and nervous and anxious about moving into 2B with my best friend.
I think the scariest part was that I thought it might work.
I had never lived outside of my family’s home for more than five months and I’d never done so without Kiddo’s dad. My independence quests (all two of them) were failed almost as soon as I was done unpacking and back home I went. Living at home was crowded and chaotic, but I didn’t know any other way. There was at least four or six sets of eyes on Kiddo at all times. There was always milk in the fridge. There was never an inch and a half of dust on anything because there was other people someone else taking care of so many things around me.
Yeah, spoiled rotten, dude.
At 2B, that whole single parent thing that I’d been doing for a year already really happened. No one else was going to make dinner or be home if I wanted to run a quick errand alone or pick up food at the store when the shelves were running low. I had no idea how good I had it. (Sorry, Mom.)
I flailed a little bit for a while. Well, I flailed a lot last summer. But I’ve learned to swim in our old little bottom floor abode. And Ree is a natural mama, complete with instinct and just the right amount of push to help get the job done and pull to cut back when it’s time to figure something out on my/Kiddo’s own.
Absolutely, positively, my head would have fallen out the window on the 405 freeway if I lived with anyone else for the last fifteen months.
Awesome roommate/best friend/ninja aside, our little old place with the super crappy backyard and missing window screen in my room and frequent spiders in the corners and ugly carpet and weird wine bottle painting on the pantry and exposed tackstrip in just about every threshold…
…is the place I love being the most.
-CJ
Reading Cunt and Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil back to back have spawned a gargantuan mindfuck to rival all mindfucks and to say I will be changing some aspects of my life immediately is putting it mildly.
Her words should be required reading for women, for Americans, for humans. I really, really could burst into tears right now. I’m so fucking moved, enlightened and empowered.
-CJ
I miss…
-Napster
-the VHS rewinder in the shape of a car that my parents had
-my pager
-my Skip-It
-the naivety that life at fifteen is really fucking hard
-my first turtle, a studly little Box named Buddy, of all things
-my family’s old nearly half acre backyard
-blanket forts
-my 1980 El Camino
-when the hardest part of my job was scooping ice cream straight out of the walk-in freezer, or carefully scripting Happy Birthday, Tommy on an ice cream cake
-my job at the frozen yogurt shop, and the Mexican restaurant two doors down
-my friend Carly
-fearlessly kissing cute boys before telling them my name
-my geedee Agent Felix CD with She Has Nice Teeth
-the used record store in Whittier that closed within the last few years
-when college was more of a hobby
-technique class in massage therapy school
-my blue 3-eye Doc Martens
-getting butterflies
-4% APR
-Tetris
He knows what you did last night.
And he is pissed.
Now I just need the one that Kiddo thinks looks like me.
This is my new favorite toy:
It’s big, it’s gaudy, it hurts people when you punch them.
I want it in every color.
