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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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American Demonhood: A Lengthy and Only Somewhat Formal Introduction To Your Hostess
This Is A Formal Introduction�And So Will Bore You Into Submission So I'll bet that you're thinking that my life is all about one night stands, the gym, my art. And, if you were thinking this, to some extent you'd be right. But beyond these things, who am I? Who am I? That's an interesting question. Let me start with the stuff that I imagine isn't so flattering. I'm a 32-year-old divorcee. (I like the word "divorcee." It reminds me of whiskey-voiced, bleached blonde bar flies, circa 1957. And I'm so not that, but it's nice to think that that image lives on, has some place in the new world order.) I live in the student ghetto part of town in a one-room apartment that I like to call The Cell. I pay entirely too much rent for this place of course, as student ghetto landlords have figured out that bilking students is a good way to make a living. Anyway, it's a fabulous apartment by student ghetto standards: It has hardwood floors and a bathtub, hot and cold running sexpot neighbors, and roaches that, if they were only a bit more domesticated, could be saddled and ridden like horses. The gay ex-husband/best friend lives on the next block, too. (More on him in a bit.) I'm about to turn down a job with a huge drug company, at their mid-west "campus" (their term, not mine), a job that would pay me about what I'm worth and which would allow me to put the biology part of my double degree to work. I'm turning it down because I have some pretty serious ethical concerns about drug companies in general and don't want to sell my soul to the devil just yet. I can still pay my bills without a paycheck that has commas in it, and I'm becoming, post-divorce, quite fond of living simply. (Besides, if things go terribly south financially speaking, I can always...always...always go to--ulp--graduate school. (And, in fact, I am planning on graduate school next fall when my life settles down--though I shouldn't put that "when my life settles down" in there, because in all likelihood, it never will. It's like when people say that they're waiting for a good time to have a baby, and I'm, like, when is there ever a good fucking time to have a kid?) I never want to have children, by the way. (I pretty much agree with Sophistica, who always says that if she could get some kind of grant from the NEA for elective surgery, she'd have her womb ripped out and gold-plated--for display purposes only, you understand.) Anyway, I've known that I was going to be a childless woman since I was about eight, and I've weathered all the "Oh, it's just a phase, you'll change your mind when you get older" comments from the family. (They, incidentally, considered me an old maid at 23. But that's the way it is in Hispanic families. Man, you don't breed by the time you're nineteen, you're some kind of washed up old hag.) So, yeah. I'm Hispanic. That's a government term, though, so I've become fond of Spanish-American as an ethnic moniker. It's not got quite the menacing quality of Chicana, but that term, for me, has always meant Mexican-American (which is only a part of my ethnic mix). But I like menacing, and so use Chicana sometimes. I also use just plain old Spanish or Mexican depending on the circumstances under which anyone asks (and I usually pick the one that I think will most disturb the person asking), though neither of those is quite right. I�m also fond of using the term �brown kid,� if only because no one is ever able to figure out whether it�s derogatory or not. And anyway, who truly knows what the background holds? There's also some Navaho and, I think, Irish blood thrown in there just to shake things up a bit. Got to keep things moving, you know. Keep the white man guessing. Being from a large Hispanic/Spanish-American family shapes a lot of my personality. I have trouble doing things alone, for example, which is the vestige of constantly being surrounded by family, by my brothers and cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. In fact, I was raised in a tiny three bedroom house that was split in two so that my parents, my two brothers, and I lived in three rooms, and my grandparents and whatever assorted cousins were living with them at the time lived in three rooms. I never had my own room until I was eight, and then it was only because my grandmother died and my grandfather went to live with an aunt--my aunt Bernice, who was also my godmother. I got the room that had been my family's kitchen, a kitchen with no running water so that we had to drink from a bucket with a dipper and carry in water to cook and do the dishes with.) I grew up in a big family, in a little space, with no privacy. So I, like most of the little heroines in all the sad little novels, learned to escape by reading. I love to read. As a child, I read anything I could get my hands on. I read my mother's textbooks, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Fitzgerald's Great Brain books. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder, Judy Blume, my father's Penthouses and Hustler magazines, my brothers' choose-your-own-adventure books. I read newspapers. I read The National Enquirer at my grandmother's house. I read Mad Magazine. I read everything I could. I read Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury. I read Paul Zindel. I read the Trixie Belden books (yuck!), and then wisely stayed away from Nancy Drew. I read Jack London. I read. I read. I read James Michener novels. I read trash. I read treasure. I read everything. I love to read. I�ve read just about everything that you think you should read to be a well-read person. I�ve read my way through the ancient Greeks, through Aristotle, through Darwin, through Gallileo�s texts on astronomy. I�ve read Eliot and Pound, Faulkner, Hemingway (I love Hemingway with a deep and abiding passion). I�ve read Nabokov, everything Salinger ever wrote that I could get my hands on, every bit of fiction Orwell ever wrote. I�ve read enough Shakespeare to hold my own. I�ve read Chaucer, Marlowe, Ford. I�ve read the Brontes, Woolf, Joyce. I�ve read Sartre, Ionesco, Lorde. I�ve read cummings and hooks. I�ve read Jung. I�ve read Dillard and Milton. I�ve read Webster. I�ve read the Bible. I�ve read the dictionary. I�ve read Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu and Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima. I've read Kafka, Carroll, Twain. I've read Sexton and Plath and Asimov's texts on chemistry and physics. I've read Rushdie and Rilke, Walker and Balzac. I've read Koestler, Cisneros, Ortiz, Garcia-Marquez. I've read both F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. I�ve read Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zora Neale Hurston. I�ve read molecular cell biology and biochemisty textbooks for fun. And I�m pretty damn smart because of it, if I do say so myself. These days, I still read everything. I am in the middle of a book of basic Buddhist texts. I just finished re-reading an Alan Duff novel and some John Varley. I love fiction and non-fiction alike. I love biographies and textbooks. I love words. I love words so I read. (I also write, but that�s another river to cross another time.) And, too, having the ubiquitous American childhood, I also watched a damn lot of television. You know the drill, so I'll stay away from the subject, except to say that people often comment that I'm "funny" (a backhanded compliment if ever one existed�and it always reminds me of that scene with Joe Pesce and Ray Liotta from Goodfellas--you remember?--the "Funny how? How do you mean funny?" scene) and ask how I got to be so funny, and my reply is always, "Too much sitcom television as a child." Man, you put me in a room with a TV and I will do nothing but try to make friends with it. Now I don't own a television and haven't for years. It's better that way. Trust me. And as long as we're talking about television, we may as well do the movies and music thing too. When people ask what kind of music I listen to, I say, "I don't like music." Which is a total fucking lie, right? I mean, who doesn't like music? But it's easier than explaining what I'm about to explain. I grew up in a house with a mother who loved the '70's (a lot of Janice Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac), an aunt who was addicted to disco (The Bee Gees, Andy Gibb, Le Chic, you name it), a grandmother who listened to Spanish radio (and don't ask me to name the groups, they all sound alike the way country music often does to me), a father who did listen to country music (Charlie Pride and Willie Nelson) and singers like Freddie Fender. My older brother was into heavy metal (Molly Hatchet, Kiss, AC/DC, whoever was loud and could drown out a kind of childhood that needed to be drowned out), my younger brother preferred rap and hip-hop and pop music (Michael Jackson, anyone?). I listened to it all. I loved it all. I also came to love New Wave music (The Cure, The Smiths, New Order), but I also played the cello (and did for nearly twenty years), so I listened to a lot of classical music (Handel and Mozart were my boys). These days I�ve got a lot of loud stuff for the gym, a lot of Missy Elliot and OutKast and June of 44. I also love Elvis Costello with an embarrassing amount of devotion (devotion akin to that you see in the eyes of those missionaries whose faces you close your door in). I listen to just about everything I can get my hands on (with the exception of that white boy electronica stuff that Max, the ex, loves so much.) So that's music. And I�m going to go ahead and skip movies, because you can just, say, trot on over to imdb.com and peruse a few million of my favorite films there, okay? (Start with Harold & Maude, if you need a direction. And then hit everything every made by Hal Hartley, Shohei Imamura, Jim Jarmush, Akira Kurasawa, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, okay? When you're done with that, try anything with Peter Lorre in it, or Humphrey Bogart, or Myrna Loy. Try The Brothers Quay on for size. Try Jane Campion's stuff. Try Louis Malle and John Ford. Just begin with those and I�ll see you, like, next year sometime.) But I did bring up Max, the gay ex-husband, so I might as well explain a bit about him. I met Max in high school. We were both freshmen at a high school that was made up largely of Hispanic kids and Max is a boy so white as to be considered alien by my fellow brown kids. He was an alien, and I loved that. I loved his reddish blonde hair and fair, freckled skin. I loved the glittery mouth full of braces. (Hispanic kids with braces? We don�t need no stinking braces.) I loved the weird clothes his momma dressed him in: high-water corduroy pants, big puffy green ski jackets, striped polo shirts, white pumas. I loved how he couldn�t play around, how he just got confused when the boys started to roughhouse. It awakened this crazy �I�ll protect you� part of me that I, in that teenaged girlish way, kind of liked. I fell crazy in love with him. It took two years for me to get him to fall something like crazy in love with me. He moved in with my family during our last year in high school. We got an apartment after we graduated and lived together. People ask how long I knew he was gay. I knew the year after we graduated, three years into our relationship. I knew, but I loved him, so I thought we could make it work. I had made a commitment to him. We spent the next eighteen years together, and were only apart when Max decided to try out the quote-unquote gay lifestyle and went off to spend four or so years doing so. We got back together after that. But to shorthand it a bit, we only married long enough to formalize the relationship, something we needed to do in order to end it. I moved out last August; we were divorced, legally, in December. Max is still my best friend, but I�ll tell you, being married to a gay man takes its toll on a girl. For example, I spent six of those eighteen years celibate. That�s something that it takes work to be grateful for, you know? And, oddly, I am grateful for all those years. I am grateful because I was hiding out. Hiding out, not wanting to be touched, not wanting to face sex at all for any reason. I�ve written about some of it here, and I�m so not up to a re-hash, so you can go and read it if you�re feeling voyeuristic or are even remotely interested in a part of my childhood that I consider to be more ubiquitous even than sitcom television. Bored Yet? Well, let me slap you in the face with some more shit. I�m a fat chick. Oh, I don�t mean that I�m fat right now. Right now, I�m actually only three pounds fatter than the AMA wants me to be for an adult female my age and height. That puts my BMI squarely in the certifiably healthy zone. I eat the way �they� always tell you to eat. I live on vegetables and a very little bit of protein that comes mainly from vegetable sources and fish. I drink a gallon of water a day. I haven�t touched fast food or any kind of junk food for I don�t know how long. I rarely eat fat or sugar. I exercise for at least an hour (usually more) 5-7 times a week, lifting weights, walking, running. So you�re probably wondering why I consider myself to be a fat chick. Well, I spent my life fat. Until two years ago, I weighed a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean that chairs trembled under me. I didn�t fit into restaurant booths, school desks, or airplane seats. I had to shop for clothes in fat chick stores (which generally carry the ugliest clothes in the ugliest fabrics known to man. Try being a fat chick and finding clothes that don't do everything possible to make you a laughing stock. It's just about impossible). I was fat, so I know that �normal� people hate fat people. I know it from experience. I know that �normal� people think that fat is something that you can catch by touching or speaking or being polite to a fat person. I�ve devoted the last two years of my life to the task of not being fat anymore. And I was only able to succeed because I wholeheartedly and unabashedly embraced being fat. I came to love and accept being a fat chick, came to see that I didn�t have to put my life on hold until I wasn�t fat anymore. And that opened every door that I had been holding shut for years. (Thank you, Marilyn Wann. You changed my life.) Once I realized that being fat just meant being fat�that it didn�t mean that I was not allowed to eat right or exercise or travel or move in the world with confidence or love myself into being�I got thin. How fucking crazy is that? And I don�t mean to say that it hasn�t been work, because it has been. But once I accepted that I was just fine just the way I was, I took all the energy I had been putting into hating myself and applied it to taking care of myself. And I changed. So that�s why I�ll always proudly label myself a fat chick. Man, I�m Tired That�s enough for today, I think. You still don�t know what kind of bad ass I am, but it�s time for me to head off to dreamland now. I�ll be back, don�t you worry. Your little Sublingua is not going anywhere.
More lies:
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