personal – Page 2 – Letters from Titan

I enjoy being a girl… sometimes. Sort of.

I have a celebrity wife problem. As in, every time I crush on a male celebrity, I discover his wife is even hotter and more accomplished, and then wind up in this weird feeback loop with my gender presentation and my bizarreo Pride-and-Prejudice-with-different-dresses childhood (p.s. in this Jane Austen scenario, I’m Mary. In case you’ve forgotten, she’s the ugly one whose name you can’t remember).

So I was educated a certain way, to have a certain life — of heteronormativity, of wealth, of female endurance, and of utter accomplishment (although generally of the in-service-to-others-while-standing-in-a-shadow sort. Bonus points for helping to create the shadow).

And to be clear I don’t have and was never ever going to have that life. Like most everyone these days, I totally live paycheck-to-paycheck and not all the Latin classes and ballroom dancing of my childhood is ever going to change that. That doesn’t keep me from missing the fantasy though, from feeling as if I have always been in exile, even if the adult reality of my childhood upbringing would have strangled me dead.

But one thing that always made that exile both less relevant and easier to bear is my queerness, and, often, my masculine of center gender identity. Which seems perhaps a strange thing to say when I’ve been growing my hair out and wearing makeup every day.

Because my whole life, people have asked me if I’m a dude. It actually happens more when my hair is long, when I wear makeup. I don’t know if it’s because my femininity when I’ve got it going on is so performative, or if it’s just my willingness to take up space.

Basically I’m a person who often looks like a dude when she’s trying to look like a chick, and often looks like a chick when she’s trying to look like a dude. Are you confused? Sure. But try being me, at eight years old, when the other parents asked my mother how she got their son into the all-girls school we couldn’t afford. Please note, I’m an only child, assigned female at birth; there was no son.

At any rate. Being able to be both a boy and a girl has been — as an adult — one of the great blessings of my life. It’s an incredible amount of fun being me. And anything I’ve ever wanted in a man or a woman I’ve generally been able to find in myself. This has, in turn, lessened my sense of exile incredibly (if I am not just a girl, I do not just have to wait about to be chosen). It has salved me when I have felt like a failure.

Practically, through the years, what this has looked like to people outside myself is that I go through phases as said in that derogatory sense often leveled at the changeable. But we all go through phases — seriously, go look at what you were wearing in the ’90s; I’ll wait — and we all change a lot during our lives. Some of us more than others. But one luxury I do have now is to embrace it.

So, lately, I’ve been on this very feminine kick. And for that you can blame two things — celebrity wives and writing romance novels. In fact, I exist now in a world where it is often my job to consider and objectify men; hence those crushes and their lovely wives.

Yet the men I write are often less men I desire, and more men I am

Seriously.

In fact, Erin and I have a book coming out in March 2017 and I know my ex is going to see himself in one of the characters and it’s like, dude, no…no… that’s about me. I’m that guy. I’m Callum. Trust me.

So the outcome of writing down the men I am in these books is that I suddenly have all this room to be the women I am, or at least was raised to be. Just without the budget or the assistance or the rewards of even approaching the perfection all women — regardless of resources — are supposed to be striving for.

It’s kind of weird.

It sort of sucks.

And if I think about it too hard I become furious. At the rigged, unwinnable game; at how far women’s equality hasn’t come; at my recent collusion in it. And at the inescapable black hole pull of it all. Do you know I actually got a beauty-related spam the other day about how curly girls like me should straighten and then re-curl their hair so they can look well-maintained and on-point?

Thankfully, I have my limits.

But lately I do wear eye shadow. I have perfume (Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb by day, Tom Ford Black Orchid by night. Not because you care, but because I needed to share the absurdity with you).

And I have realized than I am, actually, strikingly beautiful in all the too much of my face and my sadly-shaped eyes. I am that very creature of pride and endurance, elegance and sorrow, I was raised to be. But I am at least my own. And it brings me a lot of joy.

Except when it doesn’t.

Because unfortunately, this recent experience of being a girl means I have also become terrified of aging, am legitimately losing my mind over a dental appointment I have on Monday, and find myself in the middle of confronting for the first time in decades all the women I will never be.

My eyes may have a natural sadness to their shape, but I also have a natural melancholy to my soul.

Meanwhile, I scroll through my Instagram account, comparing the true but heavily-curated version of my life presented therein with those of all the celebrity wives I follow (and let’s reiterate, I don’t envy them their men, just their support staff, their relation to the world, and all their seeming surety).

I suspect, more often than not, that we cry about the same things. And so, as I keep trying to figure out how to be a girl, I often wonder if any of them have ever been boys — the way I was at 8 and at 28. In that wondering, my exile from the gendered obstacle course of my childhood feels less pronounced.

But of course, that’s the funny thing about exile. The cure and the disease are so often the same.

On unearned holiday greetings

While I was getting my face waxed today (I’m Sicilian and hairy) I got wished a Happy Mother’s Day, and I kind of wish it hadn’t happened.

Unlike many friends who are also grimacing their way through the the holiday, my mother is alive, we are not estranged, and I am not struggling with infertility or child loss.

But I am 43, childless, and deeply ambivalent about it. Ambivalence implies a lack of strong emotions, and to some extent that’s true. I mean, here I am, no kids, had other stuff to do. But lately my ambivalence looks like a constant yo-yo’ing between gasping relief at my freedom and locking myself in the bathroom at work to sob, because Erin and I have just written several novels with pregnancies and children in them and it’s been close to the bone for me.

In fact, I have a number of pretty spectacular essays about all this sitting on my hard drive. So why haven’t I posted them yet? Or submitted them? Or finished them?

Well, all sorts of reasons. Including wanting the books in question to be out first.

But I’m also cognizant that as a queer and genderqueer woman who has opted out (or simply hasn’t been able to secure) so many of the culturally rewarded milestones of womanhood, that when I say my experience of my womanhood is to feel like Hermione Granger with no awards to hang on her wall, three things are going to happen:

First, people will show up in the comments, express relief that I have no children, and call me either ugly or a narcissist.

Second, people with children will decide that my comments about my own psychological landscape are an insult to them. Maybe because I’ve been careless in my phrasing. But maybe because women are put in the constant position of having to defend their choices and circumstances no matter what they are.

Third, there will also be endless advice about late in life pregnancy and/or adoption that has nothing to do with me and my body and my life or all the research I did for the book with the 48-year-old heroine.

And it’s just going to be awful.

So what did I do at the face wax? I sucked it up and said thank you, and then wondered if I looked old, and then wondered if I looked accomplished. In the end, I suspect, I just looked tired. And none of it did anything to dissuade me from my conviction that being a woman is, at core, about endurance.

Not-exactly-an-uptown-girl at the Zuckerbaeckerball

I’m currently in the slightly bizarre position of writing a personal essay in the voice of a person who doesn’t exist, because the two-book mini-series (surely someone will excoriate me if I use the admittedly absurd word, duology) Erin and I are currently writing involves, among other things, a travel writer who can’t get his manuscript about Vienna right.

I was in Vienna for my day job in January and February 2016, in the midst of ball season. I found out that ball season is even a thing that exists about a week before I got on the plane. While I was uncertain if I would actually go through with attending one (ticketing is somewhat complex, involving admittance, seating, and a number of other items, all assembled separately into a single ticket), I packed a formal gown (let’s be real, a multi-purpose bridesmaids dress), spent as much time on Google translate as I could, and then as the date of the one that seemed likely approached, wavered back and forth.

ball4 — Debutantes, Zuckerbaeckerball 2016

I don’t speak German, although I have gotten to a point where I can do social niceties and follow the gist of a conversation had in my presence. My contemporary social dancing is adequate at best, and while I can do the sort of waltz favored in the U.S., a Viennese waltz is completely beyond my skill set. Strangers scare me. Men, at this point in my life, are largely a foreign country. And Viennese social customs, as I am given to understand them, suggested none of this would even matter, as the let’s-make-temporary-friends with strangers behavior common in the U.S., and that I’ve often encountered in the U.K., doesn’t seem to be a thing there.

If I went to the ball I would be alone, confused, unable to dance, and with little opportunity to engage strangers should I have even found the nerve, which I tend to do once I cycle through the sort of fretting above.

ball3 — Attendees, Zuckerbaeckerball 2016

In the end, though, I bought tickets to the Zuckerbaeckerball, as it was recommended to me by a random Tumblr person and was one of the few to fit in with a heavy work and travel schedule. Held at the Hoffburg Imperial Palace, a short walk from where I was staying, the Zuckerbaeckerball is put on by the sugar-baking industry (cakes not breads!) and like any proper ball has debutantes.

While I grew up with debutantes (I’m still not joking when I compare my childhood to Metropolitan), I was certainly not one myself. My family wasn’t that type of important, didn’t have those sorts of means, and didn’t really see me as part of the social whirl that was expected by the world in which I was educated. Sure, I went to balls, like the Gold and Silver Ball of the Junior Committee of the Junior League of New York (a name only typed here so you can experience the full ridiculousness of this stuff), but they were practice for events of the sort I never graced. It’s all useful fodder for writing now, but I might have been better served as a person if my parents had just said no.

ball5 — Debutante presentations, Zuckerbaeckerball 2016

At any rate, every ball in Vienna has debutantes. And, arguably, everyone in Vienna who wants to be a debutante can be. With hundreds of balls each year representing industries and social clubs, and with balls being unavoidable in the city’s social scene, young men and women who wish to make their debuts, most certainly do.

At the Hoffburg, alone, I crowded into the main ballroom to see their presentation. I watched as row after row of girls kneeled as their dancemasters and ball officials passed before them. On their knees for ten minutes at a time, maybe more, as their escorts stood beside them, some of the girls shook. One, near me, had a fabulous butchy undercut, that had been smoothed down with product and had tiny flowers clipped into it.

After the debuts, the main ballroom floor was opened for a Viennese waltz. My feet aching, and with no hope of a dance partner, I fled to sit, but without a purchased seat (it felt too weird, to be stranded at a table of people whose language I did not speak, who would not welcome a stranger), I had nowhere to do so until I found an out of the way bathroom on a mezzanine level of the palace.

From my cubicle I listened as girls sixteen to twenty slammed in and out of the bathroom, fretting about make up and shoes and boys and parents. I, meanwhile, fretted about the hundred euros I’d spent to hide in a bathroom.

So I put my shoes back on, stood up straight, and remembered that years of my life had been dedicated to how to comport myself in this entirely unlikely circumstance. And so I found a perch on the edge of the ballroom from which to watch the proceedings and wait for some serendipity to find me.

ball6 — Me, in my office before the ball

It came when the music switched to American standards, and the bandleader played Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.” As I stood there, thinking about my Upper East Side childhood and how I was never meant to be — and never could be — the girl in that song, I wondered to what extent the song made sense in Vienna. Surely, no on there knew about the ten blocks that defined my childhood, but also surely there was a Viennese equivalent to it, and the song, and girls like me — with the song’s hot blood and wedged poorly into an an archaic social structure as beautiful as it is offensive.

I smiled as tears rolled down my cheeks. Serendipity. The most perfect moment. Even at a ball where I could not dance.

Today, I’m faced with describing a very different version of that moment as experienced by a lonely male writer, ten years my senior, who fit in exceptionally with the shared world of our childhoods, and for that, has managed far more contempt for it than I ever have, to his much greater happiness.

V for Vendetta: Please believe

I don’t know who you are. Please believe. There is no way I can convince you that this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care. I am me, and I don’t know who you are but I love you. I have a pencil. A little one they did not find. I am a woman. I hid it inside me. Perhaps I won’t be able to write again, so this is a long letter about my life. It is the only autobiography I will ever write and oh god I’m writing it on toilet paper.

I was born in Nottingham in 1957, and it rained a lot. I passed my eleven plus and went to girl’s grammar. I wanted to be an actress. I met my first girlfriend at school. Her name was Sara. She was fourteen and I was fifteen but we were both in Miss Watson’s class.

Her wrists. Her wrists were beautiful.

I sat in biology class, staring at the pickled rabbit foetus in its jar, listening while Mr. Hird said it was an adolescent phase that people outgrew… Sara did. I didn’t.

In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later I moved to London, enrolling at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart, but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us…

… But within that inch we are free.

London: I was happy in London. In 1981 I played Dandini in Cinderella. My first rep work. The world was strange and rustling and busy, with invisible crowds behind the hot lights and all the breathless glamour. It was exciting and it was lonely. At nights I’d go to Gateways or one of the other clubs, but I was stand-offish and didn’t mix easily. I saw a lot of the scene, but I never felt comfortable there. So many of them just wanted to be gay. It was their life, their ambition, all they talked about… And I wanted more than that.

Work improved. I got small film roles, then bigger ones. In 1986 I starred in ‘The Salt Flats.’ It pulled in the awards but not the crowds. I met Ruth working on that. We loved each other. We lived together, and on Valentine’s Day she sent me roses, and oh god, we had so much. Those were the best three years of my life.

In 1988 there was the war…

… And after that there were no more roses. Not for anybody.

In 1992, after the take-over, they started rounding up the gays. They took Ruth while she was out looking for food. Why are they so frightened of us? They burned her with cigarette ends and made her give them my name. She signed a statement saying I seduced her. I didn’t blame her. God I loved her. I didn’t blame her… But she did. She killed herself in her cell. She couldn’t live with betraying me, with giving up that last inch.

Oh Ruth.

They came for me. They told me that all my films would be burned. They shaved off my hair. They held my head down a toilet bowl and told jokes about lesbians. They brought me here and gave me drugs. I can’t feel my tongue anymore. I can’t speak. The other gay woman here, Rita, died two weeks ago. I imagine I’ll die quite soon.

It is strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologized to nobody. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish…

… Except one.

An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

I don’t know who you are, or whether you’re a man or a woman. I may never see you. I may never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.

– Valerie

I post this every year. Every year, I think perhaps I should not. I think of the need to explain to Americans that Guy Fawkes Day is not about supporting revolution. I think about how the V masks get used in American politics. I think about the binary nature of this incredibly effective and affecting piece of writing makes it irredeemable and cruel for some.

And then I post it anyway.

Because I don’t ask it to speak for or to anyone but me. But it’s become more and more personal to me over the years, wound in with my history, with my anxieties not just about politics, but with the medicalization and institutionalization of the marginalized. My celiac symptoms developed the day I saw the V for Vendetta film. I spent at least a week thinking the movie had merely traumatized me into illness because I trusted a story more than I trusted my own sense of my own body. This is what we are taught, that we are not our own.

So the cadence of this piece is, always, my posture and my grief.

That it is a backstage story is always less-remarked on than I think it should be. All lives are backstage stories, after all.

It is strange how all its dates live in the past now. They didn’t once. And it was terrifying.

Exciting word related things

This weekend, Erin and I are in the deep edits from our publisher on Starling.

Meanwhile, our short story “Lake Effect,” is out from Torquere Press.

When Kyle and Daniel return to their hometown to get married, they find themselves facing an obstacle course of family drama and small-town misadventure in their quest to make it down the aisle.

Misbehaving relatives and a reformed high school bully, along with an ill-advised hookup in the wedding party and a weird late-night meal with a cabbie and his ex-wife, leave the happy couple doubting whether they want to get married at all. But a hot quickie before their walk down the aisle helps remind them that the most important part of getting married is being married.

You can purchase the story as a standalone at Amazon, Torquere, or any number of other major retailers. Or you can purchase it as part of the They Do M/M anthogy, which is also available at Amazon, Torquere, and lots of other retailers. If you choose to purchase from Torquere, the code PRIDE will give you 20% off everything in your cart until the end of the month. Please remember, this story does contain sexual content.

Next up, is a thing I can’t announce yet, but will be able to any day now. The information is floating around the ether, and I found out through a Google alert on my name. I love the future!

Finally, I continue to blog at Romance @ Random, but this weekend I switch from the Penny Dreadful beat to the True Blood beat.

As soon as I can catch a moment (once these Starling edits are in), I plan to catch up here with pieces on Penny Dreadful, the Broadway show Matilda, and another bit of thought on House of Cards.

Blogging about this whole romance author process thing is happening regularly on Avian30, and if you scroll through the last few posts there, you have the chance to win stuff, so you might want to check that out. Erin and I also have some readings announced in NYC and elsewhere during the Fall and Winter, so you can take a look at that, although I will update the information here once I catch that mythical moment.

Pretty Kitty

pretty Most people who know me on the Internet, know me, to some degree, as that chick that writes about death. I write about a lot of other stuff too, but the death stuff increasingly tends to be how people first encounter me. It also tends to be a mix of my best stuff and stuff that gets me, rightfully, in trouble for not letting the ideas or feelings get all the way cooked or considered.

And, like everyone else on the Internet with cats, people tend to know my cats. Alas, currently, that’s just Cricket, because Pretty died at 18 1/2 earlier today after an awesome and dramatic fight with cancer. So, as much as I actually try not to write personal stuff on this blog anymore because I’m an exciting pop-culture thinky person or something, right now, you’re getting a eulogy for my cat, who was the awesomest pop-culture diva of a cat ever.

Three days after I got her as a kitten, someone I knew tried to drunkenly steal Pretty at a party. She ran away from home several times — once being gone for days before returning (and this for an in-door only cat). Another time she hid in the bottom of a box for 36 hours before we noticed. Being half-siamese, she screamed constantly. She also liked to climb on top of the refrigerator, and sit creepily on the chests of her napping victims.

In fact, I can name at least half a dozen people who have had nightmares about her stealing their soul, and another two dozen more who would swear up and down she had a human trapped in her and you could see it. That someone eventually figured out that her odd and very human gaze was the result of her being near-sighted is entirely besides the point.

Despite efforts to give her a non-embarrassing name (Aziz), Pretty Kitty was what she liked, and what stuck. She also insisted on sitting between Patty and I whenever possible and was a ridiculously powerful presence for a cat that was rail thin and deeply eerie looking.

I had Pretty from the time she was 11 weeks old. She saw a lot of boys, a lot of girls, and a lot of apartments. She went from being a cat that hid under my bed for so long, so often that she was only referred to as “the other cat” to being The Cat. Cricket is Cricket. Little was Little. But Pretty is The Cat, a sort of stand-in for all of cat-kind everywhere.

All pets are special. But Pretty was otherworldly, and not right, and sometimes very beautiful and sometimes sort of ugly to some eyes. She was a weird cat. Spooky and neurotic, and she did this thing where she slept with her eyes open all the time. People also always pointed out how much alike we were all to an extent that’s hard to be comfortable with right now.

While it’s far from atypical, I am doing a lot of death work right now. Projects you do and don’t know about. Pop-culture interests that are obvious if you tend to see me around social media. It’s all weird and somewhat comically tangled in my head right now. Literally, I don’t even know why I’m sobbing at this point in the day — plenty of good reasons, but I’m a Libra and choices are hard.

Anyway, RIP Pretty Kitty, September 1995 – May 20, 2014.

Thank you for any kind thoughts in advance. It may be a few days before I can respond.

Starling, and now Doves

Since I anounced that Starling will be out from Torquere on September 10, 2014 there’s more news! Its sequel, Doves, will be out on January 21, 2015 also from Torquere.

While working frantically on more projects (seriously, I have a lot coming at you in multiple genres, I’m just waiting for the okay to speak to several of them) we’ve just started to plan some promotional stuff around Starling‘s release.

Erin and I will be on The Hummingbird Place, a romance novel podcast on August 18, 2014; we’ll be talking about characterization, which is the theme of the episode, which will feature several other great guests.

We’ll also be doing an interview with Raine O’Tierney at The Hat Party on September 10, 2014. We’ll have giveaways around both, and I can tell you that the one for the The Hat Party will involve an actual hat crafted by Erin like the one that serves as a plot point in Starling.

For those of you that are members of Romance Writers of America’s NYC chapter or thinking about it, I’ll be the author of the month at their meeting on October 11, 2014. The topic will be collaboration. As an aside, I can’t recommend the group highly enough. They’ve been a huge asset in helping navigate this very fast moving process. Meanwhile, I have a quick piece up on their blog about Velvet Goldmine, writing, and stardom.

As we move towards a cover reveal for Starling (this summer), Erin and I are putting together a joint blog for our coauthored work. We’ll announce that soon, once we populate it with some content.

In the meantime, Glee‘s back, I desperately need to catch up on Vikings, and I need to do some serious processing with you all about House of Cards and various patron saints. I know all the content right now is like “New content soon!” but truly, New content soon!

Starling

Some of you who follow me on Tumblr may have noticed an increase in random photos of birds, white bedrooms, and gingers. This is not due to a new pet, a house remodel, or a sudden crush. It’s actually because Erin McRae and I have written a novel, which we’re happy to report will be published by Torquere Press in 2014 (note: for those of you not familiar, Torquere is a long-time publisher of LGBT romances and there may be some images on that site you may not wish to click through to at work).

Our book, Starling, is a fairy tale about fame and everything that goes right, and ridiculously wrong, when you’re the kid who effectively gets discovered in a diner. Set in Los Angeles amongst an incestuous group of friends during next year’s television season, Starling is about figuring out how to do life when it feels like the whole world is watching.

Starling is just one of many things in the hopper around here. I’ve got a bunch of other projects at hand, some with announcements sooner and some with announcements later. Erin’s working on a ton of stuff too.

Meanwhile, funny story for you: Always. Check. Your. Spam. Filter. Because if we had checked ours sooner, we would have been telling you this story a month ago.

Oooopsie.

Luckily, the team at Torquere is lovely.

When we have a specific release date for Starling we will let you know.

Personal: Haven’t the foggiest what you will find here

Twenty years ago, I was a poet. Longer ago than that even.

I began writing poetry in high school, as a teenager, took the gift of the Writers Market book for poetry my parents gave me each year and sent my words out. Sometimes, people even published them. And when I got on the Internet in 1990, and then joined a BBS which will not be named, I wrote my words there too.

I didn’t just write them. I used them. When I was in pain. When I was angry. When I was wrathful. When I had desire I did not know how to meet the consequences of; when lovers ignored me; when the politics of friendship confused me; when the cruelties of the Internet made me certain I was supposed to stop talking and just didn’t know how, I wrote and wrote and wrote.

Some more things got published. Some more things got rejected. I won some contests, performed at some poetry slams, got email from people I didn’t know: the father who shared one of my poems with his son after a first heartbreak; the man who worked at NASA and sent me pictures of the sky.

Eventually, the BBS died. And eventually, I stopped writing, not just poetry, but everything. It was easier; boys were more willing to date me; I could pretend I was normal, and there was a lot of lucrative to be had in the office drag dot.com glory of the late ’90s.

Eventually, though, I got back to words, or admitted, more readily, that I had never left them. The boys were gone anyway. So were the dot.coms, and the century, and the World Trade Center.

But while I came back to fiction and non-fiction, I never really came back to poetry. I published something in Rattle on accident because of a friend, and I envisioned a poetry project or two I never felt able to execute on.

My brain has changed, and, by-and-large, it’s not something that really bothers me. I’ve enough to do, as arguably evidenced by my complete inability to keep up with NaBloWriMo this nearly over month.

But in April of this year almost gone, an old friend from those days of being the girl who posted poetry on the Internet, found a stack of print outs from that BBS of my work. She asked me if I wanted them, and I said, why not?

Until today, I hadn’t opened the envelope.

Some of the work I remember. Some of it I don’t. Much of what I’ve allowed myself to read has made me cringe. In many cases, I am more interested by the evolution of my signature files on the pages as my sign-off migrate from Sinead O’Connor (“there is no other troy for me to burn”) to Kristen Hersh (“’til i wake your ghost”) to U2 (“i must be an acrobat, to look like this and act like that”) to things I no longer even know the source of without Googling (“you knew how easily i bruised; it’s a soreness i would never lose”). Apparently that last one is Erica Jong.

It’s a weird stack of paper. A hard read. I don’t know if it tells me I was the poet I remember, that my resume says I was; or if I really wasn’t. So few of these things would I say now, or say this way.

But there was one thing I did, a lot, when I was sad, and that was to write on this BBS, in the third person, about Little girl (“Little girl got to be pretty for a year…. Little girl has long legs. Little girl has useful hands”). These were not poems, they were not meant as art. They were pain and wrath and a desperate attempt to explain my feeling of being an object and to deflect — through a demonstration of my grief and otherness — cruelty that these posts, frankly, only invited.

I thought they were lost forever. They might well have been, if not for my friend’s printouts and her offer to send them to me. I’m grateful to have them now, to see the record, not of the writer I was, but of the girl I was at an age when I was discovering how the things I made people feel made them see themselves and the way I allowed myself to carry, or not carry, the consequences of that.

All of this really happened. I was a writer, in that I wrote words that sometimes meant something to someone, often not in ways I intended. And I suppose, I am one now, essentially in the same way. But, wow, those two things aren’t really joined in time or subject or style or narrative technology.

There isn’t really a lesson in this, for me or for you. It’s just 50 pages of words I don’t know if I’ll ever share with anyone ever again. But once I did.

If anyone ever offers you an envelope from your past, say yes, I think. Open it eventually. Recognize that even when you were silent, you were always speaking.

The title of this entry is the opening of the note my friend enclosed with the printouts.

Personal: Haircut hell redux, this time with a happier ending

I got my hair cut today. Super short after many months of growing it out for a combination of reasons that have included curiosity, laziness, and the acute awareness that people are generally kinder to me when I have long hair, even if it’s, I’m pretty sure, less attractive on me than short hair.

The thing is, the longer my hair, the less kind I am to myself, and it shows, I think, in everything from my carriage to my ability to care for it. It’s no coincidence that the first text I got from a friend after posting the new look to the Internet mentioned that I looked less tired.

But getting my hair cut is hard. Salons never want to cut it as short and as masculine as I tend to want it, even out here at the intersection of Park Slope and Green-Wood Cemetery. For you non-New Yorkers, that means I live at the crossroads of DIY hipsters and lesbian mommies. Yet, the stylists who are willing to chop it off don’t necessarily know how, and this is complicated by my hair texture — extremely thick, extremely coarse, and pretty damn curly.

This time around, I decided to go to Decatur & Sons, based on the random Twitter recommendation of Elliott Sailors, a professional model in her 30s currently getting a ton of media attention for chopping off her hair and pursuing male modeling to extend her career.

While knowing where to go, and having an idea of what I wanted should have made it easier, it was still complicated for me to feel like I had a right both to be in the very male space of Decatur & Sons and to ask for something I only knew was sort of a choice because of someone who is basically beautiful for a living.

While some of my many jobs are sometimes about being paid for what I look like, I’m 41, going grey, and still struggle with having always been striking at best, which is a thing boys often say about girls they’re not comfortable admitting their desire for. It’s a silly wound, one perhaps over-generalized for the sake of the literary, but most of us harbor wounds like this at least sometimes — sharp and strange and filled with narrative primacy.

However — and the point of this story is totally the however — Thorin did an awesome job with my hair (so much hair, it took forever!), and my comfort, and knowing how to tailor the ideas I had to both my hair texture and the length of my face. I will so be keeping this look up, with, I suspect, decreasing amounts of trepidation.

Long ago and faraway here I took a break from my pop culture ramblings to rage post about my need for a barbershop for dykes. In terms of comment volume it’s one of this site’s most popular posts ever. As such, I figure today’s adventures qualify as a valid update.