Failure

Failure is the demon that attacks the creative muse who would visit me, and I, a coward, what do I do? I sit back and let it happen. And when Creativity has been bludgeoned to a paste and torn asunder, Failure turns to me satisfied. There, it says. What did I tell you?  It reaffirms its own existence this way and only grows in power with each successful attack.

            Failure has been especially potent lately. It points out its presence in everything I’ve touched, and whatever I have not yet touched or have abandoned before it could begin, well that was Failure’s influence too. What I haven’t done is because I am incapable of doing it; what I have done is, ipso facto, only within my abilities, which, Failure reassures me, are inadequate.  Any moron can complete something, but that doesn’t mean she can achieve. Achievement is a slippery toad that ever changes its form and eels out of my grasp as soon as I think I may have touched it. And Failure, always ready to be of service, points out Achievement’s newest form for me, while also shouting in my ear that I will never be able to hold it. I know this is only Failure's desperate way of maintaining its supremacy, and yet I let it convince me. Believing in Failure makes me feel like more of a failure, and that’s just what it needs to feed on to grow stronger and more powerful. It is like a leech that convinces its host to let herself be sucked dry.  It rattles off for me all of my shortcomings, my squandered opportunities and all my wasted chances as evidence that I am indeed a failure. that I have always been a failure, and will always be a failure. It continues this way, building the case against my own worth until it has me crippled with doubt and fetal with fear and begging for mercy. Sometimes I am able to tamp its voice down, to tell it to knock it the fuck off, but other times it feels like the only thing that is true. Certainly the only truth that is real.  Even as I write this, Failure is piping up to insist that I am not even articulating its power and hold over me at all adequately. Because in addition to everything else, it is also very vain, you see  And yet, it doesn’t think I should write about it at all. In fact, it wants me to stop right now and erase this whole damn thing and certainly never post it because:

1)    It’s nothing that anybody wants to read (because it fails as an interesting/meaningful piece of writing)

              1a) not that I have very many readers anyway (because I am failing to 

                    develop my ‘social  platform’ as well as I should.)

2)    I ought to be embarrassed by it (and I am) because in writing it, I am only admitting what I already know is true, which is that I am a failure. Because people who aren’t failures don’t need to post stuff like this.

3)    I should be able to do better than this.  And it's true. I should. But it is also true that I haven’t been blogging as much as I was a month ago because I have begun of late to let Failure whisper in my ear, to let it convince me of my shortcomings as a writer/artist, which only serves to ensure the certainty of my failure as a writer/artist.

Failure thinks I should hold out for better ideas. It wants me to wait for that creative muse to come unwarily traipsing back into my life. Failure tells me it will play nice this time, but I know it will try to bludgeon the muse as soon as she is within striking distance. Because that is its favorite past time.   And so I will write this, and I may even post it. Because it is the only power I have against Failure. That is the real reason Failure doesn’t want me to continue writing this, or even to post it. Because just this little act of defiance stuns Failure enough to shut it up for a moment, and suddenly isn’t the only voice I am able to hear anymore.  Maybe in that quiet I will be able to hear Creativity calling. If I am lucky, Confidence might be somewhere near her too. They are weak right now, still suffering the wounds that Failure has inflicted, but I write this so that I can find them. So I can begin to nurse them back to health. 

Claiming my blog from Blogger

I apologize for this post. Seriously, don't read it because it's not interesting.  I am sure there is a different way to do this, but that's the thing about technology. To keep up with it, you have to be savvy in it. To be savvy in it, you have to keep up with it. Thanks to rockin' instructions by Kate Pilkington, I am trying to get all on board with bloglovin', which is the newest bestest way to follow blogs, since apparently google is doing away with google friends. Or some such fiddle faddle. i don't even know. Because I'm not technology savvy.
    Anyway, the whole point of this post is because I'm trying to claim my blog to post it on my bloglovin' profile because that's apparently what I need to do. And to do that, i'm supposed to paste a code into my blog. So here it is.

claiming my blog

Now I can claim my blog in my profile, and that is really the only point of this post.

Though, if you are still reading this post, check out the new follow button at the top! sweet!

Now my next step is to copy that cute little button and plop it at the end of every post. But I'm already exhausted, so that will just have to wait. sigh.
follow my blog

Oooh, GIrl!

 Gina and I have a new obsession. It is drag. As in queens, not loud cars that drive too fast.  Now, I am no expert on the world of drag. I will admit that most of my knowledge about this sub-culture within a sub-culture comes largely from the internet and a smattering of documentaries, and that it only metastasized from an idle curiosity into a full blown love with the delightful discovery of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a television show that I like to imagine is a sort of a Project Runway meets a Gay Pride parade Float and they have a love child after getting drunk on too many Absolut Vodka cocktails. (I say this like I have ever watched Project Runway. I’m getting off topic, but this reminds me of a time I was checking into a hotel in North Dakota. The woman asked me where I was from. I told her Boston. She said, “Oh. I’ve never been to your coast. But I must say, I prefer the other one.  Similarly, I prefer RuPaul’s Drag Race. Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled program). I will even admit that two years ago, I knew pretty much next to nothing about drag queens. So for me to pretend that I am any sort of expert on the culture of male drag is a bit like claiming to be an expert on DaVinci after a brief stroll through the Uffizi and its gift shop. But good heavens, if I let a silly little thing like ignorance stop me from opining, I would have stopped talking back in kindergarten.

            So what is it, exactly? What is it about the display of glamour, high fashion, and exaggerated femininity from male performers that can fascinate, charm and inspire adoration in even the most rumpled of lil’ ol’ lesbian like yours truly, and her mild mannered wife?  

Pandora Boxx sporting Chevrolet chic

                                                   

Certainly, someone who can create haute couture out of licorice whips and caution tape, or fashion headpieces from automotive accessories is more than deserving of my admiration, but it is more than that. And yes, anytime a spotlight shines on some particular group who can camp out under that big sprawling tent of we call “queer,” I get a little heart sparkle of kinship love, but it is more than that too. Watching RuPaul’s Drag Race makes me want to chase rainbows in the wind and smile kindly upon my fellow neighbors of the world, and dandle children upon my knee and save kittens from danger, and write weird blog posts when I ought to be working on my novel. So what is it? Well, after more exhaustive thought and analysis on the matter than I would ever grant truly pressing concerns, and after picking through Gina’s brilliant mind in an effort to understand and articulate our fawning love for fierce female impersonators, I have come up with a few possible reasons. If you are still with me this far, bless your heart. And then buckle your seatbelt because it’s going to get craze (as the kids these days will soon be saying, just you wait). 

           

Part I. Drag Queens and Gender.

            Like I said, I have put way too much thought into this. This is part one of a three-part foray into the world of drag queens. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

   So, growing up, I was a tomboy. But sometimes, even being a tomboy was not enough. I felt lost in a chasm between my masculinity and femininity. I yearned to shed every last trace of my femininity but no matter how hard I tried, in the end I was inescapably a girl. My sex that I couldn’t shed, the female-ness that marked me under all that tomboy bravado was a source of shame for me. It’s about here that I sort of wish I hadn’t entirely blown off the only women’s studies course I ever took, because I might have some more academic analysis to back up my argument, but on the other hand, I am good at nothing, if not reinventing the wheel over and over again without a manual.  So what did my prepubescent angst mean? Did it mean that I was a gender-confused, even “trans-gendered” little kid? Well yes, I was. And that was because I didn’t yet know how to parse sex from gender, or indeed that they could be separated at all. The whole concept of gender is a complex and sometimes pretty bewildering notion on its own, and then we go and link it inextricably to sex. Males are “supposed” to be masculine, and females are “supposed” to be feminine. But what does it even mean to be masculine or feminine? Being the overly sensitive little kid that I was, by the time I was starting nursery school, I had reduced my observations of gender down to this: masculine (and therefore boy) meant strength, and feminine (and therefore girl) meant weakness; masculine/boy meant confidence and feminine/girl meant vulnerability. A little gender slop across the sexes was permissible, but girls who wanted to be masculine was more permissible than boys who wanted to be feminine. This (I reasoned) was because it was better to be strong than to be weak, and it was better to be confident than to be vulnerable. Thus: it was better to be a boy than a girl. Being the empiricist I was, I found evidence to back up my conclusion. This was the reason why I was allowed to wear pants and act like a “tomboy”, but why the boys in my classes never showed up in dresses. It was the reason why my coed classmates and I could be collectively called ‘guys’ but not ‘girls.’ It was the reason why to cry like a girl or to throw like a girl was a put down. It was the reason why boys were not supposed to act or be effeminate in any way. In a nutshell, to be feminine was to be a girl, and to be a girl was to be weak and vulnerable on account of being feminine. Who on earth would settle for that lot, if given the choice? But of course I wasn’t given a choice. I was a girl.

            But the thing that they don’t tell you when you are three to eighteen and moping around feeling sorry for yourself because of your sex=gender=inferiority complex, is that everybody embodies both genders to some extent, so being of one sex or the other doesn’t really have anything to do with your gender. To be sure, I still don’t really know what ‘masculine’ means and what ‘feminine’ means, but I know we all embody some swirly muddy mixture of both feminine traits and masculine traits. But also to be fair to my younger self, my conclusions might have been simplistic, but even today, even now, even despite the great strides we have made in women’s rights and gay rights and all that, I would still argue that femininity is not esteemed as highly as masculinity. It is still more okay for women to be masculine than for men to be feminine. When you say of a woman, ‘she had the balls to do X’, we understand that to mean she acted with courage, but you can’t really praise a man by calling him effeminate. You still don’t call a coed group of people ‘girls’, but “guys” is almost always fine. “Guys” in this context has become gender neutral, but “girls” in that same context is still too inextricably linked to femininity, and femininity still squicks people out. I’m not saying that in an equal world the sexes would be perfectly interchangeable copies of each other, or that each sex would be a precise balance of masculine and feminine because I don’t think that at all. I’m saying that in an equal world, both (or all, if you want to go that route) sexes could express whatever masculinity and whatever femininity they have as fully and freely as they choose and it’s all acceptable and no eyebrows will be raised or shame induced.

            Which brings me back to drag queens. Sorry for the off-roading, but I wanted to delve into gender because one reason drag instills in me all those bubbly happy feelings, is that the performers embrace and empower both their masculinity and femininity equally. They don’t hide behind one or the other. They don’t try to shed one in favor of the other. They don’t apologize for their femininity nor do they try to erase their masculinity. Rather, they let both shine together in one heightened and harmonious display. It is vulnerability but it is also confidence. The result is pure, sexy, strong, glamorous power. It is literally breathtaking at times. In some ways, drag is the art of creating a separate third gender. The performers are male, the outward appearance is feminine. The appearance is not just femininity, it is femininity on steroids. Heightened and exaggerated and pushed to the realm of extreme. It is larger than life femininity. It is femininity on masculine proportions. It is femininity masculinized, and masculinity feminized. It is feminine heart with masculine soul; feminine kit with masculine caboodle. 

Raven. A Fierce Queen

            The power of drag queens is their ability to transcend both genders while fully embodying each. To find strength in their femininity and glamour in their masculinity. And it is that, I think is what warms the little cockles of my tender heart. For though I have since come to not just tolerate but celebrate both my sex and my femininity, drag still speaks to that little girl I used to be, the one who felt lost in the chasm between her masculinity and femininity. Drag shows that little girl how to embrace both and not apologize for either. It shows her how to shed the shame and find the love. It tells her that she is fine and good the way she is.

            At least, I think that explains part why I love drag so much. Next time, I will explore how being a drag queen is not altogether different from being a writer.  But now, if you’ll excuse me, I feel a peculiar need to go out and rescue a kitty or dandle some child upon my knee.

Poetry

Today we bid farewell to national poetry month. Having waited until the last possible moment to get in on the poetry love,  I do want to point out that I am technically not late since this is being posted on April 30th.

A couple things: I am not a poet. I used to be, back when poetry meant producing rhyming couplets and calling it a day, but after we were supposed to outgrow that stage, I lost interest and talent and have been defiantly wading in the shallow waters of my rhyming pool ever since.  Occasionally I have turned out works of what I like to call poetry, and will continue to defend them as such. You, of course, are free to think otherwise. I will not judge you for it.

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I will.

Two notes on the poem below: 

1) The picture is of Caravaggio's painting, "David with the Head of Goliath."  2) It should be "thee," not "thou" in the second line, but I wrote it as thou before I thought about it and I sort of thought it was funny that way. Also my friend Sarah told me she thought it should stay thou, and she's smart and has a great sense of humor and also generally makes sense, which are compelling reasons for me to listen to her.  (Interesting side note: when John Lennon was singing "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" to Paul McCartney, he accidentally sang "two foot small" instead of "two foot tall," which was what he had written. Paul liked the phrase as it was sung, and said it should stay that way. And it did. So there you go.) 

David with the Head of Goliath And Mother (offstage)

God’s name, what has he brought home now?

Young man, I've had it up to here with thou!

Don’t thinketh thee can bring that in

Thou dost not knoweth where it’s been!

Goliath or Gabriel, I don’t care.

His head stays outside, is that clear?

I’ve just spent the morning cleaning,

Last thing I need’s a head that’s bleeding.

Thou waltzeth back here from a fight,

Disheveled and thine hair a sight,

Expecting–what–Congratulations?

Hmph! What thou needs is castigation.

I do not calleth thee a winner.

What I calleth thee is late for dinner.

Now return that head where it belongeth,

Then wash thine hands, and run alongeth.

And if you've read this far, here is a poem by Ogden Nash as a reward for your perseverance:

Further Reflections on Parsley

Parsley

Is Gharsley

Was there ever a better poet? I ask you! 

Happy last day of Poetry Month!

O, the Dramatic Irony of it All!

It's a good thing that I have friends who are so on the ball that they not only create their own memes, but that they invite the likes of yours truly to write an essay for their blogs, since I have been lacking and slacking in my own posts lately.  Today's Post Hoster is Anna Urquhart at The Silent Isle, and if you haven't heard of her, I imagine it will only be a matter of time before you do. She is nothing short of brilliant, and it is an honor to be invited to write for her series, "Had I But Known..."
I hope you enjoy my cautionary tale and I encourage you to check out the other 3 essays (but counting!) in the series. Thank you for reading!

A Guest Spot at Nested

I have the honor of a guest spot over at the wonderful Katie Pilkington's blog Nested for her theme "That's When I realized. . ."  

  I hope you enjoy the post,  and if you can, you should check out more of Katie's blog. She is hysterical, clever, and a super talented writer.


Nested: And that’s when I realized… I would probably never be a fashion maven.

Does this corset make me look gay?

Fraud

My hobby is feeling unworthy. About pretty much everything. I am a champion of inadequacy. I am a varsity level worrier. If I can feel confident about anything, it is in my sense of fraudulence. Just to prove it, the title of this post is not even my own. I ripped it off from the late, great David Rakoff. He was a much better curmudgeon than I am.

I adopted this habit at an early age. From many careful and meticulous hours of observation I gleaned, for instance, that genuine girls were creatures who wore bows and headbands and ruffled dresses(!!) and played with each other’s hair in class, and liked dolls and pink horses, and had inherent rhythm for games like pat-a-cake. 

I on the other hand, while born a girl, had none of these attributes. I dressed in corduroys and tee shirts. I cut my hair short. My parents gave me a Miss Piggy doll one Christmas and I spent a delightful afternoon tossing every single one of her clothes into the roaring fireplace. I would have hucked her in too if I hadn’t been caught just then by a very apoplectic mother.  I even went through a brief(ish) stint in kindergarten of standing up to pee, which is as difficult to pull off as it sounds. I never bothered to inform anyone what I was doing behind closed doors, and if my parents ever wondered about my brother’s appalling inability to aim or about the mysterious splatter patterns that suddenly graced the wrong side of the toilet bowl, they (and my brother too) must have been relieved when the problem just as mysteriously cleared up on its own.  

          Exactly once did I volunteer to wear a dress to school (a decision sprung entirely out of a desire to please my mother). I spent the entire day regretting my generosity and then threw up all down the front of it just before my mom arrived to pick me up.  I was a fraudulent girl. I felt it to my core.  And yet, nothing aggrieved me more than to be mistaken for a boy. Because I wasn’t actually trying to be a boy (my adventures in the bathroom notwithstanding), I was just trying to be me.

As I grew older, I found other things to feel inadequate about and in expanding my repertoire, discovered that inadequacy was both inexhaustible and almost universal in its applicability. There were the trivial, mundane worries of no consequence that I pondered just to stay in practice and keep the habit up: things like my inability to run more than twelve yards without getting a headache, the pace at which I read books, or my taste in lowbrow movies. Others were more significant; they stretched my muscles of ineptitude and expanded the very limits of my unworthiness: my ability to be liked, to have friends; my intelligence; my usefulness to the world as an individual, as member of society, as a human. Things like that.

I went into the sciences and felt like a fraud from the get-go. Oh sure, my degree was in geology, like that proved anything. All other geology degrees anywhere else in the world were earned. I only got mine because somebody somewhere made an error and overlooked my incompetence. Surely. Surely.

            Now that I’m in the humanities, unsurprisingly, little has changed. I worry that I will never be worthy enough to call myself an artist, let alone a writer. I worry that it is only a matter of time before I am either discovered by others to be a fraud, or that my house of cards will soon enough fall down on its own.

           

Enter Lesson 1:

 In his own way, my dad is also often mistaken for something he is not. In his case: a hardware store employee. Is it the dead paintbrush hair? The oversized glasses? The look of abject joy that graces his countenance as he leisurely peruses the aisles? I swear, no matter what hardware store he enters, it is only a matter of time before someone, thinking he works there, asks him for help finding something. Growing up, my third favorite field trip destination was the hardware store (after the grocery store and science museum. In that order). 

      I loved the thick columns of sticker-backed letters and numbers meant for the mailboxes. I loved the plastic signs that proclaimed things like No Trespassing, House for Sale and Private Property. I loved the Pepto-Bismol rolls of insulation that I’d immediately paw through as soon as my dad’s back was turned. I think I spent enough allowance money on stickers and plastic signs at Concord Lumber to fund a small expedition to the moon.

Hardware Stores. Better than chocolate.

            In one of my many tagalongs, after witnessing yet another exchange between my dad and a grateful looking stranger, I asked him what he was doing.

            Oh, he said. I was just showing the fellow where to find something.

            But why did he ask you?

            Well, he thought I worked here.

            But you don’t. 

            Dad shrugged. I know, but he didn’t know that. Besides, I knew exactly where to find the thing he was looking for.

            I nodded, satisfied by that anwer, and thought no more about the matter. Certainly, if there was a lesson or moral buried in there somewhere, I couldn’t be bothered to dig for it. Instead, I turned back  to my newest acquisition of slanted sticker letters and bendy No Parking sign, pleased with my evening’s haul.

Enter Lesson 2

            It wasn’t until college that I became comfortable with actually being a girl. (and, having finally achieved that, it would be several more years yet before I would fully acquiesce to being known as a ‘woman.’). It was not ironic that I chose a women’s college. It was a challenge. A challenge born of unconscious desperation, perhaps, but a challenge all the same. It was a challenge to myself to find a way to embrace both the sex I was born to and also the person that I knew I was. It was a challenge to myself to find a way to claim a right to the words female and girl (yeah okay, and woman too, fine). It was a challenge to find adequacy in my own skin. It was a challenge to become the female/girl/woman that I didn’t think could possibly exist, but that my friends and family had always seen in me. With quaking nerves and sometimes little else but persistence, I embarked on a long slog towards accepting, owning, and embracing my femininity. I’m still occasionally mistaken for a boy by people who don’t understand that short-hair is a choice, not a genotype, but I am no longer aggrieved by their mistake. I only pity them for the narrowness of their vision.

we can't all look like pin up girls, but lord knows some of us just keep trying! 

The thing is, it is easy to feel like a fraud. It is disturbingly easy. It takes very little effort and it can become such an entrenched habit that it feels like the only normal you have never known. On the other hand, it takes courage to decide to assume a mantle of worth. Of course, I feel like a fraud even saying that because I certainly don’t feel worthy to assume a mantle of such declarative authority. But here's where my dad’s hardware store adventures come in because it turns out there is a lesson there after all. Because he could have laughed off his customers’ mistake, or corrected them, or been embarrassed or annoyed, or even just handed them off to a real employee, but he didn’t because he knew he could help them. And so they continued to believe he was an employee, because it never mattered that he wasn’t. He rose to the challenge of their expectation, and he succeeded.

            Last month, when I was at a writer’s conference, I was stunned to hear other writers––writers whose prose and skills I deeply admire––esteem me not only as a person, but as an equal, a peer, a colleague. They think I have it in me. They think I can do it. They believe in me. Some days I think I can do it too. Some days, heck. I even believe in myself. Other days, I’m not at all sure. But what I need to remember is that in those moments when I’m not sure I have what it takes, when I feel like an inadequate fraud, when I am not sure that I even believe in myself, I have a choice. I can give up and give in to the old habit of feeling inadequate. Or I can take a deep breath and rise to the challenge.