Always, Always A ...

Weddings are in the air, and it is nice. I just bought our tickets to Dallas for my dear friend’s wedding in which I am honored beyond belief to be a bridesmaid. Yesterday I went to 47^th street to help a friend choose her wedding bands, and the weekend before that I took the same friend wedding dress shopping. She was totally overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. I didn’t really know either, but I planned a day of appointments for her at boutiques for “inspiration” and we had a nice day – and she tried on two dresses that were positively breathtaking and I could see it in her face and we both teared up some. It is a very powerful archetype, the Bride: and the moments in life where you and an archetype align are powerful, powerful moments, no matter how that alignment is manifest. It’s sort of the way even though the Tarot is rendered in dozens of styles, the Tower retains its Tower-ness; the World remains immutably the World.

Another good friend of mine’s sister is getting married this summer, and has been telling me how both incredibly happy and incredibly stressed-out her sister has been, because so much of planning a wedding involves engaging with a whole complex of vendors and media whose job on some level is to make you feel guilty and afraid that unless you spend x-hundred dollars per head on napkin rings you are a failure. [On of my worst experiences with this was after our first meeting with a caterer who busted out menus that started at $150 pp for fucking HORS D’OEUVRES and this guy was a friend of a friend. I had a full-on panic attack and threw up on the street afterwards. Later I got it together and catered our wedding for much, much cheaper – but it was the moment when I felt the shameful burning rays of God’s Decoder Ring TM like police flashlights busting Shame Party 2005: Why don’t we have any money? Why do I not have credit cards at age 33? Why didn’t we save anything? Who do I think I am to deserve anything? ]

But the other side of the wedding shame spiral is the shame women are made to feel at being anything APPROACHING a “Bridezilla.” God, I fucking hate that term. Our whole culture makes such a big deal out of getting married: to even TRY to have any kind of wedding involves engaging to some degree with the businesses and media surrounding weddings [many members of which are very nice and amazing – where I found my dress, for example, or the person who did our flowers] and then to top it all off, as a bride to be you are severely restricted in how much you are allowed to talk about this big event or OMFG you might be an asshole. All the women I know including myself have/ had internalized this shame, and it sucks. Why can’t you talk about a big party you are throwing involving a huge life change and celebration with your family and community? Whether it’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral or an impromptu flash mob on Coney Island, it’s a big deal! You are allowed to feel weird about it, happy about it, process it, figure out your take on it, and talk about it! Leave it up to America to find yet another Womanhood Catch-22 to make women feel guilty and silenced and shitty about a day that is a celebration of a choice that they’ve made.

I guess this comes from feeling protective of my friends who are going through this process because I remember how strongly it affected me, how much I felt like The Velveteen Bride, unable to run and play with the real brides, or whatever. Feelings of illegitimacy and isolation are something I’ve been struggling with for 25 years now, and although now I pretty much have the upper-happily-ever-after-hand, they surge back every now and again, in a wave of hot tears, or a strong kinaethestic compulsion to impale my heart on a stake. [I really wonder where that come from, actually, but it has been there forever, a sucking feeling in my chest that cries out to be stabbed like an itch needing scratching. Does anyone else have this? Is there an AutoHeartStabber's Anonymous?] Now it’s something I give a little space to, it doesn’t rule my life, nothing special, like birthmarks. I guess having lived in the grip of idiopathic shame for so long I want to keep it away from anyone I love, like Ripley yelling get away from her you bitch!

To be always a bride is to be always choosing the unknown over the safe, to choose vulnerability over cynicism, to choose throwing a party over freeloading, to choose giving your parents another shot over blaming them forever, to choose Yes I said Yes I will Yes and Let’s Go! One foot in front of the other, holding some flowers so I won’t stab myself in the heart.

Vegan White Trash Breakfast

I have been obsessed with vegan McMuffins. This one has a Gimme Lean patty on it (sauteed in Earth Balance with some garlic and fennel) and 2 slices of tofu, marinaded in garlic and tamari and then breaded in a little flour and salt and cayenne and fried in the Earth Balance) on a toasted English muffin with Vegenaise, ketchup and that spicy rooster sauce. Trey made fun of me, but I made him one yesterday with no mayonnaise and he agreed that it was awesome.

I'm still working for Dennis to keep him in Congress. I was crushed when he dropped out, but what can you do. I just hope that everyone who made fun of him enjoys their shitty, shitty healthcare premiums for the rest of their lives.

I have met some really amazing people through my Kucinich-ing and am totally 100% proud to support Dennis still. In addition, just through being truthful and talking to other people (including strangers) I got several people to support him in the primary. Even though it is scary, standing on a streetcorner with a sign ends up being the right thing to do sometimes, and I'm determined to continue to fight the good fight, to organize, and to try to be the change I wish to see in the world, not just blog IN ALL CAPS!!!!! about it.

Purple Potato Lady

We buy a lot of our produce from the place on Graham and Metropolitan that I recently noticed was named "Rosemary Farm." A few days ago I bought some Yukon Gold potatoes and the girl behind the counter asked me, "Why no purple potatoes today? You always buy the purple ones! You have an air of mystery, and you buy purple potatoes!"

Which made my day.

I'm Glad My Mom Isn't Around For This

My mom had many, many movie star crushes, some typical, some not-so (she had a big crush on Steve Buscemi, for example, and had a framed picture of him in her bathroom.) I can still see her handwriting in the letter she wrote me about her latest crush at the time, a "very talented young actor named Keith Ledger." Being the cunty, eye-rolling bitch I was often wont to be w/r/t my mom, I used to tell people about her constant erroneous take on his name. [In her defense, it turns she was not alone!] When I found out yesterday that he had died, the first thing I thought was that I was glad my mom wasn't around to know that "Keith Ledger" had died at 28 -- it would have broken her heart.

There are a lot of things I am glad my mother has missed. Another horrible flooding of her tiny apartment, her sister's death last July, my cousin's suicide last year, now Heath Ledger's death. It sounds insane but I know she would have been a wreck, not only for the premature loss of an actor whose good looks and talent she loved and crushed on, but because it would be just another reminder of how deeply sad and wrong the world can seem -- I remember how she was when John Lennon died.

Since Everyone's Reading That NYT Piece about "Ethical Slaughter"

Here's an interview demonstrating one of the many reasons why I love Isa Chandra Moskowitz, among other things.

Baggage

I just crossed "clean purse" off my to do list and lordy lordy, look who's got 40 pounds of crap in her bag! FOUR lipsticks, (NARS Pigalle, Fire Down Below, and Napoli, plus Poppy King's Rouge Sinner and Rose Sinner (obscured), FOUR Rimmel Soft Kohl eyeliners (there is also one in my desk drawer) and a Laura Mercier concealer. A stitch counter, an unopened cable needle, my 2007 and 2008 datebooks, loose prenatal vitamin tablets (next to the pennies.) 2 checkbooks and 2 pairs of gloves.

I got a Wellesley Women for Hillary e-mail the other day. I think it's great if you want to support Hillary, if you support her positions on the issues: subsidizing major insurance companies with tax monies and FORCING people to buy into these subsidies, continuing participation NAFTA which erodes our economy and exploits the workforce of other countries; if you think that the Patriot Act is awesome and support the Homegrown Terroism Act HR 1955; if you'd like to stay in Iraq and keep the massive illegal embassy and have no problem with the massively corrupt "oil law" that was the whole reason for the invasion in the first place; if you are fine with military force against Iran; if you support nuclear power, and if you believe that a corporation has the same legal rights as a person, then by all means vote for Senator Clinton.

I was on some comment thread over at Pandagon a couple of days ago, where the subject was how shitty the US healthcare system is. In the thread, I posted "Vote For Kucinich in the primary then, he's the only one who supports universal healthcare." A commenter asked me, "why do you think this is?" and I told her that it was probably because he was the only one who didn't take money from Big Insurance or Big Pharma, as Clinton, Edwards, and Obama do. And in a thread of 100+ comments, there was no response. No. Fucking. Response on the one issue that every American cares about.

Honestly, the Democratic party in this country is a fucking joke -- if the "liberal" bloggers like AmericaBlog and DailyKos (do not fucking get me STARTED on the dishonest post by Kos saying that since Hillary was the only Dem on the primary ballot in Michigan that all registered Dems should turn out for Romney as some kind of STRATEGY -- First of all, Kucinich and Gravel were on the ballot, and second of all, why are we being encouraged to stoop to this shit?) would rather play at being pundits following a horse race than talk about issues and support the only real progressive, then they deserve what they get. They deserve the flaccid Congress that they have. It's just a fucking embarrassment. It's bad that people are so fucking stupid -- when the so-called SMART PEOPLE are even stupider, it's truly pathetic.

Construction

Ahhh, soon to be the ugliest Scarano project to date. You can't see the bulldozers and pallets occupying the parking spaces on the street.

When I lived with my dear friend Hope on Kingsland Avenue, we would pass this corner every day on our way to the subway. When I was first dating/crushing on Trey, we would wave at his (now our!) house! One day I left a lipstick kiss on the doorjamb: in NARS' Gipsy.

Now that corner is on the way to -- ugh. Ugh, ugh. ugh.

This Is The Way The World Ends

With the ugliest of all Scarano buildings being built on your block.

I have no words.

Cognitive Dissonance

From the NYT, "Chef's New Goal: Looking Dinner In The Eye"

[...] More chefs are trying to bridge that gap. Tamara Murphy, the chef at Brasa in Seattle, took delivery of 11 freshly killed piglets last Friday, destined for dishes of pork belly with braised greens and paprika-rubbed roasted chops. “I don’t name them,” said Ms. Murphy, who wrote a weekly blog in 2006, chronicling the short lives of some of the piglets earmarked for her restaurant from Whistling Train Farm. “They are being raised for food, and there is a respectful distance I need to keep” she said. Ms. Murphy visited the piglets weekly, starting the day after their birth, and accompanied them to the slaughterhouse before serving them in a dinner that was called a Celebration of the Life of a Pig.

“The hardest part of the slaughter was the betrayal,” she said. “The pigs get in the trailer because they trust you, they get out of the trailer because they trust you, they go into the pen because they trust you.”

If this language were being used to describe human children instead of pigs, we would rightly decry the speaker as a sociopath. I call serious bullshit on Ms. Murphy's "respectful distance" that's a euphemism for "if I named the animals I was going to kill, I couldn't do it because it would make me feel horrible about the horrible thing I'm doing." There's no respect in treating a living animal like a "unit of production," even if it gets to run around and have fun before you "celebrate its life" by turning it into a tasty feast that you will shit out 36 hours later. How is that a celebration of life? It's a celebration of our capacity to rationalize fucking everything under the sun, that's what it is. It's a celebration of our ability to make all kinds of excuses for satisfying our hunger for a brief sensation. What kind of person weighs the crunch of bacon over the trust of a piglet? Ms. Murphy isn't starving, is she?

I mean, if a guy takes me out to dinner, and we see an awesome movie, and I have the time of my life, it's gotta be okay at the end of the evening if he pins me down, shoves his cock in my ass and near-painlessly slits my throat as he comes, right? I mean, I've had a good, free-range life, it was over in a second, and really, in the guy's defense, there's just nothing like the orgasm you get while fucking a dying chick in the ass! And I'm sure the guy is really honoring me, you know, in his heart! He's really grateful for what I've provided! I mean, I had a good life, right? And hey, it wasn't like I lived chained to the wall of a brothel for years before I was "processed," that's for sure! Thanks!

A Few Things

Did I mention that I hate Evites? I feel so guilty typing this as many fine people I love dearly use them to tell me about fun events, but I just fucking hate them. I hate having to click on five things to see what I've been E-vited to. I hate the nagging reminders that I still haven't responded to "Fajita-Fest 97" or whatever it is. I guess since I have never sent one I don't appreciate the convenience and the organization of the Evite, but, just like I can't bear to read things in certain fonts, the minute an event is manifested in an Evite my desire to attend plummets.

Did I mention that I hate the way people talk about politics like it's a fucking football game, and do so in a tone of overweening self-congratulation for being so much more sophisticated than people who actually care about, like, what happens to people? Did I mention that I want to drop-kick people who talk about "electability"? Because those are the same kind of namby-pamby wannabe Beltway insider "Dems" who thought Kerry was the key to 2004 and think that Hillary Clinton will somehow get elected because she has a shitload of money. John Aravosis is a perfect example of this, a fawning bootlicker who has the audacity to consider Kucinich to be not a real candidate and then bitches and moans about what a useless pile-of-shit Congress we have now. Connect the dots, moron. Vote your fucking values.

I was not surprised that Huckabee got Iowa. OF COURSE HE DID! LOOK WHERE WE LIVE!! He might as well be President Applebee's! If Huckabee get's the GOP nomination, I will be laughing my ass off and crying and puking at the same time.

Also -- I had a very unsettling dream in which Dennis Kucinich made a pass at me in the magazine store in Grand Central Station. I don't know what to make of that, as in real life there is no way any man, least of all Dennis would two-time Elizabeth Kucinich. I'm still voting for him in the primary, of course, and I'll be flyering in Union Square this coming Saturday. Consider yourselves E-vited, okay?

Truly, madly, sadly,

L