There has been some continued suckitude lately, but also some good stuff.

I’m starting with the yuck so I can end with the yay: better for me, better for you.

For a while there (like, the two years kind of while) the Scarleteen email just was NOT working. Basically, you get a site with THAT much traffic, you get so much spam every day that even a great email server gets jammed up every day. Given the content of a lot of spam is just stuff that really messes me up to read, I had to mass delete a LOT. This wasn’t a big deal: after all, I still had many ways for people to contact me otherwise, and the boards are always open. And me missing a lot of hate-mail (especially since, as I was just telling someone today, the big haters aren’t the fundamentalists: more often they’re the pissed-off hetero college boys who feel that the information we provide is going to make their dating pool less pliable: would that I were kidding)? Not exactly a bummer.

One boon of that was that I got a lot less personal emails from users. I’m not talking about hate mail, I’m talking about advice stuff. I always make clear that I do not do advice via email (I used to, years and years back, but I stopped). There are a couple reasons why. The biggest one is that given I’m often serving minors, I want everything I do and say to be up front and center so that it’s all out in the open; I don’t wind up with anyone thinking I’m soliciting their child in any way, or having an inappropriate relationship, and I also just feel like this is often such delicate work that I really prefer a sort of public monitoring. People have insinuated about what goes on “behind the scenes” in some pretty crappy ways in the past, but since I know full well that there usually IS no behind-the-scenes at all, it’s pretty easy to shrug off and just let people be the idiots they wanna be.

Another biggie is that there just isn’t time in a day, and while in many respects, working Scarleteen is often working for free, it at least has the possibility of paying me and the org sometimes. Not so with email: while I’ve accepted a deal to do some interfamilial email or phone counseling/mediation before, for a reasonable fee, there’s no way to do emails from minors that way, and I’d feel really weird about it.

The other reason, though, is that it shelters me from some of the truly awful stuff: I have enough of that to deal with in a day, and one person really can only take so much. Often, people (for obvious reasons) do not want to publicly post the worst of the worst — or even what they think is normal, but you feel is nightmare — so even if you say you don’t do email, they’ll try, in the hope that you’ll be sympathetic, which, of course, I often am. But since the redesign where we now have contact forms up, I’ve started to get more and more of those again, despite setting clear limits where I ask people not to email me personally for advice.

Like the woman yesterday who asked me to give her “proof” to give to her boyfriend who left her because she had such terrible bleeding from rough vaginal and anal sex that he’d come to the bizarre conclusion she could only be bleeding like that because she’d been cheating on him. But that’s not it: she also made clear to me that he had masculinity issues which involved him needing to have rough sex to prove something, and to keep him, she needed me to explain all this blood was okay and he could still keep doing that. It didn’t matter to her that she might well be sustaining injuries and seriously opening herself up to infections: the concern was keeping the guy. Then there was the other one, on the boards, a new poster who posted to ask if her boyfriend continuing with anal sex (she was the receptive partner) until he reached orgasm, despite the fact that she told him at the start it was hurting her and asked him to stop throughout. I explained that yes, that was rape, and not only did she tell me she’d thought it was “just” an abuse, but she also was exceptionally confused because “he deserved to feel good,” and doing what he did was “just being a guy,” wasn’t it?

No, I don’t have thimngs like these every single day. But it’s awfully close. The night before last, when I couldn’t sleep, I was up half the night on the boards counseling a 14-year-old incest and physical abuse survivior (from her brother and father, respectively) whose main concern was that she HAD to be on the pill. Why? Because — she wouldn’t give me details, and I didn’t press because I could counsel her without them — the situation she was in (now at least out of that home with the incest, thank christ) was “complicated” and sex was “going to keep happening whether she liked it or not.” I talked to her as best I could, but you know, she hasn’t had any real support or counseling, and it can be mighty hard to get a big sexual abuse survivor to understand that she really does have a right to say no to whomever. And ultimately, you have to just tell her how to get the birth control, knowing that if there isn’t anything you can do to help her to be better cared for (and to better self-care) that’s at least one way you can mitigate the bad outcomes that she’s willing to pursue. But when you go to bed after that, you don’t sleep well.

Tangentially, I was trying to explain to Mark last night that counseling for abuse amoung teens that age can get really tricky — and serious props to those who do nothing BIUT that, full-time for that age group — because they’re not just abuse survivors, they’re also normal 14-year-olds who behave and talk like normal 14-year-olds. I had to ask that one to please stop saying “My mother will KILL me if…” because in context, it was making it nigh unto impossible for me to figure out what her mother would ACTUALLY do, and if there was any abuse there with Mom, too, or not.

I do get things like this almost everyday, and sometimes several times in a day. Every now and then, they’re some creep wanting to just get his rocks off by pretending to be a rape survivor asking for help (and in those cases, whereas most survivors don’t usually want to start a conversation with a straner by detailing every minute of their rapes, with those posts, it is always written in explicit detail, that I get to read, lucky me, from the start). But from what I can tell, that’s the rarity, not the norm. (And every now and then, I have a wonderful, blissful day where absolutely not a single post makes me want to cry at all: they are infrequent, especially during the summer months, but they are WONDERFUL days.)

Needless to say, this stuff is stressful as hell, and not something you can often just call up any old friend and recount: more times than not, on days like these, I’ve started to learn to just talk to no one at all about them. It’s so damn isolating to do this kind of work, and even more so when so much of the world around you is bound and determined to say these things never, ever happen, or only happen very rarely. This stuff isn’t rare: it is, literally, an everyday occurrence. And fuck, does it suck.

What else sucks?

Still no end in sight to my financial nightmares. But I don’t want to talk about that.

Speaking of nightmares, last night, likely as a result of the overwhelming yuck of the last day or so, I had a really awful dream, starring no less that four bloated, drowned corpses being pulled out of the water right in front of my face, and a Montessori classroom that was bigger and messier than I’d ever seen, and which I was responsible for cleaning up — a Sisyphysian task, in part because it was also full of people, and every time I’d go in a different corner, I’d find myself without my clothes. Also in this classroom I found my old bunny is his cage, which I had forgotten to ask anyone to care for over the summer. He should have just been dead, that given, but instead, he had turned into this yellowed, vile and shriveled mass with bright yellow eyes that was still barely alive. Those were the highlights.

Well, I was supposed to go over to Cheryl’s land Saturday, but alas, my dog got sick AGAIN. This is the second time in two months, from a dog who has never gotten sick before, and who is also the baby to both Mark and myself here (in fact, he gets way more freaked than I when she’s not right). He was still out of town, so I didn’t feel okay leaving her scratching herself silly and vomiting and having all kinds of big bowel yuck, so I had to reschedule, even though we both really, really needed that day.

(As of right now, the vet opinion is that the fleas of last time had their revenge: apparently my dog is also massively allergic to fleas — or that’s their best guess now — and apparently when that’s the case, your dog can be not-right for even a month or two after you treat the damn things. Ain’t nothin’ like being a pet owner when you’re broke, as you may know: it never fails that just when you’re scrambling for cash to pay the usual bills, they have to get sick and you have to get stuck with vet bills on top of everything else. Argh! The antihistimanes they gave me for her were supposed to do the trick, but alas, they don’t seem to have, so I’ll likely be back at the vet AGAIN today or tomorrow.)

Know how women who are pregnant get baby weight? I have book-weight. You have to spend nearly a year with insanely long days strapped to your chair writing, under a fierce deadline…well, some things are fairly inevitable. I don’t really care all that much from a body image perspective, but I don’t dig it from the perspective of my body feeling out of whack — I’ve noticed over the years that I seem to be really sensitive about my own equilibrium — and the bigger issue is that I have to go do book promo back home in a couple of weeks and my favorite stuff to do things in and travel in isn’t feeling very comfortable right now, and I’m hardly in a spot to go buy new stuff to tide me over until moving around a lot again sets me back right.

Lastly, it sucks when you have this flood of brilliant ideas right as you’re falling asleep. I had this happen the other night, but as an insomniac, I know better than to get up and jot them down: I may be up a whole night if I do. If I go to bed at all tipsy or the like, I just accept they’re gone, but the other might I went to bed clean as a whistle, so fully expected to remember them all, and lo: not a single one remained in the morning, only the memory of brilliance long lost to me.

One forgets that as the years creep up, even though you’re totally supposed to be too young to be going senile, age itself is then only toxin required to blitz your memory.

* * *

Enough with the bad stuff.

Know what does NOT suck?

What does NOT suck is your partner coming home from a day-job biz trip to Lincoln, Nebraska (I keep telling him I feel like he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman or something, since he gets shipped to the oddest places) and having a perfecty-perfect stay at home date where you walk to the market to get what you want to cook, make a beautiful dinner together, mix up some experimental cocktails (more on that in a minute) and laze about utterly until the wee hours blabbing away. Well, mostly laze about except for the hour you get weird and have to hula-hoop in your dining room to bad 70’s pop just ’cause. But who doesn’t?

It also doesn’t suck to stretch out the anticipation with snuggles-only that night so you can have phenomenal welcome-back sex the next day.

So, here’s my fave cocktail of the evening, which currently remains nameless: icy-cold vodka (about a third of the glass) and a glass chilled after lining it and the rim with fresh orange and orange zest. Then fill with limeade and some lime pulp, and stick a big sprig of peppermint in there, and muddle it the TEENIEST bit. Yum. Free book to anyone who wants to give me the best name for it.

It also doesn’t suck to have a really good book-sales week, and last week was phenomenal. It’s pretty cool when you see your YA sex guide outsell the book that was your own YA sex guide way back when (yes, there was one day in that good last week where my numbers eclipsed Our Bodies, Ourselves: talk about an ego-boost). Rachel: I think I’ve got you to thank for that, gal.

It’s not at all sucky when one of your favoritest friends gets the hang of your “just drop by” mentality and does, and you get to head over to your neighborhood Sunday farmer’s market, and eat peaches so ripe there’s a flood of juice at your feet, and drink lemonade so tart and fresh it makes the sides of your mouth stick together. Actually, over the last couple of weeks nearly all of my fave buds up here have just dropped by, including two women who just dropped by from Tacoma — an hour away.

It’s really not sucky to have one of your favorite feminist orgs who you didn’t even know knew you existed not only interview you — and acknowledge the work you do as feminist work, because it’s about freaking time someone from something cornerstone did — but ask really amazing questions that bust your brain (an extended version — we got pretty deep into it — lives here). And Chris? We don’t even know each other — well, rather, I didn’t know you until now — but finding this this morning seriously made my day: that’s easily one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and you couldn’t have said it at a better time. I may need to steal that first sentence for my press package.

It doesn’t suck that when I go back home to Chicago, I’m definately going to be seeing one old friend I’ve missed, one old friend I have never even met offline, one of my best friends from elementary school who, oddly, found me because she’s gone into YA sex education and nursing herself (was there something in the water?), my two favorite aunts (one of whom is so close in age to me she’s more like a sister: my mother comes from big Irish family, another of whom I really need to tell stories about sometime), my Dad, my Mom, my favorite ex of all time (and his partner, whom I adore), one of my favorite living contemporary artists (who I’ll also get to take to my faveorite art museum anywhere: how cool is that?) and also very probably one of the teachers who saved my life, one of my best friends from high school and another from college. It also looks like (details forthcoming) despite my favorite feminist — really, just my fave bookstore, period — bookstore being in some crisis right now, likely get to do an event there. I even get to catch a Cubs game in bleacher seats, and take my sweetie to Wrigley for his first time.

(I also will likely be going on Fox News while I am there, but that’s more terrifying than it is not-sucking.)

I also pitched a book idea to my editor I really, really, really hope will fly. Not only do I just not want to pitch books to other pubs right now because I so badly want to work with my same editor again, I also really don’t want to do anything super-heavy or as provocative as what I’d usually do or be asked to do just this one time around. It’d be really nice to do work at least once in my life which half the populace or more soesn’t think is shameful and needs to be ferreted away somewhere. And I need a break from the heavy. I lit on something that is far lighter, but also still incredibly important — I don’t do fluff, just not my thing: don’t want to, and I suck at it, besides — and still young adult, which I’d like to stay in for a while. And not primarily about sex, thank freaking christ. Think good thoughts.

And today, I’m not doing any advice, I’m not reading any advice letters, I’m not even looking at the boards. Too. Much. I have other work I need to get caught up on, I have books I need to ship out, I need to do some boxing, some laundry and given last night’s nightmares and endless dog-scratching, I should even try to just take a freaking nap.

P.S. I’ve been noticing that in the last year, when I write here, I’ve been seriously overusing parentheses, and I have absolutely no idea what that is all about (really: none whatsoever).

filed under Heather Corinna | bookish bits | apropos of nothing
posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 9:36 am

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