I did my first day here at the home office where I was doing both jobs — Scarleteen and working on CONNECT and the CRC website — at the same time.

This is what a ludicrous amount of multitasking looks like. My corner desk, with…

• to the far left, my home office laptop on a freestanding table, where an ashtray that so isn’t anything close to empty also lives
• the CRC work laptop to the right of it on my desk, with a mouse plugged in because this business with PCs (first time I’ve been stuck with one of these stinkers) having two buttons drives me batty with a touchpad
• my stationary computer on while I downloaded cards from my camera and kept a little music going
• my phone on the desk to the right of that, with my headpiece attached to my ear
• one legal pad of notes and to-dos for each gig to the right of that
• a cup of perpetually tepid coffee on one of the legal pads
• a jade plant at the end of the desk, desperately trying to represent
• the birth control comparison chart for CRC stretched out over my office chair behind me
• and me, in the middle of all the melee, rolling around on a swiss ball I use as a chair

For most of the day, I couldn’t figure out if I was doing the kind of work I think I do, or somehow electronically responsible for the fate of the free world. I had several paranoid moments of feeling like there was probably some sort of button somewhere I shouldn’t push that had the capacity to delete Australia. Halfway through the day, I shouted “Mayday, MAYDAY!” into the phone just because it seemed like the thing to do.

Want to know the big funny? All this, and I am the girl who, in the early eighties, was completely incensed with my father, who had been having a field day for a while taking apart and putting together Ataris, who thought this whole newfangled computer business would be all the rage, endlessly nagging me to learn DOS so that I could manage the amazing and oh-so-useful feat of making the letter A blink on a black screen with orange text. I HATED technology. I even got my stray cat at the time, Bowie, to pee on one of the keyboards in a shared protest.

I still have to confess that while I know full well how I fell into this tangled-cord-spaghetti, beepedy-beep-beep, creepy-chrome digital business (in short print publishing = instant bankruptcy), it’s a full-tilt love/hate relationship.

Which is why I must head to my garden immediately, now that much of my workday is done, and get as stinky, muddy and full of pollen as is humanly possible. I might even kiss a slug.

posted in Heather Corinna, home, apropos of nothing, online life, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

Just a quick bookmark here so no one thinks I fell off the face of the planet.

Most of my Minneapolis trip was great, and I got to enjoy a lot of sun. It perhaps would have behooved me to ask how warm it had been before the week I arrived before I dove headfirst into Lake Calhoun, but I survived that error all the same. The Baby Liam is well into his two’s for the good and the ill, and began calling me “Daddy Heather” for some reason, which I have no doubt his father will not think is the best thing ever. I had a migraine for several of the days there and as a result, learned a bit late in the game that the person to send for coffee for you is not your friend who a) doesn’t drink it herself and b) has a degenerative eye disease. Only many days of growing pain later did I discover I’d been drinking decaf.

It was great seeing people, and really good to have some real downtime. I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to, but that was mainly because I did actually manage to truly vacate a lot of the time there, a nearly impossible task for me.

I, however, came home to considerable and very unexpected catastrophe, and need to find the right way to discuss how I’m feeling in writing without actually disclosing any actual details of the situation. That situation has me a bit of a wreck, though, so I’m not quite there yet and need a couple of days before I can write about it, my trip, or anything else.

I now return you to your regular programming. More later.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, wah | permalink | comments (2) »

I just got back from doing a morning birth control and safer sex presentation for the clinic at a temporary shelter for teen runaways down in Chinatown. It was all boys, which was unexpected, but I grooved with it and all went well. Still trying to figure out how one of the guys was earnestly convinced that his girlfriend hides needles in her hair in order to puncture his condoms — despite the fact that none of his condoms have ever failed to his knowledge, nor has he ever seen any of these aforementioned needles — and why he felt it was so reasonable to suggest that these are things all women do, but that’s beside the point. I’m exposed to so much paranoia, ignorance and just general weirdness in my line of work that often, what surprises me is the absence of it.

The real hilarity of my morning was that on the bus down there, I was a few rows behind a man who had some mix of OCD and Tourette’s going on. He would count all of us on the bus methodically and with his hands — “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, either, nine…” — getting more vexed the higher he got in his count, and when he got to the end of the list, he’d then shake his hands, and yell with no small measure of frustration, “Sex, sex, SEX!”

It took everything I had not to let him know that I heard him, and I was en route to do the best that I could to handle it, but he was going to have to be a little more patient, for crissakes.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, seattle, apropos of nothing, travel exhuasts me, workworkwork | permalink | comments (3) »

The last week and a half in review?

The last few days I’ve had that wonderful cycle I have every other month which results in not only heinous pain when my period starts, but hours of vomiting. This time, I hit a record eight hours from start to finish of the vomit, to the point that even keeping water down was impossible. Not my best day ever. I was at clinic when all this started and was at least able to get an EFT treatment from the doc there, which fended off the worst of it so I could finish my workday. Unfortunately, it only fended off the big yuck into the evening, and my body seemed to want to get revenge for dismissing her schedule.

After several years of this, there is still no solid theory on what the heck the deal is. I do have more votes for this being the flirtations of peri-menopause than anything else, and it does appear that in those cycles proceeding this, I’m anovulatory. As I mentioned to someone else though, if this is flirtation, knowing that given my age I’m looking at a long courtship, I’m not excited. And I don’t even want to think about what the consummation of this relationship will be like. Ugh. So much crap for an organ that, for the most part, I’ve never even wanted to use.

Given I was on the couch all day and night yesterday after I could finally keep enough water down to get a painkiller in my system, I caught up with some film. I’ve had Sweet Land sitting here for weeks wanting to see it, and it was just a beautiful, quiet and earnest film. I didn’t realize that Mark Orton (of Tin Hat Trio, who if you don’t know, you so should) had done the soundtrack, either. As I am wont to do with Jarmusch films in general, I fell asleep twice when Broken Flowers first came out, so tossed it off, but had a few people telling me it was so, so good, so finally could watch it yesterday. I remain unimpressed. My father said he couldn’t stand La Vie en Rose, but I rabidly disagree. Parts of it felt disjointed (though my suspicion is that was intentional), but I thought it was amazing, and sweet jesus did that woman ever earn her Oscar. Brilliant, brilliant acting.

Due to the holiday on Monday, I am graced with a schedule at clinic this coming week where my two days are one right after the other, rather than being spaced out over the week, which I mightily look forward to. At home, the way I work tends to be in very extended two or three day spurts at a time. Since I’m usually working Mondays and Thursdays away, that’s been creating a problem in my usual patterns, and only allowing me Friday - Sunday to do that, taking away the time Mark and I usually have together since he’s got a standard day job with a standard schedule. So, this weekend, this should allow us some extra time, and also give me the whole front of the week to finish up a few articles I’m almost done with. I’ve been working on a sort of meditation on the validity of love for young people, so often told the love they experience isn’t bonafide or real, that I’m particularly stoked to finish.

The Thursday before last, I came home from clinic feeling pretty defeated, having had my first repeat client since I started working there, a 17-year-old girl with one of those few-years-older boyfriends who looks like Joe Sensitive on the surface, but who actually is a controlling, careless ass. In fact, the first time I saw both of them at the tail end of January, the clinic was still allowing “support” people (I put that in quotes since they were often anything but: more often than not, the ones who wanted to come back only did because they wanted to control the client) into counseling appointments. He was one of my examples as to why I, personally, was not at all okay with that, and the policy has since changed. While I sat there explaining her procedure, her aftercare, asking how she was about her choice, he sat playing video games on his cell phone. Would that I were kidding. As well, he told me this whole lovely fairy story about how the pregnancy was all her doctor’s fault because he didn’t renew her pill prescription on time. When I asked if her doctor had also then, of course, made clear he was never to wear a condom under any circumstances, I got a shrug and a sneer. When I told her she could have a Chlamydia and Gonorrhea screening with her procedure if she wanted, HE answered for her saying she should probably get that, and when I not only made clear I wasn’t freaking talking to him, but asked if, given how invested he was in her screening, if he’d ever had one himself, he told me no as if I had asked if he ever tore the legs off of squirrels. What a charmer.

And there she was, back again a week ago, and she was sent home with three months of pills last time, no less. Of course, Mr. Wonderful was still with her, and very not-pleased when he couldn’t come back into my office this time. I did the sneering that day. Alas, she wouldn’t talk to any of us about birth control, or much of anything, even though she was back in the office for another procedure not even three months later. Obviously, I can’t keep watch over any client to assure they use the birth control we give them, or do anything outside the office to help them get away from jerks. So, I know I’m not at all responsible for her being right back there, but it is pretty hard not to feel like, somehow, you failed someone in that spot; like there were some magic words I could have said but wasn’t smart enough to think of. It’s frustrating, and it’s hard not to bring that home and stew in it.

On the other hand, I’ve done a few options sessions lately, hour-long sessions expressly for clients who just don’t know what to do about a pregnancy and need to talk it through, and I love those. They often do get pretty emotional, but usually within just that one hour, you get to watch someone come in totally conflicted and lost and leave resolved, clear and confident. Two of my last three decided to terminate, and one decided to continue her pregnancy and parent: all felt good about their choices, and that is incredibly rewarding. One common thread I see in a lot of these though, no matter someone’s age, are families pressuring them into a given choice. A lot of the time in these sessions, you have to spend the first quarter or even half of them just getting the client clear when it comes to putting away everyone else’s opinion, whether the pressure is to continue a pregnancy or terminate. But the mere fact that any family makes a condition of their love what a woman does with her own pregnancy and her own body is so incredibly maddening. Watching someone feel like (or be directly told that) they have to choose between what they know is right for them and the love of their family makes me want to hurl even without my grumpy uterus.
I finally got my camera in for repair: here’s hoping they can actually fix it. They seemed about 50/50, which was not especially heartening. I need a working camera, both for the photo gig in Minneapolis next month, and for my own well-being. Being unable to make any art over the last handful of months has been seriously sucky.

Plus, the garden is coming along really beautifully this year, and my old camera from early 2000 isn’t at all cutting the mustard when it comes to capturing it. (It is not, for the record, half full of poisonous flowers this year, as I unconsciously chose last year. I am taking this as a signal of improved mental health on my part.) Since the dog also has a habit of stealing my strawberries and cherry tomatoes, I also made a small garden just for her this year in the front with those things of her very own. This may or may not make any sort of difference, and may, in fact, only be indicative of the fact that I take my dog a little too seriously.

There’s also been family drama, but I’m not going there. Let me just say that a lifetime of my parents being unable to stand each other, and ever being the person perpetually shoved into the middle, is truly tiresome.

Mark is off to the start of SIFF tonight, where a feature he produced last year is playing, and I’m off to an evening out with a co-worker at the fantastic new cantina a few blocks away which includes some vegan deliciousness, then up to the Copper Gate for a perhaps ill-advised bout of Norwegian grain alcohol. I have a little gardening on my plate today, a little Scarleteen work, a couple edits on an anthology piece, some tidying-up and a few snuggles where I can get them.

(And hey: happy birthday, Fish! My father sends birthday wishes to you as well, still clearly nursing his mad crush on you.)

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, workworkwork, abortion, in which I throw up in my mouth a little | permalink | comments (4) »

I started a few different entries coming from the events of the last week or two, and I’ll be finishing and publishing those over the next week or so.

But just so everyone knows and no one worries, I’m doing just fine. I feel emboldened, actually.

Shelter Island was absolute heaven, and exactly what I needed. I met Joani Blank after my talk and totally fangirled all over her, squealing like a goofball in her face and hugging the stuffing out of her, all the while whispering that I was trying very hard to stop and would understand if she wriggled her way out of my grasp. Deb Levine was awesome to work with, and I met an incredible man who has been doing psychotherapy for sex offenders for a couple decades. I have new freckles. My Dad is here and that just rocks. Joriel and I went out yesterday so I could buy my birthday present for myself, new plants for my garden, including a horsetail which existed before the dinosaurs did. I wrote a very painful check to the IRS, but I’m over it and resisted the urge to enclose a note that read, “Dear U.S. Government: here is your fucking blood money, so you can go kill a bunch of innocent people instead of using it to take care of all of us like you should be. Your pal, Heather.” I sent out yet another huge batch of t-shirts (we’ve sold over 80 now), and read some amazing letters from other survivors, saw an incredible support from someone I don’t even know that just floored me in the best way, and played a couple very hilarious games of Scrabble with Mark, Heath and my Dad. I’m looking forward to a small birthday dinner tomorrow with the people I love.

I’m okay.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

Tomorrow, right after clinic, I’m leaving on a jet plane. It is technically — as usual — a work trip, but very much out of the ordinary, I will only have to work for around two hours on Sunday. The rest of that time, we will simply be enjoying the sun and the sand on Shelter Island.

In other words, it really is, however brief, an actual, bonafide vacation — I think if it’s more than 36 hours it’s no longer just a getaway or a day trip — something I have not had in such a long time it’s scary. Something I have needed for years.

The timing is completely brilliant: there could not be a better time for me to be able to just get the hell out of dodge, grab a few books and my sweetheart, and decompress. Now that things are dying down a bit — knock on wood, but so far today I have not gotten even one piece of hate mail — I’m actually feeling pretty okay. Stronger, more resilient than I thought I was. Tired, and certainly a little world-weary, but I’m okay. Thanks to everyone who lent me some support over the last few days: I very much needed it, and it was absolute gold.

My Dad is here now (and we did have That Talk this morning, and it went very well), and will be taking care of my child, otherwise known as my dog. I’ll get to come back to see him for another five days, and while I have to do work from home in that time, I will only need to go to the clinic one day that week. He’ll also be here for my 38th — how do these things happen? — birthday next Friday, which is just awesome.

So, off with me. I still have taxes to try and finish, a Dad to hang out with, a pug to snuggle, a bag to pack and fifty gazillion more things to do. But after 5:00 tomorrow, until Monday morning, I’ll be exceptionally busy harvesting freckles, enjoying a cocktail or twelve, soaking my toes in the pool and thanking the powers that be for that much-needed respite.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, travel exhuasts me, simple joys | permalink | comments (7) »

Oh, but there’s just nothing like waking up in the morning to find an image of you (from a clearly copyrighted page, no less) used without your permission and to be the unidentified rape survivor used as a poster child without even a request for your permission, let alone the permission itself. Having your work (Scarleteen) attributed to someone else is just icing on the cake. Given the subject matter, there’s a pretty grotesque and sad irony afoot, to say the least. Sure, it’s likely just editorial/journalistic carelessness, but it does strike me as sending the message that rape survivor = available to anyone for their own use without permission.

This is not to say I expect better things of Gawker or Jezebel — nor that I didn’t send their shared legal department a nastygram minutes ago — but rather, to say that I’m clearly going to require an awful lot of coffee, a very long bath, a hug and to manage my general disappointment with people today.

P.S. To friends who I told about my father coming down with pneumonia — which is obviously incredibly dangerous for him given his general health and the conditions he lives in — I just heard from him and he finally seems to be on the mend. That also means he will be able to come up and stay with me for a week and a half as planned next week.

P.P.S. If you’re local to Seattle, I just took a call from KOMO news on the I Was Raped project, who have assured me I can count on them for the sensitivity I have not otherwise encountered much today.  I’m not entirely optimistic, but we’ll see.  It is crazy to me that I have to explain (and I have, several times today to different people) that my choosing the context where an image of me identifying myself as a survivor is not minor.  A big photo of me on my local news can mean that I get to spend days, even weeks possibly running into people locally who know me only as “that girl who got raped,” by my face, it might mean opening myself up to all kinds of things with groups of people that are broader than the groups I usually encounter.

I will probably have more to say after the segment is aired, depending on what they used of what I said, but I gotta say, so far, this doesn’t go down as one of my best days ever.  I feel exposed — and given, I signed up for some of that, hoping it will be a worthwhile thing for others — and like I’ve had to fight for my right not to be some sort of commodity and it’s just… I don’t know.  It’s just something, and not something very great for me at the moment.

posted in Heather Corinna, surviving abuse, body/mind, apropos of nothing, online life | permalink | comments (1) »

I am physically and emotionally exhausted. This front page and everything on it is why.

And now I seriously have to go to bed since I need to get up in just over five hours. Bloody hell.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, rape, surviving abuse, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (0) »

For the next day or so, I’m going to be taking a little bit of less-work downtime. Deep breaths? Check. Friend I haven’t seen in years coming to visit tonight (who I fully intend to drag over to the Copper Gate for some Aquavit-induced mania)? Got it. Tidying up the house and doing some much needed zen-style-scrubbing? You betcha. Some mighty-swell morning sex? And how. Snoozin’ pug at my feet? Aw. Made a fire to have some quality meditation time and fit a little yoga in first? Next on the agenda, followed by a nice, hot bath. I still have some work to at home do today and tomorrow, but so help me, I’m going to be doing it at the pace normal people do.

Yesterday we had the two-clinic staff meeting where I did my segment on self-defense for my co-workers which was…eh, it was okay. I’ve never had to try and fit a whole self-defense course, including everything from prevention to evasion to physical defense in just over one hour’s time, so it felt a little bit like five-minute-Shakespeare, but that’s okay. One does what one can with what one has to work with. Unfortunately for Mark, I found out over dinner last night that I had defense so much on the brain Sunday that he got attacked by sleeping-me twice during the night, including a sloppy elbow strike as well as a much more skillfully executed heel strike straight to his nose. Blimey: the things people who sleep with me have to put up with. If it isn’t talking, it’s my usurping the whole of the bed, if I’m not waking up hyperventilating with night terrors, I’m interpreting my bed-mate as an assailant in need of a takedown.

Beyond my unfortunately violent nocturnal activities, there’s nothing much to see here. Getting some new things up and done at Scarleteen, getting things in place for one new syndication as well as a volunteer consulting gig, am all set for the SSSS conference/plenary speakership w/Deb Levine in April (and a few days away in San Diego with my sweetie as a bonus: it’s a working vacation, but I’ll take what I can get!), still working on some fundraising avenues, busy at the clinic per usual (which also includes brainstorming on developing more ways to get some extra sex ed to clients), and daydreaming about a time in my life I really hope I’ll see where I’m not working so damn hard all the freaking time.

posted in Heather Corinna, subconscious life, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (1) »

This is shaping up to be a seriously crazy week: I’ve already done two days of clinic time, and on Monday, we had new protocols, new paperwork, and one counselor out with the flu on one of the busiest days I’ve seen there so far. My first chart showed up at 8:15 and the last one I pulled was just before 5:00, with only a half hour break for a quick lunch in there. It also included a client to whom I had to break the news that she was too late for a termination, which always seriously sucks, to say the least. Yesterday, I went downtown (a MUCH better commute: I’m only a 20-minute bus ride away, tops) and did some BDI logic model training for the sex ed outreach arm of the clinic which was awesome, but that meant last night and continuing through today, I’m racing to finish a piece past a deadline for something else, and then have to do a bunch of work for extra training in Options Counseling for Friday. Tomorrow I’m probably going to want to just take my coffee in an IV since I have to counsel all day then jet over to a public health clinic at night to do some sex ed work. Then, over the weekend, I need to do some prepping for our bi-monthly all-clinic staff meeting Monday because I’m teaching a self-defense piece to staff, and I’m a bit rusty when it comes to teaching self-defense. Somewhere amidst all of that I have to try and at least do some of the usual Scarleteen work.

So, yeah: still exhausted. It’s old news, I know.

When a little bit of time shows up, I’ll write more about this is depth because I have a lot to say, but over the past couple of months, I’ve reconnected very strongly with an ex, and it’s been tremendously powerful. This is someone who I had hurt, made amends with over ten years ago after a five-year-period where we didn’t speak, then the amends and what all happened in the one-week-period of time around sent me into a massive tailspin which had legs for years of my life. We only started talking again after this recent reconnection, and we seem to finally have found a place that really works for us, and that’s just incredibly fortifying and restorative for both of us. We had a very intense and highly charged relationship — and it was one of the rare one for me where I was with someone very similar to me; I tend more often to get involved with people who are a contrast to me — and while we loved each other immensely, and knew one another very deeply, I don’t think we ever really had a real friendship in all of that. A lot of that had to do with both of us being so young for something so big, and also both being so post-traumatic in various respects, but I also think we just weren’t in the space in our lives yet to manifest what we had as a friendship. Being able to forge one now feels like the rightest thing ever, and it’s been amazing to really feel that, especially getting close to almost 20 years after we first met.

On the other hand, last week someone I went to Jr. High with managed to track me down, and the group of friends from back then have apparently all reconnected and been looking for us stragglers. While it was awesome to hear from that person, that reconnection — especially with everyone from then — isn’t something I want to pursue. That spanned a period of my life which was easily the most traumatic I have ever had, where for those years, I had to invest energy every day in outwardly projecting a person who…well, wasn’t me. I had so many horrendous things happen to me during that period of time, my home life was so awful, and having no history with those kids since I had only moved to that area once the bad got started, there wasn’t a single friend then who really had any idea of what I was really grappling with or trying to survive. Meeting up with them again, even just via email or the phone, would be so surreal for me; seeing people who felt like they knew you and feel warmly about the shell they knew, but who you knew didn’t know you at all, on top of a 24 year-lapse of any contact just strikes me as sad and strange. So, I’ve had a few bittersweet moments around that over the last couple of days: it stinks to be reminded of a childhood you were robbed of, and it’s not something I choose to reflect on often, to say the least.

Mark got home from Austin late Monday night, and last night we got to reunite in the somewhat ritual fashion we seem to have: we crack a bottle of wine, take turns sharing everything the other one missed while we were apart, start collectively cooking while blaring some music so we can dance in the kitchen at the same time, enjoy a meal, gab some more, then head upstairs to get all sweaty, juicy and melty. Paired with the fact that I could sleep until 8 this morning, it was a bonafide luxury, one I very, very much needed. I even got to wake up with some serious bedlocks from a lot of happy thrashing, which Mark would have had himself if he had any hair.

And with that, back to the grindstone go I.

Addendum: Piece finished. Man, I love writing manifestos. That was tough but supremely gratifying.  Now on to a quick bath, homework for the training Friday, and if I get really lucky, to bed.

posted in Heather Corinna, my fine romance, history, apropos of nothing, workworkwork, heart work | permalink | comments (2) »

Know what’s cool?

What’s cool is when you have one friend staying in town for one thing, who is friends with another set of your friends also in town at the same time, and neither of them knew that was the case until you mentioned it.

That means that early this afternoon, we not only get to grab a brunch with Carol and Robert, but with Elise, all of whom are also old friends. I expect ridiculousness to ensue, which is good. I could use some ridiculousness these days.

I did already get a dose of some Friday night. Once a year, Mark has all of his day-job co-workers over for an evening that involves a terrifying amount of alcohol. But these are geeks (Mark’s day job is all about traditional gaming), and they’re affable drunks. To mix it up, we invited a few of my co-workers from my day job over, aming it a very strange mix of gaming geeks and abortion workers, which if we do again, will heretofore be titled Drinky’s 2nd Annual Geek and Abortion Provider Ball. Just because it’d have to.

Speaking of ridiculousness, a couple of days before that I had a phone conference with a couple of people whose work is in conjunction with the U.N., so I had to call in on one of their lines. Now, I don’t know why I was surprised that the United Nations has an automated voice mail system — I mean, who doesn’t? — save that my brain does tend to start at a luddite place with most things and only advance when forced to. So, yes, my image of the UN was a bunch of delegates sitting in a room at a bunch of wooden desks with a podium or two in there. So, when I hit the voice mail system, my imagination went on a silly spree, and rather than hearing what it was actually saying, I heard things like…

You have reached the United Nations. For world peace, press one. To forcibly eject George Bush from the planet, press two: we are experiencing high volume on this line, so please wait patiently for the next available representative. If you’re one of those idiots sure the U.N. is to blame for every problem you have, press three to be connected to the NRA or four to be reminded that if you are not Native, you, too, are an immigrant, asshole.

This resulted in me starting my call by having to explain why I was laughing rather than saying hello, which was a little awkward.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

(So sorry I haven’t kept up with the photo blogging or, in absence of such, any writing here over the last couple of weeks. The short answer — which is also the long answer — is that I am simply working too many jobs. That’s not going to change any time even remotely soon, nor is my workload going to decrease anywhere, but I am hoping at my body and mind will at least start adjusting better soon so I have some time and brainpower back to get back here. As it stands now, on clinic days I come home, shove food in my face, stare at a wall or a screen for just a little bit and pass out. When it’s not a clinic day, I either work in a frenzy on everything known to man until I just can’t stay awake anymore, or, I zone out for hours processing something tough that happened at the clinic.

I did spend the whole of last week and every minute of Friday — after I got back from some extra training at the clinic for something else — through Monday night finishing this monstrously large piece, which was one thing keeping me way too overcommitted, but it is off my desk now. I also put a call out on Scarleteen’s facebook for more volunteers, and am saying a little prayer that will be in some way fruitful. The way things have been going there, there has been more work to do since I started the other job with even less time to do it in, which is not manageable. And don’t even get me started on my photo backlog.

But did just want y’all to know I am alive. Barely, but sometimes life is like that. This, too, shall pass.  And with that, I’m off to the clinic commute.)

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

Mark and I watched Once the other night, and it was all kinds of brilliant. Possibly my favorite film of the last year, for a whole lot of reasons I won’t spoil the film for you by listing.

It reminded me that I’ve been struggling for some time to figure out a piece for Scarleteen addressing the fact that relationships can have great importance even when they don’t go on for years or even months, and when they’re not sexual or even romantic. Obviously, this is super-pertinent for young people who are often having watershed relationships that also don’t tend to last long periods of time. During them, they’re hyper-aware that they’re important, but there are so many messages that pivotal = long-term that often when they end — or even throughout them — they discount something so huge, or diminish it, and all just because of that misconception. As well, we also have this funny cultural idea about romance that says that anyone who doesn’t stay with you is rejecting you, or feeling you weren’t worth their time, and it’s an idea that discounts the complexity and multifaceted nature of our lives and the value of every single moment.

It’s a big deal for me, too. Even when Mark and I were watching that film, the two main characters have, on the day they first meet, one of those first-meeting-days that turns into this long day and then a long night, mostly of talking, sharing common interests, and suchlike. I was telling him that I just LOVED days like that — we had one when we first met, too: those meetings that just stretch on and on, and there is a certain energy to them that’s all about meeting anew. I’ve had a bunch of those in my life, and sometimes you do continue seeing the other person, and sometimes you don’t, but the import of what happens on those days just isn’t determined by anything BUT that one day.

In college, for instance, on a flight to Oxford-via-Amsterdam in 1990 — back in those halcyon days when there was a smoking section on international flights, and that section was often like a cocktail party — I wound up sitting beside this poetry professor from Iraq. This was a double boon, since previously, I was sitting next to a male schoolmate who had teased me all the way to the airport about the fact that I was a nervous flyer, only to immediately vomit on my feet twice during take-off. So, being able to move at all was a lifesaver. But there I was reading my Blake, preparing for my Big Blake Immersion, and there was this professor reading over my shoulder and sighing blissfully. We wound up in this amazing 7-hour-long conversation, punctuated by an awful lot of wine and the distribution of many cigarettes; about poetry, art, death, poverty, racism, world peace, love, longing, the whole enchilada. We laughed, we cried, we even yelled once or twice, we held hands. When we parted ways, we exchanged things of great value to each of us, so thankful to have made that connection: I gave him a bunch of stones and crystals I always kept with me for my back (I used a cane for walking for six months in college due to an injury), and he gave me this heavy, woven gold ring. I still have and cherish it: I call it the world peace ring because not shortly thereafter, the first (though technically the second- we’re really in the third now) gulf “war” started and it struck me as so tragically silly that if two strangers, from the U.S. and Iraq, could get along so quickly and easily and talk about difficult subjects so freely and openly, surely world leaders apparently schooled in diplomacy could freaking work it out.

I don’t even remember his name. He wrote it in one of the many books I had with me, but I haven’t yet run into which book that was again yet. It’ll be a fun day when that happens. But it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that I don’t remember his name, it doesn’t matter that that was our only exchange, and likely the only one we will ever have. It is the connection and the moment itself that matters. We both left different than we came. (And after I left him, I had a long layover between flights, so I took this great solitary walk through the city, hit a couple bars, ate half a gingerbread house by myself in a park, and, having my dulcimer with me, played street musician in my traveling pajamas for an hour or two. I was so dazzled — and okay, a bit dazed, too — by the time I got to Oxford, and so high on the conversation, sleep deprivation and alright, the hash, that I slept for nearly three days solid when I arrived.)

The point is, you have that meeting, however short, something happens, you leave it transformed. It is incredibly important, and it’s import is in no way determined by time. I’ve had an awful lot of instances like this in my life, romantic, sexual (one of the many reasons I have always very much enjoyed one-to-two-night stands) or otherwise, and I consider myself blessed in that. As a Buddhist, there’s also an extra-special sweetness to things like that, which is that without any attachment, even the hint of possible attachment, there’s a certain magic that can happen that isn’t the same as in exchanges which you think or know are not temporary.

I’m always torn dealing one aspect of with young adults and relationships, and this is part of why. I never want to keep them from enjoying that feeling that strong feelings and relationships are eternal. It’s a beautiful thing, and I think it’s very developmentally valuable and poignant. I also think it’s okay to think that and find out otherwise. It hurts like hell when it happens, sure, but I often say that I’m much more worried about young people who never get their hearts broken than those who do. I think we all need some heartbreak to grow. But at the same time, they can get in some weird emotional spaces where I feel the need to explain that realistically, their teen relationships will likely NOT last forever, and even when they do, will rarely be the same relationship later that they are now; that it’s far more likely if they sustain a YA romantic relationship it will become a platonic friendship, for instance, than it will stay a romance. That that love and mad like does feel eternal, and it’s even possible those feelings may be eternal in some respect, but that isn’t the same thing as spending your whole life in a romance with the person you’re dating at 15. And part of me thinks that some of why those relationships are so watershed is expressly because they are fleeting: two people will meet, connect, share something unique, then take it with them as they move on to the next place. Clearly, you gotta walk a fine line to explain things like that without raining on their parade. For as long as I’ve done this work, I’m still not sure I get it right with them when it comes to this.

But again, some of that is this issue of time, and battling what they’re told about what makes interpersonal connections and relationships important — an issue of quantity over quality, really — out and about. Adults will often make clear, overtly or covertly, that young people don’t understand love or that their relationships aren’t meaningful because they won’t be marriages of lifelong romances, and it’s bollocks. Or projection. Or both. (Maybe wishful thinking? I seem to see a lot of parents telling their kids that it’s what lasts over time that is the biggest deal, of the most emotional import, but whose long-term relationships are clearly substandard at best.) I tend to think that there are aspects of love which we probably understand best as children or adolescents which we either forget as we grow older, or which our disillusionment — particularly if we have been given the idea that the shorter a relationship is, the less worthwhile it is — poisons. If we’re lucky, we get the chance to relearn it.

Anyway, food for thought for me over the next few days, that. Mark just spun off to Austin for a couple of days for his day job, which gives me two days and nights completely to myself that I hope to use working on things here like a maniac. Because of the holiday, I’m not back at the clinic until Wednesday, so I have some time to play catch-up, per usual, here at the home office and at the house in general.

(Perhaps hilariously, we realized last night that one issue for us in our sex lives is that because we started out long-distance, we’re both most amped up when one of us is leaving or coming back home. We never fail to have the best sex then, and sometimes struggle to have sex outside of that context as amped as it is within it. I guess we need to go away more often. Heck, maybe we’re grooving on the exact kind of thing I was just looking at: the feeling — even though in our case it’s not a reality anymore — of what is fleeting and potentially temporary.)

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

I started today with the best of intentions, doing a bunch of Scarleteen grunt work and then answering some posts. But within a few hours, I got whacked upside the head with a migraine, then also realized I was just flat-out wiped.

Taking a glance at the calendar, the why of that became obvious. Not counting the span of time I had bronchitis — because being horribly ill really doesn’t count as time off — it’s been around 20 days since I have been able to take a whole day off. A whole day off, all by myself, without having to take care of anyone? Over a month. Criminy.

I suppose today doesn’t really count either, but at least I got 3/4s of a day to just tidy up the living room, lay on the couch, read a bit, watch a movie, steam my face and cuddle with the dog. I also got to sleep in until 8, I’m heading for a bath shortly, and Mark is going to swing by the market for me on his way home and pick me up the goods to make myself a well-deserved (if I do say so myself) hot fudge undae. I have to run some errands on Friday, but I think it’s pretty imperative that after work tomorrow, I get everything set for those errands so that I can do them in the midst of a nice walk and give myself that whole day to really mentally vacate. Maybe I’ll get lucky and catch some weather just warm and dry enough to fit in a bike ride, too.

I did know that it wasn’t going to be super-easy to add another job in, but I wasn’t prepared for how tired it’d all make me. Sometimes I manage to forget that I’m nothing close to 21 anymore, when it was easy as pie for me to work a zillion jobs, get home and take care of other business, grab a couple hours of sleep, and still be full of energy. I don’t need my 21-year-old ass back, but bloody hell, it’d sure be nice to have that stamina again.

Tomorrow I do some more observations in the morning, but I finished the last of my reading and competency tools earlier this week, so by afternoon, I get started with doing the actual counseling myself. It’d hard not to be nervous. One thing I’m lucky with when it comes to Scarleteen is that if I forget something, I can always go right back and add it in, and the chances of a user returning to read more are very high. Too, even when I’m talking someone through a crisis or a difficult time , they’re rarely RIGHT in the middle of that crisis, literally. Mind, it is a comfort to be able to actually see the person I’m counseling, get a read for their body language, and even hold their hand when that’s what they need. The other day, there was a woman who was in desperate need of a freaking hug. We gets users like that at Scarleteen, too, obviously, but all I can do is advise them to go find someone to hug, I can’t just say that it’s okay to blow snot in my hair and give them the hug myself.

But it’s just one of those things you want to be sure you do right as rain. I clearly remember the support staff I had for my abortion way back when, and while I was not in any way conflicted about my choice, and in fact felt very good about it, the way they did their jobs turned a good thing for me into something even better, and in many ways, very watershed. Obviously, I want to do the same for everyone I counsel, and obviously, I’m worried about the times that I can’t help as much as I’d like to, or just don’t do my best.

Mind, this is me we’re talking about, and I do hold myself to very high — often impossibly high, I know — standards. I know in my guts that I’ll do just fine when I’m completely on my own. I also know that I have the benefit of a really amazing staff around me who I can ask for any extra help I need: I remain just so impressed and awed by the other women there. I was also a bit worried at first that I would have a hard time not being distracted about other work while I was there, but that’s not been an issue at all. In fact, it’s been really quite nice to have a few days a week without even having any access to Scarleteen, even though it does mean that that on the other days I do that work, there’s a bigger backup to deal with. I tried to do a little work on the boards when I came home from the clinic Monday, but since the first thread I opened was some creep talking about how his 14-year-old daughter was filling out and how he had to get into her pants and the next was a rape survivor I have counseled on and off for some time who just cannot seem to move forward, and who tends to direct her anger about her rape unto me? Had to just lock the creep’s thread and then just back the hell away from the computer, verifying that as I suspected, two venues in a day for counseling work is one venue way too many.

And I just heard Mark’s car door slam, which means that we need not ask for whom the Tofutti tolls: it tolls for me!  If you can’t get a whole day off, you can certainly make up for lost time with chocolaty goodness, and I intend to do so immediately.
P.S. The Storm are staying here. YIPPEE! This makes me very, very happy. My apologies to the five lesbians who live in Oklahoma (for so very many reasons), but really, y’all, not only was that location just not going to work, this is one of the few big perks I’ve found of living here, and taking them away from me would have broken my wee little heart.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, yummy, workworkwork | permalink | comments (1) »

So, pretty clearly from the vibe and the lingo, a pro-lifer (and what sounds like an adult) just posted this question in the Sexpert Advice queue at Scarleteen.

Which is fine: I have a bit in my book on this, and have been meaning to have a piece up on CPCs at Scarleteen for a while now. I appreciated the reminder and the opportunity.

But I just have to wonder: what response did they expect from me? I kinda doubt they wanted to invite me to do an in-depth shakedown of the whole deal, but I can’t imagine, for the life of me, what else they thought I’d do, or how they thought any answer I’d give would someone send more women to them or be of any benefit to them. Did someone earnestly think I’d be all, “Oh, right! I totally forgot to include a link for pregnant women — especially poor women, teen women, and women of color who those orgs love extra-super-much — who want to be manipulated and lied to! After all, that’s a reproductive choice, too, right? Silly me, let me go fix that right now. Thanks for the tip!”

People are so freaking weird, man. Or stupid. Or both.

In other news, I am slowly on the mend. These antibiotics are hell on my guts, but finally, last night, my ears started going back to normal, I was able to stand (heck, even sit) for a while without wanting a five-day nap after, have the appetite for a real meal, take in a nice, deep breath without hacking up a lung, and not have to second guess that I’m semi-coherent, as I have been for days now.

In the ER the other night, when I got put in the room, I got told to take my top stuff off and put on a gown. So, I took it all off, knowing that if they were going to do a chest X-ray, I’d need to do that. When the X-ray tech came in, I asked if I should bring my pile of stuff, and to my ears, this was the conversation we had:

Him: Oh, good, your brassiere is off.
Me: Yeah, I figured it should be. So, can I leave my stuff here or should I bring it?
Him: It’s good you took it off, you can’t have one on for the X-ray. And you’ll want to have that for the holidays.

Which a) didn’t answer the question of if I needed to bring it, b) didn’t seem to acknowledge I said or asked anything at all, and c) made me arrive at the conclusion that I was either having some serious auditory hallucinations or this guy just was far more focused on the grave impropriety a bra-less holiday would be (maybe he had some kind of traumatic experience getting whacked with a merry, unrestrained boob one Christmas or something) than on anything else. However, I was left thinking that if the latter were true, and I really heard what I did, I don’t know why he wasn’t concerned about leaving said brassiere and it being stolen.

I was going to say “What?!?” but I thought it best I just let it go. I was either going to be told I was hallucinating or I’d have to hear about this holiday bra issue, and I wasn’t up to either possibility.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

Greetings from the Planet Codeine!

So, I’ve been given the marvelous gift of some serious bronchitis and a bacterial infection from The Baby Liam, and the extra bonus of two totally busted up ear canals from my fever. The sick was not going away, even standing for a bit was exhausting, some of what was coming out of my throat was pretty creepy, and it’s ungodly how long it took my fever to break. Then Bri called late Friday after seeing the pediatrician again to tell me the word was that given what he had, I probably had bronchitis or pneumonia. Beyond feeling awful as it was, as one of those folks who tends to, if she picks up a bad virus, wind up with all the worst complications possible, that was scary news.

Got to spend yesterday going nuts trying to find anyone left in town for the holidays to give me a ride to the clinic. Finally, after nearly a whole day of hunting — always fun when you’re sick as a dog — 1happygirl was a shero of the revolution, and raced from an appointment to help me out. We tried to get up to the Minute Clinic in the hopes of my not having to pay out the wazoo for care, but not only did mumblegrumbleoverconsuminggreedymaterialistbullshit festive holiday shopping traffic keep us from getting there before close, I did grab the nurse leaving when we got there and she told me I needed chest x-rays they couldn’t do anyway, so they couldn’t have helped me even had we gotten there in time.

So, back we go to my neighborhood and the ER (which is a mere three blocks from my place, so I was pissed at having worked so hard to avoid the inevitable which would have involved no ride at all). I’m of course apologizing left and right to everyone on call there because growing up in hospitals, I know full well that people going into the ER when they haven’t, like, lost an eye in a car wreck or been shot in the guts is often really maddening for ER staff, but there weren’t any other options. There also wasn’t anyone else in, so I felt less guilty than I might have once I saw the ghost town it was inside. I expressed my amazement to the staff: given how freaking loony people get with this holiday, I fully expected to see the chairs full of people with head injuries from clocking some kind of relative in the head with the universal remote, post-Hanukkah latke-bloat, maybe faces scarred from acrylic nails due to a tussle over the last remaining Nintendo game that if little Timmy didn’t get this year, would end the whole damn world.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but public healthcare here in Seattle is beyond dismal. The few clinics there are tend to have intense waitlists due to the homeless population: save that it leaves me without healthcare, I’m fine with that: someone on-street is way more likely to croak from what I’ve got than I am. The one or two that don’t have atrocious reputations for charging serious sums and sometimes not even seeing patients or giving any care at all. Honestly, healthcare here (and most insurance companies in WA won’t even cover self-employeds, even if you have the cash to pay for it, no less) makes public health in Chicago look like a freaking mecca, which is just nuts since this city has so much damn money. But I can bitch more about that later.

I get my x-rays, the whole works. Let me just tell you that as a smoker of 25 years on now, having those x-rays done was scary as hell. I have had a zillion medical tests done in my life, but usually on my brain or in my guts: I don’t recall ever having a chest x-ray. So, it was all moment-of-truthy. But I was basically told that teeming bacteria from this toddler-based infection aside, my lungs are apparently something of a medical miracle and look just swell. Well, that’s something.

Two honking prescriptions, a trip to the market for more soup and such (including a pile of soy yogurt to avoid the hell big antibiotics wreak on one’s girly bits), and a call to poor Bri who feels terrible about all this later, I was back out on the couch in a codeine-robitussin induced stupor. I half-watched North Country for the gazillionth time because home alone, I could shamelessly weep like a baby during the last few minutes of the film where everyone finally stands (including two women as extras who were part of the real-life case, which is where I tend to really lose it) up for Josey and against sexual harassment. I watched that scene three times on a loop. It’s hokey, I know, but I was too ill to feel like an idiot about it, so it was very pleasant. If I hadn’t passed out right after, I would have watched the last five minutes of the season seven finale of Buffy to get the same buzz, too.

Anyway, I’m told not to expect to earnestly feel better for a couple of weeks. Wonderful.

I’m so frustrated right now: this week and some to myself was going to be exactly what I needed to get so much done, and so far, I can barely do a damn thing or stay up later than nine. Of course, it’s all doubly maddening when you already feel like shit on a stick and then not only have to deal with a couple of friends who you’ve dropped everything for more than once just not stepping up, but with the whole wonderful reminder of how much it really freaking sucks when it comes to healthcare in this country. Most of my life has been spent in the public health system, sans insurance, and the girl gets bitter sometimes. Now and then, I’ll listen to someone insured kvetch about how they’re sick and they have to get into the doctor, and what a pain that is, but that usually involves them dialing a number they already know, making an appointment, and driving a car they own to get there. Still a bitch to go anywhere when you’re sick, for sure, but that process is not a day or more of endless research, calling clinic after clinic, waiting for buses to get there or begging for rides, having to fill out piles of forms every time, sending in all your income information, being seen by seriously overworked clinic staff, and knowing the whole time that the chances of having to go to more than one clinic, paying out the wazoo every time, are high. Tack unto that, of course, the knowledge that whatever the bill is may potentially screw you for months — or when the worst happens, years and years — and leave you even poorer than you were already… just ugh. Do we have a single person working in U.S. Government who is actually, or who at least has been, for any substantial period of time, uninsured? I’m thinking not, because if we did, there’s just no way in hell our healthcare system would still be like this.

Suffice it to say, it’s doubly frustrating since chances are, the additional job I took in order to help with the existing financial badness will now likely be covering ER bills for at least a few months. Oy, that thing where when you finally think you can get even a little ahead and then get whacked with something that sets you even further back. It never freaking fails.

Eh, enough of my whinging. I’m going back to the couch. You know, the real one.

P.S. My horrendous headache just would not go the hell away, so I figured that some masturbation sure couldn’t hurt and might help. Holy mother of…something. All those women taking Robitussin to thin their cervical mucus for fertility purposes? Umm, is there a reason we can’t just use this stuff all the time as a lubricant, because I tend to be a pretty juicy gal most of the time already but that was pretty outer limits.

P.P.S. I just finished watching and what an awesome film that was.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, wah | permalink | comments (7) »

I’m on my second day of a high fever, joints so messed up from it that my legs feel like logs and my hips like pins and needles, ears completely congested and a migraine on top of everything due to the sick and the endless screaming of The Baby Liam who brought me the sick as a holiday gift. Grrr.

On top of that, Briana and I both were stupid and understood her red eye flight to be going out last night that actually went the night before: thus, she missed her flight without either of us knowing until I nearly had her packed up to go catch a plane in the middle of the night. Thank christ I had gone to check her in online, or they’d have been stuck all night in the airport. We had to wrestle with Northwest agents to cut us a break and not charge us $800 for a new ticket so she and Liam could get back home. Even after several phone calls, the best break we got was for an additional $300 which neither one of us has to spare, to say the least. She just called to let me know her cabbie to the airport also totally overcharged her. Great.

I just finished a third overfull load of dishes. All the traffic through here from a bunch of folks over the last week left every single dish in the place dirty, and many not even rinsed. Gross.

At least I’m not back to work at the clinic until the day after Christmas: I was scheduled to work Monday, but apparently Christmas Eve isn’t a day anyone wants to schedule a pap smear or an abortion, so I got moved to working the last three days of next week. Ah, bus at 6:10 in the morning, how I look forward to you.

I’m home by myself here now through New Year’s Eve, which is something of a drag (it sucks to be sick as a dog alone, and a week and some is a long time even for me to go without any human contact), but so long as my senile cat stops yowling sometime in the next decade, at least I can crawl back up to bed and pass out without anyone needing anything from me.

I am officially a total crabass at the moment.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

I know I’m supposed to feel ashamed about all the 70’s pop music we so often listen to around here, but I just don’t. It’s the music of my childhood, dude and it’s not tacky, it’s vintage: 10CC and The Doobie Brothers are the original Diane Von Fursternberg wrap dress of music. I know I should only admit that I really like P!nk (and enough to care about that little exclamation point) grudgingly and with some apology. But I think the girls a total badass, and see no need to apologize. In plenty of circles — and according to my sweetheart’s ears — the times that I feel the need to sing along tearfully with Kate Wolf, Janis Ian or Holly Near with absolute sincerity should possibly cause me great embarrassment, but I tend to be all “Whatever, man: I can be as crunchy, potluck and lavender as I wanna sometimes, just like you can air-saxophone in the dining room, wearing nothing but your socks, while blaring 25 or 6 to 4.”

But when I find myself raucously headbanging to Avril Lavigne — on repeat ALL DAY, no less — and belting out “You make me so hot/ Make me wanna drop/ You’re so ridiculous/ I can barely stop…You’re so fabulous/ You’re so good to me Baby/ Baby, Baby / BabeeEEEeeee…” I feel like I need more than a few moments of complete and utter disgust with myself. I need a cold bath in holy water, a hairshirt and some professional help.

posted in Heather Corinna, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

I have that first day of school thing going on, big time.

Going to sleep last night, I told myself that I would wake up in six and a half hours (the alarm was set, too, but only as a backup: I tend to be more likely to wake up on time when I just tell myself when to wake than with an alarm, believe it or not — when I sleep, I sleep like the dead), and yet, I kept waking up thinking it was time to wake up at 3:00, then at 4:00, then at 5:30, when the aim was to get up at 6. When I did finally get up, my stomach was all seasick-wacky from nervousness and excitement, and I’m hoping it’ll calm down in the next hour.

I’ve been going back and forth alternately reminding myself that it’s okay to walk into something not knowing how to do everything involved and it’s all good, and then moments where I not only know it’s okay, I’m really stoked to start learning some new things. Isn’t that crazy?

And I feel totally ripped off: if I had known I was going to have that first day of school (always my favorite day of the year as a kid) energy going on, I SO would have bought shiny new school supplies! That’s always the best part!

Addendum: You KNOW — well, when you’re me, anyway — that you have just taken a job in the rightest place in the world when arseloads of airtime are given in your training to the fact that feminist healthcare always needs to put extra-special focus on serving poor women and women of color. And in case that wasn’t enough for you to know, when you’re sitting in a training room, watching a video as part of your training, and Florynce Kennedy comes unto part of the video and every woman in the room sighs “Oh, Flo,” in the exact same way a lot of ‘lil schoolgirls used to sigh over Menudo or Shawn Cassidy? When that happens? You really know you’re in the right place.

Me = very, very happy today.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

Phew! It took me months, and a whole weekend spent doing nothing (save one book promo event down the street) but this including pulling most of my hair out to edit it down to something resembling a manageable length, but sparing a graphic for it and maybe a few more final adjustments, it is finally freaking done. Writing that piece was harder for me in many ways than writing my whole book: it’s just such a broad topic, and it is so, so hard to approach men with it and walk the fine line between accountability and nonproductive blaming. I also went back and forth a thousand times about detailing my own rapes, but it just felt like disclosing them was important (even if it means, as it usually does when I disclose without being a weepy mess, that I’m likely to get at least a few emails telling me I deserved to be assaulted) when it comes to making readers who might feel vulnerable know that I’m vulnerable, too.

We do have substantial male traffic, so I’m hoping it does some good, and to boot, I can at the very least know plenty of female readers will see it and will get to have the rare experience of reading rape prevention materials that are about someone besides rape victims.

(FYI, I had a sidebar in there originally explaining that some couples like and both consent to dominance and submission play and that doesn’t mean we’re talking about rape since that activity is wanted and negotiated, and then gave a little airtime to talking about that it needs to be negotiated like anything else, not assumed, etc. I took it out just because it seemed obvious given the talk about consent before it, but for any peeking over at it who do D/S, can you let me know if you think it really needs be mentioned? Thanks!)

Hell, even if it does no good whatsoever, I am pleased as punch to have that stinker OFF of my to-do list at long last. Know how it is when any given thing just goes on and on, never finished, and how it becomes the most important thing to do in the whole world — even if it really isn’t — just because it’s so hard to finish or get started on anything else with whatever albatross it is putting it’s butt in the way of your brain fully focusing on anything else? That’s what I’m talking about. Now, would that it were the ONLY thing on my to-do, or rather to-finish list like that, but it was certainly the biggest and least pleasant, so that’s something.

Tomorrow — hooray! — I start two days of training and orientation for my new second (third? I have so many jobs, I don’t know which it is) job, which will likely also include a new Hep B vaccination, redoing/updating my very antiquated first aid/CPR and HIPAA schtuff, and, given what it’s like here right now, being very wet and cold coming and going. I also need to not make my workwear my pajamas, which means I must, as ever, face the terrifying laundry piles which I’ve become convinced must somehow be viral. I did give myself a splurge last week as a reward for getting this gig, and grabbed a new kata as well as this awesomely wonderful, toasty sweater (in black) here which just came today, so that at least covers the top of me. It’s the “no jeans” bit that’s going to be a tough order, as that’d be 95% of the pants I own and live in which are not pajamas. I’ll work it out, but the spoiled work-at-homer in me is a wee pissy at the moment, especially since there’s laundry involved.

I also had the first day with my new, fantastic weekly in-house volunteer last week, who got started on a Facebook page for Scarleteen (I can live with Facebook: I cannot and will not have anything to do with myspace) as well as a new call for writers. It’s so nice to have someone to help a little bit sometimes right here in the home office, who I can talk things out with rather than just typing them out, and cooler still, she was a once-upon-a-time Scarleteen user when she was younger, so she gets all of the import of what we do, which is a very happymaking thing.

Oh, and my editor wrote last week to let me know that the book is going into it’s second printing. Yay! But… she only got told after the fact, which means that it’s going into that second printing with the two very irksome art department typos. Boo.

Maybe I’ll name my next pet “Urethea” in honor of those typos, and with the wishful thinking that someday I won’t have to see them anymore save on met vet bills.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

Got an interview for the job scheduled for early next week! Think good thoughts.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (5) »

You know, now and then I forget how glad I am to have grown up in immigrant culture (given, second gen on my part) and in a city of immigrants.

I’m reminded of this at this moment in the way I’m often reminded: I just got out of a cab, post-cocktails with Cheryl downtown (and earnestly, craving a few more, being in something of a lushtastic mood, and right now trying to figure if I should walk myself over to the Copper Gate or not for some Jesus-sighting-Aquavit). I swear to gawd, I can easily say that 90% or more of the most productive, useful and insightful conversations I’ve had about this nation I inhabit have not only been with immigrants, but with immigrants driving a cab. Really, even if you’re not a regular cab-taker, I’d say that for $10 or so, it’s a sort of therapy — though possibly EST therapy if you read as too American — that’s more than worthwhile, particularly if you don’t get exposed to immigrant perspectives every day or didn’t grow up around them.

I had a moment tonight, too, in the midst of an immediately quick and bustling conversation with my African cab driver, of wondering why it is that I always seem to get the talkative cabbies, and why I pretty much need to say all of nothing to get an energetic conversation started. This particular driver, pretty much at the mere instant I was having that moment, made some comment about how amazing he thought my smile was. Aw, shucks, for sure — it’s one of my favorite compliments, and something people do tend to remark on often, likely because we big-lipped, big-toothed women do tend to have smiles that take up the whole of our faces — but that likely does have plenty to do with it. Someone smiles warmly at you from the get-go, you’re going to get gabbing.

Bar or no bar. Hmm.

* * *
Mr. Price and I went to a Halloween party Saturday night festooned as boy scouts. Given, he looked far more authentic than I having been a boy scout in earnest — and I merely a jealous girl scout — and in hardcore earnest, well through his senior year of high school. But I had a mighty hard time chilling out at the party, even given that any costume that allows me to wear sneakers and cargos is about the most relaxing thing a girl could ask for.

As Mark was far too inclined to share with anyone even remotely within earshot on Saturday, that boy scout uniform drives me freaking insane. I had ripped the buttons off the top of the one I wound up wearing when Mark wore it for me on my last birthday. That kind of insane. Mark has a couple of photos of Chicago he took around 1986, in a trip from Cincy to Chicago his troupe took, and there are photos taken a mere block away from my high school (They were at the Sears Tower and then in Greek Town). The sadness that came over me in knowing that I hadn’t managed to be glancing out the window during class when a troupe full of boy scouts from Ohio passed by, all ooh-the-big-big-city lights a’dazzle in their eyes, was unbearable. Had I noticed this at the age of 16, sitting in my barely-formed classroom with a bunch of other queer art geeks, I absolutely would have rushed everyone to the window to point the scouts out and yell “Hey! Lunch!” I’ve had a weakness for corruptible boys since about the age of 13, and it’s never worn off, even given that the age of said boys has advanced with my own.

Once, likely with the intent to seduce, Mark came out of his office wearing his scout shirt and sash. Alas, he also came out totally pantsless. This, in my occasionally very demented brain, registered a zero on the libido scale because he looked like a scout someone else had clearly gotten to already.

Yeah, I’ve got it bad. But it sure was fun to get home, and boy of boy, did our couch look bizarre the next morning.

* * *

Still on the fence about the bar. Ah, those big life decisions.

I spent basically all weekend doing nothing but very hardcore cleaning, including steaming the stupid carpets (our rental has wall-to-wall carpet in three rooms, which offends my personal aesthetics more than I can say), and doing some things to better insulate the house so that I don’t have the heart attack I did last year with the heating bill. I just finally got a basic abortion walk-through posted at Scarleteen today, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which we really needed. I suppose I figured that I’ve had so much invective in my mailbox over the last week or two that I may as well put abortion on the front page, since I was taking crap already anyway. Over the next week, on top of editing the monumental-and-still-growing photo backlog, I’m hoping to get one new article up a day or so, from a whole slew of pieces that have been about 3/4’s finished for some time. I’m earnestly trying to be sure I cover any bases in terms of stuff I’ve been meaning to do that are the kind of thing I’ll take shit for (always from adults, mind: go figure that the pieces that seem to freak adults out the most are usually the ones the teenagers are the most thankful for), because it really is easier to bear during times when I already wake up every day to a pile of steaming e-poop.

Yeah, I’m thinking I’m go for that walk to the bar.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (1) »

Meanwhile, back at the ranch….

Despite coming home and finding a mailbox with a pile of reactionary wait-until-marriage stuff inside, our weekend away in Port Townsend was scrumdiddlyumptious. Photos forthcoming, but for the most part, our exciting locales were the big, fluffy bed, two overstuffed chairs beside a gas fireplace, and a large, jetted tub. I was able to get out early Sunday morning for a seated meditation on a cliff with a moldy bench overlooking the water and then take a brisk walk across the beach. Mark literally took five baths in less than 48 hours: I expected to feel his developing gills as we slept. Sofia clearly also needed a little vacation — all that itching and your people endlessly traveling is stressful for but a small pug! — as was apparent given that save maybe one hour of the whole weekend, she found herself a cozy spot amidst the pillows on one of those chairs and refused to leave.

Saturday was a sweet, all-day mix of various sorts of debauchery — including MST3K fore-and-after-play, which should be a suggestion for the teens I work with, really — and even just by mid-morning, I was relaxed enough to enjoy a very, very nice batch of big, wavy orgasms. Funny how it’s so easy to forget — even given my job and the fact that I remind people of this daily — that the more stressed out you are, the milder your sexual response tends to be. Even the really good ones aren’t as good as they could be if you could just freaking relax; really relax, about everything. Between the stress of all the travel and having to be on so much, the perpetual struggles to keep everything I do afloat and the stress of just doing my work, not having felt well for quite some time, the works, I knew I was tense as hell, but until a day when by where nothing felt at all stressful, I wasn’t aware of how tense.

At the cabin this weekend, I was also reminded that I’m never quite sure what sound sex toy etiquette is. In other words, if you’re in a place where they will or may show up while you’re out to tidy things up, do you have to care about toys and lube and gloves being strewn all over the place? Is putting them in one pile on the nightstand good enough, or are you really supposed to hide them, even when you’re paying to stay where you are? I get the feeling you are supposed to, but the minute I even start to do it, I so deeply resent feeling like I should that I never bother.

It’s really swell to be able to look ahead over the next few weeks — heck, the next few months — and know that I don’t have to go anywhere. That doesn’t come close to fixing all of my troubles, but it sure helps out an awful lot. I’m a homebody by nature: I ground at home. When I don’t really get to do that, and am in and out a lot, it makes everything feel even more unmanageable than it is. Seattle winters aren’t exactly fabulous (but thank christ, they are NOT Minnesota or Chicago winters), but I’m glad as hell that I can be home for the whole of winter and spring. Once I really get at least somehat caught up with my backlog of every kind of work, I’m hoping I can spend it catching up on the mountain of books I have half-read, do the last of the housepainting I still haven’t finished, and have the time to do some damn art. And sleep. Get lots and lots of sleep.

So long as we can swing it, I’m going to try and use my accumulated miles for Briana so that she and The Baby Liam can come up for a couple weeks around the holidays. Her living situation is scary right now, even to someone like me who knows from hardscrabble living, and she’s got a pretty substantial break from her culinary school, so not only being able to see them, but just being able to give them a break at no cost would be great. But even that doesn’t involve me having to go anywhere. I get to bring my family to my own front door.

The Babeland event, by the way, was crazy-packed, so I had to do more lecture than Q&A, which is very much not my preference. But it was still a good thing, despite the fact that almost half the place was full with community college students from a human sexuality class, some of whom informed me later that their prof was a pretty creepy bigot who clearly hasn’t read a single study ON sexuality that was published later than 1965, and who routinely lectures even his knowingly lesbian college students about abstaining until marriage. Apparently, this was the only decent part of the class so far according to them, and also according to them and the Babeland staff, the guy nodded off through half of it. I got to walk away with a new toy for my troubles, and I resisted the urge to be greedy, since I’ve been aching for this for an age (I know, I know, it’s leather, but it has laces and a STAR on it!), and also had more than one set of youth educators wanting to talk to me about what the right way is to kindly ask your students not to masturbate publicly. I had no good answers (besides my usual suggestion to just redirect them to something else, giving them the look that says you know what they’re doing, and it’s okay, but not okay HERE) for the couple who worked in a pool with jets: you can’t keep kids off of water jets, man.

My enthusiasm for my to-do list this week tells me all I need to know about how frazzled and overextended I’ve been. When I am earnestly excited to better insulate the house here (it’s a rental, yes, but if we get the heating bills this winter we got last winter we’re in serious trouble), clean the refrigerator (and only a little depressed at how empty it is), when I wake up in the morning elated that the day will be about cleaning my disaster of an office, when doing tax paperwork seems like a break, I’ve clearly been living in Stressville. Besides finishing a couple articles that have been taking way too long (in my defense, figuring out the best way to do an article about how not to be a rapist isn’t exactly a cakewalk), and answering some advice questions, I’m going to be mostly away from Scarleteen over the next week or two. I forget, sometimes, that I’m allowed to do that, and that when it’s not coming even close to making ends meet, it only makes sense TO do that. A cleaner, more organized office, for instance, equals a clearer mind to better figure out how to deal with all the challenges right now. More to the point, now and then, during the times when I’m really not being paid at all or barely getting paid, it’s sage to do other work that needs doing which I also don’t get paid for, and is far less stressful.

Plus, there was that one time where I decided to ditch everything else to clean out my closet and found $300, effectively getting paid more for cleaning than for working. I don’t exactly expect that to happen again, but I’m not going to rule it out, either. Really, given what a slob I am, I’d not be surprised if Mark started secretly stuffing bills into hidden places just so I’d clean up my crap. I DID find a mix tape yesterday from 1988, and nearly wept with the sweetness. Labeled “Obnoxiousness Found Us in Gillson Park, Illinois,” jointly by both myself and my best friend at the time, who always went nuts with the mix tapes for the long trips we’d take — in both senses of the word — I am greatly looking forward to popping it into the tape deck in Mr. Price’s office to see what’s on it. I predict plenty of Beatles, Jazz Butcher (and I also just organized a huge pile of JB CDs a friend and rare fellow fan of them made for me a couple years back, which are a major coup since most of their stuff wasn’t even on CD), Elvis Costello, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, ska and 60’s surf rock.

I’m electing not to talk about the moment a hidden camera would have found me in this morning, belting out “Angel of the Morning” at the top of my lungs while organizing my studio shelves. because, you know, we really shouldn’t document these sorts of things if we want to be taken at all seriously.

(Though as an aside, a reader here gave a very generous donation this week, and I thank you soundly. That not only helps me to be able to toss some change at my developer so we can get some more of the upgrade finished, it also means I can finally go get new glasses, and thus end the nonstop tension headache I’ve had for two months because my prescription changed. You’re a goddess!)

P.S. In trying to finish that article on how not to rape and enable rape, I’m troubled that while we have one word, a very powerful word, at that, for a rapist, we don’t seen to have an equally powerful — and ideally MORE powerful word — for someone who is not just not a rapist, but the antithesis of a rapist. So, what’s the word for a caring, reciprocal sexual person or partner? It’s pretty darn tough to sell a concept when we don’t even have a word for it. “Lover,” alas, is terribly outdated and not something young people are even remotely likely to use. “Partner” isn’t just about sex, and as I was informed a couple years back when I accidentally outed myself to some of Mark’s film crew at 5 AM, it still primarily belongs to us queers. We could make “mutual” an honorific, but it doesn’t feel right. Might be some mileage in “accord” or “harmony,” but I can’t seem to land on it.

P.P.S. The mailbag still is out of control this week. My favorite this morning?

I was so sad when I was told about your website. Teenagers go to your site and find permission to have sex in any way they want. I am a chastity speaker and talk to teens a lot about the risks of STD’s. I know how faulty condoms are and even though people are using them STD’s are still out of control. I was so sad to read a lot of wrong information on your site. Condoms will not protect again many STD’s including HPV the most common STD today and one that can cause cervical cancer and possibly lead to death. You suggest that waiting until marriage to have sex is just not possible. It most certainly is and I hope that you will start giving teens more credit for having self control. We need to encourage then to aim for the healthiest life possible. Many people are dying because of sex but no one has died because they abstained until marriage. Please carefully consider the info you share and make sure it is accurate because so far a lot of what I have read on your site is horribly wrong especially as related to STD’s and condoms.

I really love it when people tell me what I do. (As well as the idea that it’s up to me or any other adult to give teens “permission” to have sex, while at the same time telling me I don’t give teens enough credit for making their own sound choices, while they’re asking them to sign a very binding legal contract to another person in order to even CONSIDER that choice.) It’s so helpful: how would I know otherwise? I’m the idiot savant of sex ed, see. I have no idea what I do or say: all these words and statistics and sources just come pouring out of me when I consult my Ouija board every time I answer a question. A few days later, I go look at what I have written and it’s an absolute mystery to me.

I figured the best I could do with that one was to very calmly just primarily direct her to actual, international sources of sexual health information. Probably she won’t use them, or even look, or will find some way to discredit them — even though the CDC is almost entirely in the administration’s pocket these days, so you’d think these kinds of folks wouldn’t write them off anymore. But she is an educator, and I suppose you do never know when you’ve gotten one who earnestly has their heart in the right place, but just has never been informed.

And to think, some folks call me a pessimist.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, Mr. Price, home, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

Just flying through here while racing to get ready for an early morning trip to Victoria tomorrow.

(Again, for those of you nearby, I have two events up there, and the 411 — does anyone really say that anymore? — on them can be found here.)

Per usual, everything feels last minute even when it isn’t at all, I am navigating through endless piles of laundry, rushing to get other work done before I go, taking notes in the middle of everything for the workshops, and doing everything I can to be sure I remember all but the one Very Important Thing I will inevitably forget.

Seriously, this much travel was SO much easier back in the day when I had a van that was basically my home on wheels. I miss that stupid metal box more and more as this year wears on. Plus, I am at a point where I expect the teenagers of the world I’ve been flitting all over the place to advocate for to send me a thank you card as big as the Empire State Building.

Or a giant, fluffy Mighty-O donut I can lay my weary head on, munching while I snooze. Whichever.

This frazzled gal is much better speaking with images at the moment than words. See y’all later in the week.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (1) »

I am at the point where I am accepting that it is time to start saying goodbye to my red hair.

The fact that there are moments in which this is earnestly sniffle-worthy — hell, the fact that this is something I even feel a need to publicly mention and invest any emotional energy in whatsoever — is freaking ridiculous.

Ah, vanity: you heartless bastard, you maker of small minds and distractor from far greater things.

I can justify this preoccupation ever-so-slightly by saying that those of us with any brand of red hair are often defined by it, even if we don’t self-define by it. I was born, oddly enough, with nearly gray hair, to the point that my mother had a moment of fear thinking I wasn’t actually alive. In early childhood, I was one of those very light blondes, which soon turned to a dark strawberry. In juniour high, I tried to be blonder, but that soon made way for being pink, burgundy, black (alas, I didn’t look like Siouxsie Sioux as I’d hoped, but rather like Snow White gone terribly wrong), until we came back to just making the red brighter and brighter. So, sparing summers when I was just out in the sun so much, the stuff went almost white, I’ve claimed and amplified my copper for a good twenty years now, and if my appearance is mentioned by anyone, even in press pieces, it’s usually been mentioned that I’m a redhead above all else.

When you’re red, you can do nothing else to yourself, and people seem to think that you invested as much effort as they did in sprucing yourself up: it’s a great cheat for the lazy primper. When you’re brave and your red, it often feels as if your hair advertises that bravery; if you’re bold and you’re red, it seems to prepare people in advance for your assertiveness, which can be a real blessing.

But it’s going away. My father’s side of the family has a history of going grey incredibly early: his mother was nearly full-on white by her mid-twenties, as I understand it, and my father’s went that way by the time I was in high school. Who knows whather it’s the premature grey that’s hereditary or simply the legacy of trauma and stress. My mother had that hair everyone wants, that gorgeous deep russet stuff, but she’s bleached it for so long that even she doesn’t know when hers went grey. I started seeing white hairs in my twenties as well, but it’s been a slower process for me than I anticipated, which perhaps gave me some false hope.

I say that, but really, I’ve always looked forward to going grey, but in part I realize that’s because I had the silly idea that I’d go to sleep looking like me one night, and wake up the next looking like Emmylou Harris. Hope springs eternal, eh? When it became clear that wasn’t exactly the most realistic expectation, I just figured that the streak of white that had started growing on my crown would get bigger and bigger, until you’d have a hard time distinguishing me from Bonnie Raitt: in fact, when I’ve had my hair highlighted over the last handful of years, I’ve always had Sy just throw more bleach there to make it bigger artifically.

A couple years back, I stopped having any sort of allover color done, primarily because a) I got tired of it ruining my hair, b) red has always been easy for my hair to hold since there’s so much red already in it, but as the red has started to go and the greys began to take over, it would fade out very fast, and thus be a total waste of cash and c) I began to get visible roots (yuck!) because what was growing back in was so ashy. So, I’d only gotten some foils put in twice a year or so, and mixed some henna into my conditioner every now and then: I’m generally thrifty both of out habit and necessity, as well as the fact that I’ve appreciated my decreasing care in what I look like over the years. But even then, the foils with the red have started to look more and more odd to me, sitting next to a weird mix of fading copper that’s now looking more and more gold and the encroaching silvers. In some ways, it looks more like I’m going blonde than grey, which is a strange disappointment.

Yesterday, I came in from gardening and passed a mirror where the light was just hitting that certain way, and my hair was up just-so, in which I was able to see that not only are my temples now filled with white and ashy hairs — which I hadn’t noticed, having been distracted by the greys in my crown — but that it’s clearly all growing in…well, not red, and not even all that reddish. I’ve heard runours before that red-types don’t often go grey so nicely, that we do get this weird ashy stuff, and the color just starts to look more and more muted and strange, but now the proof has begun to find itself in the proverbial pudding. I remember this older woman I taught with who was a red going grey, clearly desperately clinging to her old hair, with her rinses whose color always seemed off and the whole works looking a bit like the red version of those clothes we all tried to dye black with Rit dye in high school, all spotty and mushy and nothing close to black.

I’ve had folks tell me that no, absolutely, it’s not going as much as I think it is, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to say (and I confess that I also bring to this the eagle-eyes of a photographer: we’re obsessed with tonal values). And that’s not what my hairdresser says. When leafing through my hair, and mention is made of the color and the grey, she — and I expect they teach you this etiquette in beauty school — lets out a small sigh and a simple “Hmm, well, okay.” (And as Becca could back me up with, that near-silence is quite the statement: Sy talks more than I do, which is really saying something — I write like this because I talk like this, but if my mouth is usually doing 80 in a 50MPH zone, Sy’s is careening off the highway with screeching tires and a bloody mess in her wake.)

Ladies and germs, this copper-top is going down, and I intend to go down gracefully.

I’ll be in Minneapolis very briefly next week to photograph a friend’s wedding, and because I gave up on trying to find someone here who could cut my crazy hair decently, I’ll be engaging in what has become a very silly habit (that feels very bougie, even though it’s not like I only go there to get my haircut, and it also costs me less to get a good cut there than it does to get a crap one here) of still getting my hair cut by my hairdresser who is now over 1600 miles away. She, too, has loved my hair over the years; I know that she’ll want to toss some red foils into it, but I feel it’s time to decline, and say farewell fuschia, sayonara scarlet, and cheerio copper.

(And heck, I won’t be the first person in this house to lose their red hair: Mark was even more red — by a serious longshot, he had that brillo-pad copper — than me before he lost his.)

I can’t promise, mind, that I won’t backpedal at some point (nor that I’ll win this battle this time with Madame Sy). While it’s silly as fuck to invest identity in one’s hair, or any aspect of one’s appearance or body, given how much flux we’re always in, really, my unruly red mane has been part of me for a long, long time. I’ll likely keep my red ends around for as long as they’ll have me, and if Sy argues that she wants to do something so it’s a more gradual transition, I probably won’t put up that much of a fight. Honestly, I might tell her to hack the whole works off at this point, save that for the first time since maybe the seventh grade, I have a partner who is so in love with my hair — even though he’s usually been a short-hair fan with other partners of his — that his little face crumples at the mere mention of hacking it off. Since I figure I’d react similarly if, say, he wanted to change the canvas of his perfect bottom with a giant tattoo, I get it. I’m not ready to cut it all off again anyway, if for no other reason than the fact that the upkeep sucks with short hair.

Anyway, I’m going to start adjusting my brain, and looking for some good symbolism in silver and gold to get attached to.

…and keep hoping that I’ll wake up one day looking like Emmylou Harris. A girl can dream, after all.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, body image, vanity | permalink | comments (5) »

1.) I realized I forgot a couple of good things from the trip. (Yep, still putting off talking about the bad stuff. I reserve the right not to be bitter today.) Like being able to take Mark to Wrigley Field for his first time EVAH with my Dad. After the chamoole finally stopped calling it a stadium, he confessed to having profound penis envy over my hometown ball park. Unfortunately, it appears that for the same reason that Mark’s family asks him not to attend Bengals games because they lose when he’s present, it seems Mark’s visit to our fair Cubbies, beginning with the game we took him to in which Soriano injured himself, had similar results.

Of course, this is the Cubs. Love them as I always will, the only people who need to be in attendance to assure they lose is…the Cubs.

(For the record, it looks as if Mark and I can finally stop saying we’ll do X if he comes home, and go back to when. They were doing the final checks on the car repairs today, so chances are very good that he can get on the road in the next two days so that he can be home by the end of next weekend. Jeez. I told him today that it was getting to the point where I felt this idea we had that the fates wanted us to be together was perhaps backwards: given we started long distance, and by the time he gets home now, will have gone a whole month without being together in the place where we live, it’s possible the fates instead wanted us to be together apart.)

I got to go to the library branch where I spent many a childhood afternoon and hand-deliver my book. Whether they’ll shelve it or not remains to be seen, however, not only did I get a rockin’ Library Journal review which in a couple weeks alone seemed to land it in three times as many libraries as before, my editor today said it looked like we even had backorders for libraries. This makes this girl from the wrong side of the stacks very happy indeed.

2.) For the last two days, I have inexplicably been unable to get the word dirigibles out of my head. Or my mouth: I just had to say it out loud when I typed it, and was glad for the excuse. Thankfully, I remain home alone with my dog, who, while perplexed by my shouting it out at her every few hours, is at least without the power to institutionalize me for it.

While in Cincy, I found Pez Dispensers of both Sully and Mike from Monsters, Inc., which resulted in me pulling out the Mikedispenser and shouting “Mike Wazowski!” Dirigibles seem to have wiped me clean of that, but I’m uncertain it’s an improvement. Can you develop Tourette’s with corprolalia later in life? I know, it doesn’t seem like this is Tourette’s, given that I am not shouting out obscenities, but bearing in mind what exactly I do for my living, and all I hear in a given day, I think we can agree that even determining what obscenities would even BE for me proves a challenge.

3.) I was looking over some photos of friends from Shambala today, and I found myself feeling monstrously old. By this, I don’t mean feeling old in a way that I have changed due to age, but feeling old in a way where I missed a boat that friends not that much younger than me didn’t seem to, which is a big part of why I have zero desire to ever go to Burning Man.

To whit: while I appreciate and dig how glorious those folks look out in the great outdoors with kooky fur and shiny duds and crazy shoes, for the life of me, I can’t dig up even the slightest desire to