Danser!

Sometimes (okay a lot of the time) I’m not very PC. I know that fat-shaming and judging people by their appearance is totally bad. I certainly don’t want people forming opinions (or voicing them) about the shape and size of any of my body parts. But, as someone who has been something of a fitness junkie all of my life, I’ve got some opinions about bodies and why they matter.

I guess it all started when I was a kid. For one thing, my mother kept tossing me out of the house and telling me to go play. I usually didn’t go very far. Up the cottonwood tree in the backyard to daydream, or maybe to dribble a basketball on the patio. I wasn’t exactly the first pick on the kickball team in P.E., nor the star of the various alley games with the neighborhood kids. In fact, I was pretty much the smallest and the slowest. “Field day” at school was a white-hot misery.

But then, when I was 8, my parents got me a horse. That critter was tall and scary and had a bad attitude. It was a long, slow process of learning to ride her and care for her. As I got older and stronger, my father got older and more bent from ankylosing spondylitis. I started doing more and more of the things that men usually did – mowing the yard, unloading the horse feed, cleaning the barn, working on the car. Then I started junior high school. More P.E. Basketball, which I sucked at. Tennis, which I sucked slightly less at. But sometimes, we just ran loops around the school. And sometimes I passed people, or outlasted them, and that was nice. I discovered that I really liked running, and I liked passing people too. I started to feel more capable and confident in this body.

Then somebody came up with this idea called aerobics. Jane Fonda made a workout tape. That was fun. And my high school sweetheart bought me a 12-speed-bike for my birthday present. I rode all over north Texas on that thing, once I figured out gears. The bike was a lot more reliable way to get to school than my Ford Pinto station wagon. My thighs got too big for my skinny jeans. At age 18, with no money and no real plans, I randomly decided to join the Army. Off to basic training I went, where I discovered I wasn’t as fit as I thought I was. Pushups? What are those? I remember goofing around with some of my buddies, taking pictures of each other in our battle gear. My hair was short, my body was lean, and I felt like I could do anything. What a great feeling that was. Conquering the challenges of basic training taught me to approach physical and mental adversity with gusto and courage. 

It’s been a few years since basic training. I have a desk job. I have two kids. Staying fit is harder than it used to be. I go to the gym with my oldest daughter a couple of times a week. And I’ve started taking dance classes. Belly dance and Irish dance. They are both very difficult art forms. I’m not very good at either of them. Irish dance in particular is extremely physically demanding, but after dance class or a practice session at home, when I’m panting and drenched in sweat, I feel so amazingly alive. And hours or even days afterwards, I can feel the difference that dancing makes. There’s this core flame of strength and energy that I can always draw upon. Anyone who does regular aerobic exercise knows this feeling. 

But with dance, there’s something more. Dancing is more than exercise. It’s more than just the intersection between physical strength and physical control. When you dance, you become the physical embodiment of the music. And the more you master the dance form, the more perfectly you become entwined with the music as you dance. In Arabic there is a word for this – the spiritual ecstasy that arises from the physical experience of dance. You don’t just approach the divine - as you dance you become the divine, and you understand that the beauty and strength and joy of the body are divine. There is no separation. Why do you think fundamentalist religions ban or discourage dance? There is no ‘god up there and you down here.’ The power and pleasures of your physical self are magical and powerful and sacred and real. Do not sit on that couch. No one is watching. Everyone is watching. Get up and dance.

I can't be your facebook lover

I am pretty open to meeting new people, online and off. On social media, it’s pretty easy to cut someone off if they turn out to be fundamentalists, gun-toting rednecks, or just average creeps. It’s been my experience that periodically one of my online guy friends will feel the need to initiate a flirtation.  Actually, flirtation may not be the right word. Flirting is smiling at someone over the edge of your wineglass. Flirting is looking at him while you toss your scarf over your shoulder just so. It may be that there is an online version of that, but I haven’t seen it. Instead, out of the blue you’ll receive a message that is some version of “I really want to be with you right now.” 

Since a response of “Yeah, me too!” would be neither honest nor useful, my general approach is more like, “Thanks but I’m only looking for friendship.” Although radio silence conveys the same message, and I’ll resort to that if I’m just too busy to deal with it. I don’t have anything against flirtation in a general way. I’m as fond of the opposite sex, friendly banter, and admiration as anyone else, no matter what their relationship status. Humans are humans, after all. But I just don’t have the time or energy to play make-believe with someone I may not have even met face-to-face.  

I’ve gone through a variety of theories about the internet come-on. One is that there are just a lot of lonely, unfulfilled people in the world. Another is that my online personality (outspoken activist? adoring mother? successful professional? sort-of blonde?) is particularly appealing to some men. However, I’ve come around to the theory that testing the water with female acquaintances is just a thing that guys do, which sort of takes any flattery out of the equation.

Often, the next thing I know, I’ve been unfriended by the guy in question. A friendship that I thought could be lasting and real evaporates in a moment. Some guys can laugh it off and stick around. More and more, I’m finding that my male friends are gay, significantly older or younger than I am, or married to a good friend. All of my life, I’ve tended to have about equal numbers of male and female friends, but that balance is changing, and it bothers me. 

I’m tempted to regularly post an online disclaimer. How does this sound? 

“Dear men - I am busy raising a family, holding down a job, remodeling a house, and trying to rid the world of misogyny and injustice. I am way too busy to exchange online fantasies with you. I cannot engage in long chat sessions with you during work, and I will not send you photographs of any part of my unclothed body. My favorite people in the world are my family, and they get most of my time and attention. But if you’d like to talk about sports, politics, cars, the weather, pets, quantum physics, or power tools, please feel free to send me a friend request. Ammosexuals, tea-partiers, and forced-birthers need not apply.”

Think it would help?

Father's Day

When I was 12 my parents divorced. My parents had always fought a lot, but I was particularly devoted to my dad and was heartbroken by the split. My sister, then 18, moved in with some friends in Dallas, and my mother and I moved to Denton where my grandmother lived. Our lovely house in the country near Celina was sold.

My dad had suffered from a crippling form of arthritis for several years. I could remember him being able to pick me up, to work on cars together, to mow the yard and to build bookcases using a handsaw and a drill. But as I grew stronger, his back grew more bent, and by age 12 I was the muscle in the house, doing the yard work and the heavy lifting in the barn as well. I enjoyed physical work and took pride in my ability to take care of things.

I loved Denton and quickly made friends there, which helped make the transition a little easier. But two years after the divorce, my dad no-showed for our weekly Saturday outing. We would often start our Saturday morning with a trip to Dunkin’ Donuts, and then we would scour junkyards for Ford Thunderbird parts. This was a special Saturday because it was Valentine’s Day, and I had gotten Dad a really nice card that I was anxious to give him. When he didn’t show up, Mom called his apartment. No answer. She tried calling several times. No answer. Day turned to evening. Mom called Dad’s best friend, who went over to his apartment and found him there, dead. When the policeman knocked on the door, I already knew the truth, but it was still shocking. I vaguely remember lying in my bed sobbing while one of Mom’s friends gently rubbed my shoulder to comfort me.

The next few days were a blur of misery. My friends were my great comfort. They came to the funeral to awkwardly witness my grief. When I got back to school they respected my wishes to not talk about my dad. They wanted to help, but I wanted school to be a place where I didn’t have to think about it. It felt like the pain would never end, but I did manage to compartmentalize it. Sometimes I would be overwhelmed with grief, but at other times I could laugh and be lighthearted and fun. 

The rest of my teen years were pretty tough. My relationship with my mother deteriorated to the point where I left home at 16. At 18 I joined the army and embarked on adult life. Somewhere in my late teens, my mom told me that my dad had sexually abused my older sister, and that was why she had divorced him. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a hard time believing this. Thinking back, I could remember certain odd moments and things that ‘felt weird.’ Like my dad ordering me to change clothes in front of him when I was 12, or him buying me a lacy nightgown when I was 11. As my grief for his death receded, it was replaced by grief for my sister and the harm that was done to her. 

Many years later, I was sitting in my cousin’s garage in Oklahoma. He was smoking, I was enjoying a cold beer, and we were talking about whatever. He expressed dismay that neither my sister nor I ever visited my dad’s grave to pay our respects. I gently explained the reason for our ambivalence. He digested this, then revealed that he and his brother had also been the victims of abuse perpetuated by another family member. With our grandparents and all their children dead, we could only helplessly wonder what on earth went wrong, what sort of hell our parents and their siblings had experienced that had led to this misery. There is much that we will never know.

But what I do know is this; sharing our stories is extremely powerful and healing. And keeping them secret is a cancer that damages us and our relationships with others. Years of misunderstandings melted away in that hot Oklahoma garage because we had finally gotten mature enough to be honest with each other. Depending on your personal beliefs, you may think my father will burn in hell for his sins, or perhaps you believe that he will be reincarnated into another life where his damaged soul will have a chance to learn and heal. All I know is, my focus and my allegiance are with the living, for where there is life, there is hope for redemption and joy. And I’m glad to say, whatever the dark secrets of our family’s past, the legacy of abuse has ended with my generation. Our children will not know the nightmare that we lived through.

Find out what it means to me

I am not a member of any religion. I claim no affiliation. But growing up and living in a mostly Christian country in nominally Christian family, mainly my rejection of religion is a rejection of Christianity. I don’t have any problems with Jesus. I’ve read the stuff he supposedly did and said and he seems like an okay dude. I don’t for a minute believe that he’s the one son of God or the only path to grace or any of that stuff. But that’s not the reason I reject the church.

This is the deal. The church is an organization that reinforces the social norms that support authority. It is an arm of the patriarchy that has murdered and marginalized women, gays, and anyone else deemed superfluous or dangerous to prevailing power structures. 

Sure, we can all read our history and agree that the crusades were misguided and murderous, that burning witches at the stake was horrific, that Pope Pius enabling the Holocaust wasn’t exactly a bright spot in Christian history. But, modern Christians would argue, that was in the past, that wasn’t me, I’m a good person and I try to follow the teachings of Christ. But I look at the church that you are a part of, and I don’t see that much has changed.

On a daily basis I see the church actively involved in efforts to eliminate my rights to my own body and healthcare choices. I see the church involved in preventing my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from enjoying the equal rights promised them by our constitution. I see churches promoting child abuse by encouraging parents to hit their children. I see ministers and priests involved in the sexual abuse of children. I see churches promoting sexual shame and dysfunction by teaching that the body is evil. I see ministers making a fortune off of their congregations.  I even see some churches still working against racial equality and integration. 

Any ONE of these things is enough to make me see red. Add them all together, and I really have to wonder how any decent human being would align themselves to these organizations. But my biggest issue with church is its attitude towards me as a woman. According to the teachings of the church, I am the source of sin, I am created of man and for him, I am to live for man and be ruled by him. And none of these things are actually true. It doesn’t matter whether anyone wants them to be true; they just aren’t. These teachings attempt to deny my power, my intelligence, my agency, my biology, even my humanity. 

The society that embraces this dogma is a society that rears men who think of women as lesser beings, as property. Rapists and abusers believe this. But so do nice men who don’t think of themselves as being misogynists. It’s very difficult to truly escape this paradigm. 

My husband would describe himself as non-sexist, a real supporter of women’s rights. He thinks the anti-abortion crowd are a bunch of wingnuts. But, true story, a few years ago we were having a disagreement. Our daughter, who was then a second grader, was very unhappy and bored in our awful rural Oklahoma school and asked to homeschool. This was something that she had been considering since kindergarten, but for one reason or another she decided to keep sticking it out. My husband wasn’t happy about the homeschooling idea, but after some discussion and thought, given that our community didn’t really offer any alternatives to public school and at the time I was unemployed, I decided to attempt it. Some months later we had a fight about it, and he said something that I’ll never forget. He told me that by ignoring his wishes I had ‘emasculated’ him. There are lots of other ways he could have expressed his disagreement, but that’s the word he used. So, when a man and a woman disagree, if the woman defies the man’s wishes and makes her own choice, he is emasculated? If the only choices are 1) agree with him and do what he wants or 2) disagree with him and do what you want, then any time you take choice 2, following your own instincts and doing what you believe to be right, you are taking something away from him. 

This is what systemic misogyny has given us – men who believe that when women exercise their agency, they are taking something away from men. And, so help us, we have women who believe that when women exercise their agency, they are losing something of value. The pressure to submit is there, every day, in our school yards and our media and our churches and our offices and even in our homes. Every woman alive has at some point just shut up or given up or compromised for the sake of keeping the peace. Misogyny doesn’t only reduce our paychecks or pressure us to go on a diet, it actually corrupts our personal relationships, the most intimate and personal parts of our lives. For some this erupts in violence or can even result in death, but even the most fortunate of us have found ourselves, at some point, staring at our partner in disbelief and absolute frustration, realizing that we’re not just arguing with our lovers, we’re arguing with thousands of years of a tradition that disrespects and dehumanizes us.

Once people worshiped the goddess and the god, the lady and the lord, the earth and the sun. The toxic triad of monotheism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, have robbed us of half of who we are. I am told by friends that I must respect their religion even if I don’t agree with them. This is rather like telling a black man that even if he disagrees with the Ku Klux Klan, he has to respect their philosophy as valid.  Your church has been at war with women for over 2000 years. My sisters are dying in this war. I’m not playing nice. I’m fighting back.

Angels and flowers

Today on the long drive home through pre-holiday traffic, I spotted a little car decorated with rainbows, angels, and flowers, and I smiled. As I edged closer, I could see that it had the blood bank logo on the bumper.

A few years ago, when I was unemployed and in transition, an old colleague of mine, Eric, offered me a freelancing gig with his two-man marketing company. It wasn't too good to pass up unless you were desperate, which I was, so I took it. The second contract I did for his company was a project for the Blood Center of Central Texas. I wasn't given a travel budget or any face-time with the client, so I bullied their IT department into sending me a comma-delimited file of their ENTIRE donor database, and I spent many tedious hours creating pivot tables and trying to make sense of all that data.

In the end, the data said exactly what one would have expected it to say, which is that blood donors are mostly middle aged or older, white, and college educated. More men donate than women, which is generally because of women being more prone to anemia. Absolutely NO big surprise anywhere.

Tasked with putting together a presentation on our findings, I struggled to find anything interesting to say about all of my pretty, colorful graphs. I finally abandoned Excel and decided to get groovy with Google, remembering the Austin that I loved during my college years and looking for a way to somehow quantify the feeling that is Austin. Eventually I added a slide to my presentation titled ‘Consider this…” that included some facts about Austin’s demographics (always votes Democrat, number of musicians per capita, that sort of thing) that seemed to capture the spirit of the city. Then I clicked save and emailed the file to Eric.

Eric presented it without me. I wasn't even on the phone. He wasn't the sort of chap to share the glory, or the money, with anybody. But he did tell me that when he got to that slide, everyone in the room said “that’s it!” and it was. We went on to create web sites and graphics and marketing materials and a blood donor store and all the other things that bring ideas to life.  The blood center saw a huge upturn in the number of donations.  I earned about $6k for the gig.

It is about six years and several jobs later. I live in Austin now and regularly see the bloodmobiles and other blood center vehicles on the streets with those angels and flowers. Every time, I wonder how many lives one PowerPoint slide may have saved. Since one blood donation can save two lives, probably a lot.

I don’t talk with Eric any more. His little marketing company is still puttering along without me. We didn't part on the friendliest of terms; I had gotten weary of being under-paid and invisible. It wasn't a unique experience in the world of business, unfortunately. It seems many people fail to understand that when you help other people succeed, you succeed. And more importantly, you have fun and make friends along the way. Generations of business students across the country have been relentlessly brainwashed to believe that greed is the ultimate good, and the results of that can seen in offices and stores everywhere in America – unhappy, unengaged employees, shoddy products, temps with no benefits and no security, bureaucracy and poor management. What if we started teaching students a radical new idea about business? That the point of it is to do good and have fun? That could happen, right? Can you imagine what that would look like?

At the rail

How did it happen

That I would stand here at the rail

Looking down at liars and thieves

Years ago a gawky teenager stood here

Looking at the empty chamber with reverence

Now I stand again, different

After a day at work, eyes gritty and tired

I look at the clock, raise my fist

And scream

Surrounded by armed cops

Behind me, around me,

My children waiting for me at home

They lie, these men and women, they would kill me

With their lies, if they could

They will kill my sisters, in their suits, with their pinched faces

I started screaming at a quarter to midnight

I am screaming still

Thirty years ago I walked across the lawn

And looked up at a pink dome

I have since danced on the steps, knocked on the doors

Held the signs and marched and still

Screaming until my chest ached

And my throat rasped

The cops watched and I threw back my head

When my voice was dying and louder

Louder

There is no end

To the strength of my voice

The next day at work

My voice a raw whisper I read

They called us an unruly mob

With distain as if

In this land of the free unruly

Is the worst thing you could be

Murderers in dark suits and pinched faces

Unruly inked upon my heart

I will forever remain

Unruly

Outsider

Nothing like international travel to remind you how weird your home is. It allows you to consider yourself and your culture from the perspective of an outsider for a while. Quite mind-bending (humbling) if you can enter that perspective. Having spent the last two weeks as an temporary Brazilian, I offer the following observations on the American experience:

Consider the fact that in Texas, every other vehicle on the road is a big-ass gas-guzzling truck.

Also, we light up our cities like the inside of a football stadium during a night game, turning night into day.

We rush through our meals with a smart phone in our hands or worse, work through our meals.

Can we just talk for a minute about how disgusting U.S. beef is? What on earth do they do to those poor cows?

Serving all those meals in disposable wrappers or on disposable plates with disposable silver ware is just about the most egregious symptom of a throw-away don’t-care society you can imagine.

Cops on every street and hovering in the sky in their helicopters night and day make you feel like you’re living in a police state. It’s noisy and oppressive.

A city criss-crossed by highways is ridiculously loud and smelly, but the highways sure don’t seem to reduce the traffic problems much.

Hand-shaking is such a cold and impersonal way to greet someone, really.

Our coffee is just flavored brown water with no kick at all. Why bother?

Apparently Budweiser really is the king of beers. Who knew?