You'll Always Be a Prince to Me

Robin Williams has passed on.
I'm listening to his A Night at the Met album as I type this.  He's talking about the trouble with marijuana.  I know the jokes by rote.  When I was still working in theatre and was working alone on deck I would play this album and Weapons of Self-Destruction because listening to his voice ricochet through the space made me feel less alone.  It was like having a best friend to keep me company.

Last night a cry went out: a very real and public grief that spasmed across the Internet.  I'm still reeling. I keep thinking that if we remember hard enough, if we celebrate enough, if we sing "Friend Like Me" and quote Dead Poets Society and watch Aladdin and Robots and Fern Gully and Mrs. Doubtfire enough that we can raise his ghost.  Maybe it would be just long enough to give the man some peace, to pierce the fog of his depression and stay his hand.

Of course that's selfish.  What do I know about the man?  That he was a brilliant inspiration, that his was the voice that defined my childhood, that he named his daughter Zelda because he was a complete gamer nerd, that he struggled with depression and alcoholism and drugs.  What could I, a simple fan, have ever been able to say to him that his family and friends couldn't?  I know depression cannot hear love, cannot feel love on its skin, but Christ, I wish I could just sit with him, hug him, tell him he doesn't have to put up the front...
But maybe he already knew.  I don't know.

I'm left with a gap, a reminder.  The weird dissonance between memory and reality.  I'm sitting up and listening to a cyborg version of his voice, the same jokes bounding out of my speakers and zooming around me.  The album was recorded in 1986, a year before I was born.  The recording doesn't know that, 28 years later, the man joking about the absurdity of the male anatomy and humanity's mating rituals will be dead.  It blithely carries on.  Nothing has changed.  But it has: Robin Williams is dead!  There's a liminal space where his cyborg ghost is Schrodinger's Cat, both alive and dead, present and gone.

And I'm reminded...
Sean Logan.  Emily List.  Seth Bryant.
I don't understand.  I don't understand this space between memory and reality.  How their memory could seem so real but their absence couldn't be any more obvious.

Do we keep moving forward?  How?  How do their families continue on?  Their friends?  Us?  One foot in front of the other?  Do the days just become fine grains of sand on a vast beach, tossed about by the waves of daily life?  Do we get a few bright bits of sea glass, a sea shell, a perfectly preserved starfish corpse scattered throughout?  Do we remember?  Do we forget?  Both?

(An interlude from the album: My son looks at me sometimes, he comes up, gives me a look like, 'Well, what's it gonna be?' 'Hey, Zach [his son], it's gonna be fabulous - eep.  No.  I don't know, pal...umm, it's a crapshoot, I don't know.  
All I can think is, Zach, love, your dad is going to take his own life at 63...I'm sorry...)

I don't have an ending, a neat little tie-off with which to finish this post.  But I guess the title will have to do:
Y'all will always be a prince(ss) to me.  I love you.

Millennial Terror

An anxiety, a kernel, a seed in the back of my mind.

I need a job.  I've always been terrible at finding them, especially through more official means where one sends in a CV, lands an interview, and gets to work.  I'm used to the process where one shoots an e-mail, has a chat, gets the job, gets to work.  That's how it goes in some of the places I've worked for.  But I need a job and there's this creeping feeling in my stomach that I just won't be able to tough it.  I won't be able to chase up the leads, to land the interview, to keep the position once I've earned it.  I'm afraid to leave my insulated little bubble, even if it's not as stable as I'd like it to be.  

I call it my Millennial Terror because my generation is so often accused of refusing to grow up.  We crave, what, stability?  Safety?  Comfort?  Whatever it is that our parents provide, that layer of emotional and fiscal insulation between us and the rest of the world.  I know it's crap, I have so many friends who dive out into the real world and embrace the chaos every day.  Me...

I lie awake sometimes worrying about what I'm going to have to do when I finally finish my PhD.  Yes, I want to teach.  But what will I teach?  How will I teach it?  Will I even be a good lecturer?  Will the students roll their eyes and slump in their seats when I step into the room or will their eyes shine when I bring up a new point?  How will I even get to a place where such an opportunity is possible?  

I call it my Millennial Terror because my generation is so often accused of refusing to grow up.  I have no idea when or if I will truly be able to leave my parents' nest.  Can I find a job?  Can I hold it down?  Can I make enough money to stand on my own?  Will I always be this over-grown woman/child?  I don't know.  I really don't.  And I don't know where to start...  

Happy Father's Day, Poppa.  Your daughter still can't get her shit together.  

Conversion, Conversation, Classrooms

To the men on my Facebook and the women who are like them:

You know who you are.  You are the ones who speak to me as if every feminist quote and metaphor and rant I post is an opportunity to question me, to interrogate me, to make me defend my beliefs.  I don't simply get to rant or let off steam, I must make my Facebook wall/page/timeline/whatever-the-heck-it-is-this week an open classroom and you are my primary pupil.  I must convert you, convince you, watch my tone and mind my manners.  I must be prepared with iron-clad stats from quadruple-blind studies and I must forever have patience with you for not understanding or coming in on the conversation midway.  I am not allowed to lose my temper or let my frustration show.  I am the eternal teacher to my cause, a missionary with the patience of a saint.  I am good.

Except I'm not.  It's 3 AM and I'm not allowed to simply identify with a measly graphic and slap it up on my feed in a sigh of relief and a "HALLELUJAH!  SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS."  I have to defend it, to debate it, to pull up statistics and take the time to teach you.  I know this is the Internet and everything is public.  Letting off some feminist-related steam on Facebook is akin to skinny dipping in your backyard pool: the neighbors can still see you from their balcony.  But my "backyard" is one of the few places I can let off steam in the first place, the one place where I will find the largest concentration of supporters and sympathetic ears.  If I can quietly scroll past your graphics about God, gun-control, and Gears of War then I hope you can damn well do the same.

So listen, my loves, and listen good.  You are not my primary classroom.  None of you are.  Those of you who come to me with open hearts ready to empathise, ready to listen, ready to understand and ask me thoughtful questions so we can genuinely find a middle ground, this is not to you.  By now we have had enough conversations that you and I know how to reach each other and make ourselves heard.  The rest of you, the ones who ask me if I understand "objective" reality without first asking yourselves how to understand the reality in which I live (one where sexual harassment, rape, and gender discrimination are all too real), get out.  Now.  It is not my job to educate you.  Although I am an academic I am not responsible for the module that will open your mind, nor am I paid enough to take the time to teach you.
And the last thing I am is a missionary, knocking on your door to convert you to my cause with a frozen smile and a desperate plan.  I will not come to you with what I know, I will not spoon-feed you or tone myself down just because your feelings are hurt.  This is my feminism, hard fought and hard won: to the one particular group who challenge me for the sake of a challenge rather than seeking to understand, EITHER YOU STEP TO ME OR YOU STEP THE HELL AWAY.

Girls, Grrrls, Women, Womyn, Amazons, Feminists, Feminazis, and Ladies

Sitting up tonight watching Family Guy and [adultswim] for the first time in years and oh, good lord, no wonder it's been ages!  I used to think Family Guy was hilarious, at least from season four on to season ten.  After season ten you can tell Seth McFarlane is trying to juggle three "different" shows and it's just...lame.  But the first ten seasons, they're not too bad, right?  Who doesn't love Stewie and Brian's repartee or the witty-yet-random cutaway scenes that are staples to the show?  Who doesn't love to see the whole family pick on Meg?  Well, me, apparently.  In one scene Meg announces to her father that she will not have sex until she is married.  Her father responds that this is a terrible mistake!  Why? Because sex is healthy?  Because it shouldn't be feared based on the teachings of an outdated religious dogma?  NO!  Because she's a "practice girl" and teenage boys need to use her so they will eventually be awesome conquerors of the female sex!  I used to think this was funny!!  I just cringed!  I'm still cringing.  Seth McFarlane, you used to be awesome.  Now I just think you're an asshole.  Did I grow up?  Am I just being too sensitive?

It's been more than a year since I finally started calling myself a feminist and I'm still struggling with it.  I'm talking about it more, I'm noticing how much we need it in places I didn't (practice girls??), I'm slowly seeking out other feminist communities, heck, if I do this right and don't chicken out I'll be marching in the 2013 DC SlutWalk come August and I might have a poster or two to wave.  My first protest!  If I don't get a panic attack and bolt before the seething masses of people first.  Really, I should feel empowered and brave, like I can conquer the world, but I still feel like a squeaking little mouse.  Me over here in my corner of the blogging world, squeak squeak squeak.

Right, get to the core of it, love.  What are you really talking about?
Some feminists still scare the daylights out of me.  Okay, if you ask my therapist I'm scared of everything.  I don't know how I expect to be an incredible feminist commentator cum media professor when I can't even squeak out an order for a latte at Starbucks.  Not the point.  I love feminism with all my heart and I love what it stands for.  I love the women who stand up in Texas and North Carolina and shout out against slut-shaming and rape culture and misogyny in all of the nerd cultures but oh my god I am so not one of them.  I don't know what I am.


I am a people pleaser and I absolutely want everyone's approval.  I want my fierce grrls to be proud of me, I want my non-feminist friends to understand what feminism (my idea of it, at least) is and to not shy away from it, I want my government out of my uterus, and I want my society's gender dogma out of my head.  I want my freedom.  Oh my god, do I want my freedom.  I want my freedom to speak, my courage to roar and to not worry about the shouts and murmurs that will echo back to me.  As it is now I can barely get my voice above a squeak, especially when I'm at work and I'm working with a male boss or male superiors.  I don't know if it's fair to blame my nervousness and my muteness on a patriarchal society, especially since I'm just shy in general.  However, since I was very little I have loved and feared and needed the opposite sex in the worst way.  My mother, my best girl friends, random women on the street could tell me I was pretty, smart, talented, and amazing but I refused to believe it.  It wasn't until a guy came along and validated me with his affection and approval did any of those notions sink in.

I am not fierce.  I'm a feminist, but I'm afraid to be fierce.

Maybe 6 months later

I wrote the above beginnings of an entry more than six months ago, when Wendy Davis went Mother-of-Dragons on Texas to stand against the horribly restrictive anti-abortion laws that Republicans succeeded in pushing through and women in North Carolina were fighting against similar laws.  I'm still tortured by the fact that, as an activist, I am not a shouter.  I didn't attend Slutwalk like I had planned.  I decided to take a work call instead, and that earned me some more money to pay for my PhD, so that's okay.  But you know the saying, "If it's important to you, you'll find a way; if not, you'll find an excuse".  I was too scared.  Like I said six months ago, I am so not fierce.  

But I am a talker.  And I can feel my confidence growing because feminism doesn't scare me anymore (some parts I take issue with, but that's another story.  Bloody TERFs.).  So maybe that counts as a sort of ferocity: I have enough confidence in my feminist beliefs that I no longer find myself equivocating my stance to appease the other person.  If I know they disagree with me on a fundamental level ("Women totally belong at home!  Their periods make them too crazy to have any power."), I walk away.  Hell, I won't date a guy unless I know he's a feminist full-stop.  So that has changed.  I'm proud of that change.  If I'm not a shouter and a protester I am slowly becoming a talker who stands for something important.  

So it's interesting to hear myself talk when a young woman tells me she is "all for women's rights but [she is] not a feminist".  I sputter and gape and I hear my heart break.  I feel the cogs in my head gearing up to try and open her mind because, to me, it's so simple.  Do you support women's rights and gender equality?  Yes?  Viola!  You are a feminist!  

I want to shake the girl who tells me this stuff and yell, "WAKE UP.  DON'T YOU SEE WHAT YOU ACCEPT AS NORMAL FOR YOUR GENDER IS UTTER CRAP?" but doing so would be incredibly alienating.  I am not out to convert people because that's not how activism works.  One must present others with the facts and allow them to come to their own conclusions.  Doing anything else would make me no better than the bigoted evangelical Christians that tell people they're going to hell simply for not being baptized into their particular faith.  It doesn't work.   

The reality is, we live in a feminist backlash.  After the incredible surge of women's activism in the 70s and 80s, people started thinking, "Whoa now, that's enough.  Men are no longer manly!  We must save our men from women's overwhelming new power!" (Okay, it wasn't so literal.  You get what I mean.). So people began saying the war for equality was won and those feminists who were still fighting, well, they were rabid and delusional, like they were attacking perfectly nice, kind men with their smelly arm pits or something. 

I grew up thinking this.  I still remember walking to school with a friend and saying, "I'm a humanist, not a feminist." (This was after I had spent an hour discussing the need for more information on female yogis and the discourse surrounding Draupadi and Sita in classical Hindu texts).  When I thought of feminists, I thought of Femme Fatale from The Powerpuff Girls or some insanely angry, man-eater that randomly harassed men on the streets for possessing a penis.  I still thought "feminazi" was a meaningful, relevant term to use because I didn't know Rush Limbaugh originally coined it to silence any sort of woman who wanted to leave the kitchen.  Of course I now know that I had it all wrong...

I'm posting this particular blog because I want to remember that I didn't always have the sort of confidence and awareness I do today.  It took many, many years and hundreds of conversations with friends, family, and fellow students for me to finally declare, "Hell yeah I'm a feminist!"  It may make me sad or frustrated or even slightly angry to hear "I'm all for equality, but...", but I have to remember: that was me at 18.  Heck, that was me at 24.  Everyone is different.  For now, all I can do is open my door to anyone who wants to pick my brain.