Monday, May 29, 2006

Hungry to look at some skin

I'm in love and it's time I came clean with it. I am absolutely and totally in love with my daughter's body. I mean, really in love, like can't stop touching it and looking at it love. It started in Brazil where we all lived out of clothes more than in them -and it has continued into Minneapolis summer. I notice that I am looking for opportunities for the children to get naked. Wow! Look! You can't see your breath when you blow out, let's take off the jackets and while we're at it, just strip down! What? Hang out in your backyard with your children? Do you have a little plastic pool that we can fill with water that will get all grassy and disgusting and then can the kids clamber in and out, naked and covered in sunscreen?

There is something about that unselfsconscious nakedness, about those muscles and that shiny growing skin, that just does me in. They are stunning. Completely stunning. And I am in awe.

We exchange pictures among friends - all of us sending links to our websites, attached photos, sometimes versions of the same weekend trips. There are often naked pictures in them, our children holding hands and jumping into the lake, into the slimy pool, resting in the grass. I can't help but think of Sally Mann, the photographer whose photographs of her naked children have generated so much controversy. And not only Sally Mann, but the photos siezed by Scotland Yard at the Saatchi Gallery because they were of naked children, the woman I read about a few months ago who was arrested when she tried to develop photos of her naked children. Most of the time I laugh at these stories - come on, people, there is a difference between pedophelia and loving your children. Lighten up.

But when I am smack in the middle of that intensity - watching Luca running and I can't take my eyes off of her and no, I don't want to do my daughter, but there is a kind of hungry lust in watching that beauty, when I am there, I can understand why some people might be afraid. Something primal or old, something that doesn't smell like baby powder or pastel colors comes up when I watch Luca twisting and turning, limbs splayed. I grew that, my little Petrie dish. In my body, that beauty grew. But it's more than that. Something aching about how life in its purest physical sense is supposed to be, without guile or self consciousness but purely with this turning skin drenched thing.

I do get a feeling that feels kind of like hunger, but a hunger that doesn't have a food to feed it. It's not a lost longing kind of hunger, just something deeper under the skin. And it's funny, because while I can watch the beauty of the other children in my life, admiring them, enjoying them, the feeling isn't as intense as when I watch Luca. When Luca dances, naked in the sun and without pretense, in some wierd projected maybe invisible umbilical cord maybe in misguided ego way, it is also about me. And I love it.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Starting massage school

Yeah, it's official. I am going to start training to be a bodyworker in the fall, beginning with a massage therapy course mixed in with craniosacral therapy. I am thrilled, elated, anticipatory...

And scared. It's a funny scared feeling. Lung-tightening. My partner, Raquel, keeps asking me why I'm scared. Most of the time I don't know. But I think it might have something to do with suspending the absolute hold I've let rational thought play in my life.

Meaning, I usually deal with strife by thinking through a problem, understanding a perspective, gaining more information, making lists and graphing out a solution. While I can't imagine giving up information junkiehood, I have been hungry for something else. I want something that combines that rational part of me with those places that feel unexplainable. Oh, shit, this all sounds so cheesy and I hate how absolutely cornball anything related to bodywork and intuition has become. Talk about a gendered conversation - don't mind the girl in the corner, she just wants to touch people and wander around their auras.

But I want it. Intensely. I have started to dream about it, to look for the seams in this world, this way of being, and to watch for where the seams start to get threadbare and open up to something.... cheesy again.

As I sat in my interview this morning, I looked down at my hands and noticed my nails. Kind of raggedy and long. After over ten years of living with a butch top, I've not even had to think about my nails. That was her job. Well, time to make sure they stay short again.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Safety

I've been raped by four different people in my life - two were family, two were not. All of them happened before I turned 24. I've seen members of my family and a friend die, some who were children. Those were not the hardest things to go through. The hardest thing to go through was the years that followed in which nothing could be talked about, grieved over, stated out loud. For reasons far too complex to go into here and which would take me off the point I'm trying to make, there was a web of silence - both perceived and real - that took me years to untangle and move away from. These days, I feel safest with things said out loud. It is true that there is nothing you can say to me that can have much lasting effect. I might get pissed, startled, annoyed, amused, sad or giggly. But those are easy feelings and they pass. It's what you don't say, all of those behind the scenes secrets, that make me nervous.

Leigh, I know that for some folks, safety happens in being in a space where there is an assumption of agreement. That isn't how it works for me. Safety happens for me when people say what they mean, even if I might disagree with it or, sometimes, get pretty angry. I wasn't offended by Emptyman's post (hi Emptyman). I like the give and take the blog produces, even though sometimes I get annoyed. I like that the blog makes me wrestle with difference in a way that my day to day life doesn't always have time for. And there are a whole hell of a lot of people out there who a) have no idea what transgenderism is and b) if they have an idea, they find it freakish and amusing. Like you said, Leigh, it's what you have to deal with all of the time and it sucks and it's ignorant and it's real. That's why I didn't give Emptyman a lesson on transgenderism (hi again, Emptyman), he's smart enough to google his way to knowledge, if he really wants to know. And Leigh, you are an incredibly valuable person in the community I move within. I hope you'll stay in here, slogging away at Emptyman and, yeah sometimes, me, too.

Emptyman, thanks for showing your belly on your last comment. That was kind. And do take some time to look up transgenderism. Fascinating real lives. If you want web references or book ideas, I'd be glad to do it. And sorry about the recent break up. That sucks.

And I do so hope that at one point, I get some whoop ass leveled at me. I have to assume I make mistakes all the time. I appreciate it when someone takes the time to straighten me out, as it were.

Last comment, how come no one said anything about my lesbian sex posting? That was the one I was way more interested in. And nothing. Not a whisper. Is spring not working its magic on anyone out there in the northern hemisphere?

Friday, May 19, 2006

Addendum to Emptyman

I heard from the Vikki-Kristin train that you've been warned that I might lash out after your email comment. Oh dear, I am really a controlled and kind human being. And yes, you do have east coast elitism about the midwest but you're from the east coast. You're a victim here. I take pity on you more than anything else.

No, it's the transexual trans comment. Emptyman, you gotta remember, you have wandered into a community pod that includes some queers having conversations. You speak from ignorance, love, from the narrow lens of straightness or, even narrower, bioboy straightness. It'd behoove you to learn more about transsexualism, transgenderism, and all things related. Pretty fascinating stuff. It might even help you understand that earring you wear.

Coming in starbursts

It's spring and lovely and gorgeous and the hormones are rising. Mine, too, only they don't tend to circulate in a pack the way they used to. Here's what I mean:

I was walking to the local cafe yesterday, feeling all hip and groovy in my black boots, black pants and velour black top. Yeah, all black. I was childless, which always makes me feel far more butter hips as opposed to boobs. I passed a pack of hip young lesbians hanging out on someone's front lawn. You know, cute studlets in a pack just like I used to be. Even without a daughter in tow AND a groovy black velour top, I have longish hair these days, lots of wrinkles and, more importantly, I'm not out at the watering holes. I walked by. They didn't even look up. So depressing.

I was remembering when I first moved to Minneapolis, something like 15 years ago. Newly out, wanting to sniff every dyke in town, with the feeling that "I have discovered every single new feeling, political idea, community moment that exists in my life" as though they were happening on the planet for the very first time. And me and my friends, we were somehow in the center, somehow the creators of this moment.

I worked in the local women's bookstore - appropriately enough, called Amazon Books. The older collective members were all at least 15 years older than me, had come out in the heydays of the 1970s. At one point, while I was talking with a friend of mine in highly arched tones about how sad it was that 70s lesbians weren't allowed to use dildos because they believed that penetration equaled rape, how misguided, how dry and uninteresting their tribadism must have been. This conversation took place after some well-intentioned anti-violence lesbians had come in and thrown red paint over the lesbian porn mags I had started to order for the bookstore. I felt smarter, more primal, feeling like I had discovered sex, that me and mine were doing things that all those old farts were afraid to dream about.

Into this reverie, broke in one of the older women. "You think you invented sex? We were doing things you can only dream about, we were fiercely against monogamy, believed that sex should be something you shared and didn't try and own, we had parties which I can now see were orgies but we saw them as opportunities to break social bullshit about sexual boundaries. You think using a dildo makes you radical? It just makes you reliant on plastic."

Yeah, Barb. I'm sorry. Cuz I had an edge of that feeling when I walked by the group of young women on the lawn. It was embarrassingly completely ego-based and completely projected. Who knew if they noticed me. Who knew if they cared, let alone had any thought at all about me and my sexuality. But watching them, I suddenly wanted that hormone abundance feeling, of being in my 20s with a bunch of other 20 year olds where the air is rich with how much we all want to touch each other. It changes when you get older. That feeling comes in starbursts as opposed to perpetual rain.

And none of us invented sex. And none of us have ever done all that you can do. But it has been - and it is - fun trying.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

finally

Oh how it feeds my Leo soul to have so many people ask me why I haven't blogged in awhile. It makes me feel...sniff sniff... wanted.

I've been told I'm supposed to write about culture shock, returning to the US, reflections on Brazil now that we're back here, visions for the future, funny things that people have said, all of that. Considering that we still don't have an internet connection at home and, unlike my esteemed fellow bloggers who all seem to work government jobs where they sit in front of the computer with huge spans of thumb-twiddling time, I come to the internet cafe to WORK and PAY MY BILLS, I am feeling rather wordless.

So, because I'm watching the clock and have only 30 minutes left to finish this proposal for a NONPROFIT AWARD for lots of INNOVATION AND ADVOCACY for working with TRANS YOUTH (I hope that capital letters help this proposal) and I have to walk to pick up our new-old grandma car 98 Ford Contour thank you grandma in Ohio for getting too old to walk and thinking of me and mine and yes, we've sunk $400 in this car today even though it was supposed to be all free and clear of bugs, well, with all of that plus the fact that I promised I would make zucchini risotto tonight and it takes a while to grate a fuckload (here that, Vikki, it is a real measurement) of zucchini, well, I am going to be quick.

Let's see: Came back, no one had a meltdown, stayed with friends for two weeks while the renters moved out of our house, stayed with friends for longer while the housemate found a way to de-ick the frat house smell from the woodwork, couch, paint, dog's eyelashes, and yes I have now learned that the frat house smell is a mixture of stale cigarette smoke, stale beer, stale food, no washing and, stale pot, and oh yes, lots of incense to cover it up which then goes, yep, stale, but it got clean, still had not meltdown, went to Ohio to visit family and got said car from said grandmother who hasn't driven it in two years but it does have 66,000 miles on it and not 60 so it's not REALLY a grandmother car, and then came back, stopped at the Cranberry Expo in rural Wisconsin where we learned everything there is to know about the cranberry (information given upon request), came back, no meltdowns after 14 hours in the car there and back, moved into our house three days ago, are still moving in, getting rid of crap, we got rid of crap before we left but now after six months feel less connected to the crap that was left so now we're getting rid of more crap, hanging out with friends, it is BEAUTIFUL in minneapolis right now and did I still mention, no meltdowns?

Culture shock? At the airport in Chicago before we transferred to Minneapolis, everyone looked so AMERICAN in that tennis shoes, all clothes made out of sweatshirt material and baggy, that kind of look. Maybe it's midwestern but I see those people everywhere and on the record, I have never dressed like that. Tennis shoes for anything other than working out - ish! But I love my friends who do it. Culture shock: the first time I walked into our house and our friend's house, the warm color of the wood everywhere caused eye orgasms. Different from the glass and stone and clean lines of most of what we saw in Brazil. Plus, with a huge termite problems, not a lot of residential wood there. Culture shock: not much. Except for the size of people, the size of food ordered in the restaurant, that kind of thing.

We're all pretty adaptable. We've done this before. It's Luca who has amazed me. She has been seamless in her transition. Completely seamless.

Kisses until we have internet at home.