On a Child's Seventh Birthday

They say that seven is a lucky number. But lucky, exactly, for whom?

Seven is supposedly so many things: a years-long itch, a deadly sin, a sun, a son, a wonder of the world, a sister, a number of days, all of the seas on earth, a particularly impressive notion of heaven.

Seven is also the number of years it’s been since my first child, my daughter, was born.

She was born early, not by choice but rather necessity, to protect me and her from the high blood pressure in my veins that threatened us both. The whole thing started in the morning, and she was born a little before 6 pm, silently, as if she wanted to reconsider. One of the odd things about giving birth is that you remember everything, every last detail, and yet it all seems impossible, like it couldn’t have actually happened. When your child is a small person living fully in society, it’s hard to fathom how she used to live inside of you, how at one point in a sense you were one and the same.

What a world!

Because you and she are not the same. She is gymnastics, and you are basketball. She is arts and crafts, and you are poetry. She is obedience and you are rebellion. She is straight fine hair and you are thick and curly. She is competition and you are just too busy laughing in the background to care.

And now, she is seven.

Seven is an important age, somewhere between being a little kid and being a not so little kid. Do you remember being seven? I do. I remember resignedly waking up at midnight to take my epilepsy medication. I remember that my best friend was a boy, and everyone—well, mostly adults—teased us about being “boyfriend/girlfriend.” I remember my last year with a bowl cut before my hair turned curly. I remember being able to float on my back on the water for 30 minutes straight. I remember pancakes and peanut butter and crackers and watermelon boats. I remember jumping rope for hours without stopping and reading novels intended for people ten years older and lying in the hammock in my back yard.

What will my daughter remember of being seven?

Will she remember her surprising strength, the impressive little muscles in her belly and arms? Will she remember her “monochrome” phase, wearing the same color from top to bottom? Being student of the month? Winning the spelling bee? Playing with her brother—finally, finally!—peacefully and happily for hours on end? Refusing to eat? Colored pencils or sleds shaped like polar bears? Treating an eraser with a smiley face as if it’s a real life person? Playing gin with her mother on a Friday night? Any of these songs that we sing?

Well, she will now, because I wrote this.

What can we give our children but a name, some mannerisms, immeasurable love and memories they’d like to keep?

We can give them nothing else but a wish. And so we say, Happy Birthday.

And when I remember this happy 7th birthday, I will think about how I went to her classroom to do a little poetry project. She was so excited in theory and so shy in practice. And as everyone else was shouting and giving their answers to the age-old philosophical question of Why Popsicles? and it came time for her turn, I already knew the answer: Because 30 years have passed between your eyes and mine. I asked her, why did you choose that one? And she said, in front of the entire first grade:

Because I love you.

I will always remember you when you were seven, Lenny. Always—no matter how many more sevens I've got.

This post is also available at KatyDidCancer.

Snow White v. Superman

I've written a lot about gender roles, I realize. I've written controversial pieces based on my own childhood experiences, talked about the craziness of buying clothes for boys and girls, written about sex and rape, and yes, even ventured into the territory of talking about Disney Princess movies, though apparently I'm not good at that because that post degenerated into a long missive about the importance of using condoms. And that's not to mention all the posts about hair and breasts and body image and femininity and everything else inherent in KatyDidCancer.

However, I think it's time for me to give a little bit of my take on the whole Princess phenomenon.

It really doesn't bother me at all.

If you think of yourself as a feminist (and yes, I do, because I don't think that's a dirty word and I don't like how people have tried to take history and manipulate it), this is almost a sacrilegious statement. After all, princesses are only valued for their sex appeal! They are sitting around waiting for Prince Charming! (Ever notice how no one ever focuses on the princes? They are usually some pretty ineffectual dolts) They have to give up their talents and get threatened with death and they are abused and have no lives of their own! They are literal prisoners! What does this say to our daughters?

Um, well, I don't know. That's all bad stuff. I just think our kids can figure that out. Look, I could be dead wrong about this. I didn't grow up playing with princesses. I didn't play with dolls in general, except for Barbies (read this for my mom's perspective on mothering a girl like me). I think the princess stories are disturbing, especially in their dark, depressing, original Grimm form. However, my daughter has never seemed to care about princesses (my son went through a Princess-obsession phase; he thought Snow White was SO PRETTY). Lenny used to dress up in the outfits if her friends wanted to do that, but she never chose to do that on her own. She doesn't have princess dolls and never talks about being a princess. So, perhaps I've been lucky. But I can honestly say that it wouldn't bother me if she was into all that stuff.

Why the collective obsession with princesses? I think we give advertisers too much credit, and our kids too little.

Does anyone wring their hands over the assumption everyone seems to make about boys looking up to superheroes? No--quite the opposite. The trend seems to be to encourage girls to look up to those characters too.

But think about what that means.

Who are superheroes? Well, on the one hand, they are people who help others, fight crime, and do things for the greater good.

On the other hand, they have a pretty bum rap, if you ask me. In order to be a superhero, it's pretty much guaranteed that you have no family. You are an orphan (Spiderman, Superman, Batman), led into the path of greatness by the suffering and death of the people you love most. Even that is not enough. Once you begin your life of crime-fighting, you still don't get to have a family. It is accepted that anyone who loves you--women, parental figures--will be a target of the bad guys in order to get back at you.

So, it's back to a life of solitude for you. Back to a life where you hide your true face and lie to everyone every day.

There's more. Sometimes, you can't be a superhero without literally being a freak of nature, an aberration (Hulk, Spiderman). Sometimes you bring this on yourself or it's done to you against your will (Iron Man, Wolverine). So you can look forward to being this dude who is tormented, either by others or by his own misgivings with his body, or both. Your life is filled with excessive danger and physical pain. You will die young or come close to death over and over again. People will hate you and misunderstand you. You will be expected to represent entire nations and save society from extinction (Captain America, every other superhero).

Now you're saying, Jesus Katy, way to ruin all the fun! And that's exactly my point. No one points out how unrealistic and damaging the actual messages of Superheroes are--they are too busy focusing on the cool special effects and gadgets and the flying and the stuff blowing up. We don't actually want our boys to be isolated, cold, violent, without friends or love, incapable of telling the truth about themselves, doomed to lives of heroism tinged with the knowledge of a painful and early death. I think it's accurate to say that there are aspects of those messages that do get lodged in boys' brains, and those can be damaging, but no one is wringing their hands over the completely effed-up messages behind these dudes (yeah, I said dudes--Wonder Woman is kind of on her own).

And I say that's fine.

Kids get interested in this stuff for their own reasons, and they do different things with it. Sure, there's too much product placement for little kids, too much pressure for every kid to like the same things, too much merchandising of the message. However, our kids do deserve a little more credit than for us to just think they are mindless drones swallowing every piece of junk message that's given out.

When I was a kid, I had a favorite Barbie. I named her Joanne and called her Jo. I dressed her in the pedal pushers and other awesome 50s-era pants I had handed down from my mom, and she often wore Ken's sweaters. She drove to her job (she was 17--my idea of the absolute perfect age in the world when I was 9) and did well in school and hung out with her friends and got to have sex with the one Ken doll, who never cheated on her. She was a tomboy. I never gave a thought to the unnaturally large tits or the weird curve of her feet or whatever other porn-based messages Barbie was supposed to impart to me. Playing with that doll did not cause me problems in my life, my relationships, or my career. It never affected my body image. She was a 12 inch plastic doll. There wasn't a single part of her that looked like a real person. I was smart enough to know that.



And when my brother played with his thousands of little green plastic army men, arranging complex war scenarios, it did not make him a violent person. I remember him making a diorama about World War II or something, and to make it realistic, he cut off some of the army men's limbs and painted them red. I kind of love that fact. But the point is, he didn't grow up to cut people's arms off or inflict harm on other people or think that's what a man should do.

In fact, there are so few kids who ever grow up to do anything remotely resembling the messages behind princesses or superheroes that I don't know why we've all got our undies in a bunch over it. Sure, there are some trophy wives and gangbangers, some Navy seals and supermodels (or whatever the real life parallels are), but not very many. Most kids grow up to do something, hopefully something they like, but not usually, not for most kids. They do something to pay the bills. And they learn how to do that, how to cope and survive, in part by how they play.

The other day, Gabe and I were treated to a "movie" that our kids put together with the stuffed animals. The plot was that the two Beluga whales had a baby (a cow), who was subsequently rocked to sleep by a Latina American Girl doll, and then treated to a birthday party complete with cake until Augie started throwing everything around. There was singing involved in the movie--Lenny singing softly to the baby, Augie making up some pretty creative lyrics of his own. In order to do that movie, they had to work together, plan, build the set, use their imaginations, and generally laugh a lot and make a huge mess. It didn't turn out exactly how either of them expected. Gabe videotaped it for a minute but then his phone died. I made them cut it short because it was past their bedtime. We forced them to clean up.

There's more to real life in those games than all this other stuff we worry about, and I see them play like that all the time.

I started thinking about all this the other day, when Lenny said something very insightful to Gabe about her birthday. Her words made me realize that kids do internalize messages they see and hear about men and women, though not necessarily in the ways we imagine. Girls might not see the superheroes and toughness and world-beating out there that's stuffed down boys' throats and feel left out or lesser. They might see something else--something more insidious, something that they don't want for themselves--something kind of sad.

Lenny was due to be born on St. Patrick's day. She knows this. She was born 9 days early, on International Women's day. She complained to Gabe a few days ago that she wished she had been born on St. Patrick's day because that would be so fun (we are a family of redheahds living in a neighborhood filled with a lot of Irish Catholics; we are neither Irish nor Catholic, but the shamrock culture is ubiquitous here--an alien concept to me). Gabe said "well, don't you think the day you were born is better? I mean, which is more important?" Lenny said "women, I guess." Gabe told her that if there were no women, there would be no babies. And she said this:

Yeah, and then there would be only men. And then there would be no people. Because all they would do is have wars and everyone would die.

I'm thinking that a cow born to whales that like cake and music is a better bet. But maybe that's just me.

Consent

The concept behind this post is really a very simple one. I thought of talking about a lot of other things that are related, but there will be time enough for that. This time, I’m talking about this:

Consent.

As in sexual consent.

Part of what it means to describe a “rape culture,” a term that I find accurate and yet grossly misused and misinterpreted to the point of being almost useless, is that everyone seems to agree that consent is this murky issue. Those who decry that notion state that consent is not the act of not saying no, it is the act of saying yes. Then, those people are shunned for being idiots who don’t understand the way human sexual behavior works in the real world, called Feminazis or frigid or something, and the whole mess just continues.

Here’s the thing. Consent is obvious. It is not about people having some scientific conversation that goes like this: May I have sex with you? Why Yes you may.

When we act as if consent is difficult to define, we ignore most of the history of human sexuality. People—men, women, of all different sexual orientations—manage to have consensual sex every single day here on earth. The very fact that rape cases and trials often hinge on the notion of consent proves that we are denying what we all know to be true—that people actually do know when someone wants to have sex with them—in order to excuse criminal behavior and blame victims.

If you are female, you have a high likelihood of being in a situation, or multiple situations, where you somehow have to convince folks—the perpetrator or perpetrators of the crime, the people investigating it, your friends, your family—that you were not “consenting” to certain acts just by nature of being there, by nature of existing. You begin to question this yourself. You call your own actions into question, though you are confused, because you know that you do know how to consent, it’s a normal, natural thing, nothing to be ashamed of, so how can people question it so easily?

We use the cloak of the supposedly ambiguous "consent" to call into question all kinds of things. "Consent" can apparently be assumed, based on a variety of factors: your age, your level of sobriety, your clothes, your attractiveness, your being in a certain place at a certain time, your choice to be by yourself or not, your body language.

This is a pretty complicated formula to figure out. And none of it even comes close to discerning whether or not I, or you, you know--actually want to get busy with another person.

I've always been clear about this. I cannot imagine anyone ever being confused about my willingness or lack thereof in sexual matters. And yet that does not mean that I have not been molested on numerous occasions, that I have not been the victim of attempted rape, including from multiple boys when I was very young. I have been very, very..."lucky," though I hate to look at it that way, in that I escaped these scenarios and have not been raped. I will not get into some of the more egregious cases here, for a variety of reasons. But I can illustrate a few more minor, personal stories that show that we allow boys and men to explain away all kinds of bad behavior based on this assumption that they don't know what's going on, when the reality is that they know exactly what is going on, and have even manipulated the situation such that the inevitable outcome would work in their favor.

Like the time when I was in junior high school, and I went with my mom and brother to the auto body shop to watch them haggle about getting his first car painted. My mom and brother argued with the manager or someone, I'm not sure. I stood there--I was maybe 13? it's possible I was still 12--bored, looking around absently, several feet away from them. Two mechanics sidled up to me. They began whispering to me, telling me I was beautiful, that my hair was so pretty. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing, and apparently that was "consent" to this creepiness right? So on they went: I love your titties. I'm thinking about fucking you right now. My family was right there...nothing bad could happen, right? One of them began touching me, feeling my breasts, rubbing his erection on my leg. I froze. I had never been touched like that before, and I wanted to slug him, but I also didn't want to cause a scene or upset my family, even though I knew my mom, and my brother, would have been homicidal if they knew what was going on right there. The mechanics must have known that too--that I was crazy young, inexperienced, embarrassed. They had lived in this society long enough to know I would probably do nothing, and if I told on them, they could use the fact that I did nothing, or the fact that I was cute, to cry "consent."

Or how about all the times we went to the pool when we were 12, 13 years old, and older men--men in their late teens and early twenties--felt up our legs or butts underwater while we were playing games like "I'm a mermaid!" We never said a word. Because they told us we looked hot in those bathing suits, so apparently the fault lay in our pubescent hotness.



Or when we would go to "all ages night" at various clubs, nights that existed--in our minds--in order to provide teenagers who didn't have fake IDs with some interesting things to do in a city like Chicago where it seemed like everyone on earth was dancing the night away and we were sitting in some basement somewhere bored to tears. Groups of us girls would go and dance our asses off, talk about our boyfriends who were at home, who were all of 16 or 17 years old, and we would have to contend with dudes in their 20s trying to get us drinks or corner us somewhere. Dudes who would say things like "you look older" or "I thought you were older" when I would say, hey man, leave me alone, I'm only 16. Now think about it. It's all ages night. They knew EXACTLY how old the girls were. That's the whole reason they showed up--to try to take advantage of young girls. So when he asks you to dance and you say sure, and you are agreeing to dance, he assumes you are agreeing to getting some painful hickey on your neck from this 23 year old named Marco who did that because he was pissed you wouldn't let him put his hands on you and he wanted to "mark you," which is literally what he said, so no one else would be interested. And you know that you DON'T look older, you look 16. You style your hair naturally and don't wear much makeup and wear normal clothes, hell you even throw a tshirt on before anyone takes your picture at Oak Street Beach because you are modest in your swimsuit, and people say YOU LOOK OLDER when they mean I WANT TO FUCK YOU, (which is also what it means when today the same types of dudes say "you look younger") and even teachers and coaches have done this, which makes no sense because they work at your high school and know exactly how fucking old you are, thank you very much.

Or in college, walking home from a party by yourself, when a group of guys start shouting at you, telling you what they wanted to do to you, all while you are wearing something along the lines of this Beastie Boys shirt and 7up jacket, and you run into the library which was luckily still open, and you hear them laughing in the distance, and your friends all thought you had overreacted.



Or when you are older, 25 say, and on a third date with a guy you'd like to like more than you do, and you let him into your apartment and start fooling around. And he ruins it almost immediately-- he pushes your sweater and bra up over your breasts just like you are in the 9th grade and doesn't bother to undo the bra or take the sweater off and that's wack and uncomfortable, and you know that you aren't sleeping with this dude, because this is going nowhere fast. And just as you're thinking this, suddenly you literally wince in pain and audibly say "OW!" You grab his face and push it away from your chest, where he had been kissing your breasts and stomach. You ask what the hell that was, and he gives you some look that I'm sure he practiced in the mirror since he was 13 and says "I'm a biter," so henceforth and forever he will be known as The Biter. You look him right in the eye and say "Oh. Well, I'm not. Don't do that again. I don't like it. That hurt." And he promptly continues to keep doing that shit, as if your statement was unclear. You realize that he is getting off on you not liking this, so you change tactics and pretend to get romantic with him and then tell him that you "aren't that kind of girl," whatever that means and that it's too soon to get so intimate etc. And finally that asshole leaves your apartment, and you triple lock the door and rip your sweater off, and now you understand why he didn't take it off, because he didn't want you to see your torso covered in little red welts. And it's after midnight, but you call two of your friends anyway because that shit is messed up and you have to tell someone.

Asshole.

See, here's how I know that consent is an easy concept. I know because I have been with normal guys. I know because I have been with teenage boys who were insanely horny, boys who were inebriated, boys who were probably convinced that the number one cause of death among adolescent males was the dreaded blue balls, and they still knew how to keep that shit in their pants or back off if I told them that's how it was going to be. I know because boys, and grown men, who are normal, are usually so happy and surprised and ridiculous when they find out you actually want to get with them that they forget to act cool. I know because I have started to engage in certain activities with people, told them I didn't want to anymore, AND THEY STOPPED. Without questioning it, without arguing. I have been the one who wanted to have sex when they wanted to wait. I have had the fun, exciting, laughing at yourselves sex that pretty much sums up the first time you're with a new person and you're both nervous and clueless and HAPPY.

I'm sick of this nonsense. I'm sick of the idea that rape can somehow be an "accident" or that someone "made you do it" as if sexual abuse can somehow occur out of self defense. I'm sick of people trying to find a way that some girl who is unconscious can consent to sex with multiple people. I'm sick of people witnessing those crimes and instead of intervening, going to twitter and joking about it with #rape, admitting to the whole of humanity that they knew exactly what was happening--and still not getting indicted as an accessory.

I'm sick of talking about double standards, because that language is too mild. I have a boy and a girl to raise. My kids are good-looking. People tell me this all the time. I have been told that both will grow up to be heartbreakers. This is usually followed with people winking at me and saying things like watch out girls! when referring to my son. When referring to my daughter, people will tell me things like, you will have to keep her at home! get a shotgun! just like they used to tell my mom that maybe I should be put in the convent because I was pretty. And all I can think is that the message we give is that if you are a good looking boy, the world is your oyster, and if you are a good looking girl, the world is your prison.

I'm tired of it. When I put on running tights and go for a walk, I wish my husband didn't worry about me, not just for going out by myself early in the morning, but "because of the way those look on you." He's not trying to be a jackass. He knows that bad things happen to women, and that often when they do, it turns into this conversation of "but did you see how her ass looked in those tights?"

Here's another story, a story about a guy who said that the first time he saw me naked he was beside himself because "it was like looking at an angel." He's supposed to say that kind of stuff. Fine. We were 27 years old and he might as well have been 14. And I'm sure he would remember if it was on our third or fourth or fifth date because he's a guy and that would be important to him, but I don't remember. I know we were sober, and there we were, naked together, and I asked him if he had a condom. He said yes, and I helped him put it on.

And that, my friends, is a pretty good indicator of consent.

But you know what? He said something to me that I will always remember. We were discussing this and he doesn't recall saying it. He was lying on top of me, wearing the condom I had helped him put on, and he nervously and quietly said the following three words to me:

"This all right?"

And I said "Yes! Let's go!"

And I married that guy.

Blue

What do you do when you have a child with a vastly different personality from your own? I ask that question with honesty, because I really don't know the answer. Some who know me and my kids might assume that I'm talking about the challenges of raising my son, who is a character all his own. But this time, I'm talking about my daughter.

For years, I'm not sure we really qualified as "parents" per se, when we were just raising Lenny by herself. She was such an easy kid. Now, this whole eating thing has always been a challenge. She was a runt as a baby, for sure, not just in size, but in her lack of interest in keeping herself sustained. That was hard--she needed to drink milk or formula in the middle of the night when she was a year and a half old, because she simply didn't eat enough during the day. But that passed and now she still doesn't eat much and she's still tiny but she's strong and she sleeps and she's getting taller so what the hell.

Sometimes when parents talk about raising a child who is different, they mean a kid with special needs or a kid who is struggling with identity issues. But I'm talking about something much more basic--I'm talking about a kid who is just a really different person than me, or her dad.

As I said, for years, we had it so easy. We never child proofed our house, because Lenny would pick something up off the floor and hand it to us. She would never think of putting stuff in her mouth, or doing dangerous things. She had a natural distrust of strangers, especially men. She could play quietly by herself as an infant--true story. When she was not even one, I could tell her on a telecommuting day that I was going to have a 2 hour conference call, so she would need to sit there quietly. I would give her a pac if she wanted one, and she would literally sit there and quietly flip pages in a book, watching me. I would hang up the phone and then she'd start talking. She potty trained herself. At two and a half, she would get up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom in the dark, flush, wash her hands and put herself back to bed. You could talk to her like she was a full-fledged person when she was one and a half. She started reading at three, learned to pump her own legs on the swing when she was 2, took care of her own nighttime nosebleeds, sat quietly in her room and played or read if she woke up in the morning before us, and never, ever caused trouble.

And that's it--that's what I'm struggling with right now. Where did this kid get her mortal fear of doing the wrong thing? I know we didn't teach it to her. She has literally been that way all her life. She hates conflict. She can't watch some animated movies because she senses that something uncomfortable might happen. I tell her, look, books and movies EXIST because of conflict--that's what they're ABOUT, that's what makes life interesting. But she's not having it. For a long time, this seemed eccentric to me, but you know, every person has a right to her personality, so I didn't think much of it.

Enter Augie. Lenny loves her brother and likes him. But she is still so jealous of him. STILL. The boy is almost four. Gabe might be able to relate to this better than me, but not really, because he is an only child. I'm the younger one, so I don't get it at all. I never had my parents to myself, I always had a sibling, so I never knew anything different than having to share folks' time and attention. When she acts out because Augie is getting attention, I have little patience for it, especially since I do more one-off things with her than I do with him. When she cries over homework--saying I don't know the answer! or I don't know what to say! I'm scared to make this presentation! what if I can't climb as high on the rope as I did last time! I honestly have no clue what to say.

It's not because I'm out of touch as a parent and I've forgotten what it's like to be little. It's because I was never like that when I was little. I didn't mind being wrong. I wanted to be right, but I shrugged off my own failures. I was pretty sure I wasn't the most-suited person for team sports but I played basketball and hockey anyway. I tested boundaries all the time and made my parents crazy with my inability to sit still and my interest in causing petty trouble. I was a good student but not as interested in perfection as my brother, so I did enough to be considered bright or gifted or whatever so people would leave me alone and I could eventually ditch class all the time and be forgiven for it. When I was deep in my tomboy phase, I refused to tie my shoes or clean my room and my best friend, definitely a type A personality herself, would get so fed up with my sloppiness that she would do those things for me. I did worry about consequences of bad behavior--usually after the fact, or if I got caught. I did learn early on how to be cautious and not put myself in bad situations, but that was not because I feared getting in trouble, it was because I had learned the hard way not to trust other people and their intentions.

So the thing is, I just don't get it. What is she afraid of, what is this horrible thing that might happen if she is wrong or gets in trouble or if someone else is better than her at something or if she forgets to do something she is supposed to do? Is her concept of love and forgiveness really so fleeting and conditional? It's hard to understand. It's frustrating. I feel weird being the mom saying things like "just let it go," "there's nothing wrong with mediocrity," and "you can't learn anything if you aren't willing to be wrong." Here I am, 37 years old, telling a child she should defy her teacher and just write her damn name the way she wants to write it. I try different tactics, telling her that is capable of doing things she's worried about, refusing to do things for her or even with her when she gets caught up in the idea of failure, but I have no idea if these are the right things. Gabe talks about her being a sensitive child, and I know he's right. But I am not a sensitive woman. I have been thick-skinned as long as I can remember. It's hard for me to relate.

I'm not saying that my way is better, just that I don't know how to put myself in her shoes. And then, I realize this:

My parents didn't get me either. And I turned out all right. Lenny and I have this in common: neither of us ever tells anyone else when we are upset. Or, if Lenny does tell us that she's upset, she cannot tell us why. If I try to get it out of her she will cry "I don't know." Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but all I can do is try and make sure that there's not some kind of outside force causing the trouble. If it's coming from within her, I just have to accept that she will always have that side of her. She will always be a perfectionist who wants to be right and is internally competitive with herself. That will bring good things to her in life--that fire in the belly that her mother just doesn't have, no matter how many people have tried to convince me that I should have it. I am never going to be super-ambitious, always going to be relatively complacent, fairly certain that good enough is good enough, willing to bend the rules or break them into pieces. My firstborn will be more like a lot of people I know, people who are interesting and driven and awesome, but she will be a challenge for me to raise.

I think about one of my close friends, a man who shares Lenny's nerdy love of geography and maps. One time, a bunch of us were bowling. Most of us were doing terribly, lucky to get a 100 at the end of the game, and this guy got a turkey. I thought the whole turkey thing was made up, but no, I witnessed someone get one in real life. Then, he only got 8 pins down on the next roll or something, and he was literally hitting himself in the head, pissed at himself. He was laughing and toasting the rest of us losers with beer during our turns, but even though he had smoked us all, he apparently felt the need to do better, to beat himself. I just laughed at him. I didn't get it, but who cares? This is the guy who takes a little gnome figurine with him on his world travels and takes his picture in scenic locations and sends the postcards to my daughter.

There's more than one way to be, right?

I tried something different last night, after Lenny was panicking about a presentation she needs to do for school. This is the kid who memorizes the entire play and pracitcally strong-arms her way into a speaking part, and she's scared of reading from a poster? After trying to reason with her, I just gave up. I told her to take a break. Then I said this to her. Hey Lenny, you know how you found out a bunch of information about Mae Jemison (first black woman in space, graduate of the Chicago public high school in our neighborhood) on wikipedia? Well, do you know that you can look up just about anything on wikipedia? The other day I was thinking about the color blue. So I looked it up and found so many interesting things. Will you do something for me? Write something for me about what you think about blue. It could be a word or a sentence, it could be about why you like blue or what is blue or what you think about blue, I don't care. I'm just interested in what you think.

And she stopped crying and seemed intrigued. I went out to get coffee with a friend and she was asleep when I came home. I asked Gabe if she had written anything, and he said, well, it's Lenny. She had to make it into a craft (I HATE crafts). And you know what? Of course she did. After looking at it (he said he had absolutely no part in what she came up with), I realized this.

We aren't so different after all.


Blue, According to Wikipedia
By Katy Jacob

This article is about the color. For other uses, see Blue (disambiguation).
Searching begets searching, as I yearn for ways to disambiguate
or even to understand the concept of something
that is neither ambiguous nor its opposite, but a way to explain
the inevitability of confusion.
You see? I’ve already lost sight of the goal.

Blue is the colour of the clear sky and the deep sea.
I’m starting to come to terms with things:
That even spelling is ambiguous;
in the first two lines, we just couldn’t choose.
And it pains me how we’ve started off with a lie.
Seeking clarity, we explain a name as if it is a truth.
Filled with hubris, we elaborate:

The harbour of Toulon, France, on the Mediterranean Sea.
We say this with authority.

Shades and variations of blue
This is how it all started.
This is what I wanted to know: how many?
I thought it would be simple, but
blue is not blue, it is a reflection of everything:
Sky. Navy. Cobalt.
Blue is important because of the past.
It represents us as we are, and as we have been:
Egyptian. Prussian.
Its very existence is in question;
some say it is but a wavelength,
that which comes between green and indigo,
while others do not differentiate it from green at all.
Relativity itself could not be so relative.

The war of the blues – indigo versus woad
Few things could make me so happy as this.

The search for the perfect blue
We’ve all been there, I suppose.
Someone once told me that midnight blue
was the only color that could not be accurately photographed.
He must have known that blue makes accuracy irrelevant,
as twenty years later I pass this idea onto my children,
stopping the car suddenly, admonishing them to look!
knowing that someday they will repeat this refrain
in the near dark to someone they love in a way
that is different from the way they love me,
but filled with the same mystery and impermanence of sudden blue.

Politics. Religion. Music. Lasers. Animals. Sports.
Blue has it covered.

Associations and sayings about blue
It is the favorite of many, and why not?
Blue could be anything:
Sympathy, harmony, faithfulness, friendship, confidence,
excellence, distinction, high performance, torment,
hostility, nobility, commonness, coldness,
infinity, distance, melancholy, truth, sex,
sadness, happiness, my God even drunkenness!
Blue could be eyes or ink, our world from far away,
berries or bells or birds.
Blue is blue is blue is
all that I can think about in the cold, in the dark,
and I know now that I am not alone in this.
I started off searching for something real,
something I could touch,
and I found nothing but mirrors.

You're Cheese, and I'm Cottage Cheese

Has anyone ever told you that your story isn't true? Or that you have no right to tell it? Have you been criticized, censored, excoriated, misquoted or misunderstood?

Well congratulations! Someone's listening.

As a woman who only started blogging because she had a rare and aggressive form of cancer and she wanted her children to know something of her if she were to die young, and she wanted her friends to know how she was doing, and she didn't want her immediate family to have to explain all the time, I am somewhat naive to the ways of the blogging universe. I know nothing about sponsorships, little of blogging communities, a tiny bit about trolls, and have only a vague knowledge of audience and how to attract it. Normally, 50 or 60 people read my blogs. Various cancer survivors or others find specific posts, for years after I've written them, at times, and I know that I have helped people who say that they were searching for something "real."

Once I got used to writing KatyDidCancer, I realized that my blog was only technically a cancer blog. I started this one so that I could continue to write about a variety of things without having to figure out if they were related to cancer or not. This domain has enabled me to write posts that are essentially ME. But there's another reason that I started this blog.

It's because I sometimes had the experience of people telling me that the things I expressed in the cancer blog were, essentially...WRONG.

You shouldn't feel that way. You should be more appreciative. I am living for my children; what is wrong with you?

Those sentiments have been rare; most people have responded in an overwhelmingly positive manner to my blogs. But what is interesting to me is how common it is in this world where there are millions of bloggers--especially women bloggers--to tell people that their stories aren't worth telling. People feel comfortable using this anonymous social-media-fueled medium, to violently criticize others--often while admitting that they didn't actually bother to read the entire text.

Ponderous thoughts don't work so well in an instant-gratification universe.

And women are on the receiving end of this punishment quite a bit. We have mommy wars, feminist wars, body type wars, skin color wars, the decade of my youth was better than the decade of your youth wars, your suffering is not as bad as mine wars, jock versus princess wars, funny versus serious wars. There's always someone ready to say that the life you've lived is inauthentic and the way you have chosen to talk about it is unacceptable.

I began writing a blog because I wanted to tell some very specific people my story before I died. It would be a lie, however, to say that I only started doing that in May of 2010. The truth is, I have always done that. And here's the proof.

When I was 15 years old, I loved poetry. Like any teenager, I was curious about sex, but was technically a virgin (back then, we were led to believe that oral sex "didn't count). However, I hated poetry about sex. I told someone that I could write a sex poem as good as any adult's. It was a dare. I wrote this, and my mom printed it off and framed it and hung it in the living room.

I Don't Know What
by Katy Jacob

it is in you
that makes me
crumble, or
whether it is
in pale moonlight that I
seem to fade
and I begin to open my
best heart--
or if it is simply
the action of opening;
here and there a dark new
thing
precisely made to offer
to you something
hotter
than hell--
like the warm stuff of eggs,
this that
makes me
shrink
and possibly
falter
and then
you--over me, silenced--
leaving behind only
a shedded snake-like
sigh
for the killing



When I was in college, I won an award for writing a poem about wondering what it was like to grow old:

The Elderly Couple
by Katy Jacob

As they go upstairs to bed,
the last light faintly fades.
Everything has been put away
and they are clean again, tired again.
They walk slowly in their soft clothes
as if steps were secret thoughts,
spinning and floating on delicious air,
leaving light traces of empty space behind.
As if his hands weren't silently shaking,
as if she had time to spare.



When I was maybe 18, I was riding the el with my boyfriend, who was, let me see...20, and it was really hot and there was no air conditioning on the train and there were a million things to look at out the window, but I was only looking at one thing, and it was insignificant so I didn't say anything, but he did. He was looking at the one thing I was looking at, so I wrote this to tell him that:

Doorman
by Katy Jacob

The doorman stands before me waiting in his red coat.
Shyness of color is too subtle for him;
the wool of his jacket is purpled like a worn bruise,
a color so heavy it hurts.
The detail he possesses is a kaleidoscope
of moving pictures that wrongs my eyes.
On a coat like his, even the buttons are moving.
They bleed bright light all the way to the ground,
reflecting shiny blood-drops on his face.
The collar is regally wide and teases his shoulders,
leading to simply-perfected metallic stripes on his arms.
These are his decorations--the stripes are nowhere hurting.
As the door man shifts in sunlight,
these lines become molten to his body, taking on his form.
Looking more closely I see that they are
glad straight arrows, funny kissing mouths,
two gold things going down, new money.



In my late twenties, I got tired of hearing people talk about women's words as if they were always sexual words, or of people conflating the very ideas of women and sex, and I decided to write a poem about riding the train. The TRAIN, people.

Commuter’s Lament
by Katy Jacob

When I rode different trains
I wrote different poems.

Two straight lines turned into three
as I lied a little, to mix it up.

Late became world weary,
crazy ended up spiritual.

I’d make love and redemption
out of three tin cups.

I wouldn’t cover guns at my head,
hands up my dress or the friends I kept.

Words only flowed
from the ordinary

when the sharp rumble
where my feet should have been

caused the faithless to pray a little
made the ride home sweetly rougher

turned 6 pm into everything I’d want
to remember about the life I never had

over the wooden trestles
where the sparks burned blue

the screech lingered and
you had to go down to feel the real world.



Once, on my lunchbreak, I went to a museum. Really, I did!

On Viewing "The Old Guitarist"

When Wallace Stevens saw it
he wrote about things as they are
and things as they seem
and imperfection.
When Rafael Alberti remembered it,
his written recollections were all of blue.

But when I stood in front of the painting which
stands by itself, apart,
on my day off from work in June,
I thought of making art about art--
of the ways we create worlds from a wall--
and I wondered if I could do it.

I don't think I will ever know now,
because I don't know how things are,
and I can't imagine what exists outside of
imperfection and colored memories.

All that I can recall of that Picasso
is the way it made me want to know
if there was ever such a man
so tattered and bent and blue,
if his fingers were really so long,
and where it was that he was sitting.

I can't get to the metaphor
for the obstacle of wondering
if he was real.



When my daughter was a baby, she grabbed a frozen leaf:

First Winter
by Katy Jacob

No one ever told you what lies beneath
the most beautiful days.

In the whole of your life
no one ever told you about the
heavy sharpness of white lace ice,
the glare in your eyes that you will miss after the melt,
the implied noise just before the branches crack,
the danger and perfection all mixed together.

Remember that I will always remember your tiny hand
curling up to a soft white leaf, which cracked and fell at your touch.

If I could, I’d give you this gift,
this day, a postcard you are too young to receive.
I’d vanish into you
so you could see how you smiled.



And when my son was a baby, I held long and intellectual conversations with him:

Talking to Babies
by Katy Jacob

I have a secret.
I use you to talk to myself.
You don’t mind.
You could watch me
search for dust in the air
as long as I was close.
I leave you alone
and you babble and shriek
to yourself, my son.

So keep my secret,
learn what I have learned.
Other people don’t need to be there.
Words are what you make them.
They’re real if you hear the sound,
or even if no one does.

You and I are here,
talking around each other,
wondering what the other one is saying,
alone together at least for a few more months
or maybe forever.
But why am I telling you this?
Your eyes crinkle up at me, saying
come on, Mom, we’ve had this conversation already.



In college, I did an independent study wherein I wrote a bunch of dramatic monologues--poems in memoir form, from someone else's point of view. I wrote one poem, which I will NOT include here, about myself, from my lover's point of view. He said I got it right, and my professor, who was a man, said, "I think only a woman could have done that. That must have been very difficult. I mean, it's even erotic! How interesting. You see yourself as others see you." And one of the other poems that I wrote--years before I married or had children or had lost anyone very close to me or was daily facing my own mortality--was based on the monument of a child that you can find in a cemetery in Chicago. Now that more than fifteen years have passed and all kinds of things have happened, I can say this:

Yes.

Graceland Cemetery: A Mother's Request to a Sculptor
by Katy Jacob

A little more curl in the hair, please.
She always wore her bow on the right.
That's it! That's her face--
but not her eyes,
they were never so bright white, pallid, unmoving.
Please, why can't you get her eyes?

What I would give for you to color this marble!
Then it wouldn't be so easy
for death to creep right in.
Then it could be how I remember.
But now she seems cold, so cold,
I don't want anyone to touch her.
Surround her with glass, let the sun in,
give her a space that lasts longer than seven years.

I want to see her eyelet dress move;
I want her to look on stone-stemmed flowers that won't fade;
I want the ivy to loop through the wood slates
of the white wicker swing she always sat on--
I want the green of it to glisten and melt into every
Saturday morning.
I want to drive that chisel of yours straight into my heart.

O God, when I die
lay me to rest underneath her name
Inez


These things, these stories, large and small, were worth telling. They are true, or at least as true as anything. Sometimes, it's the sharing of perspective that's important. Sometimes, we can learn all we need to know from a three year old child. My kids had this conversation the other day, and it brought everything into perspective for me, and it allowed everything else to just roll off my back. Here it is...truth.

L: you're male and I'm female.
A: no, I'm not.
L: you're not male?
A: no, I'm something more fun.
L: what are you?
A: you're cheese, and I'm cottage cheese.

On Becoming a Woman: What Does That Mean?

I have been thinking about writing this post for a long time. That means that I will write something that is very long and still not say what I meant to say.

What does it mean to be a woman?

I mean, we seem to know as a society what it means to "be a man," even if we disagree about some aspects of the definition. Little boys hear about how to be a man from the time they are babies, and what we often don't realize is that little girls hear that too. And when we collectively discuss "being a man," we mean so many things:

Being strong, responsible, secure, determined, aggressive, stoic, smart, handy.

Now the more enlightened among us might say, whoa! That's not what being a man is about! Men could be those things, but they could also be sensitive, kind, goofy, contemplative, etc.

OK, maybe that's a step up. But my point is this: Being a man MEANS something.

Growing up, I would internalize these messages, and I remember thinking, but I will never be a man. So what will it take for me to grow up? What does it mean to be a woman?

I felt like I knew a lot of men, and that a lot of them were actually...women.

They were grownups. Adults. People who took care of themselves and anyone else who came along. People I trusted, looked up to, admired. But the only thing I ever heard SPOKEN about what it meant to "become a woman" seemed totally ridiculous to me: Getting your first period made you a woman.

Nope, impossible. I got mine at age 11.

Having babies made you a woman.

But how could that be? A lot of women couldn't have babies or didn't want to have them.

All of the things that "made you a woman" were physical things or things that happened to you, not things you did, things you made, things you decided.

I could get into a long tirade about misogyny, down to the kind of deep and disturbing misogyny that is involved in our ingrained rape culture. But that line of conversation will make me too depressed. What concerns me, now that I have both a girl and a boy to raise, is how we are so casually misogynist, ALL OF US, and how we don't even realize it. And because we don't recognize it, we don't admit how it effects our children. We use misogynist language as if it is NORMAL language. I do it too:

Man Up. Take it like a Man.

And then, little boys at such a young age learn to say things like "Ew, I don't want to do that. THAT'S FOR GIRLS." And you can practically hear them retching from the very thought. What bothers me about statements like that, or things like "you throw like a girl," "stop crying like a little girl," and even the concept of "girl power" is this:

When people say these things, they are speaking of something that is inherently less. Little girls might say they don't like something because "that's for boys," but you don't get the implied disdain with that statement. They are saying I'm a girl, and therefore I'm not interested in that. We might take issue with those thoughts. But when I hear boys saying "that's for girls," even my own son, who just learned that idea maybe in the last month or two, these boys are implying that being a girl isn't as good as being a boy. They know at three years old what we pretend isn't true at 30.

I feel like I am somewhat of an authority on this topic, and here's why:

When I was very little, I was just a little ball of crazy. I wore my brother's clothes and had my hair cut in the same style as him because my parents were broke and lazy about style. Then, I was still a little ball of crazy, with the affectionate nickname "little shit," but I wore patent leather shoes and dresses all the time (bought for me by my grandfather). Then, I became a tomboy--a really serious tomboy, for several years. I cut my hair very short. I wore the same two pairs of sweatpants with holes in the knees every day. One day in sixth grade, my best friend took me to her house before school, lent me a skirt and put some makeup on me and put a ridiculous bow in my hair and I went to school like that, literally as a joke. Some boy told me I looked pretty and I chased him around the classroom trying to get in a fight. It wasn't long after that that I told my mom I didn't want to be a girl. She asked me if I didn't like who I was and I said I did, but that I didn't want to have to do girl things. I told her I wanted to wear a suit to the prom. I told her I wanted to change my name to Keith.

She took everything but the name change in stride, telling me that was all fine, but I should keep my name, because it was the name she gave me and I should honor it.

You might hear this story and think it's funny, or quaint. I will ignore the reality that a boy wishing to be a girl would not be seen in the same light. I will also ignore the fact that it is easier, in some ways, for little girls to try on all different types of gender roles, because the gender that is opposite of them is the preferred one. Being a tomboy is cool. It's funny. It's quirky. Being a girl who acts like a boy is, you know, BETTER. Boys don't get the same message about acting like girls.

What concerns me about those phases I went through is this. What, exactly, was I rejecting? I never, not for one minute, ACTUALLY wished I was a boy. I was comfortable in my body and my own skin. I was very straight, and knew that even then. I just didn't want to have to ACT like a girl, whatever that meant. I had this vague feeling of unease about being female in the world. I wanted to be the one in charge, the crazy one, the independent one, and somewhere along the way I learned that girls could not be that.

I wanted some practical things. Back in my boy phase, I did things that are in some ways the essence of what it means to be a guy. And no, I'm not talking about playing sports or laughing too loud, though I did those things too.

I took up space.

I sprawled around, took up room, threw my clothes (what I had of them) around the house. To this day, I will be the lone female who chooses to sit next to the adolescent boy who is all sprawled out over two seats on the train. I have actually on a few occasions sat right on one of these kids' legs, just to make the point that he didn't pay for two seats so he'd better move the hell over. They are always so surprised that they just sheepishly say "sorry, my bad," or something to that effect. I still feel that one of the great mysteries of marriage is why, when we have a king sized bed, I am forced to fall asleep with Gabe's knee on my ass.

I was small, but I didn't want to have to ACT small. I was pretty, but I didn't want to be TREATED pretty. What's sad to me today is that there should be nothing in the world wrong with being small and pretty. What's funny to me today is that at 11 years old I envisioned a world where a straight 17 year old boy wouldn't mind going to the prom with a girl in a suit.

We shouldn't try to convince ourselves that everyone should be strong because strong is better, or that everyone should be tough because tough is better. But we also shouldn't tell ourselves that girls who are strong and tough aren't girly or that boys who aren't aren't real boys.

I grew out of my boy phase into whatever phase I have been in since about age 14, hovering somewhere in between, choosing boys and later men who could accept my backwards ways and even appreciate them. I have gotten used to guys initially liking my "feisty" ways and then realizing that I am not actually feisty, I am opinionated and stubborn and terrible at backing down, and losing their interest for that reason. I have chosen a man who is sensitive and nurturing because I am not, and I feel that those are useful traits.

And I still feel somewhat gender-confused, somewhat adrift. I often don't fit in to groups of women or groups of men. I told a friend last night that I am 37 years old, and I still don't know what women talk about when they go in groups to the bathroom. I have never gone to a bathroom with another person, not even in high school. And I envy the girl-power of the close-knit groups of women I see who know something about being a woman that I just don't know, because I never learned it.

I mean, you can't know what you don't even know you don't know.

I never knew that I communicate like a man until I took this "Efficacy for Women" development course at work a few years ago, which was supposed to be empowering, and I learned that for all intents and purposes I speak and act like a man, which is supposedly preferred in the workforce, but has never gotten me anywhere, to be honest. I was what, 35 years old? And finally learning why I didn't know--really, I didn't--why other women or girls had been mad at me in my life. Realizing that even when I understood, I didn't. Oh, you were mad at me because I said something that hurt your feelings? But why would that hurt your feelings? I don't understand why people get sensitive, or cry, or feel hurt in some situations, and therefore I am a woman acting like a man, supposedly, but I am NOT a man, so no one forgives me for it. And believe you me I have ALWAYS been treated as a woman at work. I've never been invited into the boys club.

I'm not complaining; it's just odd. I am as curious about women as most men are. I see how they flirt, or toss their hair, or laugh, and I wonder why I can't do those things. I see mothers talking to babies in lilting voices and I feel like there's something wrong with me as I talk to my children and everyone else's as if they are just very small versions of adults. I have a hard time inserting myself into groups of women because I'm not sure what to say, what to talk about, and I am not saying that to say that I am somehow better than other women. I am truly envious of those things I never internalized. Because men don't think I'm one of the guys either, so sometimes I feel just adrift. Gabe has this problem too. He can have trouble being around guys, because he doesn't like hoppy beer or talking about rock bands or fishing or chicks, and yet he feels weird being the only guy chatting up the women. I always tell him that the guys we know can talk about a lot of different things, but I know where he's coming from--he never learned the cues, and he doesn't know how to use them. I get it.

This friend I was talking to last night told me that she has always seen me as very feminine...just not girly. She said I look feminine, I dress feminine, and I agreed. I said this: "I guess in some ways that made it easier. I looked like a girl, and guys liked me, so I never had to learn to act like someone else."

And that's the truth. I could give people shit and make fun of them, just like I did with my older brother, and they would decide I was flirting because that's what they wanted to believe. Inside I would think, no, I am actually making fun of you. REALLY, I AM. But it didn't matter. When I was 14 years old and some friends dragged me out of the house one Friday night, looking chagrined when they saw me with no makeup on, hair in a ponytail, jeans and knee high black leather boots and a Rolling Stones tshirt with the huge tongue on the front (sounds cool, huh? Well, not for a girl in 1990, NO SIR), I learned something. That cute boy everyone liked asked me out anyway. And I literally said to myself, at age 14, "Really? This is good enough? Well, I guess there's no need to ever play myself out."

The lesson was worth learning, but the message is still odd. That same boy broke up with me because he "didn't like my personality." Specifically, he told me that I didn't take him seriously enough and I was always cracking too many jokes. I guess I was supposed to be sweating him all the time, feeling his biceps or something, but I didn't know that, so I didn't do it, and he was telling me that there was some massive disconnect between my appearance and my behavior, and I assumed that was true.

I don't know. I feel like I am feminine because I am female. I feel like my husband is masculine because he is male. And maybe, for some people, it's the other way around.

When I had my head shaved for chemo, after the tears had subsided, I took a good hard look at myself in the mirror and told Gabe that I thought I looked like a boy. Like a male twin of myself. He sounded exasperated and told me I looked beautiful, that I couldn't look like a boy if I tried. And whether that was true or not, let's not lie: He was required to say that in that situation. Breast cancer can make you question the entire nature of femininity whether or not you were so inclined to question it. But the point is this: I did look feminine. Because I looked like myself. And I am female. That look in my eyes is all me, for better or worse.

I just don't want to raise kids who believe what I believed as a child, that being a man was worth more, that the things men were and did were more important. My mother didn't teach me that, so I think it's a societal thing, not a personal one. She never wore makeup and had little to no clothes and wore glasses and did most of the manual labor and I never saw her gossiping with other women or having coffee with them or whatever and I never, not for one second, thought she wasn't the most feminine person in the world. Because she was female and she was my main role model for what it meant to be a grownup who could never be a man.

I think we need to rid ourselves of the notion that there are things and traits that are male or female, not because it is untrue, but because we have not evolved to the point where all of the things that are "feminine" are lesser. I remember being in a Women Romantics class in college, and reading the poetry of the few female authors of the Romantic age. Other students thought their poetry was pedestrian, boring. I argued that they wrote about their lives, and their lives were different from the lives of men. So, they were writing about marriage and children, and Keats was writing about becoming one with fire. Perhaps that was because him mom did his laundry for him. Perhaps he was the one who wasn't fully grown.

A few days ago, Augie had a horrible cut on his finger. We have 57 different types of kid bandaids, and I asked him what he wanted. He said "well, I like Cars and Muppets and Lenny likes Dora and Disney Princesses." The kid was crying so hard I didn't get into it at the time, so I asked him about it today when I was checking to make sure the wound had healed.

I asked him why he had said that about the bandaids. I said, you love Dora. You love Snow White. Lenny doesn't really like princesses. You have never seen the Cars movie. You both like muppets. Did you think you should like those because you're a boy and she's a girl? And he said yes. So I asked him this:

But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with being a girl? Can't you think of any girls whom you would like to be like?

He immediately said, "Lenny."

I was proud of him. As he tumbled headfirst onto my lap by vaulting himself over the arm of the couch and proceeded to threaten to bite me all while wrestling me, I asked him this: "Can't you think of any other girls you'd like to be like," teasing him, baiting him, showing him that Katy kind of love. He said no, and laughed. I asked what about me? And he said:

No. You're a boy.

I was stunned, but played it off. I'm not a boy! What am I?

He was cracking up: "You're a boy. Mommy, you're a boy."

I tried to get serious, and looked at him: Augie, really. What am I? Am I really a boy?

No.

Am I a girl?

No.

Well what am I then?

You're a grown up.

And SHH, don't tell anyone, but I turned my head away and cried. But just a little.

Hey Sexy Lady

It's a new year, and I didn't get around to making any resolutions. I wrote a New Year's post yesterday that was all kinds of irreverent, so I wasn't planning on saying anything else for a while.

But then someone dared me.

This started out innocently. All I did was share the following truth on facebook:

There are some eerie similarities between Gangnam style and the Humpty Dance. Just saying.

And then, well, I was dared to blog about that. And this out of control facebook thread made me feel like I was playing a blogging version of I Never and I was just flat on my face drunk from LOSING.

Or is it winning?

So here I am, drinking bourbon and listening to Katy's Booty Playlist, which is something I worked on when my family was out and I was supposed to be doing something much more productive or mom-like. And I'm writing this damn thing. If that disturbs you, I'm sorry, but hell, at least my kids are asleep.

Now, seriously, there's not a red-blooded American out there who was over the age of 8 years old and under the age of 30 in 1990 who doesn't know the Humpty Dance. If you claim to be the lone holdout, well, WTF was wrong with you?

So, let me just explain why it's obvious that this new craze that's taking over our collectively-impaired social consciousness is not really new AT ALL.

There was already this geeky dude with glasses and an annoying nasally voice who got a bunch of people to do a ridiculous dance, no matter how much of their self respect they had to sacrifice in the process. I mean, maybe PSY upped the ante by sitting on the john during part of the song (no one seemed to mind), but the spirit of the whole thing had been there more than 20 years ago.

Come on...hips side to side...hands in the air, awkward pelvic grinding...hands on his own ass...

"it's supposed to look like a fit or a convulsion..."

"ya got it down when ya appear to be in pain."

"First I limp to the side like my leg was broken
Shakin' and twitchin' kinda like I was smokin'
Crazy wack funky"

Are you trying to tell me that PSY wasn't doing all of that during Gangnam style? Come on!

The purposely ironic clothes, the dude making fun of himself for being skinny or nerdy or whatever, the fact that it can't really be possible that this shit is so freaking ridiculously popular, the lyrics that you can understand, sure, because they aren't in Korean, but you can't really believe that they're real:

"I'm spunky. I like my oatmeal lumpy."

"I'll eat up all your crackers and your licorice
hey yo fat girl, c'mere--are ya ticklish?
Yeah, I called ya fat."

"I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom." (LL was at Red Lobster, so maybe that was a thing back in 89-90? Now, don't say it...I was only 14 then).

"'cause in a 69 my humpty nose will tickle ya rear."

"I use a word that don't mean nothin', like looptid
I sang on Doowhutchalike, and if ya missed it,
I'm the one who said just grab 'em in the biscuits"

I just don't want to live in a world where anyone will tell me that PSY isn't basically saying the same stuff. So, friends who speak Korean, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. Because he paid all the homage he needed to pay, practically telling us all that he was trying to be the Korean Digital Underground:

HEY SEXY LADY!