JUL - Double Bind

July review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Double Bind: Women on Ambition ed. by Robin Romm, 2017. [essay collection category]

Double Bind: Women on Ambition is pretty self-explanatory as a collection title. Robin Romm has commissioned a series of essays from women in wide-ranging fields, from literature to butchery, Hollywood to dogsled racing. Romm starts with an intro that examines her impetus to collect these women's stories and what the word ambition meant to her personally. As a writer, clearly I resonated with the writer essays, but I was interestingly struck by some of the other ways in which I related, and some of the questions these essays raised in me.

I currently don't have my copy of this book on hand as I write, since I lent it to my mother--isn't that what you do with books about women? Lend them to the other women in your life?--and this writeup is long overdue so it is going to be a little more overview than specific, but I think I've got the important points jotted down. To begin at the beginning, this is an essay collection about ambition. What does ambition mean? Romm and her contributors talk about the difference between an ambitious man (seen as positive) and an ambitious woman (often seen as overbearing, out of place, unattractive), and there was another interesting thread about the word itself running through these essays. Many of the women asked the people in their lives if they thought the woman was ambitious; few claimed that word for themselves, citing discomfort with the aforementioned undesirable nature of an ambitious woman, impostor syndrome, and myriad other reasons.

A lot of the responses also dealt with the "have it all" mentality, the perennial question plaguing working moms and stay-at-home moms alike: how do career ambition and home life ambition coexist? These essays covered women with kids: women who adopted children, women who had children and left their careers, women who compromised and devoted a lot to their careers but still missed their children. My partner and I have talked about kids vaguely, in some future era when we're both done with our sports, talked about who would have them or if we would adopt, etc, but this book gave me a little pause. I guess I had painted standard children desire over my own thoughts without ever outright asking myself about those desires. Don't get me wrong, I still want kids, but I need to reexamine the hows and the whens and I am lucky to have a partner who is open and honest and supportive of those discussions.

Reading this book in the midst of my sports season made me question whether you can be ambitious in some areas of your life but not necessarily others. Can I strive for a top slot on the charter team but also resign myself to an under-paying job because it's easier to deal with at the moment? Can I be ambitious but lazy, so my ambitions never bear fruit because I don't allow myself enough time on them? Is there something self-sabotaging about that, something inherently misogynistic about a creeping doubt that maybe I should just be happy with what I have? Don't get too big for your britches, my dear, you might regret it. And the answer I came up with is, I don't know. I think that is the point of this essay collection too: no one really knows. It is the asking that is important, the self-analysis that is expected of women categorically more often than men, the constant weighing of our lives against various other shining stars or gutter flops. What does it mean to me? Well that's the question, now isn't it?

JUN - When Breath Becomes Air

June review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, 2016. [book published posthumously category]

I knew that this was going to be a hard book to read. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, is the memoir of a 36-year-old neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with lung cancer before the end of his residency. It was published posthumously (hence its ability to be counted for this category), but that wasn't necessarily what was going to make it hard. Earlier this year, my father was diagnosed with Stage IV Esophageal Cancer. His prognosis is decidedly better than Kalanithi's, and he has finished his first eight-week round of chemo with little to no worsening of his condition. But still. The way that cancer works is that when it infects your life, it becomes a capital letter. Cancer. You can't think about it the same way anymore. It is not remote, like the tragic but heartwarming story of someone that Lifetime made a movie about. It isn't a cautionary tale about someone forty years ago who got it from cigarettes. My father is the single healthiest sixty-year-old man that I know, and he still has cancer. He did everything (mostly) right. He hasn't smoked in over thirty years. He exercises every day, sometimes multiple times. Sure, his hydration could be better, and he could always do more yoga, but still. Cancer wasn't something that happened to someone like him. And yet.

Paul Kalanithi was almost done with his neurosurgery training when he was diagnosed with cancer. He details the beginning of his career, how from the outset he was fascinated not only with biology and life, but also with what made life worth living and definable, things he could only really parse through by immersing himself in literature. It was hard to read this book, but it was also beautiful, the way he talked about language and life and death. There is a passage Kalanithi writes where he talks about the brain and the mind and his resonance with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that absolutely floored me: "Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life" (p31).

Reading Kalanithi talk about his own illness and his process of divorcing his doctor side from his patient side was illuminating. My father is an engineer, not a doctor, but he has a similar predilection for control and information that he is learning how to balance. That we are all learning how to balance. Thinking about cancer with a capital C and reading about someone who wanted to not only stave off death in his patients but also understand it has helped me in ways that I was not fully expecting. I know that this story is not my dad's story. He is treatable and positive and a fighter (even though cancer doesn't really care how much you're willing to fight, it's just biology).  My dad is healthy, except that he has cancer. My dad is strong. He still teaches spin class (pictured left) even when he has his post-treatment treatment fanny pack, and he still laughs at my jokes and sends me pictures of squirrels. He is doing great and I am so goddamn proud to be here to witness it. I love you, Dad.

National Coming Out Day

Feminist Apparel

Today, October 11, 2017, is National Coming Out Day. I have a lot of feelings about National Coming Out Day. I have happy feelings because I love seeing the diversity and strength of this community that I have found. I am an out queer woman who is engaged to another woman and has had past relationships with both men and women. I am proud that I can say that and not fear for my job or my personal relationships, but I know that it is not always the case.

I never really "came out" to my parents in any official way. I had broken up with my then-boyfriend of five years, and I just sort of intimated that I had a new crush, and that this one was maybe sorta on a girl. My parents took it in stride, not getting bogged down with "well, what do you call yourself now" or "what has changed to make this a thing," two of the most tired and sad questions anyone can face when they opt for such vulnerability. Because honestly, I didn't know what I was calling myself but I knew that I had always sort of been that way. I had just been conditioned to ride the hetero train and didn't necessarily question the broader implications until recently.

I am incredibly lucky to have had a mind-blowingly supportive family and friend structure who has made this shift in my life not such a big deal. The thing about that is, not everyone has that option. Some people can't come out or won't come out or do not want to come out. The thing about "coming out" is that it assumes that out is the norm, the good, the appropriate place. It reinforces the idea that there is a norm--generally cis and hetero--and if you do not fit that norm, if you are something "other," you are required to disclose that, over and over again, to the world. In Cameron Esposito's Queery podcast this week, she talked to Rebecca Sugar (creator of Steven Universe, the best queer show on TV), who is an out bisexual. Cameron makes the analogy of going to a bagel shop and ordering two bagels, to which the worker responds, heteronormatively, "Oh, takin one home for the boyfriend?" There are two options: One, you are disingenuous and play along, getting through the interaction; or two, you essentially come out to this bagel shop worker even though this information has nothing to do with the completion of your interaction. Because coming out is not just one single thing. As a friend pointed out today, you don't just automatically get a rainbow above your head from then on to denote you as LGBTQIA+ like the Sims. The choice to come out and live authentically is constant and heart-wrenching and complicated. 

I hope some day just being visible will be enough. I hope that some day there wont be an assumed normal. I hope one day that coming out won't be necessary. But for right now, I understand the celebration in those who can.

JUL - Gone Girl

July review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 2012. [Epistolary Fiction category (sort of)]

Before you say anything, I realize that Gone Girl does not technically fit the "epistolary fiction" genre, per se. I was traded this book by one of my derby wives (I traded her In The Woods by Tana French which she is obsessed with now) and because I was so woefully behind in my blog posts, I decided I would make it fit for epistolary fiction. To recap, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is about Amy and Nick Dunne, celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary when Amy goes missing. As the search and subsequent investigation continues, Nick looks less and less like the concerned husband and more and more like he has something to hide. As events unfold, readers are called upon to question the story itself as points of view change and sympathies radically alter, with the police closing in and the media trying Nick before he is even suspected legally of anything at all. Flynn masterfully depicts the minds of a married couple who have grown apart, become strangers, and calls into question how well anyone really knows the people they love. *~~Please note that this post will undoubtedly contain spoilers because I absolutely cannot discuss what I want to discuss without giving major things away so YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ~~*

One of the first papers I wrote in college was for a class called Reading for Life, and it dealt with The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. For anyone who hasn't read this text, it is a collection of war stories recounted by a remarkably unreliable narrator who often questions the difference between the truth versus Truth (with a capital T), admitting in later stories that earlier ones were entirely concocted. I think this distinction permeates the entirety of Gone Girl and there is no better example than Amy's diary. For the first section of the book, Part One: Boy Loses Girl, we receive Nick's point of view in the present, with the time delineated as how many "days gone," alternated with chapters in Amy's point of view which comes to us through past diary entries that correspond to certain aspects of the present. It is not until later, in Part Two: Boy Meets Girl, that we get Amy's present-tense story, in which we learn she is in fact alive (gasp!) and the diary is a complete fabrication, as is her disappearance. In short, she faked her own vanishing and planted a trail that sort of pointed to her loving husband, complete with a falsified version of past events that paints him as distant, quick-tempered, and borderline abusive. It is in these hours that we as readers begin to glimpse the intricacies--and veritable psychoses--of Amy's mind. I will readily admit that a part of me was elated that Amy was alright and savvy enough to get herself out of a bad situation--strong female characters, and all that--but Flynn does a beautiful job of forcing you to reconsider each of your preconceived notions built up with every passing page. As Amy goes deeper and deeper into her ruse, allowing us to see her machinations, the sheer cold-bloodedness and calculating detestation becomes apparent, and I at least felt myself growing increasingly uncomfortable with my former affiliation with Amazing Amy. I think that this questioning is an essential mechanism in the truth vs. Truth dichotomy, as it demands a re-evaluation of the character from different perspectives which facilitates a blurring of the two definitions. The truth that the police are seeking as to Amy's disappearance and The Truth that Amy constructs line up for a time, but Amy is clearly the puppeteer of capital T, and she demonstrates her power with her return to Nick's side and her editing of the real world. How important is What Really Happened versus someone's chosen truth? Does the difference really matter? I would postulate that both are equally important in terms of understanding a person and their worldview, but one does not necessarily have to be denigrated at the expense of another. Obviously this belief would fall short in terms of a definitive case in the eyes of the police, but the operative narrative here is not that someone is punished, not in the end. In the end, everyone is just fucked up in different ways and some people are better at redirecting their energy into a facade, a veneer of personality or social acceptability.

I chose to discuss Gone Girl in terms of epistolary fiction because of the Truth aspect, and also due to the entirely purpose-driven nature of anything epistolary. In straight-up epistolary fiction, we as readers are given only what is contained within the letters or diary entries or what have you, and these can be taken at face value or viewed as constructions of personality, but I believe Gone Girl is interesting because of its wholly unorthodox take on the subject. The inclusion of diary entries of a woman who is purportedly missing, entries that very clearly paint a certain picture of her husband, juxtaposed with the later revelation that they are entirely confabulated, creates an interesting comparison, a lovely and brutal questioning of the very idea of character. I will end on this quote from Amy, discussing the husks of selves she has worn over the years, in an attempt to rationalize her behavior:

   “I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
   It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. 
   And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
   It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
   I would have done anything to feel real again.” ― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

At the end of this book, I had no idea what real even meant for these characters. Is there a real and a Real? These are questions I haven't quite answered myself, but thanks for sticking around through my musings to see if I got anywhere this month.

#7/30 - 2015

[prompt: Grab the book nearest to you. Turn to page 47, 59, or 92. (Just one, no cheating!) 

Write an acrostic with the third sentence on the page you have chosen making up the first letter of each line. page 47, line 3 of The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester: "They courted quickly, and tactfully out of sight of the curious"]


They met under strange circumstances, and
courted the idea of their fingers on the same book being fate. it was dismissed
quickly, neither having been much of a believer in predestination,
and each assumed responsibility for their actions that had led them,
tactfully, to this moment.
out of the swirl and swing of everyday occurrences, out
of the reins of a scheduled coupling. fore
sight is always misinterpreted as the ability
of an individual to wrongfully assume
the authority over knowing what is simply
curious coincidence.

#6/30 - 2015

Career Counseling
is never a phrase I thought I'd pencil into my datebook.
An entire hour of talking about myself.
60 long minutes of what I want to be when I grow up.
But to my surprise,
I enjoyed it.
Disarmed with some colorful language
on the part of my counselor as she sat down,
clad in an orange blazer and a Tigers tee,
I found it easy to slip into conversation.
Retrospective on my past employment led to
a shimmering seed of an idea:
I like to tell stories.
Something so simple, something so obvious,
but it thrummed with truth,
the conversion of straightforward data into
a tale
or an argument.
I think I needed this reminder.

#26/30 - 2014

[rough draft, it's about my new car that I got this weekend...]

new

there is a spot here
on this steering wheel
that my thumb
fits.
Worn away by another hand, yet
somehow it still fits my own
it reassures me that i've made
the right choice
the responsible decision
the adult step.
It fits.
It is a new thing I am embarking upon here
and even the small comfort
of a thumb-shaped space
waiting
is enough to reassure me

#13/30 - 2014

Photography Exhibition

It feels strange, disconcerting,
seeing yourself on the walls.
Not yourself, per se; you are not the focus
of the little framed lives laid against brick.
But yourself as parts of your soul
beautiful little horcruxes (sans soul-mutilating murder).
I manage to detach
as I hang and crimp and straighten
but as soon as I step back
breath in the stark reality of my Self on display
it comes rushing back
that nakedness
filling the void left by the cessation of manual fiddling
water surging through a breach in the hull
threatening weak knees and
should my matchstick defenses fall.
This is a big step
a point of no return
and I can't promise I won't crumble some night
but my legs are strong enough now, I think
to withstand.