Your editrix apologizes
I know, I know. I totally suck. Haven’t updated this since the Pleistocene. I’ve been all antsy and nervous about writing about prurient subjects. But I promise, that’s about to change.
An approximation of our convo. because I am totally not tech savvy enough to keep AIM logs:
1. Writing about sex isn’t bad. Writing badly about sex, though, is bad. As is having bad sex, but that isn’t here or there.
2. What’s bad is using our bodies as a stand-in for talent, doing things like posing for nudie mags or posting questionable photos on MySpace. Tara Reid-ing it does not a career make!
3. Haters betta recognize, because fortune favors the brave. Who got famous about writing about Parcheesi? Seriously?
So what’s the point of this post? I’m back. You get to read more. You get to be privy to my hustling for an NYC internship. My hustling for a date. My hustling to get clips in Hustler. But not real hustling. Actually, I’m not even sure what “hustling” actually means.
You know, just the usual 20-something college freelance columnist stuff.
Yup.
Totally normal.
You know, that hysterical laughter hurts my feelings!
thoughts from a college student's christmas holiday
South Texas has become so different.
When I was a little girl running around in my backyard, the only thing visible was the vast western expanse of the King Ranch, flat plains and faraway low marshes sweeping over the horizon as far as the naked eye could see. I’ve always dreamed of the big city but now that I remember being able to just run with my friends and the unadulterated joy of building forts and playing in the outdoors until the sun went down, I realize that there’s something to be said about a childhood in the sticks. There’s something about climbing a tree that’s just good for the soul. (If you’ve never done it, try it sometime.)
Now Lauren, my little sister, has a girlhood in which the landscape is studded with more familiar American landmarks—Chili’s, Pizza Hut, the Super Wal-Mart. It’s endless. South Padre Island is lined with beach mansions skinny as stilettos selling for over half a million dollars; new condo complexes marketing to the Mexican internationals. The Rio Grande Valley, my home, now has a Starbucks chain. Starbucks! This would have been unheard of five years ago. Now it’s just another place to drive your SUV.
She doesn’t remember when cattle would break through the barbed wire that separates our backyard from the King Ranch and run around our land, until we called the cops who called the ranchers and got them the hell out of there. She doesn’t remember spotting ocelots roaming in the mesquite; the occasional armadillo. Nor does she remember what it’s like for the only “real mall” to be over an hour and a half away, for anything resembling culture to necessitate an airport. Or even what it’s like to have nothing better to do than sit on the roof and look at stars, and then realize that is the best thing you can do sometimes. I guess one thing I took for granted as a kid is wide open spaces. In the Northeast there isn’t much of that at all. Things aren’t so vast, so endless. So… looming.
But this is OK, because she still climbs trees and runs and plays soccer with her friends. She still has beaches and her backyard and her puppy and birds which nest in the tree and sing syrup sweet outside. Still has. And she’s happy. It’s just different.
Yesterday Lauren asked me if she could have my bedroom. I said yes.
Today Mother asked me to begin managing my college fund, and suggested that I take a small low interest loan so I will graduate with a bit of a nest egg, rather than a bundle of credit card debt or zero money in the bank. This money will now be truly my own to myself, to manage, to waste, to spend—or to invest wisely. I said yes.
No more childhood bedroom? No more idyllic pastoral Texan town? Paying my own bills? Managing and investing my own money?
Growing up is fun, but it’s also really confusing sometimes. Yet I do think everything is happening the way it should, and even though things are changing they are changing for the best eventually.
my new years resolution
Besides updating this woefully neglected blog (you’ll hear more sexy commentary from me after finals! Promise!)
I vow to like myself more in 2007. Yes, even though I have a shamelessly self-promoting vanity blog. Even though my outward persona’s ego is larger than Kansas. Even though my clothes could be sharper, my waist trimmer, my teeth brighter, my dress size smaller, my GPA higher, my career prospects more promising-er, my legs more toned-er, my grammar less laissez-faire…
I want to like myself more.
This doesn’t mean I want to bask in the heady glow of pat self-congratulation, no. (And I’m no stranger to that, matriculating at Penn and all, but…) It does mean I want to be more confident, more assured. That doesn’t mean I also don’t have the usual laundry list of Pottruck-going and note-taking and Crest White Strips-abusing, but it does mean that I need to put less freaking value in all that, and more value in being here, being alive, and being present for my friends and family.
Lest you think this is Gratuitous and Unnecessary (and a little too Our Bodies, Ourselves, natch), I’m always shocked and surprised when people describe me as confident or poised. I’ll never forget volunteering at an Human Rights Campaign banquet my freshman year, smiling nervously in my hand-me-down Jessica McClintock and Dillard’s kitten heels, and gasping when a twink and his sugar daddy approached to tell me they found me “poised”. Poised? As the To Wong Foo era Wesley Snipes would say, “Not on your young queer life!”
I mean, shucks, I’m glad that it appears that way. But it’s an appearance. Hell, if irrational neuroses could be traded on the NYSE, I’d be Warren Freaking Buffett. I could out-angst the love child of Woody Allen and Bridget Jones. And maybe this is a blogger thing. (Right, Miss Chen? But it’s time to end.
I know I’m late to the party and can’t claim grief as I never got to know the amazing-ness that is her, but as I write this I’m thinking about the late Star C. Foster, the promising young Philly blogger whom unexpectedly passed away last week. Look around you—we’re all living a pretty sweet gig. In the wake of the tragedies that happen every day—in my personal life and in the world at large—I guess my vow is to appreciate all of this more. As LiLo would say, “Be adequite.” Except without the diva rep and heiress hangers-on.
We are all unspeakably fragile. Savor everything, before you break.
apple, meet tree
So my mother calls me tonight from the lobby of the Luxor, cheerful on the eve of her 5th anniversary with her husband.
“I love Vegas, hon, but I love the surprise I’m planning even more!”
“Er… what surprise?”
“Well, you know your grandfather’s been cooped up in that nursing home for the past ten years and hasn’t had a lick of fun, what with all those old farts playing bridge and watching The Price is Right all the time.”
“Isn’t that a part of being ol-”
“Mark and I are blowing out of here a day early. We’re gonna be taking him to a strip club for Thanksgiving! Can you imagine the scene we’ll cause! Maybe I’ll take him up on the stage with his wheelchair and”—
“OK, Mom. I get it. No, really. Seriously.”
Dear Apple, I think, meet Tree. With a family like this, clearly I was predestined to being lewd and crude.
Besides the rather unsavory images in my head of certain relatives ogling bodacious ta tas, I’m rather swamped with work before the Thanksgiving blitz—I won’t be able to update this much with savvy commentary in the next few days, as I have a dysfunctional-family-Dia de las Gracias to organize, papers to write, presentations to finesse. Blah. The Penn homecoming stretch. Good for my GPA, bad for bloggers.
But before I say sayonara for a day or two, I’ll end this with a bit of gloom and doom—Bush’s latest “uniting” move, electing this clown as the new chief of our nation’s family planning programs. This bozo actually believes that giving contraception is “demeaning” to women. WHY IS SOMEONE WHO FINDS CONTRACEPTION MORALLY WRONG IN CHARGE OF OUR NATION’S REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND FAMILY PLANNING COUNSELLING?
The fact that someone who wishes to STOP my choice and my freedom to choose when I start a family is in charge of program about making decisions to start a family… it just kills me. It really does. Don’t like the Pill? Don’t pop it. I won’t judge you—your body, your choice, your pitter-pattering little consequences to deal with. But for Popeye’s sake, don’t tell me my choice to take Ortho “demeans” me, buddy. I think your condescending attitude towards female agency to make her own decisions is far more “demeaning” than a little progesterone.
It’s so easy to get complacent, but then I remember that we have a ways to go before this administration is over. Let’s not get complacent. If I’ve anyone to thank this Thanksgiving (besides my awesome friends and family, of course) it’s the people who work to call politicians and pundits out on this shit—bloggers, journalists, writers, activists—who I’m thankful for. Quite frankly, I don’t know how I’d keep my sanity otherwise.
(Well, maybe the new Prada perfume I’m savoring helps a bit. Seriously, it just reeks “post-coital”. Who says consumerism can’t provide contentment—and a little faux afterglow—every once in a while?)
the post in which your authoress realizes ivygate is somehow improving her love life?!?
Jessica’s Velveeta Cheese-fest Ego Boost of the Week: A Play in One Act
The scene: Your heroine’s palatial (for West Philly, that is) abode, Friday night. A tres dorky Penn/Harvard hospitality party is a ragin’ (as a ragin’ as a band party can get, anyway) and your heroine, bored, decides to mix and mingle with the musically inclined crowd. If one can dress to the nines, she’s dressed to the twos—an unkempt black sweater and an “I want my XMEN” skirt circa 1975. But, your heroin digresses…
A strapping young Harvard lad taps Heroine’s shoulder.
Strapping Young Lad: You!
Heroine: Me?!?
Strapping Young Lad: You’re that girl. That girl from the blog…
Heroine: You mean IvyGate? Well, that wasn’t the most flattering article and…
Strapping Young Lad: Oh, don’t listen to any of the comments. You’re even hotter in person.
Heroine: Jigga what?!
Sadly, nothing else of interest going on, ‘cept for a paper about Playboy in the 50’s I’m writing for my History of Sexuality class with historian Kathy Peiss. (I’ll totally post it—after it’s graded and evaluated, of course.)
But I did get my hair cut, and took an obligatory self-promotion picture. as is every young female blogger’s wont:
Internet, do we like it? The jury’s still out for me.
vamps and tramps
I am working on my pale.The advent of fall and winter delights me, for it means I can cover up: slip on long sleeve shirts without attracting confused stares from passerby, shield my legs from the sun inside slim tailored trousers, cover my face in the brim of a black cloche hat. I apply my Clarins SPF 40, dab my face before braving West Philly, rinse and repeat. I used to be made fun of for my fear of the sun, for my habit of ritual sunscreen. "Casper!" I was called. "Bollio!" "What's wrong with you?" said a childhood friend, a nicaraguense girl. "Don't you want to be tan like me?"
Yet I see the worn skin of my aunt, who spent many moons (or suns, more aptly) on Ipanema Beach in Rio, slathering her limbs in baby oil and Crisco. She is 50 and already her collagen has escaped her. Treated for melanoma twice! I fear losing her, and so I fear the sun. My father is the same -- a life out at sea has rendered his visage rough and wrinkled, like the inside of an Italian leather bag, or the heels of the boots he wears when it is stormy. He has no health insurance and I always wonder when we reunite which mole will be the death of him. My mother is still blonde and beautiful, yet even she, sun-worshipper that she was/is, now has a fine network of crow's feet gracing her middle aged face. I find her crow's feet beautiful, of course. She ages with grace, and in the mirror of her face I see me, a touching recognition. But not everyone will recognize that beauty. Cancer doesn't care about beautiful.
My little sister like to contort her 9 year old body in front of me, letting me see that she is brown as a berry. "My father says this is a protective tan," she says, and I curse her father George, for he should know better than to tell her that. George is dark like a cafe mocha; Lauren has inherited some of her father's complexion, yet still I worry that she, too, will get skin cancer in her ripe old age. Little freckles dust her nose, she already has a few moles. The curse of South Texas summers.
And so I rebel, working on my pale. I like to think of my sunscreen as a shield, blocking me from ultraviolet and pollution and dirt. Yet even this is fallible. Sunlight will always shine through the cracks, simultaneously giving us life and aging us. What do I have to fear from the sun? My mother's face is a map of her life, the furrows representing the paths she has taken. It is beautiful, that map. For what mother would I have otherwise, if her skin was smooth as marble, without error? Would I have her any other way but less than perfect?
cream in my coffee
I've been gabbing lately with my nouveau gal-pal/sex-blogger Elle over at Sex and the Ivy, whom has taken on the Sisyphean task of playing Asian Ivy League yenta for her Harvard girlfriends. At the end of her schpiel for each Crimson co-ed, she implores the rest of us to describe our own tastes in men. We had privately griped about our success (or lack thereof) with Ivy boys, so when she ended with:
"Let’s not get PC here. Be honest. If you don’t dig the white ones, ditto (ahem, Jess). Ready, set, go."
I smiled to myself. Is my dating history that transparent? I thought. Sad story is, it is. Time to unpack.
A laundry list of my laddy loves:
- A Chinese cyberpunk beau
- A Mexican Catholic sweetheart
- A supa-FOB Indian
- A nice Jewish boy
But of course, no one whose last name ends in Smythe or Carbunkle or something more subtle, like Whitelyle McCrackerton the Third. When I ran this laundry list by a male acquaintance of mine, his response cut to the chase:
"Your dating history looks like a United Colors of Benneton ad!"
Question's this: I'm(clearly) an open-minded girl, a progressive libertarian whom has crusaded for gay rights and wants to bring on a sex revolution. WASP-phobic? Me? Is this some sort of internalized affirmative action on my part, some subconscious PC-dom rearing its reverse racist head? Jesse Jackson would be so proud.
It could be guilt -- the whole bi-ethnic complex I've got going on. See, I know I look whiter than a ham and mayonnaise buffet at an Episcopal church picnic, but the truth is I'm half-Cuban. Yet you wouldn't know that from visiting my mother's house, where the garage is rife with my step-father's auto parts, Texas A&M flag, and a 1983 Harley Davidson lying akimbo alongside our all-American barbecue grill. I am half Cuban, but because of the color of my skin in a 95% Hispanic-populated section of South Texas, I grew up nicknamed "Casper," "Bollio" (white bread), "Gringa." "You can't be Cuban," little ol' Southern ladies will hiss, "Look at you!" As if Hispanic denoted skin tone; as if blondes can't be biracial. Perhaps having a brown beau on my arm reassures myself that I have that little bit of ethnic in me; that I'm not really like the rest of the white trash that populates the sleepy fishing town I'm from? I dunno.
There's also this strange (and prejudiced, no doubt) fear I have that an upper-crusty WASP just wouldn't get the vagaries of my bizarre family. I think of my Honduran half-sister's family; their plantain-and-mango orchard in the back of the house, their hog roasts, their gambling by the pier, and I cringe all My Big Fat Greek Wedding style when I think of a John Corbett look-a-like wincing at a plate of tripas and barbacoa. But this isn't fair of me. Who am I to say that John Corbett look-a-like wouldn't feel right at home putting carnitas on the grill? It's certainly not my prerogative.
Or maybe I'm beating myself up about this. Truth is, I think caramel skin and beguiling brown eyes on a boy is just... yummy. Warm. Delectable. My romantic interest in Jerry Maguire wasn't Tom-the-midget, but his show-me-the-money comrade, Cuba Gooding Jr. There is something exciting and sexy and powerful in tangling limbs to observe the contrast, making patterns on patterns on skin. Exciting. Hot.
Yet I'm always repulsed by, say, the acquaintances I know who will "only" date Asian girls. So how am I better? Beats me.
I guess my point is I'm stuck in a bit of a fixed action pattern. I'm choosing, at least unconsciously, who I'm attracted to, and harbor a knee-jerk reaction against rubio Romeos. Is it worth fixing? Time to tell.
