Just Another Friendly Reminder That Dating Is Over and You Will Never Find Love
This Jezebel article does a pretty solid job of pointing out some of what bugs me about many of the trend pieces about online dating:
Sounds shitty, indeed. But one clueless musician’s interaction with a social media manager hardly means that “Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along.” And why is it always up to men to set the dating tone? All of the anecdotes in these articles are from straight women, because straight women are apparently the only people who would be devastated about the demise of traditional courtship. But if you want to go to dinner and a movie, why not…suggest going to dinner and a movie?
Because hey, everyone: if you are interested in a specific kind of date, or a specific kind of relationship, you should communicate that to the people you are getting involved with.
Because hey, then you either
a) get the thing you want, hooray for you!
or b) learn that the person(s) in question want something different from what you want, and you can make decisions about whether you would like to modify your attitudes about dates/relationships or end your romantic/sexual involvement with that person(s) and move on.
It is actually that easy (sometimes).
Of course, often people don’t know what they want, want conflicting things, are unable to accept or access what they want due to societal or other pressures, have trouble clearly communicating what they want, etc. etc. etc. Relationships are messy business and always will be.
But real talk these things need to go:
- the idea that anyone should be tricking anyone else into a relationship (bonus points for the fucked up attitudes about gender that are usually involved)
- the expectation that you can always assume what kind of dates or relationship someone wants
- the expectation that someone else will know what kind of dates or relationship you want if you do not tell them.
I am, duh, guilty of having done all of these things at various points in my relationship/not-relationship history, so my apologies if all that comes off as didactic. This is all coming from the place of feeling like I’ve learned some things from that chaotic history, and having just had a surprisingly easy and communicative new relationship conversation that has me feeling optimistic about humans telling other humans about dem feeeeeelings.
“On the other hand, a lot of anti-makeup sentiment– particularly anything that starts talking about how “frivolous” and “shallow” makeup is– is also misogynistic and femmephobic. Makeup is a form of visual art. If making your face beautiful is shallow, so is making a canvas beautiful or a block of marble or a hunk of plastic. If you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when they make a gorgeous print, you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when their makeup looks perfect. I do not think it is accidental that the form of visual art almost entirely practiced by women is the one that gets accused of frivolity and where the talent exhibited by many of the artists is ignored or denigrated. - Ozy Frantz”
Other People’s Makeup Use: None Of Your Business – Ozy Frantz’s Blog (via brute-reason)
Draw on everything 2k13 has definitely extended to All Cat Eye All The Time.
(via bananafin)
sid’s brain fumes on this:
I also think that there’s something at play here about ephemerality, and how it relates to gendered attitudes about creative output.
A completely not-backed-up-by-anything claim that I have found to be true in my personal observations: The more physically imposing a medium, the more strenuous to work with, it is not only seen as more long-lasting, but often both a) of greater import and b) coming from a more masculine source. What up marble sculpture and steel skyscrapers? I see u there, with your gravitas and your hot, sweaty men wielding dangerous tools. If “women’s media” are textiles, paintings, drawings–things that do not last–pretty, delicate things that must be preserved by men with disposable income, then cosmetic art is an even more palpable example of this.
You paint your face and it lasts mere hours. It is assumed that you do not do this for yourself, to bring yourself pleasure through your personal aesthetics, but for male attention and/as material gain. It is considered shallow, pointless, not art but fashion–as if the distinction between those two things has ever been unproblematic. Just because it is not lasting, that does not mean it cannot be art. Look at theatre, some of which is inextricably caught up in the idea of the ephemeral performance, the moment that is unrepeatable. Only those lucky enough to be in the audience (/in your presence) at the right moment will catch this specific aesthetic experience.
Makeup, like literally every form of aesthetic choice-making, can be a tool. A tool for personal creative expression, for conformity, for rebellion, for political statement, for getting laid, for hiding something, for emphasizing something, for putting up barriers and for taking them down. (The choice of the absence of makeup is, of course, folded into all of this as well.) And sure, it can be shallow.That is totally also okay. But it doesn’t have to be, and categorically writing it off as a shallow and heteronormatively feminine (and it doesn’t have to be) form of aesthetic expression is symptomatic of some super wack nonsense about gender and ephemerality.
Apologies for the incoherence of that rambling, I haven’t finished my coffee yet and may change my mind about all of this by the end of the day.
Kickstarter backer art party
This speaks volumes, I think, about Amanda Palmer’s relationship with her fans. Yes, you can say that these images show us that she’s an exhibitionist, a narcissist, that she loves an excuse to get naked in public–all of those things are presumably true to some extent, and I see no problem with any of those things in the way she engages with the media – but the thing I think is important here is trust. She trusts her fans, not only with her music, not only with intimate information about her life via her blog, but with her body in all its vulnerability.
That is huge, especially in an era of bodyguards and guardrails and a Berlin Wall of personal assistants, and a general cultural attitude that treats celebrities as beings that are somehow physically manifest differently from all the rest of us, with our weird corporeal bodies. This kind of relationship to audience is more Marina Abramovic than American Idol, and I think that is what rock n roll is all about.
dreamlog 12/29/2012
Dream: my father and I at a swimming pool at night, pushing a tiny boat across the water while sitting in our coats on the edge of the concrete. In the boat, which is tiny but completely technically accurate, just in miniature, is a hamster or a gerbil, curled up comfortably in some little nook. He is enjoying the waves. I have the feeling something very important is happening nearby, possibly something dangerous, but I keep pushing the little boat back and forth. There are voices in the distance.
Dream: There’s a war going on, I think, but I’m in a treehouse library with a man who stops me just before I kiss him to tell me that he’s married. I’m running through a building full of wood paneling, or maybe it’s a barn, or a very large boat. It’s a barn, and for a moment the group of us believe we are safe in some back room, start planning our defenses, when I am lifted up into the air by my neck. I can only see the wisps of invisible threads, feel a cold hand. Someone holds up a mirror and everyone starts fighting. Creatures that can only be seen in their reflection, silver and hard, like ghosts made of ice.
Dream: The front door of my apartment is made of a single thick sheet of glass, and someone has kicked it in and robbed me. But not just the appliances, the valuables, but everything. They have taken my Christmas tree, the paint from the walls, the dust from the floor. My bedroom is completely intact, and I walk back and forth between the two over and over. It’s like someone has transplanted this one room into a different building. I wake up unsure if this has really happened, and lie there a long time, trying not to wake the stranger next to me, trying to remember what was real.
Inspired by this post, A Brief History of Kisses at Midnight, I thought for the sake of exercising my ever-deteriorating long-term memory I would give it a try. It takes me ages to remember, in pieces, almost anything at all, so this might be a little rough, and very inaccurate. There are many years missing.
–
I went to my ex-boyfriend’s party–not a source of trouble, just a dear friend plus the occasional joke, the occasional oops we had sex again didn’t we, the occasional reminder of why things worked and why they didn’t–but I spent the whole time avoiding another, more recent. When midnight hit I was sitting on the couch, watching everyone dance, everyone screaming out numbers. I thought about choreography, I thought about theft. I could see them both from where I sat, but am fairly sure I kissed no one.
–
We found ourselves without plans, so we threw a party last minute.We played 1,000 Blank White Cards. When midnight approached, we played Freebird at full volume and everyone started taking off their clothes. At midnight, I don’t think I kissed anyone, but I turned a corner in my apartment and walked into a room full of naked men dancing to Like A Prayer. Spinning their dicks like helicopters to Like A Prayer. It was beautiful.
–
Back when our friends still had that huge, nasty loft full of weird nights, they threw a party. I remember burlesque, and sticky floors, and making Shakespeare jokes to a dealer I didn’t know who didn’t give a damn. A mirror falling on us off the bathroom wall and not breaking. At midnight all our drunk white girl faces blended together and we gave each other kisses. At five in the morning the man who kept calling and sexually harassing my friend called her again, and I took the phone and told him in great detail how I imagined finding him, rendering him helpless, and cutting his dick off in a long, torturous operation. He never called her again.
–
In an apartment in Brooklyn where I knew no one, I watched a beautiful woman with long, dark hair play the piano. A young man told me about kicking heroin, showed me his tattoos. There were beautiful pieces of broken machines on the walls, a little fort made of birch branches. One of my idols played a ukulele, covered the Cure. I was given a scrap of paper, told to write something on it, that I’d need it later. I lost my paper, got a new one. At midnight, I dropped the scrap with the word FEAR scrawled on into a bucket full of fire. Later that night, I found my first paper. I ripped it into a hundred pieces and threw it in the trash on a New York City subway platform underground.
–
“This,” they said at midnight, “is a traditional Jewish song of celebration.” At midnight I was not kissing, I was screaming Beastie Boys lyrics with burlesque artists. We were mostly drunk and no one knew every single word, but MCA was still alive and we were pouring our hearts into this ridiculous cover, and it was probably already 12:05, but “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” is a great song. On the sidewalk smoking cigarettes with a Swiss drummer, I was swept along with the gypsy orchestra, almost arrested in the subway for playing the kazoo, so near Times Square and we were making such beautiful music–not for money, there was no one there, but for ourselves. The night took many convoluted turns, and at dawn I found myself at Coney Island, drinking whiskey and tea from a mason jar and dipping my feet in the ocean on New Year’s Day.
–
We were both so in love with him, and he with himself, all three of our faces pressed together as the countdown crashed. We all knew what was coming, but for a moment, oh, we could pretend.
–
In the basement of our parents’ house, I told my baby brother that the world would never end. I kissed him on the cheek, and time continued to pass.
scraps.
I will rearrange the furniture without mercy, because I know that when I find the right fit I will quit being so goddamn scared of the dark. I will eat all the food in this house, and all the paper, and when I am so full the darkness cannot fill me I will sleep soundly. Oh, the sound of it, nothing.
I’m not in love with you or anything, or trying to be, but I’ll memorize the shape of your back while you’re sleeping, because if I can internalize whatever it is that a man is when he’s sleeping, then maybe I can learn to sleep alone. The train rushes past and I realize this is foolish.
I pace the halls of my home like a ghost, or a rat, or a madwoman in one of those novels I can’t bring myself to read. An attic, or a basement, or a run-down bungalow out back, the grasses growing through the floorboards. A soup of shallots and watermelon blood. I can’t begin to tell you what goes through my head.
Give me a lineup of suitors and a long knife, and I’ll give you the god’s honest truth. We’re coming apart at the seams, it seems, and there’s not enough cocaine on the continent to make me forget what exactly I am. Whiskey, lemon, honey, tonic. Bird, stick, song and carrot. I’ll read your cards if you show me your hand, and if you show me your hand I’ll hold it. The night is almost as filthy as the day, and both would be yours if you’d own them.
Note written to myself, October 24, 2008:
“The name of the game is sensory overload, little buddy.”
notes from september 2012
the word of mouth, resting on my bookshelf.
the glass of your eye in my coffee.
the myriad ways of taming.
the desirous ear, the lolling breath–who are we to slip, to unhinge ourselves to strangers?
the hair of your cheek is caught in my lungs, the tremor of your hand in my pockets.
a Southwest town burns down to the ground, and your thighs are aching.
my bracelet breaks all over your bed.
these are the methods of destruction: blonde, redhead, brunette, raven black.
my bitterness wears a floor-length skirt, breasts bare and bruising in the sunlight.
the object of my longing is a jar that will never be clean.
tell me, love, what do you see on your ceiling as you sleep?
your grandmother’s fingernails, my drought and draft, the apples of the south, where do you go.
the balloon string of memory
has fled to warmer climes.
fragmented analysis of a certain kind of ache.
Oh, how all the time between now and childhood stretches out before me
a knit scarf pulling apart. All the time between now and childhood
I have ached after you often in the manner of a child.
It twists the knife in me to know
the woman that I am has always been
lapping after your gaze
like a hound.
When I picture the devil, he still looks like you.
The sight of you, moving through a crowd. The misting heat of bodies and too-bright lights. The weight of all my wanting got the building condemned. Its paint now shelters strangers.
But this, this goes in the pile of pains that help me know I’m alive.
It’s that urge to be a part of someone’s sense of adventure, to grip every moment of the world in my teeth and shake it. To look everyone dead in the eye. To climb fences and grab hands and grin with all our crooked teeth until the end. To try to feel everything we can until it’s gone. To try to find all the right words and the right people to say them to.
You drop into my life like a slap in the face and then you’re gone again, but it brings the blood to my cheeks. This is not only self-destruction; the way I burn down when you’re around means I have to rebuild and remember. Phoenix, phoenix, unhinge my jaw for you and let my heart drop into my lap, because I am stronger than I used to be.
I didn’t know who I was when I met you, and sometimes even now, the hair falling across your brow can make me forget. I am shedding the same tears, but every time I put myself back together I hope that I am slightly more aligned. Not for you, never for you, but for myself. My heart breaks every time I look at you, but it is the cracking of ice on the river, and the river will flow.