So, you are asking yourself. Who is this person who made one post, like, a month ago, and didn’t bother making the second post that she promised?
It is I! But, since you either don’t know me or don’t know these things about me, I’ll do an introductory post with ten short, sweet things about me that you probably don't know and ten things you might already know that are in stupid amounts of detail. If I bore you, feel free to move on to something more entertaining. I feel the need to do that myself, more often than not, which is why I never get any blogging done anymore.
Short and sweet:
Short and sweet:
1. The first time I felt like I really owned my body was when I got my first tattoo. I have three. I plan on getting tattoos until I stop having ideas for them. Same goes for piercings, but they don't get the same priority. (Tongue is my only exotic piercing.)
2. I considered majoring in voice, sociology, women's studies (I would if it was offered here), history, creative writing, and some other stuff that I'm forgetting. I settled on English Comp.
3. I don't hate being overweight so much because I hate the way I look, although I feel that, too. I hate it because I hate my body's inability to perform the tasks it used to fly through with ease. Then again, that's not just a weight issue, since I have the back of an eighty-year-old. I resent my body.
4. The longest time I have ever spent living in one city is four years, and it was Havelock, North Carolina.
5. I didn't even learn to drive until I was twenty-one. I learned quickly that I love driving.
6. I spend a remarkable amount of my time fighting the urge to burst into full-throated song. Sometimes I am only successful enough to keep it down to half-throated song.
7. I do not get Radiohead. Seriously. What's so great? Most of the people I know and respect love Radiohead. They just sound pretentious to me. Maybe it's because I have shit taste in music.
8.The thing I regret most about my childhood was that I stopped thinking science was cool around adolescence.
9. I am bisexual, but I haven't felt the need to have a coming-out since I'm married to a dude and will not ever actually be with a woman, if everything goes according to plans. It is what it is, I don't feel like I'm denied anything, and I'm never going to make a larger statement than this since it's not a big deal to me. However, I don't like closets, and don't care who knows it.
10. I am obsessed with Symphony of Science.
Ten obnoxiously long facts:
1. Amusingly, “Losing My Religion” came up on my iPod as I typed this.
I am an atheist. But surely, you say, I knew that you already knew this (if you knew me). What you might not know is why, specifically. No, I haven’t experienced any particularly great trauma that made me throw up my hands and abandon belief in God. No, Christianity did not scar me to the point where I could no longer believe in a God (sorry, Christians who have asserted this without really knowing me). No, it something much simpler than all that: one day last summer I was reading a thread on a blog that I frequent, and it happened. My faith simply fell away from me. I could no longer put effort into believing something without proof. It was as simple as that. I knew that we are wired neurologically to have experiences such as people deal with in religious contexts. I knew that I could not give a single rational reason to claim to be a theist. I could not justify it. So, it was gone. It was a long pathway to get there, but that’s how it happened. It was as quick and easy as falling in love. I had, to a degree, felt this way the whole time, but finally admitted it. And I haven’t looked back once.
It was like a day on the road when, thinking about it, I said something strange to my gentleman caller: “I believe in deity, but it seems to me as if the sky would be much bigger if there wasn’t one.” He was more bewildered than anything, since he’d been an atheist for a while and wasn’t inside of my head, but I found, when I stopped trying to believe, that I was right. The sky is much, much bigger to me now. It’s a sentiment I can’t explain.
Now, my reason for being a militant atheist is different, but I’ll save that for another post. I’m sure I’ll get there someday. My atheism went from a next-logical-step-in-my-development to a very important part of my personal philosophy within a few months.
2. I will never be able to give a straight answer about how I feel about my service in the Marine Corps (I spent five years in the band, most of them on light duty of some sort or other, and never deployed). I’ve written about this briefly on my other blog, and I still puzzle over it. I’m anti-war now that I’m not a dumb fucking eighteen-year-old. I am not comfortable with the thought of what I would have been supporting had I gone to Iraq, even if it would have been in a support position on an airbase. However, I am not comfortable with the fact that people thank me for my service when I don’t feel like I served at all, and when I didn’t want to serve that. I don’t know how to be proud of something that I feel was of no consequence.
3. I am a musician. Oh, ye gods, I am a musician. I do not remember a silent moment of my life, because there has literally been music either around me or in my head ever since I was able to understand that what I was hearing was music. I am obsessed with it, consumed by it. I am not completely functional unless I am part of making music in some capacity or another, and I found it out through two and a half years of what, in my life, was silence. I was happy with my partner-in-crime before I went to college and got to be back in choir, but I think that part of my happiness now can be chalked up to the fact that I am giving myself something that I actually would group as a need on Maslow’s Hierarchy. My body aches to make music. Since I don’t play the clarinet as well as I used to, and I don’t have the patience to work back up to any level of proficiency on an instrument, I am left with my voice, but I cannot explain how wonderful it feels to hear this sound come out of me. It’s like my entire body is channeling everything good in the universe through my throat when I sing well, like something from outside of me is producing this throaty contralto sound. Performing in ensembles cause the only experiences I’ve had that resemble a religious experience (which makes sense if you understand the neurological component). (I think that my being synaesthetic contributes to this. I see colors when I hear music, and one of my earliest memories is of telling my mom that a song by Michael W. Smith was blue with yellow polka dots. Music is a multisensory experience for me.) The reason I’m not majoring in music is partially that I worry that I’m not good enough, but it’s mostly that I do not want to tie something that makes me as blissfully, uncontrollably happy as music to something as stressful as auditions, juries, and grades. Nope, I’ll take the music straight, thanks.
4. I am completely obsessed with civil rights and liberties. I’ve been that way for a while. I do not plan on getting over it. I am a socialist partially because I believe that you cannot truly enjoy civil rights and liberties if you don’t have food and shelter. My passion for freedom is what makes me passionate about economic issues, but I am less knowledgeable about the latter. This blog will probably address that a lot, when I use it. I think I ended up this way because, even though I’m mostly “normal” in terms of demographics, I’ve always been different, never felt very mainstream, and I also happen to care so much about other people that it hurts.
5. Feminism made no sense to me, considering that I am generally privileged and interact well with men, until I went to my first viewing of “The Vagina Monologues” and, as a rape survivor, saw how many fucking black roses there were onstage. It devastated me, and brought it home that this is a societal problem, not an individual one. (I still interact well with men as long as they’re willing to treat me like a person and not a walking set of tits with a low IQ.)
6. I have severe ADHD, with a more invisible hyperactive component. It was easier to tell if you knew me in junior high and high school, which is when I started getting seriously symptomatic, but I had behavioral issues in late elementary school as well. I was institutionalized briefly my freshman year of high school for a suicide attempt, and I think I did it more because of boredom (I had a cutting problem, and I cut when I was bored, not depressed) and extreme stress at feeling completely unable to cope with, well, fucking anything, because everything was insanely distracting and overstimulating. Unfortunately, they treated me for depression and not ADHD. Resultantly, high school was a treat. It irritates me sometimes to think that I was a textbook case and they couldn’t be arsed to actually look into it, because it might have saved me ridiculous amounts of grief in adulthood.
As an adult, I’m not easy to treat because they generally use stimulants, and I have a heart problem. (In fact, that’s probably part of my caffeine addiction: it’s a stimulant, and it does relax me a little.) The best description of what it feels like to be me is one that was used by Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half: “Hyperactivity is like being forcibly injected with way too much crack-cocaine and then being tied down to a table and made to watch a documentary about sea snails.” My hyperactivity is invisible largely because I have a stronger inattentive component to my disorder, and also because it manifests in other ways, like in my grinding my teeth down to absolute shit and constantly twitching (I am never not moving, and if you think I’m not then you are not able to see my toes/hands/teeth). And yes, it’s difficult knowing that, although I am (miraculously, it feels) doing well in school, I have to be completely vigilant in order to ensure no slippage. I also hate that I tend to disappoint people because I don’t keep small promises because I can’t even remember where I put my keys, much less a task I said I would accomplish. I also hate that I probably will never be able to keep a clean house because, any time I have to physically organize anything, my brain tells me, “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.” I’m probably going to write a fair bit about mental illness as well, because, let me tell you, it gets really fucking irritating being told that I’m hallucinating something that kept me from doing much of anything for the first twenty-five years of my life, and that keeps me from being able to function on a normal level in areas that I’m able to easily hide. Pisses me off. This is not a sign of my being smart. This is what keeps me from doing much with it.
I'll probably be spending some time writing about comorbidity of ADHD and obesity and other issues with it.
7. I’m vulgar, and when I say I’m vulgar, I mean that I curse easily as much as everyone else I know combined. I’ve always been this way. (That’s most of the reason that I titled this blog the way that I did.) I know that it offends people, but I don’t particularly care, because I think it’s silly. I don’t believe in word magic, don’t think that the word “fuck” lowers the level of discourse unless it’s hurled abusively, and even then, you can lower the level of the discourse by resorting to abuse without using any dirty words. I think we’re way too obsessed with propriety in our culture, and I curse so much because I want to deliberately undermine this bullshit idea that we should concern-troll over people saying “fuck” but not over children in Africa mining our fucking diamonds. There are such better things to worry about than whether I’m being a meany-face with my tone to people who think I’m less than fully human or think that my gay friends don’t deserve equal rights, so on and so forth. I call a fuckstick a fuckstick. I am concerned about words that actively work in our culture to hurt people by demographics, and so, when I hear words like “faggot,” “bitch,” “cunt,” racial slurs in general and other such languages, then I take offense, because I am not comfortable with using words to treat other people as if their identities are less-than. (However! I am very inclined to describe myself as a bitch, cunt, slut, whore, and the like, because personally, I am not insulted by what people mean when they say those words. I’m empowered.)
8. Along those lines, I am rather blunt about sex. The details of my sex life stay private out of respect for the people who have participated in it, but I have absolutely no problem discussing the fact that I’ve had casual sex and that I think that a healthy attitude about sex has to include talking openly about it. I understand more why people are uncomfortable with anyone saying, “I’ve had multiple sexual partners,” but I would like to do my part to undermine the illusion of women as either shrinking violets or caricatures of human beings. I’m a wife, I’m a mother, and I’ve been around the block. Similarly, I know plenty of dudes who haven’t been around the block much. I don’t think that we have moved forward much in the direction of realizing that women and men are not wired that differently in terms of sex, and that it’s more a matter of personal morality or personal preference than of gender. I missed the shame gene, missed the “don’t-have-sex” gene, and just jumped right onto the “sex” train. The biggest deal with sex is trust and consent, and, if you’re operating with those, you’re fine in my book.
9. I am a firm believer in frivolity. I don’t think that you can enjoy life without having things that you do for the sheer joy of doing them, without purpose. Whether it’s going out on a walk, listening to Lady GaGa, playing Farmville, reading trashy romance novels, watching terrible movies, or whatever, you need frivolity. I would literally defend frivolity to the death, because it’s the little snatches of fun you grab that make life worth living.
10. I’m shitty at blogging and will probably forget to for another month or so. So sorry.
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