Being American

I never understood it.

I'm first generation American. I grew up with my grandmother talking about "those Americans" and trying to understand why my mother's ideas about manners and grammar were so different from those of my friend's parents. The only presidential elections I was old enough to participate in were both sore disappointments for me personally, but also difficult and frustrating experiences for the entire nation. I have traveled to other countries and started conversations with, "I didn't vote for him." I have groused about my irritation that my parents chose to move here before having me, robbing me of what I felt would have been a more interesting life in another country. I have complained about feeling that my government did not represent me, had nothing in common with me. I have often worried that my fellow Americans were apathetic and didn't know how to think globally.

And now I get it.

Sitting in my mom's living room and crying at the joy of listening to a leader who I am proud to hear speak, a leader who - like me - has a foreign born parent. A leader who is so quintessentially American in that he genuinely represents a huge cross section of our population and has a more wide and global "melting pot" perspective than I could have ever hoped for in a U.S. President.

Driving home and looking up at the stars in an unusually clear sky and feeling faith in the people I am surrounded by. That they care. That, no matter who they voted for, they VOTED. So many people were motivated to participate in this election. Instead of the immobile masses I had imagined, I felt hope that I live in a country where people may really care what happens - and can actually make a difference and enact change in their world by participating.

For the first time in my life I understand why people have a fervent passion for this country. I understood the ideas before. What being a United States Citizen was supposed to mean and what this country represents. But tonight I FELT it for the first time. Tonight, watching Barack Obama speak to the nation, I felt I was a part of it for the first time.

If my grandmother were still alive, I'd tell her that from now on, she would have to say "you Americans" instead of "those Americans," because I finally understand why my parents wanted to be here.

Tonight I am so glad that I am.

I Just Voted Because of the Issues

...but they ARE moving words and the action he is able to inspire gives me greater faith in people and their capacity for hope.



You know, I never saw this? I didn't even know about this video until will.i.am was interviewed on CNN amidst the election coverage.

I am so happy tonight.

I Believe

I believe in a higher power. I believe a social conscience is more than just bleeding-heart crap, it's a way of life and a better manner of existing. I believe that animals have emotions. I believe that books have some sort of life of their own because stories are absolutely magic to me. I believe that something about our planet will always be damaged and hell bent for destruction until the people of every nation learn to think globally. I still believe in my heart of hearts that my father is 10 feet tall and can do anything. I believe that my sister will love me no matter what I do. I believe that love is a holy state of being. I believe that the ordinary can be transcendent and alive with possibility. I believe in saying please and thank you. I believe that men who hold the door for you are just better to be around. I believe that we miss too much when we sleep. I believe in being honest but never cruel.

I believe so very very many things.

But today I have decided that I absolutely believe in Internet Karma.

I get in these moods. These manic dear-god-does-anyone-love-me freak out moods where I check email every ten minutes. I don't do it all the time. It's not a constant compulsion. I do this maybe once a month, but when I get like this it's frantic and obsessive and I cannot seem to stop myself and it ALWAYS happens on a day when no one happens to be emailing me so I become convinced that no one is speaking to me. It's mad. It never lasts for more than a few hours but it's completely irrational and I think it's an unhealthy reaction to the constant influx of information that we simply aren't equipped for because technology is evolving faster than we are.

But there it is. I do this. Every now and then. And I was talking to my baby sister about this and she pointed out to me that she had just emailed me the day before - and I had not responded. And she's right. Most of the time I just don't care that much about email and I read what people send me quickly and then I move on with my day - often being too rude and self-focused to respond, to let them know I got their message.

And then I stop getting emails from OTHER UNRELATED PEOPLE. Not even the same people. Not people who know each other. It's like the universe decides to teach me a lesson. But I don't always notice at first.

Then I have one of my days. And it hits me that no one has emailed me in like 24 hours so clearly EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE has stopped speaking to me and I become distraught. Despondent. Limp and unmanageable.

Then I think about the people I have made feel this way. And sure enough - perusing my in box reveals several ignored missives! So I reply to all of them and - I am not kidding - within ten minutes I start to hear from the other people I was waiting to hear from. It's completely bizarre. But it happened to me today. I sent off email responses to my baby sister, an old friend from high school and my aunt. Minutes later I had heard from a theater friend who had not been getting back to me for weeks, a friend I know from Florida and another person I had lost track of ages ago. Unrelated people. Who could not possibly have ever met, much less be calling each other to say, "Oh, you can email her now. She's finally responded to my question from last week. She's learned her lesson."

Proof. Interweb Karma. I know I've written about it before but today was just WEIRD. Not something to build a faith on or anything but further proof of how strange life is and how long-existing concepts can be reprocessed and re-imagined through the miracle of technology.

I totally believe.

Embracing Age

Sometimes I feel like my youth is lost. My best times are behind me and I am just going to go downhill from here. Then I see something like this thing on Yahoo and am reminded of how so many women - as they find themselves, as they grow as individuals, as they learn to love themselves - improve with age. I mean, these are movie stars... but most of them look BETTER as older women. I realize I'm not a guy and all that... but not only would I rather have a conversation with the mature version of these women, I think their mature selves are more physically attractive.

I've always thought that age and experience make people more interesting. Other people. It's harder to apply this to one's self. But my face was soft and without character when I was younger and now, very very slowly, it is developing more character, my bone structure is becoming more pronounced, my countenance is less child-like. I may actually be improving.

Admittedly, I didn't look like Diane Lane when I was 20. So I won't look like her when I'm 40. But I still think these photos bode well for all of us.

Late Night Thinking

Life is strange. Obvious, right? I probably spend far too much time thinking about it. I find the paths our lives take fascinating, although I believe very strongly in the control we have over those paths. I don't think things are meant to happen or in destiny in the way many people do. I think you make the life you want while working with the circumstances you are given. When you make a choice, you open new doors and you close other ones. And you'll never know which life you might have lived, what you've given up or what you might have missed if you hadn't chosen this door. I also believe that disasters and forced change are like the universe's sometimes horrific way of creating. Not everything that comes of a disaster or a personal tragedy is bad. There are usually strange places that difficult times take you that add to your life or change who you are in important ways.

I can say this. I have survived plenty. I have lived through all manner of personal horrors. I have learned to embrace change. It's the only thing you can count on. Whether life is wonderful or terrible, it's all temporary. It will all change and eventually we will all be dead so there's nothing to do but accept it and make it work for you.

Sometimes I feel like I live within the eye of a storm. A whirlwind of change. Change that happens to me and change that I create. Chaos and reason in constant cycles and struggles.

I'm working on the particulars for a wedding. A very important wedding. It was less than two months ago that I called off my own nuptials and right now I am sitting in my living room staring at a little statue of a bride and groom. I am making the cake topper for my best friend's wedding which is only a month away. Sometimes I feel like I am living a very strange stream-of-consciousness film. It would take a tremendous editor to try to explain the point to all this. The ups and downs. The people that come and go and come back again...

And how I ended up here, painting tiny roses on the side of a little wedding gown.

Life is so very, very strange.

10 Items or Less

I love Brad Silberling. He wrote and directed Moonlight Mile and 10 Items or Less. Moonlight Mile wrecks me. Using a similarly senseless and sudden loss in his own life as his inspiration, Siberling weaves this tapestry of grief and the human condition. His characters are all experiencing and expressing and coping with grief in ways that are almost difficult to watch because it is all so real. The illogical things you do. The way you get lost and don't remember why you walked into that room. The strangeness you feel when you learn you can still laugh or when you laugh at all the wrong times. The anger, the absurdity, the oddity of acknowledging the horrific thing that has happened right there in the midst of your world. And most shattering of all, the way life keeps moving on and stores keep opening and the mail gets delivered and new people come into your life and this horrible thing happened... yet nothing stops. And somehow in the midst of all of this - the film is hopeful.

It's clever, warm and strikingly spot on.

It's not at all what I wanted to write about tonight.

10 Items or Less I saw more recently. Morgan Freeman plays a sucessful older actor who hasn't worked in a few years. He's considering a role in a small independent film as the manager of a grocery store - so he gets dropped off at an out of the way supermarket to do research. Watch the locals. Get into the mindset of the store manager (this leads to a brilliant scene in which Morgan Freeman follows the diminutive, older Indian character actor Kumar Pallana around the store, mimicking his every move - HILARIOUS AND AWESOME). At the register Freeman (listed in the film's credits only as "Him") meets Paz Vega's character, Scarlett. She runs the ten items or less line. A frustrating, thankless job. She's too smart to be stuck doing this work but is struggling to find the self-confidence to get out.

Basically, they both have problems. Like we all do. And some of those problems are the ones it's just hard to see clearly on your own. So when they get stuck spending the day together (Freeman gets stranded at the shop and Vega begrudgingly offers him a ride) they both need some outside perspective. They spend one day together. Doing the most mundane things you can think of. The set up is so gloriously ordinary. The veteran actor raving about how amazing Target is. Gorgeous Paz Vega pulling a sandwich from a rumpled paper Arby's bag. And it's wonderful and strange. In the midst of it they are talking and learning about each other and helping each other do things. And eventually you are left feeling that just MAYBE they have changed each others lives.

In the midst of their day running around fixing problems and talking about everything, there is this one conversation in particular that they have that I just loved. Vega says that everyone wants more than ten items. No one is happy with ten. No one wants to give anything up. They talk about what they would get rid of if they could remove ten things from their lives. Then, more telling, they talk about the ten best things in their lives. What they would keep if they could only keep ten things. It's a wonderful scene. The "things" aren't just things. They are parts of life, moments, things you do, parts of their worlds. The ten best things. The things that, if everything else was gone, would be enough.

I loved that.

Ten things to rid yourself of is easy. But only keeping ten. Ten things. A simple life made up of it's ten best parts. What would you choose? What would that life be?

It's an intimate list and it's difficult to be honest and I think it's probably one of those conversations it would be easier to have with a stranger. Someone not invested in your world. Someone you could just TELL - give that truth to and then walk away and not have to admit to the rest of the world what really matters to you. Deep down. When it comes right down to it.

I have been working on my list in my head. Things. Places. The way certain things feel. People I couldn't live without. Ten items. Or less.

Overheard

I live in a college town. And it's that time of year again.

So today I heard the following conversation near campus:

guy: "So, yeah. I started drinking at like 7pm Friday and didn't stop until 3am Monday."

girl: "Do you feel okay?"

guy: "oh, yeah. I'm fine... but by Sunday I was physically incapable of getting drunk."

girl: (without a trace of irony) "...But you tried, right???"

________

Fall just wouldn't be the same without the annual influx of brilliant teenagers.

How Much is Too Much

I wrote the following a few months ago, in the midst of the turmoil at my job. Rereading it, I felt like it was worth saying. PLUS if I'm ever going to put it up, it should be now - before I finish my redesign and such. So - now that's it's actually safe to post it without fear of legal action - here it is:

________________

In our daily lives we make sacrifices. We make compromises. Because the world doesn't always work the way you want it to, because sometimes your needs outweigh your principles. Because there are often more people effected by a decision than simply ourselves.

Right now I am deciding whether or not to remain at my job.

There are little things, but there are always little things. Every job has imperfections and these are acceptable, because every environment has it's faults.

But there is also a very large problem. One that I can no longer ignore.

Last Friday a co-worker confronted me in a threatening manner over a minor misunderstanding. The essentially one-way conversation involved an angry tirade and an implied physical threat. This is not the first time this person has exploded at someone. He has yelled at me before. He has cursed out our receptionist. Attempting to intimidate his co-workers is a part of how he interacts. This past Friday is the first time I have seen him actually go so far as to threaten someone.

I have formally lodged a complaint with my employer. Due to the serious illness of a close family member of my employer's, I am trying to understand his need for a few days to sort this out. It has not yet been addressed. I cannot imagine there being any sufficient response other than the firing of this man. I cannot understand why this man still works here, other than the fact that he simply has a great deal of knowledge that we need access to. I do not know what my employer is going to do.

I cannot afford to be unemployed. There is little available in my field in town. I don't really want to move, at least, not right now.

Every moment I sit here, waiting for my employer to do the right thing and worrying that he won't - I feel like I'm sacrificing pieces of myself.

People who know me would be surprised that I let someone rip into me. More surprised if they saw the way I cowered, mumbling agreement with anything he said, just praying he would leave if I didn't argue. Hoping that if I agreed with him he wouldn't hit me. I tend to be an aggressive person. I've learned to be that way. Most of the time it works, most of the time it kicks in when I need it and it protects me. But sometimes another person's aggression crosses a line, a threshold of tolerance for me and I find myself in a familiar but long-absent place - frozen by my own fear. I've gone over this incident again and again in my head, trying to understand my own reaction to it. Why I feel so depressed. Why it's difficult for me to be in the building right now, as I type.

I was physically abused as a child, I've talked on here about being raped in my late teens, years ago I had difficulty with being harassed in the workplace at another job (all of which paints the picture of a perpetual victim, which I must assure you I am far from being). I have stood up for myself significantly more often than not in life, but in some instances, in THOSE instances, I failed to or was unable to protect myself. I cannot stand the idea of sitting idly by and letting myself be stepped on. Not now. Never again. I can't stand the idea of working for someone who would allow that.

Friday afternoon, I found myself cowering. Me. Cowering. For the first time in so very many years. That which does not kill us does make us stronger, right? Anyway, it lowers the threshold of what we are willing to tolerate. I am quickly reaching zero. I am not angry (I should be angry, why am I not angry?). I am just longing to do what I must to take care of myself. To look myself in the mirror and feel secure that THIS time I didn't let myself down.

Does everyone go through this, this strange self-knowledge? Learning the point at which you break, and at what point you refuse to be silent? I thought I knew this about myself, but here I am again. Trying to see my way through.

_____________

It took almost three months to find another position. The whole time I struggled, wanting to just walk away. When I was told that I had to tolerate the situation because, "Every workplace has someone like him. That's just how it is. We can't get rid of him and anyway, it's his word against yours." I consulted a lawyer and there really isn't very much you can do when you work for a small company and you live in a right-to-work state. It wasn't discrimination because of my sex. He didn't actually hit me. My lawyer told me, with no intention of offence, that if I HAD stood up to the man and he HAD hit me - well, then I'd have a case.

Sometimes doing the right thing for your long term well-being and doing the thing your principles and dignity demand... sometimes those things aren't compatible. So I did my best. I left as soon as I was able. I never said it was okay. I tried to maintain some level of dignity in spite of the fact that I felt intimidated walking in the door every day. And now I'm free and it's over. And I'll never work somewhere like that again. But I hate thinking about it. Because, when I do, I find that in some small way I still kick myself for cowering. Because I feel I let myself down. Sometimes the only person you can count on to stand up for you is YOU... it's important to know you can at least count on that to kick in when the chips are down.

I don't think it's a male-female thing, but I do think that women haven't always been taught to stand up for themselves. And we want to take care of ourselves. Maybe not all of us - but many of us want to be our OWN knight in shining armor. We want to save ourselves. I feel a responsibility to do that for myself and somehow feel incomplete when I don't.

Dame 2.0

Well, folks, I'm working on an updated version of Dame. I haven't been around for a while and I think it's time for a new look and a little housecleaning.

To Dame regulars I would like to offer my apologies. I have really good reasons for having been absent so long. Sometime around June I had some problems in my workplace. I was threatened by a co-worker, there was discussion of legal action and my workplace became a fairly hostile environment. I have spent the past couple of months securing new employment and sorting that situation out. I now have a wonderful new job and am far happier... Because I had discussed my relationship (in relatively vague terms) on here, I should also let regulars know that The Guy and I have called off our engagement. I am alright and hoping he and I will remain good friends. But anyway, suffice it to say that it's been a very hectic time for me.

My life has changed a great deal in the past couple of months.

ALSO, as of today, I have reliable internet access at home for the first time in years. It had become highly impractical to post on my blog when I could not do so without going to great lengths. That situation is no longer. I sit, right now, on my bed with my shiny new laptop (who I have named), writing to you from my home FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME. That's right. 300+ posts and over two years of writing Dame on a break at work, from a friend's computer, at my local library, etc. Imagine how much more I will get done now.

So I'm working on a new look, a new approach... and while I'm at it a whole new life.

I just wanted to pop my head out of the ground for a moment and check in. Changes are a'comin'. Thanks for hanging in there. I miss reading your blogs. I miss having the time to share what I'm interested in. I'm looking forward to getting back in the saddle.

Gender Roles

Today I navigated to Yahoo to check my personal email. Yahoo always displays stories / articles / news / human interest junk for their users to click on.

And today there were two articles about relationships:

For WOMEN : "10 signs that he's willing to commit"

For MEN : "How to tell if she's attracted to you"

It's not just Yahoo. It's everywhere. Obviously popular media STILL assumes that all women want is a long-term commitment and all men want is to know if they're going to get laid.

It's so reassuring to know that some things never change.


Did I just imagine that women's movement and the sexual revolution took place?