{Originally published on Dadomatic.}

My dad is a great dad. He indelibly shaped my personality, mores, and outlook in life. Now that I am a dad too, I appreciate what he did even more. It wasn’t easy to narrow them down, but these the top ten lessons that he taught me.

1. Don’t take any shiitake from anyone. My dad was a state senator for twenty years, and he never walked away from a confrontation with the local newspapers, labor unions, and government officials. He taught me not to kowtow to anyone just because they are in lofty positions. This is a very useful attitude because if people sense that you don’t take any shiitake, they won’t give you any.

2. Obey your teachers. My dad taught me that teachers knew more than I did so I should treat them with respect. This was a rare exception to the “don’t take shiitake from anyone” lesson. Come to find out, (a) teachers very seldom dish out shiitake, and (b) they truly change the world (and not for the money), so they (c) deserve truckloads of respect.

3. Don’t follow the crowd. Initially, I thought that he was saying that most people were stupid–and I agreed with him. But I now realize that he was telling me not to follow the crowd because the crowd “mentality” can make smart people do dumb things. This is why I don’t believe in the “wisdom of the crowd” to this day.

4. Show some noblesse oblige. My dad was very big on the concept that people who are fortunate (in terms of power, prestige, or money) have the moral obligation to be kind, help others, and even answer their emails. By far, this is the most difficult lesson to implement if lots of people want something from you, but as my father taught me, you just have to deal with it.

5. Read. My dad taught me to love to read. We had hundreds of books around our house, and he bought me any book that I wanted. With his encouragement, I also spent hundreds hours in the public library too. This love of reading led to a love of doing research (in those days, in the World Book Encyclopedia!) and eventually to a love of writing.

{Originally posted on Schmutzie.com}

Over one year later, I am still discovering the shape of my grief over the loss of my uterus.

I miss a thing I could never see. I have no documentation of its existence. It does not show up in family photo albums. My clothing fits as it did before the surgery. I never touched it with my hands. I cannot trace its outlines in pictures or where it is no longer on my body.

The only evidence that it was ever here is a pregnancy test that I keep pushing to the back of the bathroom cupboard behind the cleaning supplies.

I do not like that it was cut up into tiny pieces and vacuumed out of me. I do not like that it became medical waste. No part of any body should be made into medical waste. Our bodies hold far too much power, far too much meaning, to be so degraded.

I am angry that I could not take it with me, that I could not find my own place to put to it to rest. I hate not knowing where its pieces are. I imagine it having its own sapling beneath which it could rest and feed its growth. I need to imagine it being less alone.

The shape of this grief is little more than a chronological line between two points, from there to here. It has yet find its flesh.

{Originally Published in Cafe Philos.}

It occurs to me this morning you might be wondering how someone would have gone about buying a Playboy in a small American town in the early 1970s — and get away with it. Of course, that was back when buying a Playboy in a small backwards town could break your reputation, so getting away with it was key.

Now, I don’t recall how old I was when I bought my first Playboy. Older than 16, at least. So long ago some of the details that never mattered to me anyway now escape me.

I do, however, recall that I bought my first Playboy at Potter’s Drugstore, and that Old Man Potter himself rang up my purchase. Old Man Potter owned and operated one of two drugstores in my pathetically small town of 2,000 people where it seemed everyone knew everyone else. And here’s what I recall about buying that Playboy:

I recall I began sweating the moment I picked it out of the magazine rack, and I began blushing the moment I handed it to Old Man Potter at the check out counter. The only two people in the whole store at the time were Old Man Potter and me — I had carefully seen to that — but I nevertheless felt like the eyes of the entire community were upon me.

For a moment, everything seemed to go smoothly. I handed the Playboy to Old Man Potter; Old Man Potter took the Playboy; he looked at the price just like he would any other magazine: and then he entered the price into his cash register. Smooth. Normal. I was almost about to breath again when suddenly he said, “I’ll be right back. I have to make a phone call.” Then he dashed off to the back room with the Playboy still in his hands.

I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I didn’t stop blushing. I didn’t stop sweating…

{Originally published on PENSIEVE}

I did something yesterday I hadn’t done in a long, long time.

It was quite by accident, I wouldn’t have planned it, and in fact, had I known what I was getting into, I would’ve done whatever I could to avoid it.

Under cotton ball-dotted blue skies during the afternoon rush, I walked into the grocery store. A full shopping cart and an empty pocketbook later, I walked out into unexpected gray and gloom; not just rain mind you, but furious pregnant drops defying gravity with a sideways pour.

The parking lot had been crowded when I arrived, forcing me to park at the far end. “It’s better for me, anyway” I remember thinking.

There were no two ways about it, I was going to get wet.

Person after person in the same boat as I made a run for it; it’s funny to watch someone make an umbrella out of a bag of dogfood. It’s also entertaining to watch people dancing and dodging to avoid the inevitable–this was a deluge, THEY WERE GOING TO GET WET!

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Originally published on Deb on the Rocks

I have a theory that humans take a fancy to the things that keep them in a perpetual state of foreplay. Not in a perpetual state of pre-orgasm, because as we have established, constantly living on the edge of a volcano could be a bit too much. But foreplay, a continuous state of desire, arousal, exploration and craving, that is the human preference.

Baseball, politics, film, cooking, eating, organizing, Viggo Mortensen,
aquariums, god only know what you are into. I’m betting that if we
could start in the part of your brain where your love of whatever it is
you love resides and follow the sparking and frayed wiring past where
it crosses the blue synapses and the firing yellow connections and that
knot of red wire, we would find a glowing hotspot in your neural
network that’s throbbing and straining to break through a zipper.

That said, I love the roller derby.

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Originally Published on Dutch Blitz

I was a “big girl” growing up.

I was not comfortable in this body of mine. Yes, it was my body, but I felt as though it did not belong to me. I struggled with the fact that friends of mine could eat McDonald’s, and candy, and wear skinny acid-washed jeans. I would hang with them and curse my chubby thighs and flabby arms. I would shake my fist and silently scream, “It’s not FAIR!”

I resigned myself to the fact that I was destined to be BIG. My friends had flat stomachs and no inner thigh to speak of and it was so foreign to me. My thighs rubbed together as I walked and would get red from the friction.

There were a couple of stints where I got skinny. Because I did not eat. I remember when I was in grade eleven, I ran into an old friend from out of town. She praised me with those words I longed to hear. “You are so SKINNY!” And I told her (innocently) that I had not eaten in forty-eight hours.

That would be TWO DAYS.

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Originally published at Strange Musings of a Distracted Spunk.

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Originally posted on Bitch Ph.D.

So here is the biggest, most annoying problem with having a feminist marriage:

No matter what you and your partner have agreed on, other people will cling to their antiquated notions.

It’s the biggest evidence to me that marriage is not just a
contract between two people; it’s also a kind of social contact (for
better or for worse). Like, if you and your partner decide to reverse
conventional gender roles–you work the day job, he stays home with
kids and kitchen–and you are perfectly happy with this arrangement
(ok, reasonably happy). Lovely! You win! You and your partner have done
all the hard work necessary in arriving at this decision, you have had
principled discussions about division of labor, you have made sure that
neither one of you is feeling coerced, that this is how you both want
it to be, blah blah blah and now you can sit back and enjoy your
domestic life. WRONG. Because now you have to deal with constantly
explaining to everyone around you that, “no, this really is what we both
want, no, I am not an emasculating bitch, actually this was his idea,
no really you can ask him, no, he isn’t doing it “for” me, no, we’re
not doing this to “prove” something, really, we are doing this because
it works for both of us, individually and as a couple.”

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Originally published at oh my seven.

I’ve
been thinking a lot about this subject lately… so many women have
issues with their bodies, myself included. And you girls all know all
the usual suspects… billboards, magazines, movies, television, romance
novels (would you really want a heaving bosom anyway? I don’t get
that.) and the like. I love this Dove commercial
that’s been floating around on YouTube, because it displays an
important truth: Advertisements lie to women. They say that you have to
be This Thin and have beautiful flowing hair and sultry, smoky eyes and
full, pouty lips and be a 32D… but most people don’t look like that!
It’s telling that models even have to be Photoshopped, because they’re
not good enough! Girls, why are we buying this lie? It sucks.

I read in a book recently that you can’t give what you don’t have.
We’re taught that loving ourselves is just vanity and pride, but can
you really love other people if you don’t know how to love yourself?
Even the Bible says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)
So if that’s the case, obviously we are to love ourselves. Otherwise
we’ll go around saying, “You’re fat, and you’re ugly, and whoa! Look at
that bird’s nest of hair. Looks like you could use a shower. You’re a
lazy bum, and you’ll never amount to anything. You can never do
anything right… you always just screw everything up.”

I want to kick that habit, so that someday when I have children,
they won’t grow up thinking poisonous thoughts about themselves that
will only cause them hurt and not growth.

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Originally published at Flutter - Dark and Divine

We are all set upon this earth with our own set challenges. Some of
us have it more difficult than others, some are blessed, some are
damned. Some are equal tinctures of both.

Some persevere and blossom, others flicker and fade. To which end,
is not predetermined, rather guided by the decisions we make. Every one
thing effects every one other. From the minute to the grand, our daily
pro and con list steers us in one direction or another. As fragrant
petals in a windstorm, yet guided by a hand of our making.

Our experiences are not always ours to control, but how we react to
them is. I have been mired in a sickly sweet cloud of terror for the
better part of 15 years. Until recently, there was a sense of continual
fleeing. A sense of having to watch over my shoulder, as I ran forward.
Fear, panic, fear, panic.

The truth? Until recently I thought it was all my fault.

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