(Wish I found a better video of this song, but that’s what I got. Originally by X, that’s John Doe.)
Wrote my political column today. I’m pretty burned out lately, so not at my best. Still, food for thought.
Patriotism doesn’t mean a heck of a lot to me, yet I’m one of the most politically involved of my real-world friends, aside from a couple who actually have full-time jobs in politics. So I guess on some level I do deeply care about the state of this messed-up country. I do believe what I wrote at the end of that piece, that true patriotism comes with being engaged and concerned with what is going on around you.
Greg Palast is one of those people that gets called every name in the book for the work that he does, but he’s a heck of a lot more “patriotic” than anyone who wears a flag pin. This article came to my inbox today, and it’s mean, nasty, and true. Read it.
Today I’m going to see the Incredible Hulk with a friend who isn’t a citizen. And still, what’s more American than big blockbuster superhero movies? (More on superheroes to come, I promise. At least two blog posts this weekend.)
Last summer at this time I was at a barbecue with friends, eating wayyy too much and wishing I didn’t have to get up that morning to work. In prior years, I would visit a little graveyard not far from my parents’ house in South Carolina, where a friend and I had discovered a grave of someone who had died on July 4. His name was Joe Joe–that’s all it said. The people buried in that graveyard, I’d heard, had been slaves and freed slaves. We didn’t know anything about them, though, just that it was out of the way, not marked, and who knew how often anyone visited it.
I have a photo in a silver frame on a shelf in my living room. It has moved with me everywhere I’ve lived, but it is not of family. In fact one of the people in it is one of the few people I truly hate.
It was taken before my senior prom. 10 years ago now. My senior prom, where a beautiful boy with kind eyes who wasn’t my date kissed me and sent one person into tears and another home early.
He’s in the picture, the boy who broke my heart a thousand times but never managed to make me not love him. He’s not looking at the camera-all of my favorite pictures of him show him looking away. He’s still beautiful. And now he has a beautiful wife and a life that doesn’t include me. I just have pictures.
There’s a blond guy in the photo with a striped cane. I once (morethanonce) thought I could have loved him, but he didn’t let me try. We spent a few nights together, intense, but always with a wall up that I couldn’t break down. I don’t know if anyone has. I hope so.
The one looking straight at the camera is the only one I still talk to. My best friend for a while, at the time the only one who got it, I kissesd him one night and things got out of hand. I loved him but wasn’t in love with him and I lost all of it for a while. But not forever. Friendships last longer. The good ones anyway.
The girl in the picture isn’t me. I hate her because she slept with my man (though I could never hate him for it) but even more because she tried to pretend that she didn’t know why it hurt, why I couldn’t forgive her. She was my friend.
But I hate her too because she’s in that picture. With those boys that were so much of my life for years after that picture was taken. It should have been me.
The guy who took that picture got married a few days ago. I wasn’t there. I pushed him away because my ex didn’t like him. How stupid of me. Who ever mattered to me more than these people? I’ve yet to have a love that does. And if I did, that person would have to understand why I keep this picture.
“I didn’t think you were that kind of girl.”
“I’m not really sure what kind of girl I am.”
From Juno, of course.
Because who ever is really sure. And just what is ‘that’ kind of girl anyway? Of course in Juno it meant a girl who gets pregnant in high school. And most of the time it does mean sexual in some way. It’s a phrase that we all immediately get when we hear it. That kind of girl.
Even I use it, and I hate it. To me, though, it doesn’t mean sexual, it means crossing certain boundaries within sexual behavior that I consider wrong. Lying, hurting someone else, basically. Those are my rules, placed on myself, after years of being considered ‘that girl,’ sometimes warranted, sometimes not.
After years of those situations, I’m understandably wary about men and what they want, and that sucks in itself. Because I’m universalizing a few shitty experiences to a whole gender, and isn’t that what us feminists are fighting? Still, when I talk to girlfriends, I find myself hearing and even saying the same things over again. “Men do this.” “He’s just like this.” Not thinking about unique relationships being unique.
I talk to and link to a whole bunch of bloggers whose personal relationships are definitely outside of the rules of mainstream society (or feminist correctness as posed by some) and I’m OK with that. But I immediately call it into question with men I know. I distrust them because they’re men, and that gets reinforced by friends.
I appreciate honesty and I don’t particularly value rules, so I listen to people’s stories. I don’t file them under “good” or “bad” because I don’t really believe that people are that way, deep down. (Except Dick Cheney. He makes me believe in evil.) I give people second chances when they piss me off and I try to explain to them why certain things they say or do annoy me. I try to forgive, though I don’t forget.
I don’t like labels–maybe that’s why I was so gun-shy about marriage (or maybe I was just right all along). Even when dating I don’t easily fall into the “my boyfriend” language…I’ll use very generic terms like “the boy” or a longer string of modifiers that somehow makes that person identifiable to the people who listen to my rambling conversation on the topic. I could just use names, but I don’t do that often. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, or maybe it springs from explaining the same story over and over to different people–they won’t remember a name but the description sticks.
And I certainly despise labels stuck on by others about people’s romantic/sexual behaviors. Judgments. You can stick those someplace uncomfortable. “That kind of girl,” well, we are ALL that kind of girl sometimes. You can’t pull that out of yourself by sticking it on someone else. There’s an unlimited amount of it.
Sometimes people play semantics with relationships. “Well I never said we were ‘exclusive’ so why are you shocked that I’ve had another girlfriend for XYZ amount of time?” “I’m not your boyfriend.” “I don’t want to get married or anything,” or “We have to get married. I don’t want to be just your boyfriend anymore.” All things I’ve heard in various contexts.
All evasions or excuses or overinvestments in words. What difference would marriage make to a couple who already lives together, shares bills, money, pets? Semantics, right? At least to a non-religious type like me. (Of course, I see the opposite argument as well–when you’re denied the right to the word ‘marriage’ because of who you love, it can be a big fucking revolutionary act to claim it for yourself.)
The difference between “well I didn’t say I wasn’t seeing other people,” and “I didn’t say I was,” is shifting the burden of proof, nothing more. You still weren’t honest with me.
“I’m not your boyfriend,” well whatever you call it, you still lied to me.
But instead I’m “that girl” and nobody wants to be that girl.
And it’s just the vague boundaries of that idea–that girl–that makes it so hard to escape. It’s not a word like slut, whore, bitch, that though it has shifting boundaries, means something specific. That girl means whatever you want it to mean, in whatever context you’re using it, but it sure doesn’t mean anything good.
It puts the burden on us, though. And that’s still wrong. As wrong as it is for me to hate all men or distrust all men because a few people took advantage of my tendency to not put rules on things.
There are a couple of girls that I still hate, though. Personal things. One who was my friend, and then slept with my boyfriend–and it hurt worse that my friend did it than my boyfriend ‘cheating’ on me. (I hate the word cheating, incidentally, because it implies that a relationship is a game and the object is to win–rather than just what the word says, a relationship.) And the other was supposed to deliver a letter from me to someone I loved who was in jail states away from where I was. She never did. All the semantics and rules and everything else can’t change how those girls hurt me. That girl.
So I guess for me, that girl isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about hurting people. Mostly, it’s about hurting women. Because we’re all that girl and I think we owe it to each other to support each other. Not because women are always right (and therefore men are always wrong?) but because these ideas are used to separate us, make us judge each other, make us hurt each other.
