why do women shave their legs? I haven't in like two weeks and I don't mind it at all and I'm afraid that it makes me a freak, like people are gonna look at my legs and be like "she has hair on her legs. eww." i don't know why thats gross though because i'm supposed to have hair on my head and eyelashes and eyebrows and little hairs on my arms and thats all okay. Men are supposed to have leg hair, but for women its unheard of atleast here in america.what is that? How much time have I wasted shaving?

stupid. stupid. stupid. stupid.

frank zappa?

I was thinking about this weird little thing that happened to me when i was little today and i don't know why:

So one day when i was in fourth grade, my friend Leah and I were walking for my house to hers (we live on the same street but its a mile and a half long) when we saw a squirel corpse.

We were horrifed. We didn't know what to do. This was a dead squirel, and it deserved some kind of ceremonial burial or something.

So we stole a shovel from someones garage, put the squirel on the shovel and carried it a mile back to my house where we explained the circumstances of our shovel theft and possesion of our new dead friend and our intentions.

he threw the squirel in the garbage sent me to my room and sent Leah home.

Fake

I spent yesterday up in the Poconos with my mother and my grandparents. During the afternoon I retreated to one of the bedrooms to take a nap becuase my mother woke me up early and all of this rainy weather is sucking the life out of me. So I was laying down and watching cable and I stumbled upon some first class horrible religious programming. The preacher looked like a pimp and was babbling along about nothing.

It used to be amusing. My friends and i would do impressions in sugary southern accents, fake altar call, we would hit it other on the head, fall backwards, tremble, and then roll around laughing like the idiot we were. Landover Baptist could have taken notes from our bizarre performances.

However on this dreary afternoon as I watched this little program there was no humor to be found, it just made me sad.

What was the message behind the performance? Was it really at its core just theatre masquerading as something more?

I rememeber last spring my friend won two tickets to a Hillsong United concert and since his boyfriend couldn't go he invited me. It was free, so i said yes. Everybody else in the crowd was totally into it like dancing and crying and jumping up and down and i tried to do that for a while but i felt stupid and my arm started hurting and i realized it - this band did this every night. This was a show, a performance, an act. this was fake.

I have been called cynical by numerous persons and a person was once so kind as to suggest that the emptiness i sometimes see in life is really a reflection of the emptiness in me ( i know with friends like these...)

But seriously, why the drama? I'm scared sometimes that we wrap what we have to say, i mean, we call it 'the good news', do we really think that? Do we intentionally repackage what we really mean to make people happy, becuase we know that we would rather them just listen to the friendly things that we have to say than be truly challenged or for that matter inspired to get up and do something?

Its like, when my brother was little, she would put his cough medicine with his pepsi so he would drink it. (for me, she had to put it in a shot glass. i thought i was soooo cool. beyond the point though.)

Why can't we just tell it like it is and whoever wants to listen listens? Why can't we down the medicine straight up? Why do we have to pretend to be better than we are? Is life really a performance?

Quite The Gender Bender (or not)

quite the gender bender aren't i?

EDIT:: upon heavy scrutiny by several people, most of whom know a lot more about drag than i do, it has been confirmed that no matter what i do, i will look like a girl. oh well :), there are worse things i suppose.

creep

i wrote this post on theooze. i just like it so i thought i'd post it here. I would love to read this a s a monologue.

I have a story. i always have a story.

when i was in forth grade i was a total dork.

have any of you seen 'welcome to the dollhouse'?

well i was like that. but worse.

so i went to this agricultural fair with my mom one weekend in the spring and came home with a bag of fried worms. they were meal worms - little guys. they tasted like burnt potato chips if you closed your eyes. So i brought them to school on monday thinking that if eating worms didn't make me cool, nothing would. I kept them in my desk until lunch and then i took them out and started popping them in my mouth and smiling like an idiot.

everyone was horrified. My worms were confiscated, my parents were called and i got sent to the guidiance counsler.

so fast forward a few years i'm sitting in home room - sophmore year. I'm still weird. Rumor has it that i'm a vampire, that i did horrible things on the back of a marching band bus and that i can read minds. so there is this set of twins in my homeroom - both cute and skinny with a cool car and a wardrobe of abercrombie sweaters.

they drop a bag of fried meal worms on my desk and smile bringing up that fateful day in fourthgrade when i though eating bugs would make me cool.

i sat there thanked them kindly and ate everything in the bag and asked if they had anymore.


it was deja vu all over again - they called my parents and sent me to guidiance and didn't listen when i swore i was being harrassed by this evil pair.

my mom was proud of me

everyone knew about it by lunch. two years later, i'm stil smiling knowing that in twenty years, people are gonna show me off in their yearbooks as that freaky psychic girl who ate bugs.

bring it on :)

tract

someone gave me a tract in Union Square Park on sunday. i was sitting on a bench with my mom who had her arm around my shoulder because she stubbed her toe and was walking weird. I think the angry christian man thougth we were lovers, thus angry heathens and were in need of a pamplet titled "DOES GOD LOVE YOU?"

I am so glad this bullshit all happened after lunch becuase i completely lost my appetite and if you know me you know that i don't eat.

It kept refering to the bible as "God lawbook" which i don't really see as true at all and started talking about why you shouldn't join a church because thats not how God works anymore.

things like this make me question my entire worldview. sometimes i'm a deist. if somebody doesn't shake me around, i'm going to become a deist. i don't see god in the world at all

So i have it thumbtacked above my desk and every once and a while i look through it and my heart sinks.

i sit here today with my heart in my hands. I feel ike i'm standing at a crossroads, i can either sell my soul (thats what you do at a crossroads, you go there for powerful spells too) or choose a direction.

oh by the way i learned this today and it made me pretty happy:

"Current techniques for total surgical repair greatly improve the hemodynamic function of the heart with tetralogy of Fallot but do not provide a lifetime correction of the defect. Ninety percent of patients with total repair as infants develop a progressively leaky pulmonary valve as the heart grows to its adult size. Patients also may have some degree of residual right outflow stenosis and damage to the electrical system of the heart from surgical incisions, causing abnormalities as detected by EKG and/or arrhythmias.

Long-term follow up studies show that this patient population is at risk for sudden cardiac death and for heart failure."

I've got a lot to look forward to :)

I'm good.i'm okay.

Rasputina~ Wish You Were Here

the sexiness of this song cannot be understated

i noticed that i didn't have any graduation pictures up. my mom took a zillion of them, but steff took this one as the caps were being thrown and it probably captures the energy of the whole day the best

i went to northern state prison with some people from church and pastor abe - he's a peace officer there. My head is still spinning a little. I came in having no idea what to expect sitting crosslegged in the lobby waiting for the others in my little pink shirt biting my nails. My hair falling around my head in waves. My big class ring. My braces.

Yup, I'm tough.

I feel like a little there is a little cigarette burn on one of the places in me that used to be soft and pink. The guard made a point of telling up that there is no real rehabilitation that really happens here, they're all crazy monsters who don't change. I understand how he could think that, but I refuse to believe thats true. we would walk through the hallways by the cells and the inmates would press their faces againt the window - as if we were a glimpse into the outside world -and yes they would howl at us (the girls at least).

I wasn't scared. I don't know why ,but I was totally unfazed - totally unafraid. There I was, in Newark, face to face with a man who raped an 87 year old woman and then slit her throat. He was 16. Now he's fifty-ish.

We don't think about people in prison. They scare us. They're bad and they don't deserve our niceness or our attention only our scorn. I mean, we live in a system that throws people that we don't know how to deal with away isntead of helping them. In this overcrowded prison most of the inmates have an elementary school education and some are completely illiterate and there are almost no programs in the prison system to educate them. When they get back into the free world what are they going to do with a third grade education except make trouble and end back up in the pen?

This is all really bothering me. I was talking to my mother about it (read: ranting to my mother about it) and she said that if it bothered me so much, go get my little theology degree and be a chaplain or something.

my head hurts. this week has been crazy as hell.

yes. that is a zucchini

"Hey friend, do you want to ra ce?"

Last night, Steffie, my best friend aware of my trauma involving the whole poem stuff decided that what we needed a night to just smoke cigarettes, drink slurpies, eat doritos and drive around aimlessly listening to the radio really loud.

So we're in south edison on woodbridge avenue. It's 2 AM, all the bars are closing (i know my mom says its the worst time to drive, whatever) and we're about to turn down plainfield to pass that big Mack Truck place by Wick Plaza. We're in the turning lane. and this Honda Civic pulls up next to Steffies Caliber. The little indian driving guy does the "roll down the window' signal so Steph sighs and rolls down the window figuring he needed directions or something.

"Hey friend do you want to race?" He gives us an overly enthusiastic thumbs up.
"Uhh, no." Steph says.
"haha then we win!!!" there are atleast six guys in this car and they all have really thick punjab accents
"fine, you win." i mutter and steph yells out the window. they keep doing their little dance.
"You a little tipsy boys?" steph asks
"Oh, just a little."

The light turns green. We go, trying not to pee ourselves laughing. Seriously, we had to pull onto Jefferson blvd by that baseball field just to recover becuase it was so ridiculous.

we went home, made brownies and shot pool until the sun came up.

shes going to middlesex. I don't even know what to say. I'm either gonna cry or throw up. I am honestly afraid. I see her and a part of me just hurts so bad, just crumbles up. I can practically hear all of the horrible things she said to me over the years getting whispered in my ear all over again and those glares. She can look at you and take your humanity away. She's like a dementor in harry Potter.

Thats how she looks at me whenever I see her. She looks through me, and as much as i remind myself that i am not who i was back then it makes no difference because she takes away everything.

i wish there was someone i could actually talk to about this but there seems to be a serious shortage of shoulders to cry on around here.

I remember when i found this poem online. It was about 10 AM on a sunday and i was about to leave for church with Abbe but wanted to check my email. I don't know how this came up, but it did. i started bawling. i thought i wouldn't i would never ever stop crying and my mother made me sit in the car until i cleaned myself up, but I couldn't stop shaking.

well anyway, she wrote this poem - she knew all the right spots to hit, and all the right lies to spread. I'm not too suprised now that i got so many horrible looks from people in school.


I am a victim of your Lesbian Venom
your Lesbian Venom is in my veins
now I foam at the mouth and am subjected to pains

When you shaved your head I thought that was cool
but began to wonder when you played Etheridge
an told me Barbie used to fuck Midge

You took me to check out cheerleaders
by then I saw that it was all true
Lesbian Venom had taken a hold of you

When we took the train up to New York
and I decided to run away
on the streets of the gay pride parade

I ran through Chinatown
but you hunted an caught me
behind the incense scented like pussy

Oh how it smelled!
when you advanced in your dyke denim
and left me a victim of your Lesbian Venom

But now it's all over
you're sad and alone
looking for christian boys to take you home

I hope they like cats
I hope they like bitches
I hope they're warned of what they're to witness

A girl who ignores you
devouring macaroni and cheese
and to only the pussy does she say please