All the Horrible Girliness

My belly is so nice and soft, still with the four red lines. To touch it in the dark is heaven. It reminds one of that scene in Pulp Fiction when Butch's French girlfriend is talking about wanting a pot belly, how what feels good is not the same as what looks good. And that is why I press through the ab work after kickboxing class, and by press, I mean grunt and yelp and cry.

Mister Aran and I make noise. It used to make our instructors at the old old place laugh, how we yelled during class to make it through. Most people just slowed down. At Bodies In Motion, people stop altogether. They sit down sometimes.

Oh, Mister Thorne(1), the best guy was in my class last night. I've seen all manner of badly trained kickboxers before, but this is the first time I've seen someone get beat up by their own heavy bag. He was insane, tall with spindly, hairy legs and this determined, angry expression that made me sad. He'd hop on one foot, flailing his arms with all his might, grunting with the stress of it. You could see, in every weak hit, his cubicle, his overbearing girlfriend/mother, his Internet porn addiction, his absent father. And then the bag would swing back and smack him square in the face, and he'd look surprised, like it had come out of nowhere.

***

I used to use porn to get to sleep. Not real porn, but I'd make it up in my head. It was something to think about that didn't have anything to do with my life. I'd make these ideal porns, run them through my head, create the stars and the situations. And they usually ended with penetration, my sleeptime stories. I was never all that interested in the old in-n-out as much as the events leading up to it, which is why I was such a bum one night stand back in the day.

The sleeptime porn thing started because I can have problems with insomnia. When I was a kid I'd spend all night listening to the normal creaks and groans of my house, certain, certain, that someone had broken in, sometimes getting out of bed and standing at my bedroom door, ready to bolt to my parents' room. Laying there, hearing the settling house, hearing my parents having sex, which made me press my fingers into my ears until they ached, which always started with the swishswishswish of their waterbed - gross gross gross - staring into the dark, making patterns on my ceiling. Even after I moved out and no longer heard the sex, after logic took over and I knew the house settling wasn't a burglar, I still couldn't sleep. And in some ways, I think it was better when I worried about burglars, because after that, I started worrying about my life. Money, boyfriends, car accidents, career... shit. It was at nighttime, in the years just after moving out of my parents' home, that I became a champion worrier.(2)

For guys, porn is kind of perfuctory. It's almost biological. For chicks, or at least for me, porn is a nice addition to sex, like whipped cream on strawberries. Strawberries are the main attraction, and whipped cream can be fun, in small doses, on its own, but together, they make a great kind of sense. I know girls who love their porn, who have collections, and hell, I'm one of them, but the hardest-core girl comes nowhere near the least horny guy, where porn is concerned. Like strip clubs. You just don't see girls sitting in a male review at 1:00 pm, alone, smoking and drinking too much, trying to pick up on the talent.

So lately, since the sexing has been minimal, I haven't been into porn. I don't even dig thinking about it, really. I get partway into a scene and just shrug it off. So I've been stressing at night.

You'd think, with all this sleep deprivation, that I'd fall asleep on my way into the covers, but my brain just doesn't work that way.

So, I've been thinking of lists. I go through my endless to-do lists, and I mentally do the things on the list. I actually fantasize about cleaning the inside windows of my car, making the bed, returning library books, picking up water from the grocery store. Maybe because of its dullness, this puts me right to sleep.

It worries me, too. Is this how cool chicks turn into short-haired, overweight mothers who speak babytalk and ignore their husbands?

***

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte is turning out to be one hell of a book. Chuck P. has recommended his work before. I don't always trust Palahniuk's abilities, but his taste is spot on. Mister Thorne, you would dig this book. Trust Samus. This isn't one of those reading assignments I give you, which you should really get going on, like this. Home Land is one of those you're going to read in two days and then emulate on your goddamn blog which, I might add, hasn't been updated since the Truman administration.

***

(1) I've wondered a lot lately why the name Thorne reminds me of my earliest childhood memories of educational discipline, which in my private elementary school involved a paddle and a big man in a three-piece gray suit, and today while putting away folded laundry I remembered that my Vice Principal was named Mr. Thorne. So there you go.

(2) How weird to find out, some ten years later, that I got this from my dad, that he spends all night playing video games and reading the Bible and doing whatever he can to numb the stress. Maybe I should tell him about the porn thing.

posted by Samus @ 4:27 PM