All the Horrible Girliness

Yes!

posted by Samus @ 2:30 AM 0 Comments

I stand out in the backyard. I feel little stings on my feet and look down. Black ants are biting me.

I hook up the spinning Elmo sprinkler. It does not spin. The Bug is uncertain. However, he is also very into washing cars. He sits on his big wheel. His legs are only long enough for his toes to reach the pedals, so he pushes his feet along the ground, steering toward the cascade of water. Water dots up his legs and belly. The big front wheel gets soaked. The Bug is naked, and tentative. He observes it a long time. He seems to be deciding upon a plan of attack.

A fly lights on my foot and I shriek. It didn't look like a fly at first. Feeling foolish, I mess with Elmo, wrestle with him until he spins like he's supposed to. It's a flimsy, cheap spin, but it means The Bug has to consider all new things.

On Saturdays, men come to my house and take care of my yard. Every four weeks I give the main guy a check. They are thorough and kind. My yard is small and beautifully kept. There is a small white peach tree in the corner. Many of the peaches fell and were worked over slowly by snails and other disgusting creeping things. After three days or so, the rotting things would be only brown seeds. I tried to clean them all up once, but Mister Aran said that was just the way of things. The fruit falls. The bugs eat it. The seeds bust open and grow new trees. I didn't want to think about it.

*

Last night in the car I had a moment. I was feeling fine. A little roughed up from sparring, but fine. I had a vague notion of getting into Mister Aran's pants as we drove home. He was coming home late from work and I knew he was tired.

Halfway there, I thought of abandoned babies. You never know, until you watch from the outside, how much work it is just to grow. Kids are hard workers. Babies have just spent nine months coming from nothing but two microscopic cells. They do it all themselves. Us women are just their house and food. We're not creating their little hearts and things; they are.

I went to Colorado and The Bug got sick. Fevers worse than ever before. He laid on my lap lengthwise, his head on my knees, and fitfully napped. His skin was red and it burned my fingers to touch him. I fed him droppers full of Pedialyte while he slept. His mouth was open, his lips cracked, and he breathed fast. His chest was tiny. His lungs underneath working hard. His whole body fighting. I wept.

In the car last night I thought of the babies. We tend to think of the mothers of the babies, in these instances. How could she do that? we wonder. But last night I thought of what it is, to be enclosed and growing, in the dark, to finally come out into the cold and open your eyes to the fuzzy world, then to be left in a dumpster to die. Your last breaths full of garbage smell. Your body fighting to breathe. Your tiny stomach cramping. Starving to death. Crying at first, then stopping.

I thought, all that work! Last night The Bug took out all our shoes, counting. "One shoe. Two shoes. Three shoes. Four shoes." He lined them all up. He can name Thomas and all his thousand or so friends. For what? It takes so much work just to get to two. So much must be learned. Bones growing whole inches in a few weeks. Brains and relationships developing. So much. For what? For what? It is too easy to die.

*

In my backyard today, The Bug is loved. The kids on my block are loved, as far as I can tell. While I wash my car in the driveway, boys gather to discuss rules to a game that seems to be like tag, but with a ball that has a handle. I think you become "It" when you get bopped with it. But that's where the simplicity ends. The "It" guy can only see his opponents when they move. They can only be still for ten seconds. They count out loud. The game stops often for foul calls and more in-depth discussions of the rules, rule amendments. Then it's game on again.

posted by Samus @ 5:16 PM 0 Comments

I woke this morning feeling feverish and achey. Mister Aran said I might have had an "adrenaline dump" during sparring last night. Or maybe he said I took an adrenaline dump. It could have been either.

posted by Samus @ 2:55 PM 0 Comments

My dad is wrong about things a lot of the time. He freaks out and stresses for months, years at a time. I used to live like that. I thought that was all there was. I thought everything had to be stewed over, simmer, boil, then burn all up, then start over again. I found out today my grandmother, his mother, has been harboring a grudge against me for years. My transgression? Not once, but twice, I forgot to cash a check she sent for Christmas. Utterly fixable. If, years ago, she'd given me a call and said, "This hurts my feelings," it would have been fixed. But she and my father are exactly alike, and they love a grudge. It's the only way they know how to relate with people. They chew on them like cows.

It was very, very bad for my dad to be wrong when I was growing up. Even if he was wrong, absolutely red-handedly wrong, it was death to point it out. Rarely would he admit being wrong, and it was always a very sad thing, like the twin towers falling down. It was easier to just agree with him, to assume you had seen it wrong, or didn't have all the information, somehow.

Now, I see that he's often wrong. Not on purpose. He's misinformed and stubborn, that's all. For the most part, he is a good, strong person. He was a good father. He still is. He struggles, always, to know what that should mean.

When I was about to move my in-laws in, though, he flipped. I have made very few decisions in the last fifteen years that he's agreed with, but usually he stews about it where I can't hear, with my mother or his mother. That time, though, he called me. He told me it might be fine for awhile, but mark his words, it was going to fall apart. Mister Aran's mother was not going to let me be the lady of the house. She was not going to be able to stop parenting her son, and she would want to parent mine. He didn't have anything specific to say about my father-in-law, which sounds odd until you realize what he was doing: transferring.

He wasn't talking about Mister Aran's mother. He was talking about his mother. He was talking about my mother's mother. My family life is like nothing he's ever seen or known.

"It's a completely different culture," he said. He does not, as a rule, trust other cultures.

He was right about that, though. It is. It's a culture that comes from a place where it's too hot to argue. People generally let things pass.

It's a culture rooted in Catholocism, and people are likely to forgive one another if only because not doing so hurts you, not the other person.

It's a culture where people work hard and have babies and take care of their aging family members and adopt more babies; it's a culture where people know and take care of their neighbors.

It's a culture where people don't stress about what to get people for Christmas. No matter what they get, they're grateful and they laugh, and most importantly, they're together.

In my opinion, it's a culture that has too many babies, I admit. It is a culture with problems. But it is also a culture of artists, singers, musicians and dancers.

I sit at my dining room table and read Esquire. In the kitchen, my mother-in-law cooks something involving pork and, probably, masses of oil. I hear dry rice hit the bottom of the rice cooker pot. She and her husband converse quietly in Tagalog. When I lived in my dad's mindset, I would have been insulted. Now I know, what they're talking about might have nothing to do with me, and they're just more comfy in Tagalog. Maybe it has everything to do with me; maybe they're saying I should wear a bra with this shirt and my hair is a mess and I made lasagne again even though they never eat it. I doubt it. But even if so, they keep the house peaceful.

In two years we have never had an argument, even through the tough house-buying time, when everyone was stressed and tired. Besides that wicked ninth month of pregnant hormones, I have been grateful for their place in my home every single day. They are my family. It feels completely natural to have them here.

posted by Samus @ 8:20 PM 0 Comments

I hate to be repetitive, but what can I do? This is what I'm obsessed with at the moment. I can't stop listening to Static X (pictured below, best concert I've ever been to, including the two empowering and uplifting and wonderful in every day Parliament concerts, sorry George, I love you second). The following song is the best one currently in existence (just knocked out "The Boxer," if you can believe that. Well, maybe not. If I had to really sit and talk about it, "The Boxer" is still the best song in existence, but I ain't listening to "The Boxer" on a loop lately, you know?).



I started sending my daily food intake and exercise... out-take? to my previous trainer, Keren, owner of the finest ass in the world (sorry Jessica) via email. I hope she is sending them all to the trash because 1) I feel obnoxious and 2) I'm embarrassed for her to read about the time I spent $5000.00 in bills and went immediately to the fridge for several biscuits with honey butter and pumpkin pie, then watched that thing on TV about the kids in the cancer ward and had to go back for more pie.

posted by Samus @ 11:27 AM 0 Comments

For Michelle, who lurks here kind of creepily, and who didn't know what Jessica Biel looked like:

She's the one on the right.

I'm on the left.

posted by Samus @ 1:14 PM 1 Comments

I was at brunch today when I thought, there will come a time when I won't have sex anymore. There will be a last orgasm.

This is worse than the regular old gonna-die-someday panic.

posted by Samus @ 1:15 PM 2 Comments

It smells like gay in here

So here are some boys I like! Please to deliver Japanese boy to me COD, thanks!

posted by Samus @ 2:20 PM 0 Comments

I dunno why I keep adding sex to the equation when I talk about hot girls. I don't want to have sex with them, as evidenced by my vagina post, and yet if you page down a little in this blog you don't see me fawning over boys much. And I'm linking videos of girls slapping each other while kissing. I should elaborate.

I don't want to do those girls. I want to be them. I want to be cute and Eastern European with a gap in my teeth and huge tits with all that bendy gymnastics ability. I want to be fierce and blonde with a growly voice and get to lay in studio meadows and be petted by Dani Filth (even though yes, he is four feet tall, this is why he's sitting in the video). I want to look good with tons of black eye makeup (I don't, I can't figure it out) and be able to make the faces that one porn star makes while the camera flashes. I want to have a good orgasm face (I haven't looked, but I bet I look like I'm choking) like she does. And I want Jessica Biel's basic body and life. I want to meld with Jessica Biel. Osmosis Jessica.

posted by Samus @ 1:24 PM 0 Comments

Here's a horror story about guys, their testosterone, little packets of powder that make them into what they think a man should be.

I don't know anything about it, really. But I have a friend online who bodybuilds. Who builds his body. And he started doing something with little packets that he promised weren't really hormones or anything. I don't remember what it was. He told me several times. I'll call it XYZ. I think it has an X in it, or a Z, one of the extreme letters of the alphabet that makes you feel like you've made a very strong consumer choice. Every once in awhile he'll drop the name and I won't know what he's talking about. "I just took the XYZ so I have to go to the gym in twenty minutes." And I'll go, "What?" I just don't care all that much.

By "friend," I really mean casual acquaintance who talks about himself a lot to me, because I am the only one who doesn't make him stop.

This guy has no imagination. I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory way. He's one of those scary six-fives who are conspiracy theorists with a whole coldly logical but unreal fantasy life about who they are and where they fit in the world. So I guess he does have an imagination, in that way, but he can't reach out beyond it in any way. If he is prodded to do so, he gets extremely angry about it.

I attract these people. I think it's because I tend to like to compliment people. Once, Mister Aran told me that I had to cut down on My Side Of The Conversation, and that was why I had no friends. So I started really getting interested in what people were saying. And I am not pretending, either. If you say you belong to a society of people who climb city lampposts, I will go to the website, I will google, I will make sure I know all the names of the equipment the lamppost climbers use, the sticky... harnesses... with rubber spurs... I am making this up, but it holds. And that habit of mine has backfired majorly. It does not attract people who are then happy to ask me about my interests. In fact, most of my online acquaintances know nothing about me and don't care to. They do not ask. Oddly, I have started to like it that way.

So anyway, suddenly he says out of nowhere that he's getting hardons again. I do not need to hear this, and I tell him so. "No no," he protests. It's not like he's coming on to me or anything, it's just revolutionary. Usually he doesn't get hardons. It's not that he can't, it's just that he never got excited by stuff before. Now he'll look at something and get a hardon for it, where he didn't before.

He'll tell me his weight every couple of days. I remember sort of being that way, but in the opposite direction. Nobody wanted to hear it from me, either. But once, my hairdresser picked up my Weight Watchers card thing for me, and she looked through it and showed her co-workers, and I was really pleased, because it showed where I'd started, and how much I'd lost each week, and all the little silver star stickers that say Bravo!

*

Today I sat in the car reading while Mister Aran went to the gym. I am not in a gym space today. I went back to my fighting class. This is why, over all else, consistency is important. If you keep taking weeks off between classes, or dieting, you are constantly starting from zero. Or maybe one, actually, because you know the moves, but your body can't do it anymore. It's a weird experience. Your brain is sending the same signals, but the muscle doesn't respond. At one point I looked at the heavy bag with confusion. It's there, I thought. And I am here. Why is it not working?

So I have the sore. My forearms are particularly fucked, so that the rest of my body which is also sore doesn't feel as bad as it would otherwise, but I'm still not working out this morning.

So I was sitting in the car and in the side mirror I saw this guy come to his car after a workout. He was tall and he had the beginnings of that certain physique that guys get from non-functional bodybuilding. To me, it's almost like surgery, this unnatural bodily change.

(Random aside: The Bug is wandering through my room reciting this monologue: Open, it's open, door's open, there you go, what happened, it's the cat, it's the cat...)

The guy was slick on his arms with sweat and at one point he lifted the neckline of his tee-shirt to wipe sweat from above his lip. The whole time, he had his mouth open. Not because he was still breathing heavily, but in an idle, nobody's-watching sort of way. It made him look dumber than he probably was.

He set out on the roof of the car an elaborate setup that emerged from a reflective zip-up cooler. Two bottles of Dasani water, a small baggie of powder, and a cup with two complicated-seeming lids. He pulled and twisted and popped the lids off the cup and then poured a little water into it, then the powder, then the rest of that bottle of water and half the next. He downed the rest of the water, then pushed and twisted and popped the lids back down, then shook and shook and shook the cup. He put the cooler back into the car, and put on wire glasses, which was a little endearing to me somehow. Then he got into the car - at first I thought it was the passenger seat, but later when he drove off I realized my mind was just mixed up from looking at him through the mirror - and continued the shaking. From where I sat, all I could see was the top half of his head, bobbing fast with the shaking. It looked like he was jerking off. I wondered if he were shaking the cup and jerking off, and thought of that online acquaintance. But then the head bobbing stopped and he took a pull from his drink, and left.

I wondered about him, cleaned up, meeting girls at the bar. If he told them about his regimen and rituals. I wondered if the girls found it sexy. I thought it would be better if he didn't tell them, if he were like one of those quiet men who you wouldn't know was a Buddhist until he made you dinner at his house, and you found the little prayer-type altar space. I wondered why I immediately figured he was single. Then Mister Aran came back, and we went to buy some kettlebells.

posted by Samus @ 12:37 PM 0 Comments

Warning, near X-ratedness

Don't watch at work.

posted by Samus @ 9:50 PM 1 Comments

Because I like to take dramatic pictures of myself and edit them in Irfanview

Fuck off if you don't like it.

posted by Samus @ 9:47 PM 3 Comments

Here's another horror story: eating almonds and cherries will make you poo in little, explosive spurts.

posted by Samus @ 9:45 PM 0 Comments

I think my vagina knows I hate it. I am not a fan of vagina. The older I get, the less gay I get. It's not like I wouldn't kiss Jessica Biel, and live with her, and cook her pancakes every morning, and have lunches in places that serve sparkling lime water and salads with almond slivers, and sleep wrapped up in her 5000 thread count sheets with her. I'm not saying that. But I still wouldn't get into her panties. Maybe over the panties. I'd let her ride my leg, is what I'm saying. On her birthday, my hand. So I don't know if that means I'm a little gay or not. I'm thinking probably no?

Chuck Palahniuk said that horror is when you tell the stories people are afraid to tell. So here's the biggest sociological horror story right now: girls? Those little twelve-year old princesses? We grow up. Mostly our minds don't, though. Even if our minds grow up, we still think we need to emulate that fresh twelve-year old experience. Chicks with those stickers on their cars, labeling them Daddy's Girls, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about all the shaving and waxing, the hair coloring, moisturizing. And what's more, we think we're letting people down when we can't keep up anymore.

So let me break it to you ugly: vagina is difficult. It refuses to play along. I guess mine was once pretty and pinkish. I didn't look at it then and I don't look at it now. It's unexplored territory, basically. It's the jungle. I take care of it, or I try to. But when she gets sick, I'm always too embarrassed to talk to the doctor about it. I feel like I'm letting the doctor down. Like he or she will look down his or her nose at me - in this picture, the doctor somehow always has spectacles - and shake his or her head slowly. Or sigh. Ever had your doctor sigh while making the notes on the clipboard? I have. I have a vagina that makes doctors sigh.

This is for all you out there who thought I might be just the kind of twelve-year old vagina you would like to put your penis into. I hope I have dashed that theory once and for all.

You know, if I had a penis, I wouldn't put it in anything. Penis is precious. I'd wrap it in ten inches of cellophane before letting Jessica Biel go at it, even. That's how strongly I am in favor of penis, and anti-vagina.

posted by Samus @ 9:09 PM 1 Comments