Your Actions in Life Will Reflect in Eternity

Total Asia Swineflu Mask Count: 16
Portion of which found at the airport: 7

Once upon a time I went to Asia, made a lot of swineflu jokes, came back, and was afflicted with cough, runny nose, and slight raise in body temperature. Swineflu. is not. a joke.
(no, it totally still is)

Right now I'm trying to fix my jetlag. Last night I slept from 6pm-11:30, and I've been up since, and now I have that stinging headache you get when your body is just pissed that you've been up on the computer all night and you're not sleeping and you have swineflu.

I feel like I have a lot of things to say about the Philippines, but a proper recap post will never actually materialize. I turned into sort of an introvert over there, I think I lived a lot in my head and just stared out into the strange world around me and had conversations with myself. This resulted in a lot of observational-type writing, since 1) it is my favorite, and 2) it was all I could really do...observe. It feels like a weird shift from when I started this blog ranting about gender and sexuality and societal norms. Does anyone have strong feelings about this? Can I get some feedback? Maybe that's a school thing. Maybe I'm several different people, or at the very least several different writers. I'm nervous about this going back to school thing that's happening in less than three weeks. I'm not really sure who I became over the summer, or if I became anyone at all, or if everyone else became something and I didn't, or vice versa. Different post for a different time.

Hey look, here's this!

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'YOUR ACTIONS IN LIFE WILL REFLECT IN ETERNITY' is what the billboard said on the way to Makati. It wasn’t in front of a church, like a fun fact or a quick tip for eternal salvation. It wasn’t “Jesus is the way, the truth, the light” illuminating the side of a building, turning it all neon and glowing and casting a dim, colored light over Manila’s chronic traffic jams. Its letters were arranged, all caps, on what seemed to be the header of a former movie theater, as if weary traveling souls could stop in and have their 120-minute salvation session accompanied by popcorn and soda. I wish this was a movie. I wish it was the vehicle for Vin Diesel’s comeback.

I also wonder if there ever was a statement simultaneously truer to those with belief and more false to those without, though its something we wished were true. We wished it were true knowing that nothing survives an eternity, not even our own, knowing that eventually we’d all bend to question marks, then fade, and then what? Just a movie billing. Just a shrug.

-candles
-manila paper
-safety pins
-pastries
-cake
-postcards
-twister fries
-priest

We’ve been sent on an absurd scavenger hunt, my cousin and I. Today is the blessing of her family’s new house, and we’ve been made responsible for picking up all necessary supplies. And nothing is more necessary to a house blessing than a priest. The car ride is long because Manila traffic is notoriously unforgiving. Bumper to bumper at any and all times of day, drivers so aggressive that when it loosens up even bus drivers navigate their monolithic vehicles by weaving between cars. What do you listen to in the car with a priest? We think Coldplay. We’re not sure why. I don’t have any Coldplay on my iPod. I think this means I’m not meant to hang out with priests.

He’s wearing plaid, and this confuses me because I sometimes forget that priests are also people, and people sometimes wear plaid. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and faded blue jeans made of that really resilient material and he speaks loudly and gruffly as he laughs and tells us about barkless dogs and gives us advice on convenience stores where we can buy alcohol. He is not at all like the priests I've known in the States. They are old and stern and do not like plaid. They furrow their brows and move slowly and take careful, agonizing steps, their shoes are weighed down by the heaviness of soles. They do not know where I can buy cheap beer.

By the time the house creeps up on us, Gaby and I are singing along to the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” I am wondering how this song manages to seep into my life at all junctures and how, in every sense of the phrase, we've gotten to this point. Father Ben is happily tapping along in the front seat. Maybe he wants to hear “Billie Jean.”

The house is extravagant, beautiful, sweeping in that cold, modern sort of way. High ceilings, ever-expanding white interiors, stone floors, walls of windows like eyes dumbstruck and gazing into the abandoned house next door. It’s not yet been furnished. Six cardboard-wrapped chairs are lined up in the living room, and the granite dining table stretches the length of the dining room, flanked by plastic patio chairs. The workers tape our manila paper to the windows, obscuring the view. “The theme of tonight’s party is ‘Furniture Warehouse,’” says Gaby. She motions to the scaffolding outside the door, the pile of construction rubble on her front lawn. “Deconstruction under construction. Post-modern. Deep.” These are the kind of jokes you make when everyone you’re related to is an architect

Father Ben enters the house, shaking hands with our grandparents who sit demurely in the barely-furnished living room. He opens up his backpack and takes out his priestly robes, throwing them over his plainclothes. Oh, okay. There we go. Phew.

We’re lined up in the doorway, all of us. The air conditioners have yet to be functional, and in this short span of time, we’ve learned to gather in the corridor that runs straight from the front door to the dining room at the very back of the house. It’s breezy, which is relieving, unless you’re trying to light candles for a blessing, which we are. We’re jammed into the doorway and cannot focus on what I'm sure were Father’s sagacious words about hospitality and family and home. We’re too busy hovering over our candles, hands cupped over flames, shielding the flickering, flailing, frantic little lives on top of the wicks. My candle is out, we whisper. Can I light off yours? Oh, it’s out too. What’s he saying? Does this blessing still count if we’re just holding wax sticks?

Maybe it will be better once we’re in the house, like really in the house. We follow Father through the rooms as he sprinkles Holy Water over the Furniture Warehouse. He leads us in prayers, incantations, a repeated murmur of the Hail Mary. He loses some of us along the way. My grandparents can’t climb up the stairs, the train of people is too long to navigate the tight U-turns in the hallways. Didn’t we go into this room already? I’m waiting in the kitchen next to the KFC.

How are you even supposed to hold candles? Who the fuck forgot to get the paper to catch the wax? Oh, right.

I wince and swear as the wax drips over my fingers, down my wrist, onto my exposed feet.
And I remember that time I watched drops of wax turn opaque and harden on your chest. And how you gasped and grabbed my collar when your skin burned because I was new and clumsy and held the candle a little too close. And how, though I was intrigued by the flame, I knew I could never even try because my pain threshold was too low and besides, what had just happened to you made me feel nervous and stupid.

When did it happen that in my mind, that everything in my life turns to sex? I wonder if this is something like growing up or if I’m having a really prolonged adolescence or maybe I just watch too much TV. I’m like an explicit Midas. Straw to gold, blessings to sex. I wonder what’s with this business of turning things, transforming them. I wonder if this means growing up, and that maybe it's just nothing more than gracelessly executed alchemy.

They Call It Way Too Rowdy, We Call It Finally Free

It's like my notebooks threw up on my wall.
My notebooks hide the contents of my head, thoughts, scrawled out in code, meanings revealed by ink color or placement on the page, once sandwiched into a leather binding, are now hanging up over my desk. Pinned up against the wall as if they escaped from my notebook and found themselves disoriented by the explosion with which they were released.
My lists are on my walls. I can look at them all at the same time. Even if I can't understand what they're trying to tell me. They're overwhelming, but as they sit there staring at me, they remind me...something's happening.

Something's happening. Something's fucking happening.

I should have known it because lately I've been so restless and eager and anxious in the very best way, but also in a way that totally keeps making me nervous. Toward the end of the school year, I used to do this thing where I'd take present me and look back on past me, and almost feel envious. It would never be distant past me, it'd just be like...me three months ago before I knew that such-and-such was going to happen, like I never knew I'd stop caring about money or I never knew I'd end up on the floor of this total beatniky apartment, or hey, I never knew I wouldn't regret coming home for the summer.
Anyway, what really characterized the me in the past was that she never knew that her life had the potential to go somewhere else. I mean, she knew that there was growing to do, and that growing meant change, but this girl never felt what I feel now...like I'm on the brink.

Things just keep fucking happening.
Before I was always expecting my luck to run out or for things to slow down or for me to try to have to be a real person. But it's been all ups. And I'm finally starting to believe in it.

What I'm trying to say is, I just had one of the best weekends everever, the weekend that was supposed to be the peak of my summer, and though I did go through this two-and-a-half day period of real/fake/real devastation when it was over, what I'm beginning to realize is that what happened this past weekend isn't over at all.

So here we go. Starting off with a little vocabulary:

gaygrounding (n) - a common punishment for teenagers of the homosexual persuasion, where the subject in question is not forbidden from leaving her home, but from leaving her home to...do gay shit. This may include Pride events, hanging out with that girl with the short hair from down the block, or secretly running downstairs to watch Logo every time the parents leave. This last part, of course, still continues, as that is the point of secretly running downstairs. Gay grounding is usually highly ineffective and tends to promote increased homosexual behavior, but with a sexy, vindictive edge.

See: X, KC Danger

Gaygrounding is what I narrowly escaped this weekend after a blowout of sorts with my parents that almost kept Emily out of my house and me out of a momentously absurd pride weekend.

But. There are some things that are worth modeling through it for.
And one of those things is Autostraddle.

I think I mentioned before a few of the reasons why I love this fucking site and how I can't possibly believe I'm lucky enough to be working (I've been told that's sort of an inaccurate verb, interning perhaps?) for them. It always turns into gushing. Just to be sort of repetitive, this place isn't just a website, it's a community. A community run and organized by some of the smartest, wittiest, most interesting, self-assured, and unapologetically fucking crazy (and potentially superattractive, who knows, oh wait I do) queer ladies I've yet had the privilege of knowing. Like, I thought in a group of lesbians, there's always the one really cool girl who sort of rallies and carries the rest. But in this group it's all of them. And they're the ones giving a new kind of lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise inclined women a voice. They can have fun and get shit done. And it's just nice to know that that exists.

Oh, and did I mention that the interns are totes bomb-ass too?

And did I mention that both those groups of people hauled ass to New York (or, y'know, bused in like 20 miles like me) for dinner and a parade and a spoof on Tyra mail and a Rodeo Disco Party? Because that happened. And it was glorious.

Here are the vague concepts:
1. Meeting People from the Internets
So bitches always be like, "Isn't it weird that you don't really know any of these people? Like, won't that be weird?" Well, let me answer that for you. I do know these people, and they are weird. And crazy as shit. But there's too much love to deny it. The thing about meeting people on the Internet and then meeting them in real life is that you've already got it out in the open--we're weird. Like, yep, we exist pretty functionally in 3D, and maybe we've got jobs and friends and school and shit, but at the end of the day, I don't have to second guess what you're doing, because I read it on Twitter. I didn't have to be there for your last significant experience. Read it on your blog. Let's just talk about it, how we're all kind of weirdos who feel the need to broadcast our lives online. And we're unapologetic, because we wish other people would do it too. Give 20 people like this a weekend together, see what happens.

2. Drunk
The number one feeling of the weekend. There was little/no time to not be like this. I think most of the interns ingested their daily amount of grains through liquids this weekend. But why not? I mean what better way to get to know someone than by getting all loud and getting all touchy and getting all honest and covering each other while peeing because the line in the men's room is shorter and ending up in a room full of juice bottles in the corner of Stonewall Inn? Were those last parts just me? Woops, sorry then. What I'm trying to say is good times all around.

3. Persistence
In flyering alwaysalwaysalways, in getting up before noon despite wicked hangovers, in believing that eight people can stay in one hotel room. In fighting gaygrounding because we that what we did wasn't wrong. And in sneaking back into a bar over and over again, only to be escorted out by the same cowboy bartender three times.

4. Embarassing Honesty
I've got this tendency left over from DC that goes like this: amphetamines + alcohol = rambling honesty and an abundance of feelings/the need to tell them all to you. And so I did. Sitting outside Mason Dixon for two hours while the party reached its peak and eventually cleared out, Emily and I were visited by various members of Team Autostraddle who shared a number of drunken gems and relics from their young gay past (no, we totally heard everyone's coming out story, and it was all really cute, especially since everyone was in cowboy hats). We sat out there for two hours and watched everyone go by, half dazed, never sober, always talkative, and half in love with everything and everyone and the feeling of a dream finally realized, though realization didn't mean an end.

And it's all just so fall-against-the-wall-and-take-it-in-because-what-if-you-never-feel-this-new-or-real-again. ((But you do and you will and you know it, but you don't thikn you're allowed to admit it just yet)).

5. Withdrawl
It was like having everything happen at once. And the fastest of events make for the slowest of goodbyes, and after two straight days of being surrounded by peoplepeoplepeople (rather, girlsgirlsgirls), waking up alone in an all-too-spacious bed just doesn't do it. All day I can talk and work and run around my town, but when I finally stop, all it is is, why is my bed so big, and why am I the only one in it? And where are the other ten people I've attached myself to in these two days? And why aren't we getting stared at in public? Where are those naked feathered guys who walked behind us in the parade? Why aren't the following my car around? (Actually, if someone could arrange this, that'd be great). I miss everyone; I never wanted them to go back to 2D.

Everything's a little duller now, a little muted. But at the same time, everything's a possibility. Everything is what it could be, or could be again (and again and again), because maybe the apex is just a plateau, and we're all just really into climbing.

This Is a List of the Things I Learned

Christ, is the "a" in that title supposed to be capitalized? Whatever, I don't know.

The past week or so has been filled with a series of what I'd like to fancy as interesting and introspective posts, but (and I think I've used this line on you before), my personal life's been getting a little too personal lately and I say inappropriate things in my head, and so all the contents of those posts will hopefully soon be relegated to paper in my pretentious hipster Moleskine journal. Aw yeah.

I'm embracing the hipster because lately I've been hanging out in Williamsburg so often that it would just be insulting to try to deny it any further. That being said, I'll defend myself once again: I'm not a hipster, I'm just a lesbian. Really. I'm thinking about writing an article about passing as straight only by passing as a hipster. I'll start it once I come up with a really clever, obscure title that I can use to judge people who don't understand it.

Anyway, now that I've clearly established that I'm in a psychotic state of mind (to Nina: "I love face tattoos because I hate having to wonder if someone is a psychopath."), the point of this post is basically just to have a post because I get a little bummed out when I go a long time without updating. So in going with the whole I'm-sequestered-away-from-my-people-but-I'm-stupidly-optimistic deal that's been taking over my brain this past semester, I present (in list form!) things the summer has taught me so far. Not all positive. Mostly in a weird middle ground, once again proving that I'm crazy.

This actually is probably going to end up looking like a series of mini posts compiled into one big post, and maybe one day I will actually end up turning some of these into their very own entries.

Hokay, let's begin!
In no particular order:

1. The most interesting people I know are all addicts.
We've all got addictive, hungry personalities, and we are all fucking crazy. Some of us are addicted to substance. Some of us are addicted to workworkwork or the internet or drama or the notion of glamour. Glamour the British way, obviously. We chase these things and cannot get enough and one addiction feeds the other, and goddammit, we're just all trying to get our fix of whatever and trying to figure out why we need it.

2. No, I would not like a receipt.
I don't check my ATM receipts. Ever. This is probably why I'm broke all the time/why my bank account sometimes ends up pretty far into the negatives. Or I think I'm broke. I wouldn't know, I don't check my ATM receipts. I'm not a compulsive shopper, but I pretty compulsively do not give a shit about what I'm buying. I don't even know what I've been buying. I think it's been food, because I certainly don't have anything to show for it. Also transportation costs FAR too much. Also you should really be allowed to withdraw less than $20 from ATMs. I was in line behind this guy, and dear lord, that thing just shot 20's at him. He doesn't just have $20 in his bank account, he has multiples of it. That's why he was in a suit.

3. I now have a favorite time of day, and that is 4-5 a.m.
This only counts if I've been up until this point, not if I'm waking up then. Making it to 4 a.m. means that you've been up entirely too late, probably doing something stupid or having the longest, most intense conversation of your life, or having the time of your life, OR everything you've put into your body has made your body angry, and now it won't let you sleep and, consequently, you are completing one of the above listed activities. Making it to 5 means you're officially nuts because now real people with real responsibilities are waking up to go to their real jobs, and there you are, still awake and fucked up from the night before. I love staying up through the night and day and then throwing yourself out into the streets at 11 a.m. where all the normal people are running around looking normal and stressed, and I'm just standing there all crazy-eyed with a RedBull in hand and a long letter to write.

I like buying RedBulls at 11 a.m. because it means that something weird happened. I feel liek people either buy them in the morning to get themselves going or at night to do the same (but with alcohol). If it's 11 a.m., you've already gotten yourself out of bed and to work/school. The hardest part is over. Why are you standing there looking crazy?

4. I've deemed this one to be inappropriate for interwebz.
Just know that I'm going through a detox, and my brain is like "what's serotonin?" and the subsequent crashing has pretty much led to the seemingly hopeless life-reevaluation that's been going on the past few days.

5. We don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck.
I actually, legitimately care about very little as of late. Not in the whole life-is-meaningless-I'm-16-and-wear-a-lot-of-eyeliner sort of way, but in the way that I realized that getting stressed and throwing fits over things just...doesn't matter. Oh, also we don't get in trouble for anything, and we don't get hit by cars. My friends and I shamelessly and flamboyantly throw caution into the wind and run through fountains and guess our way through traffic. Basically, I survived my week in DC, and that is a miracle.

Also, last night, while taking off a sweatshirt, I accidentally removed my entire shirt in front of a group of people that I really didn't know at all. It looks exactly like you're imagining it in your head. And actually, I'm fine with that.

6. Something I did not learn.
How to pronounce "creuller." Wow those donuts look great. I keep wanting to fucking order one whenever I go into Dunkin' Donuts, but I never. can. because I cannot pronounce it and am to shy and weird to try. So someone, please, either give me a phoenetic spelling or tell me that they taste like shit and not to waste my time. Thanks!

7. I still look really awkward flirting with girls.
Despite claiming this as one of my only few marketable skills, I'm still fucking weird. Great evidence of this is when, post-Santigold, a few friends and I were standing outside of DC9 smoking when I found a cute girl on the other side of some glass making eyes at me. I returned a shy smile, tried to be cute, then accidentally dropped my cigarette and chased it into the street like a small child chasing a ball. I did not see her inside.

8. Wow, I'm boring.
Last week I was at a used book store with Rachel, and after sifting through aisles and aisles of books filled with history, social commentary, and theory, I finally settled on this purchase:
I can't be certain, but I think it makes Rachel hate me.
It also makes me look at really tacky wall decorations like this and say stupid sarcastic things like, "Oh hey, I really like the way that size 18 Times New Roman font looks. Good job double spacing, really creative."

Sidenote: this really is the most horrifying thing I've ever seen. In addition to the really unrealstic waving that happens, it's basically a really awful poem about imperialism. Needless to say, I'm stealing it and putting it in my room next year.

9. I'm literate!
...or am I?
No, really, I've been reading, and it's exciting (this obviously only serves as an extension of #8)!
I like non-fiction (I wasn't kidding)!
I'm too lazy for descriptions, but check these out! (Descriptions will come eventually. I love parentheses).

Non-fiction:
Resist!: Essays Against a Homophobic Culture (Mona Oikawa, Dionne Falconer, Ann Decter, Rosamund Elwin)
The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (Jessica Valenti)
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Matilda)

Fiction:
Call Me By Your Name (Andre Aciman)

QWAC is starting a book club this year, get pumped!

That's it for now. It's a list of 9, yeah. I'll have something interesting to say soon.

This Is What a Music Post Looks Like

The weather in DC is atrocious.

It's one of those lack-of-weather days where you almost can't feel the temperature difference between outside and inside, and the only thing that characterizes the day is the complete lack of color when the clouds turn everything to grey. The sky has opened up, but not in the sort of way that causes students to scurry frantically between buildings, books servings as impromptu umbrellas in a torrential rainstorm. It's the sort of mist that you can't really define or avoid, and so you just walk through it, squinting as drops of water rest on your eyelashes and an uncomfortable clamminess works its way through your bones.

Anyway.
As a result of this, it's also one of those existential crisis days for me.
As a sort of follow-up to my last entry, I'm in a bit of an ironically apathetic panic. My education seems pointless, I'm unmotivated, and I just feel like I'm wasting money and time in these classes.

Enter playlist therapy.
In accordance with my lack of motivation, I'm too lazy to make a real playlist. Plus I'm in the mood for epicness, so I'm making it my mission to listen to about seven full albums front-to-back throughout the course of my day/night. It's no Apex, but everything's got it's place, yeah?

So here we go, in no particular order (except the one in which I am listening to them, which is random)...

1. In Our Bedroom After the War - Stars
Epic epic epic epic epic and made entirely for rainy days.
Potentially the most cohesive album I've heard. It manages to be uniform in sound without being dull and repetitive. The album lulls and rocks and carries the listener from the wonderfully synth-heavy instrumental opening track "The Beginning After the End" to the final seven-minute title track. Slow building tracks and perfect harmonies between the etheral Amy Millan and Torquill Campbell lull the listener into a seamless dream-like state in the very best of ways.

Download: The Night Starts Here, Take Me to the Riot, Bitches in Tokyo

2. Set Yourself on Fire - Stars
The predecessor to In Our Bedroom, Set Yourself on Fire functioned today as the more lively, though slightly less mature, answer to my gloomy mood. "What I'm Trying to Say" is potentially my favorite song of all time. As Campbell once announced before performing the piece live, "This song is about fucking and death." Its multilayered beat and carpe diem fuck-'em-all lyrics combine to form a three-and-a-half minute no-fail tour de force. The rest of the album follows in the same vein.
Download: What I'm Trying to Say, Reunion, The First Five Times

3. Pinkerton - Weezer
My first favorite album ever. Originally crafted to be a concept album (this admittedly would have been a fail), Pinkerton serves as the pinnacle of Weezer's discography. It is the epitome of eccentric frontman Rivers Cuomo's style (though he doesn't know his own talent): a collection of confessions, apologies, and love songs expressed through charmingly simple and almost uncomfortably honest lyrics. It also works on shuffle. He screams, he whispers, he makes awkward references to lesbians and half-Japanese girls. It's perfect. Also home to my second favorite song of all time, "El Scorcho."

Download: Falling for You, El Scorcho, Across the Sea (epic!)

4. The Con - Tegan and Sara
I know, you were all waiting for this one. My favorite, and perhaps the ultimate (yes, ultimate), album to listen to front-to-back. With 14 songs coming in just over 30 minutes, The Con is potentially Tegan and Sara's best work to date, all at once featuring their classic harmonies while managing to reach toward the experimental. With a higher production budget, and therefore quality, than any of the other albums, the Quins take on a variety of musical styles, from the standard poppy "Back In Your Head" to the electronic, looping, "Are You Ten Years Ago" to the haunting, quirky "Like O, Like H." Despite the variation among songs, always consistent is the raw and honest emotion that carries the album through a full story arc. I have listened to this album a countless number of times, and I can guarantee that there is always always always something new and wonderful to discover.
Download: THE WHOLE THING
But no, really: The Con, Nineteen, Dark Come Soon, Back in Your Head (demo, if you can)

Okay, I'm actually going to give it a rest for now because (1) I've only gotten this far in listening today anyway, (2) I have a TON of work that I've been putting off through this, and (3) this shit is getting real epic.

To be continued.

This Business of Business

This entry is coming at you live from Global Corporate Citizenship.

Yes, it is as horrible as it sounds, and yes, I am here because of my greatest kept secret: I am a business major.

Not so well-kept secret: I hate being a business major.

The classes are tedious and uninteresting, and I'd swear that there's nothing in the content that you couldn't figure out yourself. Even the professors tell us time and time again that success in business is dependent largely on personality, not whether or not you can list the differences between sole proprietorships and corporations.

I wouldn't necessarily mind pursuing a career in business once I graduate (though my degrees, if successful, will end up being conducive to a career in music journalism), but as far as education goes, quite frankly, this shit is a waste of time.

Business education benefits the pocket, not the mind, and if you cannot expand your mind, then why bother with a college education?

I miss my history courses, my literature analysis, and the intricacies of DNA. There are no questions in business, nothing to explore. Only facts and statistics and fifty-dollar ghetto public speaking pamphlets (not how to public speak in a ghetto manner, rather an expensive poorly-assembled packet).

And yet, I. am still. here.

I cannot leave, despite my overwhelming passion and desire for other subject matter.

And last night I finally figured out why.

How my life was to proceed, according to my parents:

1. Birth

2. Elementary eduction

3. Prestigious Jesuit university

4. Church on Sunday

5. Graduate with a business degree

6. Pursue a career conducive to earning lots of dolla dolla billz

7. Marry a nice man (Filipinos appreciated, but not required, score!)

8. Pop out children

9. Die

My life plan:

1. Check

2. Check

3. Find my inner radical queer at American University

4. Hungover on Sunday (getting better at this. In addition, that's not the only reason I don't go to church. Reference my first entry for vague thoughts on religion)

5. Fail my business classes, pursue Women's and Gender Studies, Anthropology, Biology, Journalism (anything that will earn me no money in the future)

6a. Live in a box

6b. Not mind living in a box, because all my friends from AU live in boxes anyway, and we're in love with our lives so whatever

7. Gay. (not the only reason I don't see myself getting married, but that's an entirely different post)

8. Gay AND irresponsible (and kind of selfish and totally disapproving of the way that childhood is rapidly disappearing for newer generations, also another entry)

9. We'll see.

If I could, I would make a bitchin' venn diagram of this, and it would become even more apparent that I've ballsed (yes, balls as a verb) it all up already. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, because here, away from home, I'm finally able to pursue what I truly want, free from direct restriction from my parents and able to get all my quality out-of-classroom-learnin'. But. My weekly phone conversations with my family serve as a constant reminder that I'm nothing that they expected. Worst of all, is that I've got the feeling that even if I didn't decide to earn a Catholicalicious education and ironically pursue a soulless business degree, all would be well if I'd just settle down and get married.

None of this is happening, and as far as I know, my life is better for it.

But business, right now, it's all I've got.

This Is Not the Jenny Schecter Show

I'm about a week late on this post, and I told myself when starting this blog that I would only post things that brought me to profound conclusions, but I realized that
-that would leave my posts very few and far between
-I am a lesbian blogger, and as such, I am obligated to do an L Word finale post

That being said, here are my feelings on Chaiken (we're on a last name basis now), Season 6, and The L Word in general. In list form. It would be in chart form as a final homage, but...that seems too difficult right now.

(These are in no particular order).

10. Who killed Jenny Schecter? Not even Ilene Chaiken knows. But I know. It was the ghost of Dana Fairbanks. She was angry that Jenny did not try to contact her for the tribute video (because God knows she went to incredible lengths to track down people who didn't. really. matter. A trip to the lesbian underworld would have been entirely feasible). See, what really happened is that GhostDana found Jenny, pushed her off the balcony, and...

9. Stole the armor off Xena Warrior Princess and turned her into a cop. No really. I somehow feel like this is some sort of ten-year delayed apology to the queer grrrls of yesterdecade who sat patiently through the entire Xena series for the Gabrielle/Xena hey-we're-lesbian-warriors deal to finally be acknowledged. The last episode does not count.

8. I hate this show. Wait, no, I love this show. Wait, no, I hate it, but I hope it's memories stay with me forever. Wait. This show is like everyone's ex-girlfriend. Touche, Chaiken.

7. This is not the Jenny Schecter Show.

6. I really appreciated the fact that a really cliche reflective look-at-all-our-good-times

kind of ending was avoided, and the fact that all the characters had to reflect upon their relationships through interrogation was ALMOST clever, but Chaiken (boooooo) handled it in an extremely nonsensical (though aesthetically pleasing) way. Really though, the ladies all looked inappropriately stunning in the interrogation room, but the whole thing seemed like more like some bizarre Lesbian Real World confessional starring, yes I'm going to make the joke again, Xena Warrior Princess.

5. Booooo Chaiken for spending the entire season trying to defame Bette Porter. Man-hater, cheater, etc, etc. For shame, Chaiken, for shame.

4. Booooo Chaiken for wasting the penultimate episode on a glorified dance-off! And with no snarky references to Flashdance?! How dare she.

3. I once had a crush on the actress who played Jamie after seeing her in X-Men several years ago. This isn't really relevant, I just wanted everyone to know she made a really cute purple-haired mutant. Oh right, also, her character would have been great and compelling in ANY earlier season. Starting a new storyline and introducing a new character this (half) season was just inappropriate.

2. Max's moustache? Helena's weird boob-cup-accenting dress during the final glamor shots? I don't know.

1. This show has literally become the center of lesbian culture. Ilene Chaiken was entrusted with the responsibility of SHAPING. LESBIAN. CULTURE. It's a big fucking deal. But no matter how much it may have gotten screwed up, we all still watched it, didn't we? If nothing else, it let us know that, yes, lesbians are real, and yes, there can be inside jokes so extensive that they can be shared by an entire community (I'm talking to you, BETTY). No matter how good or bad this series/finale may have been, there's no denying that many a queer grrl, closeted and out, would be sitting in their rooms, doors closed and laptops open, waiting for the next episode of The L Word to load so they could watch it, low resolution, Korean subtitles and all.

Conclusion: Am I going to boo Ilene Chaiken if I see her in the streets? Why yes, of course.
Will I always be glad that The L Word existed to bond queer grrrls and friends alike under the premise that this is NOT the way that we live, but we're glad we can pretend someone does? Yes.

So thanks for six seasons of the first lesbian sex any of us had ever seen, for the Chart, for the most attractive actresses to be found on cable TV, for women we could secretly relate to (sometimes), for that really weird thing you did in Season 2 everytime someone had sex (you know how it goes...Shane Shane Shane Shane Carmen Carmen Carmen Carmen Fucking Fucking Fucking Fucking), and for teaching us that some scenes really work better on mute. Really. It's been good.