dropped out of being mikvah'd

because it was a mindfuck realising that i am, at bottom, a fundamentalist, but also because i was a fundamentalist who could neither pray nor bring herself to cover her hair. i'm doing what i always do after brain surgery: growing what i have out. my hair is more than midway down my little back, and now that the sutures are all closed, i've been able to remove the colour i put in when it got too blonde for my liking, and it's as close to my natural colour as i can get it, and all the tiny blonde baby hairs near my forehead are coming in. it looks beautiful, honestly, shiny and healthy and strong, which i'm finally beginning to feel, too. the thing is, i no longer want anyone besides joel to see my hair. i won't wear it down when i'm out on the street, and i've been thinking about doing the old bethlehem bun and hiding it under a rag altogether, which is another mindfuck.

whenever there's a proposition somewhere banning girls from wearing headscarves, i cheer, although not as much as i did when i found out that new immigrants to the netherlands have to watch movies of men kissing before their citizenship is confirmed. i'm a hardcore proponent of laïcité, and the fewer backassward superstitions the populace engages in the better, which means, of course, that headscarves have to go. but here i am wanting one.

there are a few reasons so far as i can discern: now that i have my figure back, i am again being stopped on the street, and my hair is more often than not mentioned. this would be fine if my legs were well enough to run in the event that the inquiries stopped being polite, but they aren't as yet. also, wedding bands aren't the deterrent they were even a couple of years ago, and covering my hair seems a way to underscore leave me alone, i'm married, in a way that a bit of platinum cannot. and the truth of it is, i once liked the attention my hair got me when i was first married. i never cheated on my first husband, but to claim that i didn't like the attentions of strangers would be utterest horseshit. i very much liked the attention. it was a reprieve from how much i hated my husband. it reminded me that men, categorically, weren't necessarily rotten, that they could hit it, without hitting you. but now that i adore this new husband, men are becoming categorically rotten, and for the selfsame reason i once liked them. i no longer have any need or desire for catcalls, even nice ones, and i now take them as an affront, to myself and joel. i actually dislike the nice ones more. telling a man you're taken and having him persist, as he tries to play himself off as polite, interested, is more craven and more despicable than an unsolicited "you wanna fuck?" but a headscarf, i'm supposing, would mean less of both.

although it wouldn't necessarily. i'm thinking of the time i balled a blazer up and put it under my shirt when i was stranded once in an airport, thinking men wouldn't hit on a pregnant woman. i was wrong. i got less attention generally, but managed to elicit the notice of a supercreepy perv who not only thought, but told me, pregnant women were hot, and asked me if i wanted to go to the bathroom with him.

i don't know if i should trust the headscarf. i haven't tried it yet. i'm shopping now for big square scarves that will cover all my hair, and have found a host of sites that serve the modest. there are heaps of them, all, more or less, equally horrifying, although it's funny to note how slutty the mormons are, comparatively. there aren't, to my knowledge, any secular plain dress sites, and i don't know why, but i'm sure it has everything to do with the fact that, in the absence of chatter about the sanction of god, what modesty is really about: women are, and ever were, nothing more than a species of property, objects of exchange that circulate among men, through an accident of birth.

saying i'm taken, much as i love joel, as freely as i've chosen to be with him, is another way of saying i've been had.

it wasn't so very long ago

that you weren't supposed to trust anyone over thirty, and now, thirty is young, but only because the baby boomers can't bear being old.

POS

joel says it at least forty times a day. piece of shit. an initialism because the object of contempt isn't even worth a whole phrase. babel=POS. we were counting on it being a benetton version of crash. we were counting on it being slick, trite, contrived. we were nevertheless not counting on it to suck as bad as it did. a self-congratulatory uniworld wank. toothless. why? because it patly ties the world together, false unity betraying, in both form and content, this one unassailable truth: "poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance."

i know that an academy nod is nearly a guarantee of mawkishness, but what i can't understand is this: aren't critics ashamed to be taken in by such rampant sentimentality? are they stupid or cynical? are they so eager to have their guilt assuaged that they're actually willing to believe that someone with a 1500 square foot apartment in tokyo* is fundamentally the same as a goatherd in morocco**? that the grupsters and the nanny illegals they employ are, at the end of the day, in the same boat? or, are critics, as the culture industry's functionary usherettes, in on the scam? praising only the most insipid artifacts as worthy of consumption in order to dope the populace? confederacy or conspiracy of dunces?

i can't tell anymore.

more swift: "i never wonder to see men wicked, but i often wonder to see them not ashamed. "

* real estate averages $50,000 per square foot.
** by world bank's 2001 figures, the average rural worker in morocco earns 57 cents a day.

the millionaires' club

net worth of various senators listed here. further proof that campaign finance reform is needed now: those best able to afford a campaign are probably the least likely to be able to represent us for the same reason. what do i have in common with someone who is worth $171,000,000? nothing. a million is a serious buffer against reality. 171 million even more so, and not just 171 times the buffer. i figure that every million after the first affords an exponential measure of distance, although you'd ever think so talking to the rich, not as if i'll ever know. that's the thing, isn't it? where all the trouble comes from. one can sympathize with the plight of another, talk about it, but there's no knowing the plight of another unless one's been in it himself. this is pure conjecture here --actually, it isn't; i married into a family with money once, so i know how wide the gap between an actual problem and a perceived one can be for the rich -- but i'm hardpressed to think of anything other than death that money can't help buy a way out of. scandal. imprisonment. even illness is much easier with money. everything is easier with money. which begs the question, what frame of reference can a millionaire use when confronted with a constituent who says she cannot afford groceries? what can that possibly mean?

i have a little cousin in portugal. she was four when last i saw her. she heard me speaking english and wanted to know what language it was. "inglês," angelo said. this was a wholly unsatisfying reply to her. she walked away annoyed, waving us english speakers off with a flutter of her hand that fell very promptly to her hip. "might as well be chinese to me," she said, in portuguese.

our senators might as well be speaking chinese. seems like a hell of a gamble to me. so why is this acceptable to anyone?

it's the same logic that got lucky louie got cancelled and that makes people take a pressing interest in britney spears: people don't like reality, not really. they don't want to see it represented. people like the meltdowns and spectacle of reality shows, but that's doctored reality, and nobody likes reality straight. it is ugly, unflattering. i remember doing a project in AP american history juxtaposing busby berkeley stills with pictures by dorothea lange. they were contemporaries, after all. busby berkely won. why? reality is depressing. so why on earth would we want it in our politics?

the naming of parts

i rather doubt that there's a significant difference between men and women, but if there is one, it is this: men are not ashamed to discourse freely on subjects they know nothing about; women are. men speak grandly about nothing, perfectly careless as to whether they're right or wrong, and women confine themselves to the feeblest nothings about which they seem to care a great deal, namely feelings, which can never be either right or wrong, and the result is the same in both cases: idle chatter.

i was mean

i presented him with a false choice, knowing it was a false choice, which he knew, too, and he called me on it, and i made him pay for it. which is just rotten. i should never have pretended i was magnanimous in the first place. better to have been the sort of rotten where i freely admitted i didn't give a fuck what he thought, since i didn't, than be the sort of rotten i was.

i'm sorry.

my affection for colour, explained

the book of notecards i bought on mommy's dime that i'm all in a dither about.

the view from my writing room window.

Il ragazzo è sotto il tavolo.

we are going to sardinia. we are going into debt to do it. that's what credit cards are for.

the beautiful breakfast lady.

our house for the week.

our bed for the week.

our beach for the week.

i'm so excited about the food. i'm already slavering for mutton stew and bread soup and sebadas, cheese filled pastries soused with honey and speckled with slivered almond. i'm going to be in a bikini and i'm going to get wretchedly fat and i don't care. i'm thrilled about it.