Appropriation.

I've seen a lot of talk about cultural appropriation lately. From the ubiquitous sugar skull costumes around Halloween, to posts about wedding traditions including a discussion of mehndi, chuppas, and jumping the broom, to a discussion about smudging with sage on a shelter blog. There seem to be two views on all of these things: a) that we're all members of the "human race" or "human culture," and thus all traditions are to be shared, and b) that we should be careful--especially, that people with certain types of privilege should be careful--to not use the traditions of other cultures in ways that might be insulting, hurtful, of just plain incorrect to their cultures of origin.

I'm pretty solidly in group b, which was solidified not ten minutes ago, when a blog I frequent used the term for the most sacred rite in the religion I was raised in, to signify something that, while I know she meant no offense, was comparatively trivial. And it kind of stung.

Now, due the fact that the rite was baptism, as practiced by Baptists (Southern ones, even!) I'm trying not to get all bent out of shape. Christians in general have done our share of appropriation--look almost every tradition surround Christmas, for a timely example. Not to mention that the Christian experience in the States is so widespread that you can't help but absorb some of it, or even a lot of it, and the dominant culture really has nothing to whine about. But the most important act in a young Baptist's life, one preceded by prayer, meditation, and pastoral guidance, one performed publicly in front of one's entire faith community, laden with tradition and one on which the very state of one's soul may rest? is not the same as falling out of a canoe on a chilly day.

So, I have my little taste of what it's like to be on the other end of things. And I would like to apologize to anyone I've stolen culture from, in ignorance or in a misplaced sense of "sharing." And I'll try to do better.



A quick note: one of the blog posts that got me thinking--the wedding one, on Offbeat Bride--had a sort of solution to the urge to borrow culture in it. The writer and her husband, inspired by the meaning behind the glass-breaking in a Jewish wedding, invented their own tradition to honor the meaning without appropriating the act. In their case, this was adding a small charm to each of their outfits, as a  remembrance of hard times during their joyful time. And in the smudging discussion, several commenters recommended Western traditions with similar intent, instead of borrowing an act the OP was obviously unfamiliar with--for example, cleaning the house thoroughly and lighting new candles, or rearranging furniture to make a space seem new and cleared of bad memories. Perhaps USians need to remember that we do, in fact, have our own traditions, and we need to find ways to honor those and rediscover our own meaning in them.

Highschool English

Books I remember reading in highschool and liking:

Their Eyes Were Watching God (my first AP English teacher was in love with this one)

Wuthering Heights (But the ending sucked. I recently got an oddly romantic email about it from an old highschool friend. Go figure.)

parts of Canterbury Tales (I'm descended from Chaucer's sister-in-law Katherine Swynford)

The Killer Angels (actually this was eighth grade, I'm cheating)

The Great Gatsby (the high point of ninth grade english)

Books I read in highschool and hated:

Heart of Darkness (BLECH. It was a good teaching tool, being dense and short, but BLECH)

The Yellow Wallpaper (short story, not a book, but still, I detested it)

Lord of the Flies (Really now. Blech.)

Crime and Punishment (boring, nasty, long, and the epilogue doesn't make a lick of sense in context)

I'm not sure if I had to read Huckleberry Finn until college, actually? But I'm oddly indifferent to it.

I really thought I could remember more. Apparently, most of what we read was forgettable dreck? At least I was never made to read Ayn Rand.

On a lighter note, boobies!

After reading Dw3t-Hthr's post about this post, I thought I'd weigh in with my own thoughts:

Having been on the pill for a few months now, I am proud to report that my breasts have grown from 32-no-one-makes-cups-this-small-dammit, to 32-a! The past few years I've mostly worn training bras from Target, which come in a few cute colors and patterns, but are lacking in the won't-show colors of black and "nude," and have oddly-placed underwire. Now, I have one black bra and one "nude" bra that came from the adult lingerie section. I have arrived.

I still don't like my bra selection, though. Bras this small usually have a metric buttload of push-up padding, because most bra manufacturers seem to think that a-cups are something to be ashamed of. I stopped wearing padding after meeting Wulfy, who helped show me that my breasts are fine as they are, thank you very much. Victoria's Secret even has a bra they claim "fit's like custom," which means that d-cups have no padding and a-cups have more padding than I have breasts. And their underwire stabs me like woah.

I also don't like going braless, which larger-breasted women keep marveling at--even though they're small, it's uncomfortable to jog or go down stairs without a little support because they bounce (that, and my boss is the Abominable Snowman who keeps the office incredibly cold and a ridiculous lot of people are offended at the site of a nipple bump through clothes). This, even though my mom had to naaaag me to start wearing a bra when I was thirteen.

I'm more-or-less happy with the way my boobs are now (I was not particularly happy when they grew, as now I only have two bras I can comfortably wear), I just hate whatever idiot designs most bras.

Now, a couple sources for small-sized lingerie. I haven't ordered from these yet, but at least most of the models do actually have small enough breasts that I can get an idea of the fit on petite ladies like me:

Lula Lu petite lingerie has lots of cute lacy styles, and lots of basics.

The Little Bra Company has bras designed by a petite woman just as frustrated as I am about bra design.

How do you start?

I just got into an argument with a few white male friends who insisted that American white men are discriminated against, other forms of discrimination have nearly faded out of existence, and "racism doesn't exist up North."

*facepalm*

At least one of them is genuinely a cool and understanding person. I think he's just burnt out on the atmosphere at this liberal arts college, where no matter what the class, the point is often that White Men Are Evil. If I had the emotional wherewithal to calmly discuss a few pertinent examples with him, I might be able to get somewhere. But I am an emotional person and I'm dissatisfied with my living situation and my body hates me and I'm underpaid and my dog is dying, and I just. Cannot. Do it.

So, Irrational Female I remain.

The other guy? Is a know-it-all engineering major. The numbers of disciplines in which he thinks he is an expert and is Most Emphatically not are ridiculously numerous, and no matter what the argument he seems to end it with "whatever, we're not going to agree anyway," with an undertone of "I'm right and you're wrong, no matter what you say." To which tonight, I had so say, "You're right, we're not going to," and refrain from saying "because you're never going to listen to a word I say." He's the one who said "racism doesn't exist Up North." By Up North he meant, mostly, Boston. Any minority Bostonians want to disagree? I'm sure you're out there somewhere. Not that he'll listen.

And my beloved Wulfy had to take me home and comfort me, after being astonished at the ire I showed in this argument. And, because I am a white female and this is what I know, the conversation turned toward "women's issues." Why am I a minority anyway? My "minority" comprises 51% of the population, I say. My "minority" also makes less on average than your "majority," for the same work, of the same quality, over the same time. A female coworker of mine was flat-out told by our manager that she doesn't make as much money as a man who works with us, despite doing the same work and having more experience, because "it's a man's world, honey." And here's how I really flabbergasted him:

"Can you tell me when the last time you were really scared you were going to be raped? Because I can."

My car wouldn't start and I was near my workplace, and after catching a ride over I got a male coworker who used to work as a mechanic to take me back to my car and get it to start. And I was scared shitless to get into his car, but I need my car and I knew he could fix it and I was afraid to piss him off if I told him I didn't want to ride with him after he'd gotten our manager to give him permission to leave work, and I knew for sure he could fix my car, for free, and in a far shorter time that waiting an hour in freezing weather for a AAA person who was a totally unknown quantity. And I had to weigh that against the fact that he's over six feet tall to my 5'3", and weighs nearly twice as much as I do, and I know he can lift me a foot off the ground at arm's length.

And my boyfriend had no clue that I was scared that night, that I would have reason to be scared. Because he has never faced that kind of fear.

And now I am so far away from that original argument that I don't know what to think. I'm just a mess of these stupid emotions and I've cried too many times today.

I am tired of my body betraying me. And vice versa.

I started on birth control recently, as the last few years my cycle has gotten less regular than, well, ever before (not counting the first few that I know I didn't keep good track of) and the accompanying cramps got worse. And well, it's nice to know that, should Wulfy and I decide to start having sex, I'm covered on the pregnancy front.

But this damn pill. Is killing me.

Even my worst cramps, the four-Advil-takes-the-edge-off, mommy-I-think-I'm-dying, ohgodowowowowow cramps, have only ever lasted one or two days. Until now.

owowowowowowowowow. For more than a week! And as I haven't even finished my first pack yet, I need to keep on this stuff long enough to find out if it will work long run, once my body gets used to it. I actually left work early today, even though I've been snowed in since Friday and missed even more days of work.

AND, my boobs are so swollen and tender, I can't wear my favorite bras--the cups are too little. I know I have said in the past that I would like to fill out an A cup, but I am so not sure about that right now.

I am so tired of feeling like my body and me are two separate entities fighting each other.

Why hello there, come here often?

...No, actually.

I just graduated college--only not really, because I'm going to eventually go to grad school so I'm not graduated in the sense of "omg I'm DONE, WOOOO," and because the ceremony got snowed out. 10+ inches of snow in this part of this state is, while not by any means unheard of, still brings everything to a grinding halt. Except people wanting eye exams, apparently, as my-brother-the-doctor still performed a fair number of exams in the midst of a raging snowstorm. Without my help! Amazing.

The snow wasn't really that raging, it just. kept. coming. is all.

So now, being out of school for the time being, I have no clue what to do with myself. Hypothetically, actually write something funnish--blog more maybe, and start work on a cheesy romance novel. All my loose ends feel very untied right now.

Am thinking, this minute, of blogging every day; if not here, over at the other blog. Obsessed as I've been with interior design lately, it makes sense. Blog as daydream, as I'm not in a position to decorate anything--living with an aunt who has an apartment in the basement that's supposed to be mine, but actually in her guest bedroom (on a twin bed, which I vowed never to do again) because said apartment is filled with the detritus of many years of living in the same house. It is, after all, in the basement.

I feel guilty for feeling so dissatisfied with this situation. I have a job, a place to live, plenty to eat, a great boyfriend, a city I love, etc etc etc. But nothing feels right, right now.

Names, Nicknames, and Identity

Due to discussion about names, nicknames, and the importance we ascribe to them here, I got to thinking about mine, especially my first real online handle.

Somewhere on that thread, someone named Rebecca gets told maybe it would be cool if she went by "Reb."  This was, in fact, my first handle, short for both my middle name and "rebel" (not the Southern kind, but stemming from an odd occurence in my youth group*).  I loved that name, really, even though I haven't thought about it in years.  It felt very "me" at the time--maybe still does in some ways--and I wanted badly for my friends to call me by it, but that would be (like Buck) violating the First Law of Nicknames.  Plus, self-ascribed nicknames rarely stick.

"Seraph" was thought up for me partly by a friend of mine in highschool (The Mastermind), when I was making my first-ever online journal.  I tend to overthink screennames because I want them to convey my identity more fully than a lot of people tend to bother with, and I had trouble thinking up that one because I felt that my social identity was in flux at the time.  Mastermind suggested some combination of "shadow" to express that gray area, and "seraph" because I'm religious and it sounded cool.  Eventually the shadow part got dropped but Seraph stuck somehow.

In a lot of ways I think of myself more as Reb or Seraph than my real name.  But there's no way calling myself by those names in social situations would fly.  This comes from very early personal experience, when I tried to get everyone I knew to call me by the name of a candy that I liked, and which sounded vaguely like my name in some contexts.  I think only two people ever called me by that name, and one of them arrived at it on his own instead of having me try to tell him.

Maybe names aren't something we're meant to pick for ourselves, somehow?

*One time, my youth group in the course of a Bible study was asked to think up a bunch of people they would call "rebels" to write up on the white board.  My name ended up there alongside Che Guevara and Saddam Hussein, probably due to my perpetual tendency to play devil's advocate in discussion rather than immediately swallowing the usual doctrine.  Maybe they should have called me "Buck"?  The actual point of the exercise was to demonstrate that while most people that youth-groupers will call rebels are "bad," there is a good way to be rebellious, especially since Jesus was portrayed in that study as "The Ultimate Rebel."

Anxiety

I am stressed right now.

It's not because of school, per se, because my classes are going along more or less fine.  I'm just stressing myself out over grad school.

My parents want me to go into law, which would make money, but I don't know if I want to.  I would ideally like to teach English at a community college or higher, but there aren't a whole lot of jobs or money there.  Or, lately I've been thinking I'd like to get my masters in library science and be a librarian, at least for a while.  A few schools in the state offer a joint JD/MLS, so maybe that would be good?

So either I've been working on school, thinking about what to do after I graduate (likely this December) or distracting myself with fluffy bunnies and Shadow of the Colossus so I don't freak out too badly.

And this is why all my blogging, even my shiny new design blog, has fallen by the wayside.  *sigh*.

Is this thing on?

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?

I started a goofy new blog about design, my latest relaxing time-waster:

Ange de Design

Sometimes it's hard to write about things I want to write about here; so many other people have a better handle on current events etc, and my personal life is...well, it's personal.  I'm at a point where sharing my life is kind of difficult, for whatever reason.  But "hey, I really like this chair!" is not so personal, so there you have it.

More stuff will go here, I swear, when Winter Break is over and I have classes to write about.

*buuuuuh*

I've found lately that looking at fundamentalist Christian websites, books, videos, practices, etc, makes me feel dirty.

Buuuuuh, get it off me.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, I did the purity pledge thing, I went on mission trips. I "witnessed" to my friends (for those not familiar with weird xian jargon, to witness to somebody is to tell them about Jesus in the hopes that they'll decide to convert. Not necessarily as creepy as it sounds). But it never made me feel skeeved out, unclean, or intellectually violated like looking at the Purity Ball or Quiverfull or Mars Hill or what have you stuff does now.

The key difference is probably that my five-point Calvinist and seven-day creationist, yet uber-beloved youth pastor really, truly wanted us to think. Bring your Bibles with you to church, he said. Pray and think about what I'm telling you and what the other preachers and Sunday school teachers are telling you. If you don't agree with us, that's okay.

And sometimes (maybe a lot of the time), I disagreed with him, and that was okay. And when he decided he was wrong about something he had taught us, he told us, and apologized, and told us what he'd learned.

Looking back now, I can say I swallowed a little too much of his more conservative doctrine, but I did so of my own free will (pretty funny for the student of a Calvinist, eh?). And being taught to think about my shit made it, if not easy, at least not near-impossible to change my mind and learn and grow. And not having it shoved down my throat made it possible for me to see the love of the god I believe in, and return that love in my human and imperfect way. I can pretty accurately say that he was probably the biggest influence on what I believe, even if I don't believe in a lot of things he believes in. Here's to you, Mr. Youth Guy.

So feeling like I'm having some nasty, hateful doctrine forced upon me is actually a fairly new sensation, and it's totally grossing me out. Ew ew ew.

Fear, Taboo, and Kink

Upon reading this post and the following comment discussion over at my web doppelganger's--that is, Amber's--I got into a discussion with a friend, we'll call him Alcée, about the meaning of the word "kink". The discussion blended into a discussion of what is "normal" and whether there are any constants from society to society, when we eventually decided that we'd never come to an agreement on a point and moved on.

Now, keep in mind, neither of us are experts on kink--far from it. But the closest anyone seems to get to a real definition is, as he said "something that's different from the norm, [sexually]." The question then became, but what is normal? Move from society to society, or even subgroup to subgroup within a society, and the rules change. Christian devotees of Domestic Discipline wouldn't say spanking your wife for disobeying the rules and then having sex with her is kinky--it's the Lord's will for a husband to rule his wife. My Christian mother would say heck yes, that's kinky*. Some would say using a blindfold and a feather is kinky, others would say oh gee, how vanilla.

So. Societal norms. Alcée says there are no constants from society to society; like the good once-upon-a-time student of society I am, I say there are three things that are taboo in all societies:

1. Murder within the group. (Thou shalt not kill--except the Phillistines)
2. Theft within the group. (Thou shalt not steal--except from the enemies of the Lord)
3. Incest. (Honor thy father and mother, but not like that!)

He of course took issue with this. There are times when it is societally acceptable to kill a member of one's group, he says.

I say sure, but the thing is, those who are acceptable to kill have in some way placed themselves outside of society already. Within fundamentalist Muslim communities, it's okay to kill a woman who had premarital sex because by breaking the rules she put herself outside of the community. She broke the rules, she pays the price. Within our society it's okay to sentence a man to death by lethal injection who murdered his buddy who fucked his wife because by breaking the murder taboo, he stepped over the line. He broke the rules, he pays the price.**

Incest, on the other hand, is pretty definitely forbidden but the definition varies. Is it taboo to sleep with your stepbrother? Can you marry your cousin? How about your uncle? Your mom? In our society most of these are taboo (depending on what state you live in) but in others, some would be, others not. The taboo on some act labelled incest, then, is constant. Would, then, some sort of real or play union with a verboten relative be "kinky" across the board?

Enough with the broad, societal view of kink. As Toby Keith said, I wanna talk about me!

My personal definition of kink would involve fear. The things that could be considered "kinky" that I like (in practice or in theory) fly in the face of things I fear.

I'm claustrophobic, so tie me up.
I fear pain, so whip me till I bruise.
I'm scared of heights, so suspend me from the ceiling.
I'm desperately afraid of being raped, so take me by force.

Which reminded me of a link Alcée sent me earlier today, and which I used in a vaguely scientific way to explain to him how fear is related to arousal:

Flow of potassium ions in brain cells is key to sexual arousal

The interesting thing here not being the potassium, per se, but the norepinephrine. If I remember correctly, norepinephrine is released in the brain as a response to epinephrine, commonly known as adrenalin.

The fight or flight response.

The pounding heart, the panting breath, the dilated pupils, the sweat.

The confusion of one type of physical arousal with another.

I'm also not a biologist, so don't jump on my ass for getting this connection wrong. It certainly makes sense to me.


*The word "kinky" is related in my memory to a moment when the fact that my mom is not, in fact, the Blessed Virgin was hit home. We were watching Trading Spaces, and the design of one of the rooms, a bedroom, focused around a bed that the couple had been given as a sort of bizarre wedding present; it had been handed down through several pairs of newlyweds in their family. It was a large canopy bed made of clear acrylic (like a stripper's platforms) which was bad enough, but towards the end of the show we simultaneously noticed that the acrylic canopy was lined with mirrors. We looked at each other and said, in unison, "wow, that's...kinky." Keep in mind that I had pretty much never talked about sex with my mom before so the fact that she knew the word and could recognize it when she saw it was a shock to my tender teenaged sensibilities.

**This is not to say that either capital punishment or honor killing is right by my own moral compass, only that it is generally accepted in that particular society.

I am a horrible blogger.

I keep thinking of these interesting things to write about...and then I think, someone's probably already said it, and said it better than me, and it's not like I matter much anyway.

So I talk myself out of writing anything of much importance.

Hopefully later in the summer I'll be able to jump this silly ditch and start actually writing in this thing.

OMGWTFBBQ

I did something rather strange and certainly not exactly characteristic of my usual self yesterday.

It started when Wulfy and I rolled out of bed in the morning. He went back to his room to take a shower, I hung around mine checking email and stuff, waiting for him to come pick me up because we were supposed to eat breakfast at IHOP (we love us some IHOP. Cheese blintzes, mmmm). But he had a wedding to go to in about an hour, and an errand to run before then, so when I went out and met him he ended up circling campus and dropping me right back off because exactly why am I running this dumb errand with you instead of going back to bed when we don't have time to go to breakfast which is what we were supposed to do and I reminded you about ten times over last night and this morning and we've been wanting to go out for breakfast for about a week so how the hell did you forget?

So I stayed pretty pissed at him until about four in the afternoon, when he returned, and we waited until about five to finally go eat our IHOP because we might as well make it supper since you got back so damn late.

So I simmered and he kicked himself for about an hour, at which point I decided to try and be nice (which I actually rarely am, I am sullen and have a tendency to half-unconsciously, half-intentionally make him pay when he pisses me off, which he only usually does slightly anyway. I'm hard to live with.) and hopped up on the bed with him to tickle him and cheer him up and get him to stop looking pitiful and take me to IHOP.

I say, "Oh look at the poor pitiful Wulfy oooscha booscha wooscha wooooo *tickletickletickle* Oh come on cheer up."

He says, "But I hurt you."

I say "You're a silly bean. Do you want to take anyone else to IHOP with us?"

He says "I don't know, what do you want to do."

I say "You decide."

He says "But you're more important than me."

I say "Oh Wulfy, you know that's not--"

Wulfy, at this point, snaps because I've been a brat all day, and says very harshly some unpleasant and unpleasantly true things about the way I treat him and threatens to leave me.

I say "If that's how you feel, just leave."

He gets his big oh-shit-I-shouldn't-have-said-that-now-she's-gonna-hate-me eyes and says "I didn't mean it!" while attempting to hug on to me so I won't get up and make him leave.

I make him let go.

I sit and seethe for a while.

Then, without saying where I'm going, I put on a hoodzip and put my room keys in my pocket and leave.

It was pouring rain. I walked around campus for what I'm guessing was an hour or more, cellphone-less, considering a lot of things. I've been inexplicably unhappy lately, with myself, with school, with the job I have at home, with Wulfy, with what the hell do I really want to do with my life, with what the hell am I doing with my life now, with my suite-mates who are Loud Talkers, with my brother who is an asshole and my mom who is a little bit nuts and my dad who is not exactly the most sympathetic person in the world and the portion of my friends who never talk to me and the one girl who slandered me and with myself for not calling her on it and with my campus ministry for being politicky and obnoxious and my campus minister for having a large and thorny stick up his conservative-in-about-every-way-you-can-think-of-except-not-hating-
Harry-Potter ass and myself again for not being good enough for my almost annoyingly sweet and considerate boyfriend and sometimes wanting to break up with him for no good reason and for flirting too much with a cute coworker and just GAH WHAT THE FUCK TIME FOR A MELTDOWN.

So by this point I am fucking soaked and tired and my jeans are getting heavy because they're so wet and I'm wearing an old pair of Keds that are now squishy and my socks are wet so I've got two intense blisters on my Achilles tendons and ohmigod how long have I been gone what will Wulfy think I bet he'll hate me for making him worry I'm so mean to him god I am a horrible girlfriend and I just got mad at him over IHOP for god's sake wtf am I doing.

So I go back, and find my cell phone, which he has called three times and left a desperate choked-up message begging me to call him and tell me where I am because he's really worried and DAMN, I do not deserve to be with someone so wonderful but I'll be fucked if I let him go. So I call him and he's outside looking for me (oddly enough, he's where I was, but having checked other likely places first he's about an hour too late to find me there) so we figure out where we both are and meet halfish way (he runs, I limp in my squishy shoes so I meet him more like a quarter-way) and we have a cheesy-romance-movie crying hug in the rain, then go back to my room and cry some more and talk everything out and woooooo catharsis.

And THEN, we go to fucking IHOP.

Wow, the drama. The romance. The histrionics.

So I feel much much better now, though I'm thinking about forcefully dragging myself to therapy since as long as I'm a student here I get like ten free counseling sessions a semester. Well, sort of free, since it comes with tuition and all. I've got a big fat family history of depression and have had an episode or two before of just feeling like shit for weeks, so I feel like I need to be doing something to at least monitor that and try and check it before I end up being, well, my mom, who is only just getting some help now that she's going crazier now that she's older.

So yeah. The whole meltdown thing is in general not me but this time it worked out, even though I feel just the tiniest bit stupid about making this big scene. I was never really nuts as a teenager so perhaps I'm still getting the adolescent crazies out of my system. But for now, the air has been cleared and I'm feeling pretty groovy.

Hey Wulfy! I love youuuuuuuuu!


[Edit] After reading over the first bit, I seem to have made the Wulf look worse than he was with the snappage. This is something he does occasionally, usually as a weird injoke thing, but also occasionally because I really do drive him nuts sometimes. The criticisms were real, the threat to leave was not. It was also stingingly accurate, namely that I do often treat him as if I am more important than he is, but I was upset about it because I already had too much going on in my head. We have also lately not really talked about all this shit enough, and even the Wulf has his breaking point.

My point? He really isn't an asshole, even if the outburst seemed harsh.

Wuv, Twue Wuv

I have not written lately because it is summer and I am lazy.

Plus we just ditched our old dialup in favor of cable with a wireless setup, so I've been catching up on my YouTube and undergroundfilm.org.

Renegade Evolution (whom I enjoy and hope to never piss off) recently had a "Blog for Sex Education" day, which I missed. But my one-sentence answer for why I would like to see better sex ed in the US, specifically my south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line area, is:

I never again want to say to a boy (or man!) over the age of twelve, "No, girls do not pee through their vaginas."

I had to explain that to Beowulf once.

Speaking of, he has already visited twice, with a two-week space between each visit. Having him here is always lovely, which is saying something because I hate having people invade my house. This includes relatives, and friends, unless I'm very very close to them. Wulfy actually just left; his actual reason to visit this weekend was a friend's wedding that my non-driving self needed a ride to. It was a pretty wedding. The bride and groom are the same ages as Beowulf and I. It's strange to have one's friends get married.

It's getting late and I have to get up early tomorrow for work.

Angst

All last night I dreamed about weddings. White dresses galore (and other colors--my dreams can be noncomformational), and vows of eternal devotion. Some of the many of me getting married were happy; some weren't.

According to an (admittedly small) amount of research I've done online, dreaming about a wedding can symbolize a number of different things, among them:

a) The desire to get married.
b) a transitional period in my life, specifically in my relationships.
c) a need to integrate different parts of my life.

The shiny newness of my relationship with Beowulf is beginning to wear off, sadly enough--we've been "official" for nearly two months--and problems begin to set in. Puritanical guilt over our physical involvement, his anxiety disorder and accompanying paranoia that something is wrong, and my own wanderlust conspire against us.

He and the better part of my friends here are on a hiking trip today, one I skipped out on in order to stay in bed, dreaming of weddings and worrying. Is the idea that some day we may love each other enough to hold us together?

Almost an Angel

So, this will be my blog for the world to see, the face I show to the world, my soapbox and my soap opera. I guess I had better watch my grammar.

I suppose an introduction is in order:

-On this blog, I will be referring to myself as Seraph. Previous internet incarnations of myself include Reb (on AO-hell message boards) and GingerRose (on dA).

-I'm young. How young, I don't think you need to know--but I'm a good bit past sneaking into R-rated movies.

-I define myself as a Christian (or Xian, as I dorkily like to type it) but I'm not one of those Christians. You know what I mean.

-I'm a feminist. My male friends occasionally call me a feminazi...but I do shave and wear makeup and all that patriarchy-approved nonsense. I can feel pretty if I want to, right?

I think the rest of my character will come out eventually. I'll never reveal my real name, or the real names of my friends, or where I live. Now, down to the posting.

Why do I even set up these blog thingies, anyway? What sort of abnormal need for communication and approval do we bloggers have, that we air our dirty laundry online for the world to see? I do have friends out there in the "real" world, friends I can talk to and laugh with, some of whom I can tell everything. But there's something about a stranger...probably the impulse to blog is the same impulse that occasionally leads me to pour out my life story to people I've just met--an impulse that has occasionally landed me in uncomfortable places. Especially since the moment a guy my age hears a girl say "oh, my last boyfriend came out of the closet this summer..." he immediately retreats inside himself and closes the door. Oh noes, he thinks to himself, she'll turn me gay too! Aaaaaagh!

So yes, I dated a gay dude. Oh the horror. *rolls eyes* What gets me is that he's such an utterly fagtastic gay man, I don't know exactly how I missed it. I'll refer to him as Jai, because that's almost his name.

I have a tendency to get off topic, forgive me...it is rather late/early here. Back to the subject of blogging: I am a writer by nature. I have been making up stories since before I could write--at that time, I dictated to my grandmother. I fell in love with poetry around the age of eight, and have kept a fairly consistent journal since I was twelve or so. There is something in me that won't let me go without my writing. It's a force like gravity, or the pull of the moon on the ocean. And many of my friends don't understand...so I turn to the faceless crowd of the Interweb. Ha.

I think that will do for a first post.