you must watch Bearforce 1

Dutch man-bears dance and sing boy-band-style. "Ooooooooooo, it's so goood, it's so good, It's sooooo gooooooooooood." They're so cute. I'm not even attracted to hairy men and I can't decide if the pink one or the yellow one is hotter. (No, I'm not talking about a caucasian and a regular asian. Just watch the video.) They're so simultaneously serious and winking you have to get up and dance, too. I love these boys, boys, boys.

My letter to the New Mexico Tourism Board:

Dear Sir or Madam:
I'm from New Mexico and still have family there, though I now live in Texas. I'm always encouraging my friends to travel in New Mexico and telling them about all the wonderful things to see, do and eat there, but every once in a while I have a problem.
I'll be talking up everything in my home state when suddenly my friend or acquaintance will get a funny look on their face and say, "Yeah, but I don't have a passport!" or "What do you do about the water, or are you immune from being from there?" So I say, "It's a state. In the United States of America. It's called _New_ Mexico. They have modern sanitation. It's between Texas and Arizona. Colorado and Utah are just above it. The US-Mexico border is just below it. And below that is Mexico. Old Mexico. The country. Which is no longer any relation to New Mexico, because it's a US state. I was born there. As an American Citizen."
And they say, "Wow, no wonder your English is amazing!" I'm tired of explaining this to otherwise intelligent people. Someone today just asked me about how I feel about having to get a passport to go visit my folks after so long of having an open border. I know the tourism board wouldn't endorse my screaming and hitting these people, but what _should_ I do?

we are very small

Neato! Watch this! It pays to spend all morning looking at Defective Yeti after all!

new favorite song

This is so amazingly wrong and right at the same time. I love it so much I can't hardly bear it. Can't wait till I end up singing it somewhere innapropriate..."It puts the lotion in the fucking basket...bitch...in the basket...oooooohhhoooooo...sorry officer."

Thanks to the internet...

suddenly I don't feel so alone.

(Earlier tonite I felt like it might be one of those nights, but it turned out I just needed to be alone, and once I let that be okay with me, I feel fine. Ish. Or whatever. Anyway, it was a melodramatic thought I had about the kind of night I thought I was going to have, and it turned out to be a funny google, so whatever. Love you.)

people smarter than me

I was noodling around the ol' internet this morning, thinking about writing a nice, long blog post about some of the intense thinking I've been doing about the news lately. You know:

Anna Nicole Breaking News: She's Still Dead!

Don Imus Controversy: Everybody Who Ever Heard His Show Totally Unsurprised, Celebrities With Apparently Nothing Else to Do Shocked, Outraged. (The uproar somehow kept the focus from the way the actual Rutger's women were a total class act throughout, behaving with respect, poise and self-possession at every turn and making all the "outraged" people look shrill and selfish.)

Virginia Tech Tragedy: Continuing Insensitive Saturation-Coverage of Horrifying Tragedy Causes International Non-Partisan Sympathetic Vomiting

It's possible that somewhere in me I have an entry about the media behavior on that last one, but not right now. My point is, before sitting down to write, I looked around at some of my favorite sites and found that my much more intelligent and talented male doppleganger from another universe had already written a much cleverer post expressing most of my salient views, probably more germanely and coherently than I would have. (Oh, look how she uses the vocabulary words to protect her from feeling intellectually inferior! Why did I let her buy that Mensa book?)

further postiness

Ah, the reason I hate putting things off: I never get around to them. And here I am again blogging while doing laundry and willing the sun to come out. My brain does not toggle cold/hot easily enough for me to be living in a non-tropical area. Seasons just exhaust me.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't think that all the people I wanted to mention don't now deserve mention now that I've put it off so long. I've just made myself so neurotic about the risk of leaving out someone who has meant the world to me (yet again) in the last few weeks, and have panicked so about what to say about these people (these people who make my sanity and marginal pleasantness, if not my life, possible) in a format where they, and everyone will see my remarks and praises, that I'm sort of sparing you all the tortured excercise I forsee it being.

Besides. You know who you are. Your ears are still ringing with the constant refrain of my journey-bleating when I begin the serenity-croaking. You listen to me when I need to be listened to, and you tell me to shut the fuck up when I need that. You laugh delightedly and tell me how happy you are for me when I am amazed to be doing well. You defend me and succor me when I'm dissapointed to be doing poorly. You wrap your arms around me at the slightest opportunity and help me find the heart to love me, too. And you trust me to do the same for you, in the way of friends. No list of names and why-I-love-thems, this far after the impulse to share it, will be adequate, so just keep in mind I'll be looking for ways to appreciate you practically, since you know you're on the list.

birthday

My birthday: fun, quiet, personal, intimate, gentle. I loved it. I loved the wonderful conversations, in person and on the phone. I loved the simple meetings and the soft words. As always, I appreciated the triage, again on the phone or in person. I got so many lovely gifts and so much lovely love. Thank you, each and every person I love, for helping me celebrate my continued exhistence. You made my day!

other people even besides me

You can't belive what kind of wonderful people I know. Well, if you're reading this, you're probably one of them, or someone who knows one of them, so I guess that's a patently false statement. All I know for sure is that this whole weird ride would be a hell of a lot less interesting and more painful if the people who love me didn't love me, or even tolerate me. Suffice it to say, if you've passed more than three words with me in the last week, you are on my all-time list of People I Could Do Without But I Wouldn't Like it One Bit and I'd be a Lot Worse Off.

Soon, when I'm not blogging while doing laundry and willing the sun to come out, there will be further postiness here about who I love and why

a story

It is summer. She is eleven years old. Her birthday fell on Easter, this year. The cake was a bunny; her mother outdid herself. She, her mother, and her baby brother have arrived at the town pool. They do this every day that the pool is open for the entire summer. No one thought to teach her to swim until she almost drowned when she was five. Then there was a flurry of lessons and caution that gently dropped into near-total amphibianism. Her mother will leave her here when the baby gets tired and pick her up before dinner. On lucky days, she might get to spend four or six hours in the water.

She had to stop taking swimming lessons two years ago because everyone watching her swim was making her very nervous. Really, anyone looking at her for any reason makes her nervous. Now that she's older it isn't cute to hide behind doors, in closets, under tables or in cabinets. Sometimes when she tries, now, she gets stuck. Then everyone has to look at you even harder while they try to help you get out. She doesn't understand why they won't just close the door and let her stay there until everyone leaves. She could get out if she was alone.

Lately she has discovered that if she corralls some of the younger children, or runs errands, or gets the grownups refreshments everyone will ignore her, as if she wasn't even there. As if she wasn't something to stare at. Being helpful and useful makes you invisible, and safe. She doesn't hear the words in her head, but there is a sensation like a tiny click as she realizes it in much broader terms. Now she thinks she'll get out and run around to the deep end and do about 98 dives and cannonballs, then go play with her brother.

She's thinking about this as she climbs the ladder, so it's a shock when she looks down for the next rung and sees her body for what feels like the first time ever. Her legs, which she's been looking at for her entire life as various people dressed and washed them, and then as she learned to do the same, look like part of an alien species that she's encountering for the first time. Here in her head, there has never been a judgement on a particular body part. This is how they sounded in her head before: leg, arm, hand, head, torso, foot. Now, somehow, since she heard that click, they sound like this: fat, weak, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. The way her hand-me-down black Speedo one-peice is cutting into the dimpled fat over her hip is making her seriously feel like vomiting.

She is paralysed on the ladder, and when she can finally climb out she wraps her towel around herself. It won't go all the way around, and her eyes dart around to see if anyone is laughing or pointing. Retching. All she sees is regular, happy people. They don't seem to be paying any attention to her, so she sits down on the side and covers as much of her body as she can with the tiny towel.

Sometimes things get very weird when you're a kid. Some mornings she wakes up and the whole world except for her is in super-slo-mo mode. It feels like it takes her mother an hour and a half to say, "It's time to go to school." Even swinging in the hammock is so incredibly slow that she can't stand it. Sometimes if she reads and pays attention to nothing else, it will speed up enough so she won't scream. Sometimes it just starts in the middle of the day, too, and those days she sometimes will scream.

Words have been bothering her lately, too. The word "crotch" has become unbearably dirty to her ears and eyes. Not only can't she stand the written or spoken word, but she has an aversion to most things which could be described by the word. Strangely, the crotch of her panties doesn't bother her (except at the laundromat, when so many panties in the basket make the crotchiness of them shoutingly obvious), nor does her own crotch. However, the crotch of a pair of tights has made her hysterical and her mother has bought all new knee-socks to spare them all the drama. And the crotches of tree limbs make her so uncomfortable she has had to stop climbing trees altogether, though if you'd asked her before this she'd have described tree-climbing as, "my favorite outdoor activity which doesn't include immersion in water."

All of a sudden, she wants to leave. If she tells her mother she doesn't feel well, they will go home and she can lie in bed under the covers. She stands up, shading her eyes with one hand and trying to obscure at least her bottom with the towel, looks for her mother and brother. Mom, tanned and lithe in her bikini, holds the baby over her head, then swoops him around in the air over the shallow end, just skimming his baby belly and legs through the water, then claps him to her body for a big hug. He's laughing hysterically as drops of water shimmer in the hot air all around them. "Mom!" She can hear her voice in her head, but it isn't coming out of her mouth. "Mom, I feel sick, I need to go home!" She's afraid they're having so much fun they'll be mad about having to leave. She can't ask them to, but she can't be here anymore.

Her voice still won't come out of her mouth, but it starts talking in her head again. "You can't make them leave. Just go hide in the shower, or the locker room. Come out in a little while when you're more calm, and buy some candy, then sit and eat it in the truck and a few minutes later you can all go home." This is reassuring. Her voice won't come out and tell people what she wants, but it will tell her, secretly in her head, now to make them give it to her anyway. This might be okay. Her voice says, "You're too ugly and fat, so no one will ever love you or want you for anything. Go hide in the shower so no one has to look at you and you don't cry or make a scene or everyone will know how pathetic you are." So she did.

the end

a letter

Dear Kellye,

We are trying so hard to be there for each other and support each other and love each other that it is hard for me to criticize you or ask you to change your behavior. I don't want to inhibit or discourage you. I know how fragile you are under the mask, and that the tiniest nay, once said, can make you want to hide for days, to retreat to that safe, dry place where you don't have to try, or care, or engage ever again. I know that when you're scared and hurting all you can think about is how to make it stop, and how to keep it secret, and how to protect anyone else you care about from being exposed to it. I'm asking you to listen to me with the thought in mind that I love you very much and I wouldn't ask if I didn't need it.

I know you're stronger than you think you are, and more useful, too. I know you have a lot of room to improve in almost every area of your life, but where that makes you queasily suicidal or autistically depressed, I think it could be exciting if you'd embrace it. Also, embrace your fears. It's time. You know they're most of them not real, and you know you can beat them. You're scared of dancing and love and sharks in the same way you were scared of the 183 flyover, which you tricked yourself into not caring about one way or the other as you drive over it three times a week. So what if you're scared of looking stupid? So what if you're scared of being vulnerable or dissapointing or laughable or getting hurt or being rejected. Being so careful that none of those things ever happen to you hurts just as much if not more. And it's so much lonlier. Watching you be this lonely and scared and sad is breaking me.

Here's the thing, darling: I want to help. Everyone that loves you wants to help. And we can. None of us could do it alone, not even me, but if you can stretch yourself out to be just a little more vulnerable, to be a little more patient, a little kinder, a little safer in your own skin. Then everyone who wants to help you would find it so much easier, and you'd be better able to be there for them. Things wouldn't be so scary if you'd at least try to believe that you're really a cherished part of a huge, loving, wonderful family of people who only stand as far off as you make them.
love, -kel