i love you because i need you.

i need you because i love you.

face value

people were always telling my mother what a beautiful daughter she had. she would plan for the grocery shopping to take twice as long as it should because so many people stopped to comment on the little brown girl in the basket. i was famous.

by second grade, i'd had my waist-length hair cut into an awful mullet (i know i asked for a bob!) and my adult teeth had begun to grow in crookedly.  i was a new kid in a hillbilly school, so my brownness was no longer exotic, just strange. i stopped existing.


the ideas of beauty and ugliness should be opposites. for me, they are close neighbors, separated by a very fine line. one look in the mirror, and my face is almond eyes, a noble nose, and a tiny rosebud mouth. a second glance reveals poisoned skin, yellow teeth, and a masculine chin. i don't even want to think about my cheeks. my perception mirrors the wicked queen in Snow White, shifting from the (al)most beautiful woman in the kingdom, to a haggard old woman.


i can't keep all this judgment for myself, can i? of course not. every woman i see is subject to a watered-down version of this criticism. 


i realized today that i have a new weapon to use against these women. i look at them and consider if their attractive faces would hold up under obesity. most of them wouldn't. this makes me feel better.


i know, it's sick. still, i doubt that i'm the only person to play these games.

"mission accomplished."

Rekha as Umrao Jaan

let's dance

i've only had one truly recurrent dream in my life. i don't have it anymore, but when i was in elementary school, it was a frequent nightmare.

i stand in the parking lot behind the school, looking towards the playground. suddenly, the world rushes towards my cheeks and sounds sneak up and crawl into my ears. i feel like i am experiencing everything. i enjoy the sensitivity, but am terrified. then things pull back, and i'm relaxed again. this sensation repeats several times before i wake.

it's difficult to describe, and was especially so as a nine year old.

intimacy is hard. getting close to someone is no problem; letting them get close to you can be excruciating. come here, go away. i hate you, don't leave me. we all do it. we are all afraid.

even so, we are all loved.

dynamic duo

animal househusbandry

my secret shame

the treehouse is doing a monthly night of folks covering classic albums. i like to imagine myself a musician, so finding my classic cover seemed like not an entirely pointless effort.

i spent some time sending the right songs to the right person. honestly, they were the worst possible choices! the first was good. i really should have left it at that. (no! really this time!) we had seen, but not heard, it on a saturday afternoon infomercial. 

i had planned to send a david bowie track after that because "moonage daydream" played on the way home. i couldn't find what i was looking for, so i thought i might send the t. rex song with the barely discernible persian reference. so lame. of course i sent it.

another t. rex song, which i had rejected moments before, suddenly appealed to me and revealed itself as the one true t. rex-ference. so, there. now that's two.

two songs from his favorite band. it's screaming, "hey, i'm thinking about you!" which i was, but so deeply that i didn't really know i was. obviously, i'm looking at songs to send him, but once i focus on the song itself, it becomes less about him. it honestly didn't cross my mind that it was an awkward choice.

would 3 be enough? of course not. as soon as i sent "jeepster," i realized i hadn't thought of myself much at all (too little, too late). 

somewhere in the 1990s, a comedian/rocker/writer told/sang/wrote a joke that made it very clear to my forming frontal lobes that phil collins is not cool. having been fully engaged in survival mode for several years, i immediately calculated the cost-benefit. i had to hate him, too.

i've been learning to embrace my tastes. i really like phil collins' songs. none of that pretentious "before peter gabriel left ..." bullshit. i mean, genesis as most of the fucking world knows it. 

my classic cover album is: Invisible Touch.

"land of confusion"