The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

Wednesday, March 15.

So, I have decided on my new tattoo.   It will be a single phrase, in old-fashioned typewriter font (for clarity and ease of reading), about 6 inches high, across my forearms.  I may have to tattoo it onto both forearms just to underscore the intensely urgent and excruciatingly important message.   The phrase will simply be:  FUCK DAY 28.

What is Day 28, you may ask?  Perhaps it’s a bit self-referential, but the fact of the matter is that I am fucking tired of my life coming to a grinding halt and then shattering into a million tiny pieces every 28 days just because of a stupid menstrual period.   

PMS: fuck you.

Oh, menstrual cycle.  How did you, in all of your holy bloodiness and preparation for childbirth, get lodged into my otherwise boyish body?   How can the mood swings that you bring manage to convince me that I am an awful human being unworthy of the air, water or sunlight that is allotted to my humble person?  How can you alter my brain chemistry so much that I am convinced that I need to break up with every single lover every 28 days. 

The time I’ve lost to the menstrual beast is staggering.  I spend days 24 and 25 starting to freak out (averaging $4 a month for the PMS tea that I start drinking 6 times a day around this time). Days 26 and 27 are spent floating around in the ether, starting to formulate theories like “Gee, my friends cannot possibly really like me, they must be faking it because I am truly awful,”  “Our revolution is fucking stupid and we’re all going to die miserable and materialistic deaths and I can’t understand how I ever thought that anything I have done is worthwhile or useful,” or (the real crowd-pleaser)  “I think they only had sex with me because they feel sorry for me.” 

Day 28 itself is spent alternately crying and wandering around in a hyperactive hypersexual yet totally unfocused altered state of mind.   I get insomnia and stay up all night re-reading books I’ve read a million times, which leads into more bizarre and apoplectic theories.  Such as: “I’m not even as badass as Pat Califia, I must really not be genderqueer. I can’t believe I even have the right to talk about genderqueerness. My privilege of looking so heteronormative is staggering; perhaps I really am straight.”

Day 29 arrives with expectation (and $4 doled out for the super-strength Aleve, of which I take about 12 million milligrams).  My cramps start working their wrenching circular motions through the lower portion of my body, and I am dizzy with conflicting feelings about how selfish and ridiculous I am.  As soon as the first few drops of blood slide out, I exhale a sigh of relief and my mood is instantly transformed, as if the bad mood that had been built up was just —whoosh! – expelled from my body in one fell swoop. I usually want to then run a victory lap around the library or computer lab at school, punching everyone on the shoulders saying, “We’re here!  We’re alive! We’re all doing this! I was wrong!  We’re not a bunch of shitbags!  Queerness is really real and vital and we really are all special and precious!!!”

And that victory lap will buoy me through the next 3 weeks, and I will make some genuine but half-assed attempts to make the next cycle the last problematic cycle. Appointments with acupuncturists, trips to naturopaths, meal plans heavy on the kale and quinoa, sublingual B-12, and a promise that I will think about quitting coffee. I write letters to my friends and lovers apologizing for my behavior, wash all of my blood-stained boxers and jeans, organize my schoolbooks and binders so that the next months days 26-28 will at least not be accompanied by my klutzy habit of losing important documents (like my taxes, FAFSA forms, or FBI background check form).

There was a time, when I was first radicalized and walked around with Our Bodies, Ourselves that fairly blushed with my pink highlighter marks all over “the important parts,”   that I tried to avenge my period through menstrual love.   I made menstrual pads from old shirts and squares of flannel, I made art with my menstrual blood, I collected and saved some of my blood in little tincture bottles to remind myself of the holy rage and power of a woman’s body.   I was only a few cycles away from joining a lesbian separatist farm, certainly, a place where I envisioned that I could build a blood hut and maybe even make magic spells from pieces of my uterine lining.

In many ways, I realize that my periods are bad because I have endometriosis.  But on an emotional level, I sometimes don’t understand why the entire thing is so fucked up.  There is also a part of me that believes that I am not able to have children, and that the endometriosis is slowly shredding apart my insides, making my uterus an inhospitable and sterile environment.  Why, then, would I suffer this monthly cruel exercise in reproduction? In pondering both my menstrual period and my genderqueerness, I am sometimes shocked and afraid that there is a biological “reality,”   that my body’s function has been pre-destined; in particularly bad cycles, I have thought that the awful nature of my particular PMS is nature’s hideous way of reminding me that whatever ideas I have in my head about being not-quite-all-the-way-female, that I am essentially an egg basket and a baby carrier – and that the bitter brain dysfunction and paralyzing cramps are a punishment, some sort of redemptive Hail Mary designed to yank me back to my role as an obedient woman.  Have I really been marked and punished?  Are there really similarities between the Jesus and his dripping stigmata on the cross, and my dripping bloody cunt?    

Or, alternately, is my menstrual period some sort of divinely vituperative version of It’s A Wonderful Life?

But I have to remember that my bad moods and swinging sense of myself is not real.  The menses are mind-alterers, and I am not an unworthy person.  So, as with most difficult times in my life, the only way I can truly meet this challenge is with the swagger and gravitas of emo-bravado.  So what I have to say, and what I want to remember to say every month is FUCK DAY 28. 

It was all so gorgeous, it really was.  I didn’t know how I was going to explain it to anybody else. I guess I could have kept the feelings hidden away, relegating that type of beauty to a sort of vacation, a dream, a scrapbook.  I could have written a travelogue, perhaps; I could have written letters home, from “there,”  and we all would sit around some day when we’re old around reminisce about the trip we took together. When we went there together.    

But sometimes I can’t explain to anyone outside of Boston what this loneliness feels like. My days are spent knee-deep in dayplanners, study carrels, lesson plans, highlighters: none of it is unenjoyable to me, and certainly it is part of a larger goal that is attainable not too distant.  But it feels so boring when I explain it to anyone else.   I end up turning pages on photo albums, squinting into the dusty, creased, laminated pages.  Did that all really happen?

Do you remember when we rode trains down the west coast together? Do you remember drinking whiskey with our legs dangling out of a boxcar in hot July stillness on a siding in Montana?   Do you remember biking up great altitudes with me, and then coasting down hills with our mouths open wide with glee, the cold wind whistling at the enamel of our teeth?    Do you remember making out with me on newspaper boxes in the San Francisco Dyke March, or running naked through the shockingly cold Pacific Ocean with me? Farming topless?    Running with llamas?  If I say the word “prusicking” and “fanny pack” will you laugh in the same way that I do?

Did you ever go see Ramsey Gulch after the cut?  Would you want to?  Do you have any of my old zines? Did this all really happen?   

Because I live in Boston now. It is wicked cold and I go to bed mad early compared to my days on the west coast frantically scribbling Geraldine Fibber’s lyrics by candlelight and smoking cigarettes out the window with girls with deep throaty laughs.

And, yes, there are things here that I like. But they never seem to make it into my journals.    There is so much to say, also.  A partial list of topics that I have been tossing over in my mind: a creative writing professor at my school wrote a novel about treesitters with an unfactual ending;  the “situation” with the ports and the company in Dubai and that old spectre called the WTO (which did not, apparently, get shut down yet);   a Supreme Court case called Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952);   the feelings of my hamstrings, generally; varieties of apples and the beauty of barren branches against crisp blue skies;  the stress of pondering genderqueerness while in a heavily mainstreamed environment like graduate school at BC and teaching at Dedham High School. 

Somehow I feel that there are secrets that we are holding onto like birds with broken wings, and I want to cradle the bird in my cardigan and rush towards the fireside to nurse it back to health.  Yes! All of it really will happen; and I am certain that it will happen again.

The world seems horrifyingly gorgeous from my perch in the O’Neill Library, and I guess I’ve had too much coffee again.

         The omlette was dill, basil, cilantro, and had a big slab of BRIE in it. And texas toast so big I could only have 3 bites. My friend and I sat in a corner booth,  drank tea, and marvelled over how amazing our bodies are and what they can do for us. We’d just biked around Portsmouth, New Hampshire on a brilliant crisp fall day, and (almost by intuition) had found the Friendly Toast Café.

I had a bit to process about the party we’d been at the night before (if only because we were hung over as fuck). Though I had gotten some serious booty moves goin’ on, I couldn’t help but feel irritated because some guy (who goes to my school, actually, which is nice because I have now hung out socially with 3 people from my school) said that he thinks it’s great that "older" people are still partying (he’s 22). I about fell over, and he was like, ‘Well, no offense, but I don’t know a lot of 29 year olds that party down.’ And the conversation just really grated on me for some reason, even though I know that 29 perhaps sounds really old to someone who is 22.  And that would have been fine if it would have stopped right there; I can deal with the fact that some people are older than others and that for those on the young side, a 29 year old grad student drinking a tall glass of Beam on the rocks might seem out of the ordinary.

But then he proceeded to talk about ALL the girls at the party he thought were cute. Now, again, I realize my own bias: I like to be the most special in the room. Or, at the very least, the most special to whomever I am talking to. I don’t know if this qualifies as self-importance or just a fine appreciation of conversational etiquette. But I was thinking, "Wow, this is interesting. Has my age removed me from his range of options to the point that he surveys his options without awareness of the blatant rudeness of doing so?"

And then I (stupidly!) thought , "Oh, if I was prettier, then maybe he’d be more interested."  The sheer ridiculous of this statement after the fact did not prevent me then from getting all lame and deciding that maybe I just don’t have my mojo going on anymore. I tried to dance up to some girl wearing a sparkly skirt, and she was so wasted she didn’t really respond well (and later, the 22-year old was spotted making out with her up against a pole; he emailed me the next morning to tell me that, in case he "didn’t say this already, she tasted salty.")  One guy asked me for a cigarette, and I suspect he was being flirtatious to me, but I couldn’t figure it out.

             When re-telling this story in the booth over the best omlette ever following a beautiful bike ride through the most picturesque New England countryside, it all seemed absurd enough to make me laugh until I thought my guts were actually accordions. However, at the party, I felt a little less amused. Since moving to Boston, I have felt at times a bit crazy for feeling like I am not very attractive (intellectually and physically).  And then I feel even crazier for spending any time thinking about who does and doesn’t find me attractive. 

         So, my friend and I had am interesting conversation over dinner about capitalism and how we have a compulsion to hoarde stuff. Like, even shopping at thrift stores or whatever, the urge to buy stuff is still compulsive; there is an urgent feeling of, "if I don’t buy this item right now, I might not get another chance to get it!"  And then later in the conversation, we were talking about age, and how people our age are starting to see marraige and kids as this thing that they had better do before they can’t do it anymore. And we wondered if this sense of rush is complicated dating and hanging out. And then I had a revelation; I thought that maybe because I am getting to "that age" where the stakes seem higher for making the decision about having kids or not, and that I moved to a predominantly heterosexual environment right at this time, of course the capitalist instinct is to assess my "marketability" (ie, my ability to find someone to nest and have babies with) based on men finding me attractive. This is the best theory going, because, honestly, the whole thing has not made much sense. I mean, on one level, yeah, whatever: who doesn’t like to feel attractive and who doesn’t like to be pursued by people in socially-powerful positions.  Who doesn’t like to be fussed over and complimented and gazed upon like high-femme royalty? But my queerness has really removed me from a lot of that questioning and agonizing over who is and who isn’t finding me attractive, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my age is fucking with me in subtle ways because I am visiting a lot of themes that relate to things deep within our psyche (about what makes me desirable, about what makes me a woman, etc).

And it’s especially ridiculous to even feel these thoughts roaming through my head. Why should I feel so upset because I feel either not pretty. Why should worry or feel badly because I think that guys don’t like stretch marks on hips, cellulite on the thighs, or anything else that real women have. Why this matters, I don’t know, because I am certainly not looking to really date men, and even if I were, I’m not sure that I would want a man who didn’t like stretch marks. What kind of idiot is that?

        Also notable at the restaurant was our waitress, who was so hot and sexy that my friend and I had several jokes relating to her "can I get you anything else?" question. She had long hair, and I had the thought that if I had longer hair, that I would look more like her, and thus "more sexy." I said to my friend, "I’ll bet if I had long hair, more men would be attracted to me." And he said, laughingly and bit pointedly, "Well, yeah, certain men. Like, most straight men. Is that what you want?" And I was like, "Well, no….(laughing) but it’d be nice to know that they wanted me" And we realized, "That is capitalism right there. Stuff you don’t want and you know you don’t need, but you are taking up an awfully large line of credit to pursue it." Brilliant.

          So that’s where my little Ivy-head is lately. Don’t tell anyone else that I told you this.

My current theory is this:

Look, it’s the time of the year when the membrane between this world and the afterworld is at its thinnest. This is the time when grief can be at its greatest, when our past is very much with us, and when the ache of death is present in all of our activities. It makes sense that things would get all freaky. I have to remind myself of this. I have been crying a lot lately about people who have died years ago, or people who are not in my life anymore, and I have felt very mournful for past incarnations of myself. Revisiting a lot of old themes and talking lots of walks in the old corridors of my mind.

It makes so much sense. I think that things are just this way, before we move into the quiet hibernation of winter. The wheel just keeps turning.

I think that creating and participating rituals are part of this, and I feel shy for not remembering before this weekend that we are in Samhain/All Saints Eve/post-Harvest time. Last week, I worked the Pumpkin Festival at the farm, and it was amazingly beautiful, an achingly brilliant fall day. I walked around the farm to check on the storm damage of trees (we lost a few, unfortunately), and was overwhelmed with the bare branches against the crisp sky and the fallow fields. The farm was silent, where only a few months ago, it had been buzzing with the heavy humid air and swarming insects. I felt like I could imagine myself going crazy, or stepping into another slice of time. I was, for a moment, nonexistent on this terra firma. And then I sweetly came back, and stumbled back to the festival area, where a high school jazz ensemble was playing Green Day covers, and families were participating in pumpkin-tossing contests and chestnut throws. Kids pedaled the bicycle-power blender to make whipped cream like their lives depended on it. We are alive in all our closeness to death.

Anyway, what really sealed the deal for me was bringing our houseplants in to overwinter. Rearranging the shelves to fit everything, repotting the experimental begonias and making room for them on sunny windowsills. The advertisement for the Requim Mass. The deflated pumpkins rotting on everyone’s porch.  These things are all so important, and everything that I do that honors this season seems to shed a little more light on why everything seems so crazy, so unstable, so freakish.

The afterworld is really breathing in on us close, and I think that this time of year is really asking us to face our relationship to failure, to future, to our own creativity, and to our own human strength.

I don’t know, those are my off-the-hip thoughts about it.

I flew home to San Clemente this weekend. My mom had planned a family reunion of sorts with her father’s relatives.  Nobody on the Tolmasoff side of the family gets together anymore, so my mom decided it was a good idea to get everyone together, haul out the rotisserie for shashlik and get on with being sentimental about things. The entire month, I’ve been anticipating a dramatic family reunion, and though I remember these Russian relatives as drunkards and misfits, I imagined that this would be an afternoon of familial comfort, where older women would rub my hands and tell me how proud they are of me, and I would finally accept the touch and closeness that had frightened me for so many years.

Of course, it was nothing like I had hoped for.  Oh, it was interesting. And, oh, it was family, but it was not, of course, the reunion I could have imagined.

Firstly, I need to describe the points of origin of my mom’s family. They are Russian Molokans, of the Clan of the Spirit Jumper. Holy Rollers who speak in tongues during church services. They travelled together from Georgia in the early 1900s, to Los Angeles, where they continued their Old World religious traditions in a spare white clapboard church on Spring Street. I remember going to church, and I remember the roasted lamb and tea afterwards. I remember the non-church events, also — the roundtables of drinking, the singing, the highballs, the arguments, the Russian women with the watery red eyes. For some reason, everybody’s skin is paper-thin and mottled with dark spots where the blood vessels seem ready to burst through, seeping through the epidermis like a map. Or a plum.

Anyway, the Tolmasoff relatives are my mother’s father’s brothers. He had 6 brothers and a sister, but only 4 brothers remain alive. It was these brothers,  and all of their children that are around, who were invited today.  2 brothers arrived early this morning to set up the barbeque, and the one brother brought me books and Russian hymanls translated phonetically.  I need to interject right here that I am incredibly interested in my family and their religion. I imagine myself frequently in Russia, riding my bike through crumbling buildings or sleeping in haystacks while drinking homedistilled vodka. And while I realize that those dreams are fanciful romantic imaginations that are probably 27 degrees away from reality, I still feel them in my bones. I am still Russian. While I was learning Russian in school a few years ago, I felt the words click and clack through my throat with a certainty that was thick with bloodlines and memories.  And I have, in my studies, grown more curious about the religion itself, what it means, how it has evolved.  So when Alex dropped the books in my lap, I was delighted.  I thought we could talk about it. I told him that I was learning Russian, and he just looked at me, and pointed to the hymnbook, and pointed out the prayers. He gave me all the books, but he seemed somewhat uninterested in talking to me.

Was it the tattoos (which are verboten for Molokans)? Was it the tongue piercing? Was it the scratches on my legs and arms that were helpfully pointed out by my cousin Eric?  Was it all of those? None of those? I’ll probably never know, but it was subtle enough not even to feel alienated, just empty. It’s fine to never feel quite Molokan (it’s not something I beleive in), but I have to say that there are times that I wish I could read the Lord’s Prayer in Russian with my uncle Alex and have it mean something. I stood there in my mom’s courtyard feeling that same old feeling I have been feeling for years, and what comes up urgently when I am at their house and around family: I want to feel my emotions, and I want to feel them powerfully. I want to feel real.

What happened in the next few hours, though, was an awkward and excruciating paegent of family. Our cousins are themselves interesting in their own way, but one cousin in particular had some trouble keeping boundaries of physical touch. I realize that he is mentally retarded, but the unwanted physical touch was too much for me to bear. I repeatedly verbally told him how I felt, but to no avail. When I tried to tell my mom how I felt (somewhat embarassed that I, a 28 year old badass needed my mom to rescue me from a conversation about Elvis with my second cousin), she hissed at me to help her slice the pie (never mind that I had been orbiting around the kitchen like a hummingbird maid for the past 15 minutes) and slithered away before I could confide in her. It wasn’t until everybody but my aunt and first cousins had left that we all compared notes about boundary crossing and creepy second cousin vibes. My mom was, of course, shocked, but rather than feel vindicated, I somehow still felt guilty. As if it was my fault that things were awkward. As if I could have done something or said something that would have made the situation flow more smoothly?

The other cousins were interesting but banal, and I definitely felt guilty about that. My interpretion of their boringness is definitely my own chip on my shoulder, but I just couldn’t help it. I did sit down and talk to my mom’s uncle Jim for a long time about his time in the Army (or Marines?) and his service in the Battle of the Bulge. I promised to look up the Battle of the Bulge — not only to make more sense of his stories, but because his personal comments reminded me why I am going to teach high school history, and I do not want to forget the feeling of hanging on his every word, and then of hearing his thoughts and reactions to the Iraq ‘war,’ and how this situation is different than World War II.  That conversation alone is what I flew home from Boston for, except that I was so excited, and so distracted by the creepy cousin out of the corner of my eye, or my two first cousins giggling with each other on the bench next to me, and of the excitment of having a Real Family Moment of talking to Uncle Jim about the Battle of the Bulge, that I could hardly pay attention. My mind raced with the feeling of being a stitch in some fabric of history, a younger guardian of the Tolmasoff family fabric, a secret fanner of the passionate flames of the Russian Molokans (Conscientous Objectors by doctrine, but all Americanized and thus servicemen in WWII).

Where do I fit in with my family? I’m not quite sure. Perhaps I don’t have to fit in anywhere. Their social ways left me feeling awkward (as they always have, every single gathering that I have gone to) but is that partially my own fault? When does the feeling of family snap under my own weight of trying to feel someone else’s idea of family?  I have run up against my feelings about the Molokan side of my family a lot, but I thought that this event would somehow put some of those feelings to rest.  I realize now, on this damp moonlit night in Southern California, as I listen to the palms rustle in the inky breeze, that my family is wierd, and they need an entire novel written about them. And I don’t have to sugarcoat it, or feel sentimental about family that i don’t feel sentimental about, but that my feelings that I have are fine, normal, healthy, beautiful. Family is wierd, and it always gets wierder the more we know about ourselves.

As the evening had dwindled down, my mom’s uncle Morrie stayed to chat. He did his impersonation of my grandfather (whom we all adored), something that we always love. My mom gave him a samovar to make tea, and Morrie chastized me for not rolling to ‘r’ on the end the right way (something which I also loved). After Morrie and his son left, my aunt and cousins and mom and I sat around and compared notes, processing, laughing, eating more cake and scraping peach pie filling out of the crust. I felt the family that i know and love in those moments. My mom poured more wine, my cousins rolled their eyes at their mom, my aunt and mom made wierd comments about labor laws that were nonsensical but nothing I wanted to argue about, my dad did the dishes while us girls all sat around, speculating and gossiping. It felt comfortable, and for the first time all day, I felt content and happy. It is this family that I love, and even though my cousins popped up when it was time to leave and insisted that they wouldn’t be home if i came to visit tomorrow, I felt grateful and loving just to see them in person, to hear the cadence of their voices.  Interetingly, when my mom and I were walking back into the house after waving goodbye to their Mini Cooper, my mom said something to me, and she sounded just like my grandma. Her breath even smelled like Russian food, and I was overwhelmed with the continuity of family.

Portland was everything I wanted, and more — in fact, it was everything I didn’t even realize that I wanted until I was on the tarmac of the airport waiting to walk up the stairway to the airplane back to Boston.

It was so surreal — like something out of a movie. There was nobody behind me for at least 20 steps, and I let the chattering girls in front of me get way ahead of me. I stood on the tarmac, and slowly turned my head westward. The hot, fiery, volcanic evening breeze rush across the hot putrid asphalt, and the gusts of wind blew up from the Columbia, somehow so holy in its power that all the pollution is cleansed. My hair blew back like I was maybe riding horses along the Snake River…

I can’t beleive I am going to graduate school in Boston. I closed my eyes to the setting sun, and thought of everything in Portland — the Fresh Pot, the bikes, my friends, the nights spent at Overlook Park rolling around in tall achey grass laughing and spilling wine and eating blackberries until we are sick, playing hot dice, singing Judy Garland and drinking champage, romping in the backyard, examining the pond, racing down the Mississippi Hill, and laying on the floor of Powell’s Books making notes on what new history books fit the theme of "Dramatic One Word Title: How Something Changed the Face of Civilization/the World" theme. Eating tinned fish at Kelly Point Park and repeatedly telling each otherthe story of the grisly murder scene there a few summers ago (no matter how many times we’ve processed it before), talking shit about Earth First but in a meaningful way that is only trying to make things make sense when everything seems crazy, eating Nicholas’ spinach pie on the banks of the Springwater Corridor, processing complex emotions and gender fluxes all while discussing the best trends in handbags and sporty shoes, all the streets around Alberta with their perfect mosaics and greenhouses and wraparound wood porches and herb spirals and artisan carpentry and espalier pear fences. Everything is just so perfect, and I stood there on the tarmac, so sad.  Feeling so delicate.

And yet, a few hours before, i had been drinking coffee in the Fresh Pot and making notes for potential future doctoral dissertation topics, and later, after talkingwith my advisor for my graduate program again, and I felt this quiet hum of "the right decision."  I was overwhelmingly joyous, sitting in front of the coffee shop,  knowing — knowing!–  that I am making a good choice. That is the feeling to bottle and save.  To tack onto my bulletin board, to sew into the hem of my winter coat. To put a dropperful under my tongue when I start to freak out and wonder, "Oh, fuck, what have I done?"   The joy, the knowing, feeling the tingle of unfamiliarity blending with the excitment that I am fulfilling a goal that I have had for 7 years now.  Yes!

But there on the tarmac, the wind was hot, and Portland hugged me tightly. Always my home. The great Pacific Northwest.

But, yes, "fucking A," I’m in Boston.