Anonymous asked: Why are you so fascinatingly interesting and beautiful at the same time?

:] Wow, thanks!  Anonymous, huh?

Follow Your Heart

zoom

Ah, Jason Read said beautifully and succinctly what I was trying to say in response to this guy:

When I said this:

“Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk”

The schizophrenic logic pattern of this anti-gay rant fascinates me.  I couldn’t find anywhere where someone had transcribed the whole thing, so I did it myself because I am fascinated by the linguistic patterns and the verbal synaptic hopping of the schizophrenic.    Also, this is a great portrait of what happens when schizophrenic people are parked in front of Fox News all day.

“Winter Wipeout Tv Show had broken bones and manslaughter every minute. Winter wipeout show is produced in Holland by gays, bis and orgy-ers. Why do gays like to see people perishing?

P-E-N-I-S goes into the anus to rupture intestines. The more a man does this, the more likely he’ll be a fatality or a homicider. Getting pleasure while the other man passes away reverberates another homicide later. UNESCO United Nations has gender and bioethic conferences combined. Only gays go to gender studies. Gays are the bioethic genociders in hospitals.

Uh, children can be eliminated. The FED stated in this December 11^th article, uh, The Lincoln General Star page 6: ‘Gays should not be employed in Hospitals or any health occupation.’

Whitney Houston was found without clothes in a bathtub. Every corpse found without clothes has a partner that did away with them. Lesbians and gays rarely live past forty years old because it is common for a partner to do away with them or they self-inflict. We want everyone to live as long as possible, to be eighty years old instead of forty years old. Don’t go gay – it’s not healthy.

Anus licking causes sepsis. If not given antibiotics within a half hour, they perish.

Have no gays in education: a high percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don’t have AIDS yet. Be on the side of the innocent boy who get Fs and Ds a year after being molested. Don’t allow hundreds of molestations a year with this equality ordinance. Where are our school teachers that should be speaking about this today?

Hillary Clinton’s roommate four years in college was Eleanor or Eddy Atchison, a gay woman, daughter of Dean Atchison. To avoid going gay like Hilla- Clinton did, college students need single rooms and single gender dorms. Going lesbian is not normal. A college woman is seduced with illegal rohypnol to go gay, otherwise they think it’s abhorrent.

Lesbian professors state, quote, wives are enslaved by their husbands, unquote. All you married councilmen know this is not true and this is deranged thinking.

Have no gays in education: The Canadian Gaëtan Dugas was the first person to get AIDS in 1980. He depressed his immune system with pot. He ruptured intestines as his partner became a corpse. Candida fungus grows hugely on a corpse! AIDS is a candida fungus disease.

Roman senators went to Roman baths to be promiscuous gay, bis and orgy-ers then went to the coliseum to watch Christians get mauled and perish. Do gays become this sadistic? Yes! They cuss after coupling, don’t like the land they lay on, and 80% of those who did treason by the year 2000 were gays. Don’t employ gays in military, education, health or psychology.

They are the genociders, molesters, treasonous deranged.

Gay is not a behavior by the way. A gay is a behavior! It’s not an identity. Shoplifters don’t make good salespersons. Gay behaviors aren’t needed for military, education, health and psychology.

Don’t encourage gays. Do not harm gays. Gays can transform-”

“One minute” - Moderator

“I have… let’s see. Gays can transform to be celibate to live to be eighty years old.

Uh, gay persons want to adopt children. The California Board of Education said last year, ‘Children in San Francisco have the worse scholastics filling all subjects, all grade levels.’ They cry all day and rape each other hetero without being told not to. Give us your molested children deranged by seeing only gays kissing.

Don’t ask, don’t tell what you do in your bedroom, and you’ll be respected for your work.

Read the book Nijinsky, uh, to understand that bisexuals always become insane. A wedding dress is for a woman, not for a man.

Jesus was kissed by Judas, a homo, who tried to sabotage Jesus’ kind ideas. Do you choose Jesus, a celibate, or Judas, a homo? You have to choose.

This is a result of a ten year study by over 700 psychologists, PHDs, read Crisis of Generational Pursuits at andy Lincoln Center School.”

Then her time was up.   

New Ben & Jerry’s Flavor

My Letter to The Afterword Podcast in an Attempt to Win a Signed Copy of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother

I was recently recommended Alison Blechdel’s work and promptly went out and read Fun Home.  Obviously it was amazing.  I’d never read a graphic novel before, and now I’m a little upset because my list of books to read is at about 650, and this means I’ll no longer be able to just ignore graphic novel recommendations, which means my list will grow longer and longer even faster.

 

(I mean, this is me.)

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But, alas, Bechdel showed me what the medium can do, and it was a rich experience indeed.  Though I’m doubtless not anywhere near the first person to say this, I feel like Blechdel is basically the same person as me.  Gay = check, basically overcame OCD but is still totally obsessive and compulsive = check, exhibitionistic = check, writer = check, cartoonist (or whatever) = check, raised by weird parents = check, I’ll see her closeted mortician father and call with my terrifying Mormon mother.

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I hope that I continue to “be” Blechdel in that I hope that I too one day will have my writing (and perhaps my drawings too) published and beloved by and really speaking to so many people.

__

I’m sure I have a lot to learn about life from Are You My Mother, a phrase I actually co-opted from the children’s book years ago, changing it to “Are You My Mommy?” - out of copyright fears - and putting it, along with my drawing of a bird, on t-shirts and other products on Cafepress.com.  

No one ever bought one, it was just something I was inspired to make because I’d long thought of, if not my gayness, my particular sexuality being formed by my problematic relationship with my mother.  I was clearly seeking out a surrogate mother by age five, if not earlier.  I’ve had a number of what I call “mommy crushes,” strong feelings of affection for a woman (often on older women when one is younger, but as one gets older one’s mommy crushes might be on someone one’s own age, or perhaps even somewhat younger), that aren’t really sexual feelings but more that one wants to be held, hugged, cuddled, comforted.  The soft curves of the body are sought after, but maternally rather than sexually.

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So I feel that on some levels, I’ve been searching for a mother all my life.  Which can confuse one’s sexuality.  Now, I haven’t read Are You My Mother yet - I’m the 31st in the hold line at the Boston Public Library - and, yes, I could pay for it, but look I’m an aspiring writer working at a grocery store (Trader Joe’s) in order to live and have enough time to write my first book (not to mention my little blogs), so money isn’t exactly piling up for me right now.  Obviously I need to read this book.  I have such an imagination of what this book is like, that I just can’t wait to see if it’s anything like my ideas.  Whatever it is I just know I have so much to learn from and be inspired from in it.  And Alison Blechdel’s autograph!

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So, it would be so super to win this drawing.  I realize you’re probably choosing these things randomly, but I hope this email was at least not annoying.

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P.S. My goal in life is now to have a blurb on one of my books read, “It’s like David Sedaris and Alison Blechdel got really drunk one night in the 80s and we’ve found their long lost love child.”

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P.P.S. Oh my gosh I’m now being one of those P.P.S. people, how horrible.  I just wanted to say to June that her/(your?) podcast is a delight.  As soon as this contest is over, I plan to start recommending it to all of my friends and customers (the Trader Joe’s customer and potential subscriber to intelligent podcasts venn diagram overlap ain’t bad).

“That Old Cliché”

“News Flash”

Found Note

“Retreating”

The Protein Powder Workout

“Helpful”

Loving my Imperfect Self

Silence - Part 3/3

I so need to read Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works:

“You’ve been there: In the middle of a hot shower, the solution to a problem that had been particularly vexing suddenly becomes clear, like a light bulb going off overhead.

But what quirk of your subconscious is responsible for that? What happens in our brains during that “ah-ha” moment — that shower-induced epiphany — and how does it differ from the type of creativity involved in writing a poem or inventing a new mathematical equation?

…

Q. So, start with that ah-ha moment — that epiphany. What happens there?

A. There is a sharp spike in activity in the part of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus, in the right hemisphere right behind the ear. It’s closely associated with things like inventing metaphors, hearing the punchline of the joke. It kind of confirms in an ironic way the cliche of the right hemisphere is central for creativity.

Q. Why does it help to be relaxed?

A. When we’re not relaxed, our attention is focused on the problem. That means we can’t hear the quiet voice in the back of our head trying to tell us what the answer is.

Q. Some of the most creative minds are altered through either drugs or illness. Are they better at unlocking that answer?

A. A study came out last month that people actually solve about 30 percent more insight puzzles when they’re slightly drunk. In terms of mental illness, that’s complicated. No one would prescribe being bipolar in order to become more creative, but longitudinal study after study has found that there seems to be this correlation between some forms of mental illness — especially bipolar depression — and creative production.

Q. You argue that brainstorming, as we typically define it, doesn’t work.

A. That surprised me. Brainstorming has become the most widely implemented creativity technique of all time. But people are much more productive when they work in groups following a very different set of instructions.

Q. By being critical?

A. This is a legacy of Steve Jobs, who advocated the practice of brutal honesty: He was president and CEO of Pixar during their formative years. They have a meeting every morning where they review the most recent footage of the film they’re working on, and then they engage in what they call the “shredding process.” They tear it apart. Over the course of four to five years of shredding, you end up with a really, really good animated movie. Criticism is built into their process at every step.”

-Gannett News Service