#uncoffeed...

...so I've been crying, quietly or not, for at least 20 minutes now, which is no big deal because it's what girls do, right? Why is that, exactly? Why do guys not do it? Does crying make me girly? Go ahead and cry, guys. I give you permission. It makes me human. It makes me hurt and unresolved. I seriously dislike lack of resolution - this is why I watch detective stories. There's a neat wrap-up at the end. Also, it is a big deal. It's a big deal when anybody hurts enough, for whatever reason, to sit and cry alone in a room. When you do it, give yourself a hug and also a pat on the back for allowing yourself to feel. You don't need to suck it up. You need to listen to your body , and do what you need to do. In all things. I feel like I have a hole and it's the source of the crying - a void with raw edges that I manage to patch up on most days, so that nothing falls into it and nothing leaks out. It has a voice and it wants something I can't identify...

...so you may remember my banyan tree. I grew it from seed, killed it three times, and vowed to never kill it again. I have a simple gauge of a person's nature: name something you've maintained for at least ten years. My answer is a pile of unfinished projects, furniture I've shucked from state to state, and I had this tree since my second year of marriage. In a way it represented the marriage: it kept reviving itself after near-death experiences. I moved it with pride to Annandale from DC. I was excited about moving forward. And then I got distracted and left it outside to freeze. I developed an interesting bundle of emotions this weekend and decided to burn the stump in a sort of cleansing ceremony. I even folded the pages of a book - Urdu for Beginners - to use as firestarter . The landlords are away and I wouldn't have to explain the blaze in the driveway. And then I realised I don't care. I don't require a ceremony to absolve myself of this failure...

There’s a lot of uproar in our country right now.  Lines are blurred as everyone tries to stick with the status quo: choose one label for yourself, and go at it hard. Choose my label, so that our team will win ; there's strength in numbers!  Sorry, guys, our bodies and our psyches don’t work like that. I am several things: female, white, not white, human, writer, artist, introvert, pacifist, arrogant, heterosexual…I make a damn fine Venn diagram. Someone named Joe Manion once said, “We give up something when a choice is made.” Write this down somewhere, because he deserves credit for his words and his observation is solid. How, then, do you choose one label for yourself? If you choose human, do you give up your gender? If you choose pacifist, do you give up your right to defend equality? Very few people on this planet are comprised of a singular race or cultural genetic makeup; more people spit in the tube every day and are surprised by their DNA results. ...