My love affair with the end of the world

Hey y’all,

So, it’s the end of the world. Maybe the end was caused by a terrible war; maybe it was caused by some massive new plague, preferably zombie-related. Heck, I’ll even take an alien invasion or some extremely powerful cult. Whatever you like, I’m not picky. Anyway, the world is over. So, now what?

Orgies?

Well, obviously YOU survive. You, sir or madame, somehow got out alive. You beat off that first zombie with your nine-iron or wine bottle and went on to rescue most of your friends and family. (Not all of them, of course; maybe your sister or best friend didn’t quite make it – after all, it’s gotta be a believable apocalypse). After rescuing your kids and that hot teller from the bank you fought your way through the horde and found the perfect hideout from whence you are planning the glorious new world. Obviously.

Maybe you discovered that hidden talent with guns you never knew you possessed, not to mention increasingly awe-inspiring speed and agility. Maybe you finally became the sort of hero you’ve always imagined that you should be. Despite all of the (not insignificant) difficulties, you managed to survive and thrive, and probably inspired a few others along the way. Obviously.

"My self-esteem is through the roof!"

When we watch movies or read books about the theoretical end of the world, we never identify with the extras. We don’t tell our stories about the people who get eaten on the second day, and part of this is practical; it wouldn’t make for a very good story, or likely a very long one. There is another reason, though, that all of our tales revolve around survivors and oftentimes heroes: in our heart of hearts, that is who we expect to be.

Realistically, for any convincing end of the world, we need a fair number of people to explode/get eaten/get abducted by aliens/have their brains replaced with robots. Yet we all assume that if the end comes tomorrow, somehow – despite the odds piled against us – we, yes we will be the ones to make it out alive. We’ll find hidden reserves of strength, skill, cunning, leadership and resolve; the grand end-of-it will make us the people that we really want to be, which is particularly funny considering many of us *cough me cough* can’t even manage our current, incredibly cushy lives with any semblance of coherent planning.

I've never killed a man with a stapler before, but I bet I could if I had to.

Friends, I love the end of the world for three ridiculous reasons, and I bet you do too:

First, I assume I will survive. Second, I assume that this process of surviving will turn me into someone infinitely cooler than I currently am. Third, if the world ends I’ll be able to rise up with my comrades and make a new and better world for my new and better self to live in, doing something newer and better than I am currently doing now. This is all crazy, of course. I am in a lot of trouble if civilization collapses, I just don’t want to admit it.

Problem # 1: I’m never going to survive the end times. And neither are you.

Well, sure, there’s a chance that you or I might make it through alive, but let’s face it kids – the odds are against us, or at least me. I am legally blind without my contact lenses. Now, before you start thinking that I’m exaggerating, remember that is a direct quote – from my optometrist. I also like eating – you know, regularly – and I’ve never fired a gun or ever had to defend myself from anything more harrowing than a bunch of pissed-off Christmas shoppers. I’m not particularly assertive and I don’t like conflict and I can’t run very fast. I’m not going to say that I’m the worse off of everybody ever, but I’m not going in with any advantage.

Problem #2: The process of surviving probably won’t make me a better person. Or you, for that matter.

In my imagination, surviving turns me into some kind of bad-ass super hero (and gives me great abs, somehow). In truth, people who survive the end times are not necessarily kinder or nobler or braver or better-looking than those people who don’t; some would argue that extremist situations actually favour cruelty, greed, manipulation, etc etc. The end of the world isn’t going to make me a hero or fix my hair or find me true love, it is just going to make it really inconvenient to be hypoglycemic.

Problem #3: The end of the world won’t solve all my problems.

When my job starts to get boring or my life starts to seem like a meaningless cycle of taxes, groceries, laundry and arguments with my mom it becomes quite appealing to start imagining the end of the world as a clean slate. Why, if the world were to end tomorrow, I’d never have to file again! I’d never send another passive-aggressive email or desperately mash zero on my phone because I just want to talk to a goddamn human. I’d never spend twenty minutes in line for coffee and I’d never have to listen to teenagers having conversations on the bus.

                                                                                                                                                                          I can finally end my abusive relationship with the fax machine.

 

Once again, though, let’s get real. After the world ends, I am not going to spend my time sowing the seeds of a glorious new epoch. I will spend my time pregnant, probably, or battling gum disease or simple infections and toiling unceasingly until I die young of some preventable illness, possibly lingering for months without any kind of pain control. The new world will not, categorically, be better than the old. I like my dental hygiene and I like cars and I even like filing sometimes. It is stupid and childish and insulting of me to think otherwise.

* * *

I guess, at the end of the day, it is our desire to break out of our boring routines and our predictable lives that makes movies and books about the fall of civilization so much fun. It’s harmless to want to escape for a couple of hours and pretend to be cooler and faster and sexier than we are. Sometimes I just want to believe that I could beat up a zombie if I really had to.

I know it’s not true, but a girl can dream. Until then, I’ll keep drinking coffee and dealing with bureaucracy and pretending I’m a dinosaur.

Love,

Leslee.

Stuff

I am distrustful of stuff.

I love beautiful things, of course – cute shoes and clothes, gorgeous jewellery, stylish furniture, etc, etc – but even while I covet them, I don’t trust them. Stuff is laden with meaning. Stuff is getting in the way of everything. Stuff can be awful and stuff can be great. It has taken me a long time, and I still haven’t fully come to terms with my relationship with stuff.

When I was younger I wore my disregard of stuff like a badge of honour – I didn’t care about my things, or taking care of them or keeping them safe, because that would be letting them have control over me. I avoided beautiful things, because if I loved a thing then I would worry about losing it or be upset if it broke, and no thing was going to have the power to upset me. I was above all this materialistic nonsense; I was entirely too good to waste time worrying about my petty, unimportant possessions.

I was, unequivocally, drowning in my own bullshit – a condition I probably still haven’t fully recovered from.

There was a secondary, less insipid reason for my callous and calculated disinterest stuff: worrying about the best or newest or trendiest blank was decidedly anti-feminist, and I was determined to be feminist in these matters. Obviously, the patriarchy wanted to divert my energy – the energy that I should be spending learning, fighting, thinking and exploring – into harmless avenues, like the meaningless acquisition of the latest fad. I also understood the concept as the woman-shopper as the main support pillar for a flawed capitalist system that required ever-increasing levels of consumption, and fuck you if you expect me to turn into one of those people.

Listen, I read a lot of Betty Friedan and a lot of Naomi Wolf and I thought I was better than a lot of people; the combination was not pretty.

Our fine feminist fore-mothers do make some excellent points, it is true. And I certainly have no intention of becoming an acquisition zombie, my personality defined in its entirety and exclusively by my level of consumerism. At the same time, though, I had to pull my head out of my own ass eventually.

Firstly, things do not own you. They can – certainly – but stuff, by its nature, is not innately suffocating. I can have nice things, and enjoy them reasonably, and want to take good care of them as an expression of respect for the work I’ve done to get them – and still recognize that cute dress is just a cute dress and has no power to make me happy or satisfied or emotionally fulfilled. I can play with my appearance, spend a little money looking the way that I have chosen to, and still be a serious and ethical person. Stuff, in moderation, is a lot of fun. There is no need to punish myself – ourselves – for enjoying it.

What I had to recognize, when I stopped dressing it up in grand puritanical terms, was in fact a tight and unreasonable fear. I was afraid of what stuff – particularly clothing, the main ‘stuff’ of our adolescence – would do to me.

I was afraid of looking like a person who cared about her appearance – what would people think? Obviously, they’d think I was silly and superficial and not someone to be taken seriously. I didn’t want how I looked to detract from who I was, and I made the novice mistake of believing that I could take myself out of the conversation entirely. I couldn’t, of course. I’m always here, and people are always looking at me – and my stuff.

Secondly, and more broadly, I had to give up the idea that it was anti-feminist to care about my appearance. Certainly, there are branches of feminism that reject appearance and the concomitant materialism, and there are good arguments to be made about the infantilizing and paralyzing obsession with stuff that many women experience. But stuff itself is not anti-feminist. Cute shoes are not anti-feminist, unless you are wearing them against your will because you feel like you have to. There is certainly still a looks discrepancy, and I will say that there is more pressure on women then men (although the gap is closing fast) to buy, have, and acquire. Yet I am quite convinced that I can have nice things and dress how I want as an expression of power, rather than an abandonment of it. I can’t blame high heels or bath products or the reams and reams of makeup for making me feel bad about how I look – that stuff just is. I decide how I live with it. That is my choice.

Okay, so I moved through a kind of narcissistic aestheticism that was at once self-righteous and irritating, and I came out the other side as a person with a healthy respect for stuff. The problem arose, though, once I got to the other side. It’s okay to have some stuff – but how much is too much?

This question – the question of “too much” – has been bothering me a lot lately. When thinking about stuff, we generally have to think about three things: what we need, what we want, and what we can afford. Sometimes, those three things agree nicely and everyone goes home happy, but this is rare. Add to this my own complicated feelings and the still-lingering fear that, to paraphrase Fight Club, the things I owned would end up owning me, and you begin to see why the question of “too much” adds another layer of unwelcome confusion.

What do we need? What do we want? What can we afford? These questions get confused easily. What I ultimately have to conclude – and I am bad at putting this into practice, and I apologize – is that none of us gets to judge anyone else for this stuff. Some people are happy and satisfied with three pairs of shoes – some people cannot function with less than twenty. Some people think candles are a waste of money; others, cars. Unless your stuff affects my happiness – and usually, it doesn’t – then I’m afraid I don’t get a say. Do the best you can to live happily with you stuff, and I will do the same.  

So I come back to the question of “too much” – the thing that’s been bothering me. How do you know you have too much? (And I truly believe that, except in pathological circumstances, only you can know this):

If you spend more than you earn, you have too much. If your stuff is keeping you from the things you really want – like a house or kids or a car or a vacation – you might have too much. If you can’t get around your house, you have too much stuff. Most importantly, if you feel suffocated, overwhelmed or depressed by your stuff, then you definitely have too much.

That’s where I’ve found myself, recently. Looking at all my stuff and realizing that it’s taking up too much space, too much time and too much energy. I hope I’ve gotten to a place where I can deal with all this stuff exactly as it is, and not let my complicated feelings get in the way. I’m learning to live with stuff, slowly. I can be generous, I can be careful. I can be ruthless if I want – it’s my stuff, and ultimately, I’m stronger than it is.

And so are you, of course.

 

Love,

Leslee

Getting Dressed

Do not dress to impress. Dress to express.

Dress joyfully. Dress for love. Dress because life is wonderful; put on the clothes that remind you best of that happiness. Wear joy fearlessly; layer all the best things, all the things that make you smile. Dress for the wonder that you are here and somehow, despite everything, you are making it work.

Do not dress to conform. Do not dress to hide; do not dress because you hope it will help you avoid scrutiny. No one avoids scrutiny. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you can dress to be invisible: everyone will see you, and they will see that you are a person who wishes to be invisible. Do not dress to please anyone unless you really want to, and don’t do it all the time. Dress to please yourself, most of the time: this is an underated kindness.

Dress fearlessly; dress with unending courage. Know that you are entitled to look however you want to – do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Do not worry about judgement - the worry will hamstring you, leave you limping. Stride purposefully towards the look that makes you feel at home, and ignore the people who tell you otherwise: they are crippled with fear.

Do not worry about dressing “skinny” or “flattering your figure”; your figure is fine just the way it is, and you are exactly the right size. Even if you want to lose weight, celebrate the body that is getting you there. Celebrate yourself and ignore the promise of corrective clothing, as if you were a thing that needs fixing. You are not: your body is not. Wear horizontal stripes; swath yourself in oranges and pinks; learn all the subtle nuances of silk. Break the rules; burn the magazines. Ignore any fashion that makes you feel bad. Do not dress your body as punishment: it does not deserve to be punished. Do not worry about your fat ass or skinny arms or breast or cheeks or eyebrows. They are perfectly good. You are perfectly good.

Do not listen to what your mom says about how you dress if it makes you feel bad. Do not listen to what your best friend says about how you dress if it makes you feel bad. Listen to what your boss says – but only if you have to. I am not saying that your mom and best friend and boss do not have your best interest at heart: they may, but do not listen to them if it is not communicated to you lovingly. No one should have the power to make you feel bad about the difficult, frustrating, creative, amazing process of looking the way that you do.

We all participate in this pageant of decoration: we are all prisoners and we are all each other’s prison guards. We put these rules on ourselves; we pass judgment, we make assumptions, we insult and we degrade. We punish each other for imagined transgression. Everyone has to get dressed. No one should have to feel bad. No one should have to hate the process.

All bodies are good bodies and deserved to be dressed however they want to.

Wear florals. Wear polka dots. Wear oversized mens shirts and spandex hot pants, so long as it makes you happy.

And try to remember – as I am trying to remember - to be gentle with all the people getting dressed around you. Try to be kind - as I am trying, and not always succeeding, to be kind. We all have to put on clothes in the morning. We have the power to make the experience joyful – for everyone. It is a monumental feat to accept what people wear, because we attach so much judgment to such a supposedly simple thing. It is a huge leap of faith that we can take – that I am trying, and not always quite managing, to take.

Remember, even when it is hard, that no one has to give you permission.

 

Love,

Leslee.

Back to Maxwells – My Complicated Relationship With Bars

Hey y’all;

I’ve written before about Maxwell’s Bistro down on Elgin, but I don’t think I’ve really done it justice. Maxwell’s is a strange and alien place, the kind of bar that you discover slowly and only with a great deal of patience. It has taken me nearly a year to become a regular, and it’s opened my eyes to something nearly unrecognizable in the bar scene – sincerity. Maxwell’s is weird and wacky; Maxwell’s is foreign and unknown; Maxwell’s is a different world entirely. Step through the wardrobe.

A good bar takes the experience of sadness and makes it friendly and familiar; any bar can give you a place to party, but how many bars give you the mental space to mourn? Sometimes the presence of strangers lessens our sadness, and sometimes they make it worse. If you are depressed, and you go to a bar, and all you feel is more depressed and upset, than you are in a bad bar. A good bar won’t necessarily make you happy – happiness is a cheap commodity and tarnishes quickly – but a good bar will give your sadness a public face and will make your sadness more bearable. A good bar will be a good place to party, certainly, but it will also be a good place to not be alone.

At first glance, Maxwell’s (Wednesday nights) is no place for me. The clientelle are distinctly of my mother’s generation, the music – performed live by Johnny Vegas and his All-Star Band – is classic lounge fair, lots of Elvis and Nat King Cole, all the greats, a few Bat Miztva classics. There is a strong sense of belonging; clearly, the people who show up on Wednesday nights have been showing up every Wednesday for fifteen years. It can be intimidating to be on the other side of that kind of community – to be an outlier in every sense of the phrase.

I kept going because my friend sings with the band – solidarity, all that jazz. I sensed that I did not belong, but I am used to not belonging, and I’ve learned to go past that, slowly but surely. So I kept going, once, twice, three times a month, home before midnight, get up and dance, alone, to a song or two, if the mood struck me – and that was okay. Sometimes other people would be there – friends of my friend, family members, cousins or coworkers, normalizing this little place with their familiarity, maybe only for an hour. It was strange, and then it wasn’t, anymore. And then something happened.

I remember the first time the one bartender remembered my name. Such a small thing, really – I’m sure he learned to do it early on, gets better tips that way. Before long they all knew my name – or came up and introduced themselves. We had inside jokes, the bartenders and I: the nerdy-looking one, the one who always wore plaid, the one who looks like a biker. It might sound pathetic, but that recognition – that sense of being familiar – made me feel a little more at home.

The regulars started to know me, started asking me to dance. Well, actually, I started asking them to dance, since I do a little lindy-hop, a little jive. The response was always the same: open, happy surprise. A sense of welcome started to creep up on me, and I began to realize the difference between Maxwell’s and so many other places: the community here was not vested in exclusion, was not built around keeping people out. The thing that made me feel strange came from inside of me and was driven by presumptions and foregone conclusions that I never bothered to explore. Maxwell’s never tried to make me feel like an outsider; I did.

The last time I went to Maxwell’s, I brought a friend. We did some swing dancing, and as we left the floor a man in his early-to-mid-thirties stopped us. He had his arms crossed in front of him, a beer bottle clenched in his meaty fist. He squinted at me and asked a question I’ve asked myself over and over again – in this bar, in every bar, in every brave new world, on every unfamiliar bus route:

“What are you doing here?”

He wanted to know what we - young people, clearly not the target audience, not recognizably a part of this crowd, presumed to be strangers – saw in a place like Maxwell’s. Shouldn’t we be packed into a noisy club or overpaying for warm beer in a campus pub? We were unexpected, and he wanted an explanation.

I found out later that he was there with a group of about twenty young guys, celebrating a birthday. I called them “the football team” all night – turns out they were cops. The world is full of surprises.

I glanced at my friend, then back to our accoster – arms folded, eyes narrowed, looking for all the world like he had been dragged to this alien world against his will. I frowned at him.

“Because this is a great place.” I said. Sure, I gave him concrete reasons: friendly staff, good dancing, and no creepy dudes trying to pick me up – well, considerably fewer than average, anyway – and my friend in the band. But you can’t explain a place like Maxwell’s. You either get it or you don’t. You can’t just go once, though. You have to keep going – you have to laugh when the tiny hairdresser tucks her business card into your cleavage in the bathroom; you have to be a little rude to the old dude in the skin-tight bike pants and the velour dress shirt who won’t leave you alone; you have to smile at the cute bartender and cheer for the band; you have to wave to friendly ladies when you pass them unexpectedly on the street somewhere; you have to engage.

The kindness is surprising.

Maxwell’s is a great place to be sober. Maxwell’s is a great place to be drunk.

Maxwell’s feels like going home.

It’s comforting, somehow.

 

Yours,

Leslee.

 

Lolcats Win Every Argument – The Problems With Dialogue on the Internet

Hey y’all,

I think every person alive today needs to sit down and think about his or her relationship to the internet. The web is a huge, terrifying, wonderful place – it’s the center of the sun. It’s infinite. It’s unbearable. And it befuddles me, greatly.

The problems with the internet come not from the plethora of questionable porn or the reams of blogs by fifteen year-olds; the major problem with the internet is that there are no ground rules. You can do and say nearly anything you like, which is a blessing and curse. My question is, how do you disagree with someone on the internet?

Some of my friends have adopted a strict non-engagement policy. They just don’t get involved, and sometimes I think that’s the best idea – it is almost impossible to win an argument on the internet without being a dick, and often the mere effort involved is exhausting. They’ll make exceptions for friends and family – people they might see in real life – possibly because when you argue on the internet with people who you actually see on a day-to-day basis the risks to being a huge dick outweigh the rewards and the chances that you can have a productive chat increase.

Still, lets say you DO decide to disagree with someone on the internet. It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to get a real debate going, and no matter how hard you try, you’re much more likely to get the following:

-People who call you a dick/faggot/faggit/asshole/*racist slur* or whatever else they fancy at the time. Some people literally cannot take disagreement, and if they’re going to yell insults at you it’s probably best just to turn off the internet and go make a sandwich.

-People who argue with you without reading what you wrote. This can be UNBEARABLY FRUSTRATING as you find yourself re-iterating and re-phrasing points you have already made to disprove the very first thing they said. If reading comprehension is the problem, there is really no point in continuing.

-People who tell you to “just go away” if you don’t agree with them. “It’s a free country” and “it’s my opinion” are two of the most difficult phrases in the English language, but they deserve to be deconstructed. Technically I could just go away. The internet has the benefit of being infinitely turn-off-able. I can always close the website if I don’t like what I’m seeing, and from that point I can see the validity in the “it’s a free country, if you don’t like it you can piss off” state of affairs. However, shutting down dialogue is hurtful to everyone involved. If I cannot take (good, intelligent) criticism of my ideas, then I am truly worthless person. On another level, everything on the internet does affect me even if I can turn it off – because real people I have to deal with can encounter these strange and ill-created ideas and their behaviour very much affects me.

So I suppose if you really just don’t want people to argue with you, the best thing to do is to stay off the internet. At the same time, separating the (good, intelligent) criticism from the barrage of human waste that can end up in comment fields can be difficult, time-consuming and tiring. And don’t tell me that “it’s [your] opinion” – if you have an opinion on anything that can be supported or refuted by actual facts, then you need to be ready to defend that opinion.

Let me illustrate the difference between an opinion you do not have to defend (and which you are legitimately allowed to ignored criticisms against) and an opinion you do have to defend:

1. “I like not having abortions.” – good for you! I cannot, realistically, argue with you that you do, in fact, LIKE having abortions. This opinion cannot really be disproven. Success?

2. “Abortions are morally wrong.” – whoa! Wait a minute! That, while not a concrete fact, is an idea that can be argued. So don’t shut me down with “it’s my opinion” – if your opinion applies to more people than just you, than you need to have something to support it. End point.

Most of the issues we face when we argue on the internet are the same issues we face when we argue in real life: namely, that people don’t understand how language works. The problems are intensified on the internet, however, because there is no time-keeper, no mediator, and no baseline understanding of what it is we’re doing. Arguing on the internet is like bringing an appetizer to a dinner party where you don’t know anyone, only some of the guests are robots and one is a giraffe and three are blind orphan guinea pigs and another is Patrick Stewart and then the rest are on fire.

It’s challenging, is what I’m saying.

Still, I think it’s important to keep arguing and it’s important to keep writing. We have to defend our intellectual space, on the web and otherwise. If we quit, the trolls win, and then we’ll all just have to go back to reading books and doing crosswords like chumps.

Love,

Leslee.

Regarding Babies

Hey y’all,

To follow with my last post concerning pair bonding, I thought I’d take a minute and a glass of wine to talk about babies. Not children, exactly – because they are little people and therefore more complicated – but babies. Reproduction, to use the baser phrase. Breeding.

First, a caveat – I have no babies myself. I’m coming at this from the least-babied place imaginable, never having had brothers, sisters, cousins or children of my own. Babies are a terrifying mystery to me, and I have spent a lot of my time trying to unravel just what it is that makes these screaming balls of poo - I mean, precious tiny miracles – so appealing to so many people.

When I first hit the age that spawning became a thing my body could do, I decided emphatically that I DID NOT want babies. They were smelly, sure, and a lot of responsibility, but more than that they were a vast scary unknown. When I hit puberty, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d interacted with infants, and those times were more than enough.

Even then, there were girls who were into babies – girls who had babysat and already knew that they were going to have four children (a girl, then a boy, then a girl and then a boy) named Ainsley, Matthew, Emma and Kyle. They had an unwavering determination to use the womb that nature gave them – and quick! – and keep up the survival of the species. Whether or not they’ve had their young, their success is debatable.

It always makes me laugh when single women (who wouldn’t consider having a child alone) “plan” on having kids. If you aren’t willing to go solo, how can you “know” that you’re going to have babies? Or how many? Or when? I’d like to have a kid or two someday, because I like them and I’ll need someone to celebrate Christmas with when all my family are dead. I’m willing to accept that it may not happen, but I’d also be willing to reproduce all on my lonesome, which might be crazy, but at least I have a backup plan.

These days, I have friends all over the baby-making map. Some are just getting ready, some finished up years ago, some are right in the thick of it. Everybody loves it when people get pregnant and have babies, especially family members and would-be grandparents. MAKE SPAWN. Little tiny people! So adorable!

I don’t get it, and I’m at a point in my life where I LIKE kids.

Babies: confusing.

One of my be-child’ed friends made a very astute observation: no one ever warns you that you might not like your offspring. You know you have to feed them and house them and dress and even love them, but like them? Mother nature has no need for that. Our species doesn’t care if you get along with your kids, if you understand them or if they are complete strangers to you.

Mother nature also doesn’t care about sacrifice, suffering, worry, loss of sense of self, or all the other crappy parts of parenting. Mommy Magazines make light of the suffering, positioning all the things you give up in a cheery, we’re-all-in-this-together sort of way. Man, parenting! It’s tough! Here’s a recipe for vegan Mac and Cheese Your Kids Will Actually eat, gosh golly gee!

And it’s not like there are any tests take or any standards to bear witness to. We are all just faking it. Lets admit that it’s terrifying. Let’s admit that it’s not always wonderful. Let’s take the saccharin out of childcare and make it a thousand times more acceptable to never have kids, and let’s make it more realistic if you do.

Kids are fucking weirdos, and yours are no exception. Let’s talk about how fucking hard it is, how scary, how strange. Don’t give your daughters dolls that look like babies. Give them legos and sex ed. They’ll be grateful, and they’ll probably go have babies anyway, but the panic will be gone.

Kindness, people. It makes better people and better parents of us all.

Have kids, or don’t, but try not to worry about it or make your whole life about it. There is so much more to the world than the new little people we produce.

I might offend some people with this, but I don’t mean to. Just relax, everybody. None of us are getting out of this alive.

Yours,

Leslee.

Dating, Mating, and Etc.

So.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dating and love and all that business as of late. It’s a popular topic: I see it on facebook, I read about in books (dating books are great if you want to feel like the world has been eating crazy tomatoes), I carefully avoid movies about it and I talk about it Ad Nauseum. The truth is, of course, that I have no idea how anybody dates anybody; heck, I don’t even know how I date anybody, and I’ve been doing it with moderate success for six or seven years.

It was so much simpler in high school. Some of us dated and some of didn’t, and people broke up and etc etc. We didn’t date people with kids, we didn’t get married, we didn’t get divorced, we didn’t date people in other countries or even other school districts. I’m not saying it was a good system – it wasn’t, categorically - but it was easy. I knew what the hell was going on back then, even if I didn’t entirely get it.

Now, I’m worse than clueless. Part of me wants all the happily-ever-after bullshit and part of me wants to die alone and get eaten by my seven huskies because fuck you, that’s why. Thing is, I have ISSUES with the way we treat dating, being in a relationship and being out of one. Big, angry issues. Surprise, surprise.

I suspect our language is part of the problem: we talk about dating and love as if it were something we could achieve, a goal we could get to if we just worked hard enough. There’s a phrase I’m secretly angry at all the time – “relationships take work”. A relationship is not a shed; you can’t guarantee you’ll make a good one just because you spend three hours on it every weekend and follow all the DIY advice. Certainly, relationships (romantic and otherwise) require effort: if you aren’t willing to give people and their needs your time and attention then obviously you’re setting yourself up for failure. At the same time, claiming that “relationships take work” implies that if your relationship doesn’t “work out” it’s because you aren’t “working hard enough.”

Bullshit.

We treat romances that end as if they are failures, but we have to start acknowledging that a relationship that ends hasn’t “failed” and that we aren’t bad or lesser people for “letting” it end. Love is not a three-legged race where the winners are the ones who get to the finish line together (and then die in tandem). Love is not a competition! It’s an element of our lives that is important and beautiful, but not something we win or lose.

You could argue that these same issues come up with our platonic friendships, but friendships have never inspired the intense, visceral reactions to the birth or death of our hangings-out. Actually, it might be better to talk about our relationships as if they were living things, small animals that we needed to feed and care for in order to keep them healthy. Yes, sometimes relationships die of neglect, and that’s unfortunate, but just as often they pass away from natural causes, or we force them to keep going long after they’ve lost all quality of life. It’s okay to let relationships die; it’s a kindness. Sometimes it’s a mercy-killing.

Is lifetime monogamy realistic? Honestly, I don’t think so. That’s not to say that I think it’s impossible; obviously, some people do it. But it takes a lot to love someone for 40 or 50 years (our lifetimes being so much longer these days) and it’s entirely likely that for most of us the task of loving the same person for all that time would prove unreasonable. Still, if you want to try, I think that’s very noble, or at least not overtly foolish. You make the best decisions you can with the information you have available to you, and of course sometimes things change. That doesn’t make your marriage a waste of time or your relationship a failure. A life lived courageously is never a failure.

I guess what I want to say, ultimately, is: go ahead. Shoot for the moon. Promise to love each other forever: many will break that promise, but a few won’t, and how can you know until you try? “I love you forever right now” might be the most honest thing you can say to a person, but the qualifier shouldn’t really be necessary. People are fickle, it’s true, but that alone doesn’t make us cruel.

Date stupidly, love wildly, ”fail” miserably; have lots of great sex, make promises you might not keep. Don’t let the process take over your life (those people are unforgivably boring) but make sure to enjoy the wild ride, whatever seat you’re in.

Love,

Leslee.

Contentment

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think, ‘If this isn’t nice,  I don’t know what is’.” – Kurt Vonnegut.

The Buddhists say that it is the nature of human life that we suffer, and that only by abandoning our ego and our desires do we overcome this suffering and obtain peace.

I think this is bullshit. Why should the human condition be suffering? Why should we be pre-destined to agonize, to feel pain, to feel hopeless? When you abandon longing and desire entirely then you quit; game over, nothing to see here, folks. I cannot sympathise with people who give up, who stop playing because the game gets hard. That’s called resignation, and it’s for suckers.

Still, the ability to set those things aside – those overwhelming needs, those desperate desires, those petulant displeasures - that’s a powerful thing. The ability to feel peace, to hold moments of sweetness in our minds like the music of wind chimes – of course, that matters. There is a strength available when we find a groove, when we start working out the kinks, when we practice loving-kindness to ourselves. When we know we can always go home, because home is a soft place to fall that lives so deep inside of us that nothing can touch it.

To me, this is contentment. I want to talk about contentment, about that metaphysical sense of coming home, because it is so important to me, because it holds on when everything else gets lost or confused or right proper fucked.

Contentment is not happiness. Happiness is a fleeting thing – happiness is the moments we find in-between and happiness is the ultimate in subjectivity. Some people are happiest at rock concerts, over beers, in a jet. Happiness isn’t a thing you can hold onto; it’s fleeting and ephemeral and easily misplaced. It is important, but passing.

Contentment is a fuller thing, rounded and smoothed at the edges. I find myself utterly content on crowded buses, in the middle of parties where I don’t know anyone, sitting alone in a bar or lying awake in bed at night. It’s not a big presence – it doesn’t demand attention, it doesn’t yell or stomp until I notice it. Contentment follows me like footprints in snow.

Resignation is not contentment. If you feel like this is it, this is all I can do, this is as good as it’s going to get, then you aren’t content. You have settled for less. Settling-in is not settling; finding your comfort zone is not the same thing as hiding within it. Resignation stems from fear – fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of the unknown. Contentment stems from courage – the courage to see all the wonderful things and less-than wonderful things and know them, and love them anyway. When you are content, you don’t avoid new things, and you certainly don’t find contentment by staying away or standing still. You have to dive in, you have to go further, and sometimes you fall off the edge of the world, and it’s beautiful.

Being content does not mean that every thing is perfect, and it doesn’t mean that we have no regrets. We get to a good place by travelling hard roads, by surviving our mistakes and our failures, by fucking up again and again. How can we love anyone if we don’t know what we’re giving up? Our hearts aren’t worth much until they’re broken; the value comes from the risk. Whole hearts can never love fully – the strength comes from the weak spots, and the seams are stronger for being ripped apart and sewn back up again.

Contentment is not mandatory. There is nothing superior about contentment – nobody is better or worse for having it or not. But it is a soft spot to fall; it’s a warm bed for the soul to sleep in. That warmth is a kindness we can give ourselves when nothing is working. That feeling of yes, exactly, completely, that sense of belonging to our own skin keeps things sane. In a world full of lunatics and strangers, sometimes the only safe place is within ourselves. When we are content, no matter how much fucking-up we do, our hearts and our heads are always friendly places.

We do not live our lives awash in contentment, moving like bees through a garden. Life is cruel; life subjects us to heartaches and crushing defeats. Finding contentment in life is a constant process, like breathing, like feeling your heart beat. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can avoid every pain by contentment; they are lying, and possibly trying to sell you something. Don’t let anyone sell you contentment. It’s free, buried deeply but available. It’s there, the beating heart of the world.

How do we get to content? How do we find the sweet spot? Some people suggest renouncing material possessions, and certainly there is only so much contentment you can get from a flat-screen TV. But things have never been the source of our disquiet, although they can be distracting, and they do make a convenient scapegoat. You can have things and be settled and gentle with the world, and you can have nothing and be settled and gentle with the world. You can get a little harmless happiness from things, and still find feathered byways in your mind filled with contentment; they are hardly mutually exclusive.

Some people find contentment by letting go, by giving in, by giving up. Some people find it by fighting back, by standing up, by holding fast. Contentment isn’t one mindset or the other – contentment is the peace we find by doing what feels right. Do we face our days with kindness, fighting or surrendering with warmth, changing our minds and screwing up and breaking promises but always, in the end, feeling that safe space at the center? Contentment isn’t a series of actions, it’s the sense that those actions are the best we can take, and the knowledge – deep and secret – that no matter what happens, it will be alright.

I am getting to that place, slowly. I am getting to alright; I am finding my way home. The fullness of being alive terrifies me; the courage of living inspires me. Of  course I get angry – of course I am cruel, I am hurtful, I am impatient and petty. Contentment doesn’t justify bad behaviour, but it is a quiet place where I can go and examine my critics, and acknowledge when their criticism are correct. I can choose to be better, because I’m getting to a place - warmer than summer rain and twice as gentle – where everything comes together. Not to say that the pieces ever really fit; they can’t, but we learn to live with the hard places, the jagged edges. They become part of the scenery.

I guess we spend our whole lives getting to alright. The journey is worth it.

 

Love,

Leslee

Sometimes I write shit. This is where it goes.

“Vast hordes of semi- or untalented amateurs festoon the Internet with their ungrammatical, puerile trash, and they think because this vanity publication gets seen by a few people, that they are writers. Horse puckey!” – Harlan Ellison.

 

Hey y’all.

Welcome. This is a blog, of the usual type. There will be ramblings, there will be laughter, and certainly somebody is going to get offended. I’m still going to use the ‘eff’ word. Like this: Fuck you, Pandas.

I don’t actually have anything against Pandas. That was just an example. I’ll use those too. Also, incorrect capitalizations. And sentence fragments. If your panties get knotted, you can leave them at the door.

This blog will be about Big Ideas and my opinions thereon. Not because I think I have anything new or particularly clever to say, but I like talking about Big Ideas, because it keeps us thinking about Big Ideas. I will also talk a lot about little ideas, because sometimes I just get really fucking angry about people on the bus or really excited about vaginas. It happens.

Pull up a chair, have a bottle -er, glass- of wine. Whatever. Make yourself comfortable. I know I’m certainly not going to be wearing pants most of the time.

Expect a real post soon. This place will feel like home in no time.

 

Love,

Leslee.