io sono mia

dear friends,

today has been such a good day for feminist raging that I can't help but share with you guys. first of all, last night I had to do some recovering because a prospect fell through and it was a bit rough. thank god for feelings mgmt though, i mean writing out and through all of the bad ways that i feel is usually good enough to banish them at least for awhile and sometimes for always. so that was the first one. second, in greg smith's class today we talked about italian feminism and i heard the slogan "io sono mia" which basically means "i am mine" and which is an extremely powerful and reassuring thing to say and to remember and to believe. i mean in italy the context is extra extreme especially in terrible places like sicily where your parents have the right to kill you and your lover if you have premarital sex, and where there was not a law passed against rape until 1996 (1996!!!! what the fuck!!!) and before that it was a common practice for men to kidnap and rape the girls that they wanted to marry and then the girls almost always married them because their reputation was so tarnished that they couldn't ever hope to marry anybody else. so for sicilian girls saying io sono mia is a powerful and political statement but it is for us too. next i had a big phone talk with lindsay about her discontent and relationship and self-trouble and talking to her i dug up this gem on my xanga from freshman year so i have decided to post it. it is a little bit long and might have outdated references, but here it is nonetheless:

Thursday, March 19, 2009

waxing philosophical (practically a dissertation)

Currently All Hail West Texas By The Mountain Goats Color in Your Cheeks see related I think I know what it is: Thinking about who I am/was/will be, one of those things is held constant is a girl. Hate to be so gender-specific but a lot of the problems I've had and the problems i see other ladies having re:boys, self-esteem are the same. Legacy of oppression blah blah blah because it's hard to see the modern significance of that fact until you start to compare. I mean I'm honing in on what's important, just generally speaking, just regarding my life and everything nowadays and I'm glad. Ok. Relationships: never had one that didn't completely overtake my mind. Is that because it's love? Could be, but I think a better explanation would be the fact that being a half of a couple so overtook my identity that it took up most of my time and mental capacity with being the kind of girl and the kind of girlfriend that I thought I should be. A common complaint I see, mostly in long-term couples, is that the lady is upset that her boy doesn't pay as much attention to her as he did in the beginning. myself included--I vividly remember the feeling and it really sucks. But what in us trains us to yearn so hard for increasing amounts of attention and affection? The lovey-dovey sweet actions that constitute romance performed by men is short-lived if that. It dies! Always! Why do we fool ourselves that we can resurrect it? Why do we need it so acutely in the first place? I guess I should be more clear on my definition of romance--because romance being simply a poetic moony notion that we can use to color the dullness of everyday life is perfectly acceptable. This romance we fabricate in our own heads, but what we don't realize is that we generally fabricate the kind associated with love that way too. I guess my argument is thus--that we should not depend on boys for romance, because they will inevitably let you down sooner or later if that's what you are concerned with. Construct romantic notions in your head at your leisure, but the kind of romance from nicholas sparks is not the kind that you're going to get--the female appetite for romance is so ravenous that no man can satisfy you as well as you would be able to satisfy yourself with pure fantasy. dani got a boyfriend over break, the one she called a "stage 3 clinger" when she first met him while she was seeing tim. I gather they talked on the phone and texted a lot before break, saying I miss you etc nightly even though they had only been on one date really before this. He surprised her friday night by showing up to a fancy party she was at and they talked and they are going out and they said love yous. Mind you, it's been a week? two? It's funny how often I use her for character study--I have so many observations that I can't say to her but I meditate upon and use to refine my personal philosophy. I don't want to diss on her, because I do love her, but the more time you spend with a person the easier it is to see their flaws, and believe me, living with somebody puts them right in your face. The decline of our friendship taught me how sean fell out of love with me because I saw her the way i'm pretty sure he saw me near the end. it was the snoring, believe it or not, and the fact that both of my calves cramped up from walking on eggshells around her. Think she thinks i'm a hard ass from everything I've told her about how I relate to boys that I like. Think she thinks she's strong because she won't let him pay for her but that's not really what it's about. I'm almost certain that 90+% of our lives happen in our heads, and the way you perceive something becomes, to you, what happened. Strength is mental and learning who you are is the most important part of life, and can indeed be a full time job. Who am I? a girl for starters, which can be problematic considering the default gender is male. Truly, my male friends mostly seem to have a better handle on their identities than my female friends including myself. Why? stupid moony fantasies of big weddings and rose petals come before intellectual pursuits or moral imperatives. surely our narcissism plays into it--this is a human problem after all--and I know I can only speak for myself but every observation has led me to conclude that this is more or less universal. I would almost wish that I hadn't been one of those girls to have lots of boyfriends in high school, but I honestly am not quite sure if it would have mattered. I was equally starry-eyed as a nine year old as I was a 16 year old, and I feel like I would have been anyway, boyfriend or no boyfriend. Not to say that there's anything wrong with looking for love--there's not. But we're looking a lot harder than the boys are and we're willing to sacrifice our individuality more easily and for a lower quantity than the boys are. I'm almost positive about this. Audience--i think almost everyone who reads this is a girl, except maybe the occasional mike. Not knocking on boys, you know i love em, and not blaming them for our plight. Who's to blame? society maybe, and us for being dopes. Straight up, I know I'm a dope and I know I care too much about stuff, I know I long too fervently. I know I construct a lot of stuff--but this realization is powerful in and of itself, because what you construct you can control. Really, your own mind and body is all you've got but at least it is definitively yours. So be willful, be mindful, and construct your own world from the inside out. All I know is that nobody, boy or girl, is going to co-pilot mine ever again. and that's that.

Jimmy krasley

I wish I was home today instead of in stupid italy because i want to be with alex and gaurav and everybody else that knew him. Jimmy was my friend and today it's been a year since he died, i remember being in doc wargo's class when joey alpert told me that margaret's boyfriend died and it took me a second to realize what that meant. i couldn't even pretend to concentrate in that class or in urban politics which i contemplated leaving early and ducked out to the bathroom to text alex and make sure he was doing ok. i remember i went to boog's room and talked to him for a while at night and that helped. I texted stupid casey too because in those days i had only recently succeeded in ceasing all communication with him, and, although he was the biggest doucher in history, i was sad and i wanted to talk to him about it and he blew me off. I remember going to j and h for dinner probably the next day and sitting with all of them and walking on eggshells basically because i didn't even know what to say around them. they raged harder than i've ever seen them at jimmy's stupid friend from home who was involved. gaurav was a hard one too because he's the biggest indian in the world and who would have ever thought he would be sad? i couldn't stop thinking about it for probably two weeks straight. i called my mom. i remember skipping econ that friday to go to the wake - we took a yellow school bus to bethlehem which was about an hour or two away. i cried really bad like the whole time and maybe on the ride home too - the worst was seeing all of the baby photos and high school year book photos and the line of his friends and loved ones which stretched out the door and wound around the building and practically across the street. in those days i was sad all of the time and i felt guilty all of the time because we weren't that close me and him, we were just kind of vague friends and i felt bad for being sad when other people had so much more reason to be sad. about jimmy, i remember smoking weed in his dorm room freshman year with gaurav and shram, and i remember j and h dinners at the end of freshman year, and i remember the first time that i met him, i smiled at him and he made a weird face at me. the next time he saw me he apologized for making a weird face at me. that's just the kind of guy he was. i remember the tape recorder they took out to parties at the end of freshman year and how funny it all was. i remember that he would always be excited and happy to see me even though we weren't very close. i think the last time i saw him was at doug wolf's underwear party the beginning of last year - he had no shirt on and accidentally turned on a stove burner by backing into it. i wish i could have gotten to know him better. i wish i could be at home today to be with my friends who are certainly having a hard day. i wish i didn't have to do this by myself today. i miss him. he was the best person i ever met