So, the robot. I am a robot. And I am decisive!

Okay, that is not entirely true. In fact, not true at all. I am very unrobotic. A robot, in theory, will do whatever it is commanded to do, whatever it is necessary to do. (Unless you are in one of those movies in which robots take over the world, but that is another story entirely.) I cannot really be relied upon to do that. There are certain situations which, despite my alleged adulthood, still make me timid and nervous. Talking to strangers on the phone, for instance, or asking my boss for something at work. Annoying but true. I am aware, however, that these things are a necessary part of my life and I must deal with them somehow.

Sometimes I try to distance myself from myself and pretend that I am just remote-controlling some robot-me from someplace far away. Then if I screw up horribly it doesn't have to be me, exactly, and I can just say "darn robot, screwing up again" and try to control it better next time. And maybe if it's a robot it won't screw up at all, it won't be that stammering, timid version of me, it will be decisive and say what it's supposed to say and do what it's supposed to do, because it won't be me and my own self-confidence on the line. It'll just be the machine that I get to make my phone calls for me.

I am going to address the wife thing first, because the more I look at it the more it looks like a weird thing to say out of context. Don't worry, the robots, by popular demand, will be explained soon. And please forgive me if some of these ideas aren't as clear and well-thought-out as they should be -- this list has been sitting on a shelf for a long time.

So the delightful thing about going to a school like Colgate is that you get invited to professors' houses for dinner, because they are amazing and like seeing their students. And so I found myself in a lovely house one evening eating spectacular food and chatting with my professor and his wife and trying to figure out what on earth was the polite way to ask if she had a career. In my head I turned over the phrase "So what do you do?" and immediately discarded it. Of course I understand and truly believe that being a homemaker and raising children certainly counts as doing something, but so many people don't think that way that I saw immediately how the words would leave my mouth and harden in the air into the snide, judgmental remark of a young, arrogant career-girl. That is, if she were a homemaker. If she weren't and I phrased it differently, implying that she might not have a career, she could be offended that I was so backwards and ignorant as to imagine that she just stayed home and served my professor dinner all the time. So I kept my words in my mouth where they wouldn't twist themselves and betray me, and made my way through the meal listening and inferring instead of asking. And I thought that there must be a better way, there should be a way to talk about this issue without offending anyone, this really shouldn't be scary or taboo. And maybe it's just my social awkwardness, maybe it's just that I think far too hard about these things and I'm just too terrified of the ways my words might be taken or mistaken, but after all this time I still haven't found a way.

And reading this over, I realize that I've made this woman sound like some horrid, unpredictable person that would be offended at the slightest thing. On the contrary, she was so gracious to me that I just didn't want to risk saying anything wrong. So perhaps this is just some strange issue of mine, some social paranoia that I haven't managed to outgrow, but I think what I'm trying to say is that there are so many different ways of being a woman, and our language doesn't yet have ways of expressing how equally acceptable and even wonderful they all are. Or it does, but people's attitudes and biases have twisted it in such strange ways that none of it sounds right anymore.

So I have spent a lot of time not writing blog posts in the past few years. This, in general, is a good thing, as it means I am both going out and doing things and getting sleep. But that does not stop me from having ideas for posts that I never have time to write.

For a while I kept running lists of things I intended to write when I got a chance. I only rarely got around to writing the posts, but I kept the lists around anyway. And recently, when I was unpacking things, I came across them again. Half of the little notes I took down don't even make any sense anymore, and I'm not sure what prompted them or what I meant to say about them or sometimes even what they mean. But here they are. Just in case you were curious.


porcelain doll girls
paradox of the awareness of the psychological value of something as opposed to its "real" value
"deserving"
how to deal with someone's wife
real magic in the world
dangerous ideal of complete security
shaving head as analogy for rebirth
asking people for things (forgiveness etc.)
understanding and being
the robot is decisive
head of religion = head of state
the rules of the game
house with words on walls


Some of them maybe I'll still write about. For some of them, the inspiration and reasoning is a mystery, and I suppose they'll never happen. At least one I know I did in fact write a post for it. If you're interested in any of them, let me know, and maybe if I can still remember what I was going for I'll write it after all.

Today did not really have to be, like every other day, a day to face and fend off the challenges to my femininity and self-esteem. I have a paper to write before tomorrow morning, plenty of reading and writing to get done. But maybe it was because it never really got light today, or maybe it was because, despite the fact that I've been growing my hair out for over a year now, some guy on the train platform last week mistook me for a man (something that has happened periodically all my life, regardless of the length of my hair). Maybe it was the simple fact that the mirror hangs on the wall not far from the desk I've had no occasion to leave today. The fact of the mirror is enough to require periodic looking. Vanity is a tough curse.

And so-- the periodic fussing, the application of various gels and goos, the use of several kinds of brush and comb, the agonizing over why my hair can't just decide to be either stick-straight or curly instead of winding itself into mysterious hooks that grow lazy and frizzy at the end in a sort of puffy mass. The varieties of creams and cleansers applied in order to try to get my skin to settle somewhere between flaky-dry and oily-blemished. The tweezers to try to thin and shape my scraggly eyebrows.

I will probably not even leave the apartment today. I do this for no one but myself, to try to spend the day in a kind of peace, to avoid having fights with the mirror when I walk across the room.

Mostly there is the agonizing frustration that for some reason it requires effort for me to look feminine. (Perhaps it is for everyone? Maybe I've just never mastered the skills for putting on my woman-face in the morning.) I am woman through and through, in ways that are stereotypical and otherwise. I have the correct female anatomy; I have a certain typically-female emotionality (which some have tried to tell me is immaturity; I know better now.) I identify with women as a group and I fight and have fought their battles. But for all that, no one would know: I was not graced with an elegant face or a shapely body, and on the street every day, for all anyone can tell, I might as well be a man.

It was easier, actually, when my hair was short and my clothes loose: the mistakes happened more frequently then, but it bothered me less because my choice had been deliberate. I had known what would happen, toying with androgyny, and I considered myself free, stripped of my gender, not whistled at by passing cars, seen as a person foremost, not woman, potential girlfriend, "other". But I had my fun and finished with that, withdrew from the society of people for whom that somehow made a difference, took back my gender and its burdens and claimed them as my own. But it has not been so easy to return. It is not just the comments of idiotic strangers; much more so it is my own standards of myself reflected back at me in the harsh judgment of the mirror each day. I am not doing a very good job at this.

Some days I win the battle easily: I glance in the mirror quickly in my hurry to leave the apartment, don't have much time or patience for what it tells me, and rush through my day without another thought about whether I am pulling off this female thing properly. Other days it seems my ragged hair has held a peace conference and agreed to all curl in the same direction and degree, and the mirror can say nothing to ruin my mood no matter how many times I see it in the day. But yet there are some days like this when it holds only harsh criticisms and, weak, vain soul that I am, I just can't stop thinking about it. And so: gel, tweezers, layers of creams, contact lenses, endless decisions about hair clips, and tight little gender-defining shirts. All for a me that I can stand to look at all day.

I find that I am generally perfectly content except when I start listening to people who tell me the ways in which my life is lacking and the reasons I ought to be unhappy.

Therefore, I have resolved not to listen to these people and their sneaky self-fulfilling prophecies.

Instead I will remember that I'm in Boston. I think it is the magic of the names that draws me here and makes it more special than anyplace else. There is so much ancient personal history here, from before I was born and from the first year of my life. The names of these streets, these neighborhoods, these subway stops are the ones my parents have always spoken of, things that I have always known but not known, being so close to the city yet so far away. Now, I can reach out and touch all of it. Beacon Street, Tremont Street, Longwood Ave, Comm Ave. Boylston, Arlington, Copley. Allston, Brighton, Brookline, Cambridge and Medford. The Fens, the Public Gardens. The Charles River and the harbor. These are all mine now, just a token or bus pass away. In a way they were always mine, but they are like gifts saved from childhood, a nest egg carefully stored away so that I wouldn't spend it childishly, frivolously, in my youth. And now here it is, after waiting all this time just for me to become an adult and be ready to take it as my own.