What struck me, though, were the terrible grudges that live on. Some of them are thousands of years old. When are people going to call it even? Is there this hatred that people will nurse until the end of time, or for as long as they maintain a distinct history and cultural identity? Is it inextricable from us, because we can’t afford to throw the baby out with the bathwater? The valuable lessons of history were gained through too much bloodshed and tragedy. Those lessons cost us too much. Unfortunately, our memories hold the good and the bad.

And then I saw this.

I thought to myself that there are groups who seek to homogenize the world, and I said a silent curse in my head over them. These religions and regimes want to erase the beauty and variety of human culture, and remove any competition for people’s hearts and minds. They destroy things that can never be replaced. I hope that they never succeed at it, and that they always miss just enough people to fail completely. One day, may they be so deeply tangled in their web of destruction that they cannot separate themselves from it or claim innocence for what they have done.

Recently I had an experience at a work potluck in which I brought a tres leches cake. The cake got compliments and raves. Then a woman came up to me and told me how I should improve it so that she would like it. I thought to myself how rude that was, and how it was something I’d experienced from a number of people in my extended family all my life. It took a stranger doing it for me to realize that it was rude, and that I shouldn’t tolerate that kind of treatment from strangers or from family. I also thought about how I had been brought up never to argue with them or contradict them, and always think about their feelings. It occurred to me that they’d never considered mine, and that reciprocation might be something a reasonable person could expect.

The conclusion I came to was that if I am trying to walk away from them, I should think about just saying “Thanks for everything, have a nice life.” I need to remember that what goes around comes around, and for my own mental health, I need to cut off the diseased relationships that have never been good. Once my own obligations are met, I can walk away with a clean conscience and have my own life again. I don’t have any responsibility for their happiness, and even if I did, that would probably be best accomplished by my absence during the holidays.

I have to say, I don’t think I’ll be sad when 2009 is dead and gone. It’s been a rough year all around. We’ve been laid off, moved, been desperately broke, considered moving again, owed taxes, (the figure we owe is suspiciously similar to the figure we got in a stimulus check) and now due to a fuck-up on the part of our employer during Mehdi’s transfer, we’ve been presented with an $800 bill by our dentist, because Mehdi wasn’t covered by insurance during August. My first thought was, “Sykes strikes again”. The alternate thought was “And here we are again, guests of the surprise party department”.

I’m starting my new job on Monday. It promises better wages, hours and benefits. I even get holidays and weekends off like normal people. It’s still ostensibly a call center, but I suspect it will be better work too. In addition to this, I went to the doctor and got a prescription for Chantix. For this I endured twenty minutes of lecture on the risks of smoking. I felt this was ironic, because the very fact that I was there asking for Chantix meant that I’d come to that conclusion on my own, and that the doctor was trying to impress the student doctor in the room with us. It was my feeling that quitting tobacco was a positive change in my life, and that I wouldn’t have any reason to stand outside in the freezing cold to feed an addiction this year. I’d like to get healthy and be more like my old self, only a little wiser.

Hopefully when the new year starts, we’ll have the makings of a better year. I’m hoping that the neo-cons realize how childish they’re being and lay off our president, and with any luck they’ll take the opportunity to embarrass themselves into irrelevance and darken our doorsteps no more.

The first thought that came into my head was that it was something a woman could hock if things went south. It was symbolic of economic independence, a gift that a man gave a woman to show that he was giving her freedom instead of tying her down. Then I thought about how it symbolized an investment in the relationship on the part of the man. To most men, a diamond engagement ring is a significant investment. You have to be serious to even consider spending that chunk of your income on a piece of jewelry. That, paired with the idea that it symbolized economic freedom to the recipient creates the situation of it being a sacrifice, a leap of faith.

I got to thinking how people simplify these ideas into an obligation. “He owes me a ring” (In exchange for what?) “She owes me because I gave her a ring, otherwise she should give it back.” (Again, what’s the exchange?) It all seems to have turned something with beautiful symbolism into something ugly and materialistic, or commercial. It’s turned into something that makes women into grasping whores and men into buyers. I can’t help but feel as if so many things in our society and relationships are reduced to this. Maybe it’s because we make a show of love, but love doesn’t figure into all that many relationships. The ideas which would be beautiful in the presence of love and trust turn into something ugly and cheap in its absence, and it’s reduced to something very very close to prostitution. Maybe that’s why I didn’t want an engagement ring before I got married the second time, because I’d perceived it in its ugly sense, and didn’t want to sully my relationship with that.

It’s funny how many things change depending on their context.

A friend and I had a short conversation about how it’s nice to just chill out and enjoy the moments of good conversation and good company, or just peace and quiet. I had to bring up the superstition of the “evil eye”.

In some parts of the world, people believe that if you value or love someone or something too much, you’ll attract the attention of the evil eye. If somebody compliments how pretty their baby is, they’ll sometimes smudge dirt on the child’s face and say something like, “yes, but her face is dirty”. This is to avert the evil eye. It’s magical thinking, that something bad will happen if you admit to something being good.

We came to the conclusion that sometimes this mentality prevents us from enjoying a happy moment, because we fear that something bad will come of it if we don’t have our guard up all the time. When she put it that way, I began to wonder if that’s something I’ve been doing for much of my adulthood. Maybe part of what makes us this way is early training, maybe we all become skeptics. We begin to examine all good things for the catch. We develop the ability to find the cloud in every silver lining. It’s a very pessimistic way to go about living.

It’s interesting to note the prevalence of this neurosis. We as a society and almost globally have developed a complex. There’s no way to get rid of it. Maybe in small doses it can be a good thing, but in large doses it leads to people being so cautious that they don’t dream or enjoy the things in their lives. Perhaps it’s the continuing fight between the left hemisphere of our brains and the right hemisphere. Perhaps it’s the influence of a much more ancient part of our brains, and when it takes over it becomes paranoia. Then you get religious nuts saying that we enjoyed ourselves too much, and now God is angry. We’re here to suffer and to work, not to enjoy ourselves. Even the enjoyable things are to be done with a kind of grim and businesslike air.

I always see religion at the heart of all societal neuroses, and this is no different. Maybe we’ve internalized it so much in the various cultures it’s touched that it prevents us from letting go and truly enjoying our lives. It keeps us focused so much on the negative and the possible disaster that could be our future if we don’t keep our eyes down and our minds on the program. I’m not advocating everyone becoming a hedonist and losing themselves in carefree pleasure, because there’s something to be said for moderation. A little carefree pleasure couldn’t hurt us though, could it?

Last night my husband and I decided to watch Behind The Green Door. Now, there are a number of redeeming things about the film, such as a script and a plot, weak though they may be, and the fact that it was shot on film. Also, all of the people in it were adults with the body hair adults are supposed to have. We came to the mutual conclusion that the film did not appeal to us, though. The reason for this was that the people in the film were at best enthusiastic, but not skilled. Porn historically seems to be made up of people who don’t really know what they’re doing, and just go through the basic operation of getting off, but not all of them are even really doing that. While it is very nice to see a woman put her mouth on a dick, just doing an up and down motion seems rather mechanical. It isn’t exactly enjoyable to watch. There’s no real effort or investment in it. Maybe we’re just picky, but there has to be something more to it. There was, of course, plenty of cunnilingus, but none of that was skilled either. Most of it seemed to be geared towards not blocking the camera rather than actually doing something. And we wonder where people learn to be lousy in bed.

I could easily say that porn has created generations of terrible sexual encounters. People see porn which is primarily done for how it looks rather than how it feels. If they have only that to guide them in their own sex, they are probably going to end up frustrated at their failure to please themselves and their partner. “I’m doing everything right! I’m doing it just like the porn stars! Why isn’t this doing it for her? Why isn’t this doing it for me?” Even watching it was fairly tedious and disappointing.

The other aspect of it was the way it was geared toward male fantasies. I realize that fantasies are meant to be unrealistic, but still. Watching Marilyn Chambers trying to do the equivalent of a contortionist act and multitasking was excruciating. I have no doubt as to why she kept her eyes closed. She had to concentrate to do two simultaneous handjobs, one poorly-executed blowjob and have vaginal sex with the man beneath her. The premise of the movie was that she was going to be loved as she’d never been loved before. It’s supposed to be all about her, but really in a scenario like that, I can’t imagine how she’d be the focus of anything, and instead of being the person acted upon, she was the person acting upon everyone else. Definitely not a female sex fantasy.

All of this led to me looking for feminist porn, and in turn it led to me reading the blog above. There were some interesting points, and the one which caught my attention the most was the assertion that Andrea Dworkin had done some great things to further women’s rights sexually, but also that she had created a division between women by separating gay and heterosexual women. I had noticed the same thing myself, except that my own observation was that there was a great deal more lesbian porn than there was heterosexual feminist porn. That’s a bit of a shame. We continue to be marginalized, and men who want to see something that pleases women (you know, men who actually want to have sex with women, and maybe be invited back.) are also given nothing to watch.

I have a theory as to why that is. It’s because there is some solidarity between gay women. They form a community. They realize that because their sexuality is not considered standard, they have to cater to their more specialized market. Since heterosexual women are the standard, straight women feel no solidarity toward each other, and classify their identity differently. Little thought is actually given to improving the resources available for their sexual likes and dislikes. This leads, I suspect, to many straight women being kept in the dark about the possibilities sex could have for them. They don’t know what they’re missing, because there is no community and there is no communication. Unless a straight woman gets into something a tiny bit more specialized sexually, like bondage or furry-ism, there is no porn geared to her specifically. In fact, even the special interest porn is not geared toward the women in it specifically. Almost no porn is. The result is that the sexuality of heterosexual women is almost exclusively informed by porn made for men or lesbians, none of which is aimed at showing women enjoying sex with men so much as it is aimed at showing men enjoying sex with objectified women or women enjoying sex with other women.

My husband tells me that he’s heard of one female porn director/producer who specializes (how ironic that it would be a “specialty”) in porn for heterosexual women. I’ll continue looking, but I thought I’d share the site I’d found just to keep it somewhere where I can come back to it sometime.

One more interesting site I found was Good For Her. They actually have an award that they give out to the best feminist porn for the year. Sadly, it is once again pretty heavy on the lesbian porn, but there is some good heterosexual stuff in there for women too.

At any rate, we are now in the stage of moving in which we have completed the move, but we have not yet unpacked. Hopefully we’ll get everything stowed away and get rid of the things we never needed or needed so much we’d forgotten all about them. Of course, work starts on Tuesday, and I have a potentially stressful funeral to attend on Wednesday. We’ll see how it plays out.

On the upside, there is a grocery store within walking distance, and this means an even quicker trip by bike. We also have a thrift store within blocks of our house, and not only is it a good thrift store, but it is set up to help battered women to be rehabilitated. Not a bad cause to back. There are so many things to do here, and I think that Mehdi and I are going to learn to take advantage of all the ones that are free or nearly so. We’ve done a little reconnaissance in the neighborhood, and plan to do more as the time goes by. As soon as we’ve got the finances straightened out and some things budgeted, we’re going to check out the possibility of getting a pair of bikes to tool around on. It’s doubtful that we’re close enough to work to get there by bike, but we might be able to spend our weekends on some.

We compared the price of an apartment and the price of renting a house, and the house came out slightly cheaper, but with the wonderful bonus of not having neighbors directly above, below and on the other side of the wall. There’s a basement, and it’s not three floors to move our furniture up. It’s a bungalow, so the living space is all on the ground floor. We won’t have shared laundry facilities, we can simply take our washer and dryer along and hook them up, and without the need for quarters, we can wash and dry our clothes. We can leave clothes in them without worrying that we’ll piss off a neighbor or have something stolen.

The walls will support shelves, and we have more room in the house than we had here. That would not have been the case with the apartment. We can store things in the basement, like potatoes and apples and plastic tubs and boxes of miscellaneous we’ve collected. Mehdi can have a woodworking bench and space to use his tools on a cement floor. I can have my little patch for herbs, and space for flower beds. There’s even room in the basement for things like a sewing room or a studio for Mehdi to finally use the easel and paints I bought him years ago for his birthday. I’d like to see him take up a hobby again. It always seemed like space was too tight and life was too stressful for there to be room for things like that.

I like this. It’s a positive move. It’s an adjustment. It doesn’t have that sense of flimsiness that this place has, and it doesn’t have the institutional aura of an apartment in a building full of apartments exactly the same, with the same pre-fab uniformity of a mobile home, only stacked in blocks. Imagine mobile homes as being similar to cargo containers, and apartments as stacked cargo containers, and you’ll get an idea of how I look at them. They’re more like storage units for people than they are homes. I can easily see how the lack of territorial boundaries can cause intolerable stress for people. I think I’ll be lucky enough to avoid that for myself and be in a house. Even the fact that it is a rental does not daunt me. It doesn’t affect the feeling that it is a home, and the territory it encompasses is ours. I won’t have to listen to people walking to and from other apartments, feet treading within feet of my door.

We’re even getting the Nova running again. It appears that sometime during the winter a leak developed in the line running from the radiator. Perhaps it was metal stress which was exaggerated by the extreme cold, -40 degrees. At any rate, the leak was there, the water coming out of it froze, then expanded the leak to its final state when the car broke down in December due to overheating and a completely empty radiator. When we got it started yesterday, we took it to the gas station to inflate a tire which had flattened during the winter, and the car overheated within the ten minutes we had it out. I took it in to the mechanic today, and he figured out right away what was wrong with it. He quoted me a price and actually didn’t appear to be trying to take advantage of my gender and ignorance of cars. Maybe he appreciated the fact that I was honest, and told him that if I knew what was wrong with it, I wouldn’t have brought it to him. Soon we will have two cars again.

I really hope all of this comes together, not just for me but for everyone involved. It sure looks as though it has the potential to.

Funnier still is the feeling of loss in a way. As shabby and unbeautiful as the place was, it was the first big thing I’d ever owned. I had the title to it, and I’d scrounged to afford it. It was mine. It was an accomplishment, something I hadn’t experienced much of in my life up to then. It was one of a handful of things at the time which proved I could be responsible and have happiness and independence. I wasn’t living in an apartment or somebody else’s house. I was capable of budgeting and juggling finances well enough to have a little extra. It isn’t much of a house, but it symbolized a lot for me. It’s something I could be proud of. It was the first home that Mehdi and I shared. It was always supposed to be a place we started at, which implied we intended to leave it. I hadn’t thought it would affect me so much to actually follow through with that plan. It’s been home.

I hope that this is only a temporary stop for my brother and his family before things improve for them too. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want my nieces to grow up in trailers. I don’t know why, or rather, I know that what kind of house you grow up in doesn’t necessarily determine what kind of person you grow up into, but I want them to have what I had. I wish they could remember one home throughout their childhood, and one with a foundation. There’s something about tenements or apartments or trailers that just discourages you. It robs you of your spirit and motivation. The people around you aren’t inspiring, and neither are you. A bunch of drabs caught in a poverty trap. Maybe I’m over-thinking it. Maybe I read too much depressing revolution-era literature from France. Maybe it was the Orwell or any of a dozen dystopian writers. Still, art reflects life. If it can be imagined, then it exists, at least in theory.

We’re going to do this. It’s set now. I wonder what I’ll do with nearly a month without work and an impending move. I can’t say that the temporary job I took was particularly helpful to keep my mind off things, but it did help a little. Now I’ll be in the house, packing a bit at a time and cleaning the place before Jacob moves in. I hope he got the better end of the bargain.