Strange but true: I felt like I had finally reached a positive, calmer, more empowered, better stage of life when a month ago I found myself hungover and barely awake in the last row of a movie theatre on a sunday afternoon watching an opening weekend screening of jodie foster’s new (children’s) film, Nim’s Island.
On that particular Sunday, I lolled around after waking up, drank some juice, and, attempting to get the very most out of my one day off per week, thought ‘what would i do if i could do anything right now?’.
I thought I might go see an obscure foreign movie about the lives of Iranian women that my local independent newspaper favorably reviewed; I checked out the times it was playing and this made me feel so cultured and good about myself that I decided to do what I really wanted to do, which was see Jodie Foster attempt comedy in a series of awkward outfits.
Until recently I had been doing a lot of working and spending the bulk of my free time zoning out on the internet (talk all day about how useless and damaging television and drool mindlessly as I hit ‘refresh’ on perez hilton repeatedly at night; the conundrums just keep on coming!).
I had not really been using or abusing the single person’s privileges of not ever having to explain one’s behavior, not ever having to show up for parties one does not desire to attend, or not ever having to say one is sorry (because love means having to say you’re sorry like you mean it). I have done a lot of kvetching, and sojourning out on lackluster coffee dates set up via the internet, and thinking about what life will be like when i am a sheep farmer in estonia (and drooling in front of the internet).
So it was with great pride and a sense of recklessness that I ignored the leftovers of the four grapefruit martinis I’d ingested the night before, threw on some sweat pants (If it is wrong to wear sweatpants in public, then hand me a dunce cap and call me Pokey), dug under the couch cushions for bus fare, and went to a children’s movie in my pajamas.
Just prior to that Sunday I had, with some prodding and groaning, acknowledged that I was spending all of my time talking about the things I like to do with strangers on bad coffee dates instead of actually doing them. That Sunday was the first time in recent memory I had asked myself what I felt like doing, thought about it, and then did it. What a simple conversation; none of this ‘we need to talk’ bullshit.
It felt good, and I’ve been better about talking/listening to myself and doing whatever it is the citizens of marne-land feel like doing. It isn’t the specific thing so much; Seeing Nim’s Island/Jodie Foster on a very big screen wasn’t what made me feel good; the movie was formulaic, Home Alone with pirates, and generally terrible, and by the time I made it to the U-District I realized why people don’t wear sweats in public (your butt looks like carlsbad caverns complete with underground lunchroom! yipe!). It was more of the process and then the act of following through.
At the movie I haphazardly stumbled onto the the thought that I am very slowly, after six months of intentionally not dating, coming back to be the kind person I was when I was fourteen, when I didn’t have the brain capacity to think about myself in terms of others, when I was on the bowling team and the technology club because I felt like doing it, just like when I used to spontaneously stand on my head when I was eight because I felt like doing it. I am totally, completely, unabashedly engaged in a ‘who the fuck am i now’ stage, and doing things you like because you feel like doing them is almost an entirely sufficient substitute for a relationship with constant snuggles and someone who feels concerned for your well-being. It is probably only a matter of time before I manage to lose myself in someone else again. I wonder how long I will go next time before waking up and realizing that I don’t know what kind of movies I like. I wonder what Jodie Foster will be doing then.
1. heads up! this might be triggering for survivors of abusive relationships!
2. don’t expect an update more than once a week.
I almost got married when I was seventeen.
My high school boyfriend was busy picking rings out of a Macy’s catalog with his mother when I told him that I was moving away to ohio and gay. He cried for a couple of hours and I watched and murmured things about ‘it has nothing to do with you’ like a good girlfriend, and then I made him drive me home.
It’s hard to look back and own up to the fact that I spent the kind of time that I did (two years) on an emotionally abusive, futurama watching, tuba-playing misogynist. But it was an important chunk of my adolescence, and it’s important to remember how I got there and why I stayed there so I don’t ever go there again, and, anyways, I am mostly doomed to exploit my bad teenage relationships until being fifteen is no longer inherently pathetically funny.
At fifteen, sixteen, seventeen I had no idea that I was queer. I was devoted in a painful, ever-prostrate way to my boyfriend. I was too busy working through my gag reflex (nice try, biology!) to think about being gay. I wrote poetry, I played music, I was a member of the varsity bowling team. I watched reruns of Beverly Hills, 90210 every afternoon from 4-6. I was obsessed with English literature and internet blogging (how’s it hanging, TeenOpenDiary.com?). I wore sweater sets that my mother bought for me from The Children’s Place. It felt scandalous to stay up past 10pm. I was, as my hairdresser recently pointed out, a square bear. I was oblivious to sexuality, let alone anything of the alternative variety.
Throughout middle school I had prayed for a boyfriend so I would have someone to hold hands with in the halls. In my head it went no further than that. In high school I prayed for the same boyfriend that never appeared in middle school because I was convinced that everyone I knew had moved on from holding hands to having sex and I was clearly standing under a neon sign all day long that blinked “late bloomer”. None of my friends ever actually talked about sex or made mention of their “sex lives” (a phrase we had come to say as often as possible in our conversations), but I was unwavering in my understanding that everyone else was fucking in the streets after school except me, and when they were done they smoked cigarettes and talked about my virginity.
The day after we consummated our relationship I woke up and finally realized that none of my friends had ever had “serious” boyfriends and that I had immediately teleported light years beyond anything any one of them had ever “done”. We were nerds and drips and members of the technology club; we didn’t have sex, but I hadn’t noticed. It was like peer pressure… but without any peers. Or pressure.
I was going to include a few paragraphs about oral sex right here, but some things don’t translate really well into public blog territory, so here’s a summation of three smarmy paragraphs: it made everything better for four minutes, and then it made everything much, much worse.
The first time I told anyone I was gay was when I broke up with the boyfriend. I had just turned 17; I think he was almost 20. We had talked openly about marriage for a long time. No, I have no idea what I was thinking. We planned to get married in our near future; I would go to college in Boston (I had been accepted at Brandeis) and Philip would accompany me. We would live in married student housing. He would become a police officer. I would begin having children as soon as possible. We would be very happy.
About a year into our, er, courtship, though, I very slowly began to understand that what was going on in my relationship amounted to what we in service provide language generally refer to as “fucked up shit”. He threatened to kill himself if I ever broke up with him a few times a week. He got angry whenever I spent time with my friends. He isolated me from my parents and fought with me for hours whenever I told him about a family vacation I was going on or a night I was going to spend with my grandparents. He counted the number of orgasms we had so we would know how many I “owed” him.
It got worse. I felt like I was living on another planet, I was so isolated (it was like dating scientology). I knew I was involved with someone who was controlling me, who was dangerous and desperate. At sixteen it felt like there was no way to get out of it unless I went far away to college. I made plans to graduate high school a year early. I was praised and admired for my academic drive and ‘internal motivation’. I really needed to get away and couldn’t figure another way out.
When my boyfriend informed me of his plan to come with me to college in Boston, I did two things; I prepared an application for a school very far away from home (Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio), and I brainstormed excuses for getting out. I thought about telling him that the rare disorder my sister had as a child had reappeared and I had to break up with him to take care of her. My family was moving? I wasn’t allowed to date anyone anymore?
And then it dawned on me; the granddaddy of lies: I’m gay.
I knew it would work. He couldn’t argue with it. He couldn’t change it. He couldn’t work around it. He wouldn’t tell anyone because he would be so embarassed, both for him and for me. He wouldn’t follow me to college. I was pretty sure it would keep him non-violent, and I was pretty sure that it would crush him.
In my head I knew it wasn’t exactly a lie. It felt like I was lying to him when I told him; it was an excuse that I made up, and I neither felt nor identified as gay, but I knew something wasn’t entirely false. It was a lie, though I remember thinking it might not be a lie for very long (and wondering where that thought emerged from). It was like I knew eventually that I’d figure myself out (in favor of the gay), even though I had never given it much thought. I knew he wouldn’t tell anyone, but I wasn’t wholly concerned if he did.
We broke up in June, a few days after my high school graduation; I told him I had been accepted off of the waitlist to Oberlin and that I would be going there and that I was gay and he shouldn’t follow me. I spent one afternoon with him in early July during which he picked me up in his car and wouldn’t let me go home for four hours until I promised to always love him and care about his feelings. After that I decided I would never see him again; I left shortly thereafter.
I realized that I hadn’t been lying on the second (yep, the second) day of college, when I saw a poster advertising the queer students’ union meeting and realized I was moderately interested in going. “Oh”, I thought, “that’s me”. And that was that; it was a great rush of understanding and relief as I stared at a poster on the wall of my new dormitory. I fretted about going for a few minutes, made up my mind, and there I was. I was not a liar. I was free.
I just got off the phone with my accountant, and I owe the government almost $800. I am celebrating by getting a not-in-the-budget haircut tomorrow night at VAIN.
I was living ’simply’ (thanks AmeriCorps!) and not cutting my hair, but my taxes have knocked the wind out of my simplicity sails and I look like a cross between a wildebeast, Medea, and my twelve-year-old self.
I hadn’t written anything by hand in a long time, but a few weeks ago as I was bent over my canary legal pad in a coffee shop, one hand scrawling trite prose, I found the other glued to my forehead to keep my hair out of my face. When I sat up, I had a greasy forehead with a handprint on it, a big flat spot in my hair from where my hand had been, and I had managed to sink about a half-inch of a decent sized lock of hair in my cup of coffee.
I used to have nightmares about my hair. I cut it off during the first semester of my first year of college and for years I had dreams it was growing back and there was nothing I could do to stop it. In my dreams I would be doing something mundane: showering, talking, going to school, and I would brush my hand over the back of my head and there it would be, hair down to my waist. I would wake up sweating, feeling the fuzz on the back of my neck to make sure it was still there. I was never one for subtlety.
My mom did my hair every morning until I was twelve. I had three choices: ponytail, bun, or braid. Most mornings I would beg her to blow dry my petulant curls straight, and sometimes she would oblige, and then I would spend the day petting myself. I would feel like a model, and the oil in my hands would turn my hair greasy and frizzy by lunchtime. My mother never learned french braids. I never learned how to do them either, but I eventually did my first ponytail (at 12; I was a late bloomer), and some years later I learned how to take care of my curls.
My hair has been short for a very long time now, but last month it started fitting into a ponytail, and I’ve been thinking about the brief period in college in which my hair was just long enough for my then-girlfriend to put it into little french braid pigtails.
She had a fauxhawk and wore carharts but she had learned a bunch of complicated braids as a teenager. Before we met she used to braid her roommate’s hair each day for her; she swore off braiding for others shortly before we first met after too many mornings silently cursing her roommate’s thick, coarse waist-length locks into a plait.
The first time she did my hair, I had just been hired to work in an ice cream store. I was offered a choice of ponytail, hat, or hairnet. My hair was too short for a ponytail, the only hat I owned was a straw cowboy hat, and a hairnet would have crushed my always hesitant self esteem. My hair extended barely past my ears. I complained to my girlfriend and she stared at my head for a moment. “It’s probably long enough for two little french braids”, she said, and before I knew it, I was sitting cross legged between her knees, head arched back, trying to hold still and not squawk.
In five minutes I had a couple of hysterically miniature but tight, functional braids coursing down either side of my head. Sexy, no (unless you’re into the softball look), but workable. They were so tight that I would be able to wear them for days at a time without them falling out and my ice cream store boss conceded that I did not need a hairnet.
She continued to braid my hair throughout that summer, often wrangling my hair into submission in the early morning before her fingers had loosened from the prior night’s sleep. At the scoop shop I was often asked about what grade I was in at school or if the scoop shop was my first real job, but being constantly mistaken for a middle school student didn’t keep me from coming to like the perky little braids and soon I started asking her to braid my hair at other times.
If we were going to go out but accidentally had sex beforehand; if I overslept; if I didn’t feel like showering; if I couldn’t find my straw cowboy hat (I know, I clearly made a fabulous partner). All summer she acquiesced without any complaint. I felt like I was ten again. I would hunker between her legs, on the floor, and rub the tops of her feet as she sat above me in a chair. I would run my hands from her knees, down her legs, inventorying the week’s bumps and bruises (we worked on a farm; there were lots). Sometimes I would rub one of her calves as she worked, half-heartedly trying to make up for all the time she spent on my hair.
Some mornings it was slow and sensual, a way for us to relax and be together without speaking, just feeling close. Some mornings it was all business; the yanks and tugs would be harsh and unannounced, and I would feel her eyes searing with indignation through the back of my head. Once in awhile they would come out uneven or lumpy and I would complain or futz with them until she redid them, usually sloppier than they were the first time.
By the end of that summer, our quiet ritual that I had begun to crave had begun to make her hate me. She hated that I never learned to do it myself, that I never wanted to learn, that I was always asking for something, and that I reveled in feeling like a princess. More and more I had to plead with her for the braids until she would only agree to do it to shut me up.
The first time she outright refused to braid my hair was not long before we broke up. We were back at school. Summer was over. There was no warning; there was no last, quiet, meditative morning, no final day of pretending I was Heidi or Pippi Longstocking. One morning it was just “no”. And “no”. And “Leave me alone, I’m sick of braiding your fucking hair; why don’t you learn to do it yourself?”. And then there were no more braids.
It wasn’t long after that episode that we broke up for good. I reverted back to my old friend the bandanna; I never learned how to french braid. I still don’t. I cut my hair even shorter not long after, and enough time had gone/enough life had happened to me that the nightmares about my hair growing back had finally subsided. The idea that I’d ever had braids became silly again and I swore up and down that I would never let it grow to even tiny french braid pigtail length ever again. And then I became a slave to national service, living on 10k for the year, and haircuts became frivolous, and my identity no longer depended on the right haircut, and last month I walked into my office one day and one of my coworkers offhandedly mentioned as she walked by my desk that my hair looked like it was almost long enough for pigtails.
I had a friend in college who told me that the first thing everyone learned to do in her Computer Science 100 class was to write a program that would flash the words “hello world” on the screen.
The “hello world” program sounded like a waste of time to me (my exact response was “why would anyone ever want to do that?”), but it’s now irrevocably lodged in my head and I couldn’t start this blog any other way.
I’m Marne. For a month or so I actively kept up another blog, NSA Dinner, at dinnerslut.wordpress.com. That blog is still up and you can go read it if you want to; it’s about this one time where I was even broker than I am now and I asked strangers on the internet to buy me dinner (and not expect me to have sex with them afterwards). I had a bunch of dinners with random strangers and wrote about meeting them and dining out in Seattle.
It was touching.
I thought I believed in taking up as little space on the internet as possible, but something felt wrong about continuing to blog, and not about not food/stranger related things on my no-strings-attached dinner blog. The dinnerslut hat didn’t fit quite right when I wanted to blog about my job/family/etc… so now I have this new and quite empty rest-of-my-life blog. I’ve been writing steadily more as my social/love/interpersonal life atrophies and I wanted to post story fragments, observations, and random but strangely attractive photos of myself in the same place.
In case you weren’t up and up on the lingo, Marne Gras is a play on my name; like the drunken revelry that happens just prior to Lent? Exactly. It also translates roughly to ‘fat marne’, but not many people can seamlessly insert their names into holidays, so it’s only a minor inconvenience when you consider the positives.
So, that’s all. Hello again, world. Welcome to my blog, where every day is Marne Gras.
