June 2006-March 2008 Blogs
It’s frightening to me that ever since I was laid off in April 2006 from the full-time copyediting job I held for seven years, I seem to have been in a tailspin from which I have not recovered. The last two years have passed by in a kind of hectic dream.
In the two months following the layoff, I sat down and wrote the draft of a chick lit novel. It’s a 90,000-word hemorrhage, and I still don’t have the energy to sit down and edit it into something that will sell.
Then I tried getting back to work full time. I took a job that was pretty much the same as the one I’d just left. That didn’t work out so well; I ended up quitting after nine months of vaulting throw each of the rungs of hell.
Then I decided to have two part-time jobs instead of one full-time job. I began tutoring in a writing center during the day and teaching at night. On some days, my commute was two hours total. I believe the stress of this schedule precipitated the depression from which I am still reeling.
Rod and I have been through a lot in the last few years. Both of his grandmothers, to whom he was very close, passed away. His parents retired and sold the house in which he grew up. They moved two hours farther away. We went to six months of marital therapy, which revolutionized our relationship. We’re tighter than ever.
What follows is an attempt to fill in this missing links, when I wasn’t blogging regularly:
July 2006-March 2007
Nine months of my life were spent at a toxic copyediting job. I did almost no writing during this period, except for some poetry. Most of my time outside of work was spent belly dancing.
June 2007
Started tutoring in the writing center at a community college. The pressures of this environment sucked up all my desire to write.
I auditioned for the dance troupe ChoveXani and performed with them in Night of 1,000 Goddesses in September 2007. Shortly afterward, I quit the troupe to form my own dance troupe, The Voodoo Sisters (www.voodoosisters.com).
The Voodoo Sisters’s debut was at Romka’s Belly Horror Show in DC October 2007. We performed “I Shimmied with a Zombie,” which can be found on YouTube.
November 2007
I performed a solo gothic belly dance to Siouxsie’s “Peekaboo” for Tempest’s Thanksgothing, in Lambertville, the weekend of Thanksgiving.
With Jackie Sheeler, Phyllis Talley, and Kathi Georges, I wrote and performed a show at the Living Theater called “Not Beautiful Enough: Women on Violence.”
Here are the poems I wrote for it:
Walking Past the High School
I am no young girl
Like those shrieking
splay legged colts
raised for the race or for meat.
But my girlghost is welded to me,
closer than my shadow
pinned to the tips of my toes.
I wish my body were not
a battleground, that I didn’t have
to sneak up on, my blessings
my hard-won joys like a soldier crawling
through a minefield.
Why can’t you be happy?
My parents used to chorus—
the last task unmastered
in my efforts to please.
A litany near and constant as breath:
Fat, ugly, dumb, no one
will ever love you.
I can no more divorce it
than I can be unmade.
But there is the sun in sparks
on the sidewalks broken glass.
My hips swaying secret
in a loose cotton dress.
Another Monday morning
throwing my charmed life in God’s teeth
until I walk past the high school
and get an eye full
of skinny, clumsy girls
and follow my shadow into the day.
The Gothic Heroine in the Suburbs
You are not the pretty sister,
so you grow up unraped.
Still, the air boils,
and the white knife of moon
blazes in the black sky.
The woods full of eyes. Waiting.
This state is indistinguishable from safety.
You have never known
anything else.
Still you itch
because the skin can’t be fooled.
An incantation, a name, crawls unbidden to your lips.
This is the way Adam tamed paradise
But your domain is fallen
and every hole in that body of yours,
even that foolish, fancy mouth,
you inherited from Eve.
You call danger,
invoke it from the dark
with your brand-new tongue.
The relief is temporary.
What you conjured scurries.
It lurks and spits and mocks.
You are aware of being watched.
The good women draw in close
as a white picket fence.
You can’t remember being
without this terrible expectation,
some threshold you were born to cross.
Transgression is in the eye of the beholder.
Your mother, broken
as kindling and you
in your new flesh, striking sparks.
The unshakable gaze
you didn’t ask for, but got
because your body did what a body does.
The world is a gauntlet of eyes
that never meet your eyes
since you turned nine
and the breasts began.
You think starving will stop
the rounding of your hips.
It only stops your tongue, dumb muscle.
Which is one solution, anyway.
Until it isn’t.
December 2007-March 2008
I almost never write during the wintertime because I get sucked into the maw of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I spend my time watching television, cooking, and reading. Stupidly didn’t keep a journal of what I read or cooked or watched.
I started taking belly dance classes with Sera, of East Coast Tribal. Love her, love her class.
