J9

I’ve been told that, prior to 1648 there was no concept of political autonomy. There were no accepted laws protecting any geographical land area, but rather a widespread abundance of weaponry that deemed property to be of a certain individual. The “civilized” world was divided into kingdoms and the size of said kingdoms was protected by as many half wits as could be gathered together on this land. Understandably, the larger the kingdom, the larger the number of half wits… or was it the other way around?

You may call it “sovereignty” with an ironically proud South African accent, but I merely see it as a disassociation with the surrounding world. When we start claiming things with ownership and support a system of selfishness and greed, we coincidentally start loosing our sense of that which is important. Etymologically speaking, sovereignty is not all that tangible. Having supreme and independent governing power over an area of land or group of people turns out to be rather hard to hold in your hands. Power is not something that can be literally thrown in the direction of those who are perceived to be weaker. What is it exactly that forces us to do anything?

I suppose on a seemingly primal level, the need to survive is the strongest of all motivators, as Maslow tells us so in his description of physiological needs. After putting some more thought into it, this need to survive is the motivator for more of our actions than we realize. Personally I have come to notice that underneath the material coat that is our society, my actions are purely motivated by the need to survive. When in the company of certain individuals I find myself motivated to be better. Acting in a manner in which they would deem acceptable or admirable, I monitor my actions much more closely when around those I am trying to impress. More often than not, I am trying to impress for the innate and primitive instincts I have to “find a mate” which we lovingly call a relationship. Whether this relationship is on a friendship level or any variation of that, it is important and undeniably necessary for survival.

When placed in a setting in which the simplest of needs are scarce and hard to come by, we regress even further as our survival needs hold a stronger power over us. We seem to loose insight of the social structures by which we typically live as well as the norms and morals we hold to be social law. When it comes down to it, we focus on our selves and disregard any others. When given the opportunity we reach out to our families and other close loved ones, but the thought of helping out another with whom we are not acquainted is unthinkable.

And to think, all of this would be our reality if it wasn’t for Westphalia. I’m not saying that I support a system of this so called “sovereignty”, but then again I’m not saying that I don’t.

Aside from the noises I make, the only sound I hear is the world. While that may seem intimidating it is merely a few birds, the rustling of the leaves and silence. I watch the water in front of me and each molecule seems to be going in a different direction, which is rather bold considering the population. Some of the water runs to the east, other to the west, while others still seem to travel in a circular motion. That is, until I realize that I am deceived. The water that I believed to be so intrepid in its travels is merely moving in reaction to the reverberations of an insect on its surface. I had such high respect for that water, only to find out that it wasn’t as I thought it to be. Turns out, we aren’t so different from pond water.

In a world where so much as a glance can keep me, an avid anti-coffee proponent, buying iced espressos until your shift ends; I find it hard to believe when people say there is not much hope for love. I’m pretty hopeful. People tell me that they have given up on falling in love. Their heart has been broken and they have no desire to properly put it back together, let alone allow anybody else to do so much as try. As much as we may cringe when I say it, I’m a lover at heart and in this an optimist. I’d like to believe that there is hope for harmony and a sense of unity in this world, despite your attempts to influence me otherwise.

I believe that despite our differences, we are all born the same. We are made out of love, or in the very least lust (which I’d prefer to quixotically call passion), with the only innate goal to follow in the footsteps of those before us and produce more out of love. Mr. Ben Lee has been quoting saying “we are all in this together.” I don’t know of a better way to possibly put my thoughts on this issue. We are all here together, so why not make the best of the time? People we may call “strangers” prior to meeting them very well may soon become “friends” after a few short lines of pleasant communication. Why then do we allow ourselves to be rude to people we call “strangers” and excuse our actions merely because of their label? I consider all strangers to be on some level or another, an extension of a friend. Perhaps my downfall, I think this quality is worth the pain it will one day surely deliver. If trusting people too easily is a flaw, I am more than fine with being flawed.

I feel badly, but with each passing day I am loosing more and more faith in us. I have this friend who thoroughly believes that everybody, yes everybody, cheats. At one point in our lives or another we find ourselves in situations where we cheat on a significant other. She has a pretty good case. I may be slightly ashamed to say it, but I am one of the many who have proved her to be true and it seems to be getting harder and harder to find people who are able to disprove her. Night after night of working in a place where “happily married men” and “really good guys” end up being cheaters and scumbags after a few drinks, I hate to say it, but I am really losing belief in commitment.

One way or another, by the grace of those open enough not to have private profiles, I found myself on the Myspace page of a girl who recently was cheated on. She doesn’t know it, but one of my friends slept with her boyfriend in a drunken stupor. Pathetically, or not, I came to realize I was literally crying looking at the comments that her boyfriend, the infidel, was saying to her. A creepy lurker perhaps, I imagined myself in her place, under the assumption that he was true to her, that every word he said meant something real, and to do so simply broke my heart. I couldn’t quite tell if I was crying because I felt badly for the girl, or because I felt badly for every girl and every guy and every person who has ever been in a relationship that actually meant something.

I don’t mean to make it sound as if I am merely blaming men for all of the cheating that is going on here. After all, none of my girl friends can honestly say that they have never cheated. Perhaps they are not a representative sample, considering they are friends with me… but the point is it most certainly is not just men doing the cheating.

It seems to me that believably the most important of relationships we can have is indeed the relationship we have with ourselves. If you cannot stay committed to yourself, how can you ever expect to commit to anybody else? I think we are pushed into romantic relationships too quickly, without ever properly exploring the relationships that we have with ourselves, our peers, our elders. We need to learn to respect ourselves and the world around us before we can ever imagine properly respecting a significant other. Horribly, we do not have one tenth of the respect that we should have for ourselves and others, or in the very least, we do not show this respect.

The second most important of relationships we could have is that of our friends and synonymously (or at least it should be) our family. Often I find myself in a situation where I feel like I am being cheated on by my friends. We always ditch our friends to go out with a significant other. Hell, I’ve done it, I’ve had it done to me and I’m certain that I am not merely speaking in the past tense. Should fidelity apply to relationships that are only on the friendship level? Is it possible that we cheat on our friends with the person we are dating? We frequently take for granted the existence of our friends in abandoning them to spent time with “that special someone”. We know that they will be there when that “special someone” isn’t all that special anymore. We know this and we use this.

Why?

No answers, just questions and observations. Thanks.

I hate having secrets.

I feel as though secrets are dishonest, rude, as well as disrespectful. It is as if I don’t deem you important enough in my life to be honest with you and tell the truth. At the same time I hate making people unnecessarily uncomfortable, thus my rational for having certain secrets is the aversion I have to making other uncomfortable. This leaves me with a huge judgment call that I seem to be making more and more every day.

Additionally, I feel pretty self-centered when telling people my secrets if I am unsure of their reaction. It is as if I am saying the guilt I feel from being dishonest is more important than the discomfort you may feel from my exposure.

Basically my secret is I hate having secrets.

Get in where you fit in. That is the problem. It seems to me that I, quite frankly, don’t fit in anywhere around here. Too young to hang around those I’d wish to, yet too old to hang around those I’m supposed to. Those seem to be my only options these days and honestly neither of them really fit. I am a fine combination of a 60-year-old woman and a 13-year-old-boy. This unlikely blend of characteristics makes social interaction difficult at best. Strategy and a lightning quick plan subconsciously enter my brain upon meeting someone. Do I play the laid-back, intelligently witty, powerful yet quiet J9, or rather the giggly, sexually witty, naive yet surprisingly not Jeanine? The 60-year-old woman battles the 13-year-old boy within me, until, in true American Gladiators form, one pushes the other off a platform with a giant Q-tip. No matter the outcome, the victor is me and the other falls into oblivion.

Those who actually know something about me are aware that I truly am the mixture of the 60-year-old woman and the 13-year-old boy (which I suppose in this case is an androgynous 36-year-old perhaps explaining my various so-called “sick” sexual attractions(old men anybody?)). Upon changing someone from a stranger to an acquaintance, I merely downplay some of my characteristics and am more obvious about others. Never dishonest, just fluid. So where does this get me? Well, I suppose it gets me identified. Confused is how they will disparagingly call me, when in all actuality confused is one of the very few things I am not. I guess I am not so simple to define. I am the unnecessarily long answer to a question nobody was asking just to be polite.

After any intense inspection, nothing seems all that appealing. I try to hide a lot and in a drunken mindset (that I tried to hide) I had a conversation with someone that left me thinking. Why is it that we feel a need to hide some of our cards upon approaching a relationship? I was told that you have to play hard to get sometimes and hold back some of your cards in order to prevent some people from being scared off. While I think this is a ridiculous course of action, I find myself taking on this course. On top of that, I feel badly for doing this. Perhaps dishonest, I feel as if this manner of social interaction is the one looked upon as the most safe and useful. What I don’t get is if we all have these cards we are hiding because we fear scaring away others, then we really have no right to get scared from the sight other people’s cards. If that makes sense at all.

I’m so young, I’m so god damned young…

Sex appeal has become a synecdoche for all appeal: People refer to a new restaurant or job as “sexy” when they mean hip or powerful. A U.S. Army general was quoted in The New Yorker regarding an air raid on the Taliban as saying “it was sexy stuff,” for instance; the New York Times ran a piece on the energy industry subheadlined “After Enron, Deregulation Is Looking Less Sexy.” For something to be noteworthy it must be “sexy.” Sexiness is no longer just about being arousing or alluring, it’s about being worthwhile.

Passion isn’t the point. The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture isles about connection than consumption. Hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people send a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it. Hot ness is not the same thing as beauty, which has been valued throughout history. Hot can mean popular. Hot can mean talked about. But when it pertains to women, hot means two things in particular: fuckable and salable. The literal job criteria for our role models, the stars of the sex industry.

And so sex work is frequently and specifically referenced by the style or speech or creative output of women in general. Consider the oeuvre of pop singer Christina Aguilera, who titled her 2003 album Stripped (the tour was sold out and pulled in $32 million), mud-wrestled in a humping fashion in her video Dirrty, and likes to wear assless chaps. “She’s a wonderful role model,” Aguilera’s mother proclaimed on a VH1 special about her daughter, “trying to change society so that a woman can do whatever men do.”

It is true that women are catching up with men in the historically masculine department of sexual opportunism; trying to get the best and the most for ourselves in that arena as we are everywhere else. But it’s not true that men parade around in their skivvies as a means to attaining power, at least not men in mainstream heterosexual American culture- they don’t have to. Jay Leno sits floppy faced and chunky in a loose suit behind his desk, confident that he is the kind of late night. When Katie Couric guest-hosted the Tonight Show in May 2003, she wore a low-cut dress and felt the need to emphasize her breasts by pointing at them and proclaiming “these are actually real!” Lest the leg men in the house feel under stimulated, Couric also had guys with power tools cut a hole in Leno’s desk so that the program could be a more complete peep show- a Google search for “Katie Couric legs” provides links to dozens of porn sits with her valves in close-up, in case you missed it. Even America’s morning TV sweetheart, a woman who interviews heads of state and is the highest paid person in television news- outearning Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, and her cohost Matt Lauer with her $65 million contract- has to dabble in exhibitionism to feel as though she’s really made it today.

Couric later commented that she wanted to show America her “fun” side on the Tonight Show, but in truth she was exposing more than being fun, or even being sexual. Really what she was showing was that she was open to a certain sort of attention- which is something that we specifically require if we are going to think of a woman as hot. Hotness doesn’t just yield approval. Proof that a woman actively seeks approval is a crucial criterion for hotness in the first place.

For women, and only for women, hotness requires projecting a kind of eagerness, offering a promise that any attention you receive for your physicality is welcome. When Leno did his stint at Couric’s post on the Today Show, he remained fully clothed. While Janet Jackson introduced Americans to her right nipple at the notorious 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, Justin Timerlake’s wardrobe managed not to malfunction. Not one male Olympian has found it necessary to show us his penis in the pages of a magazine. Proving that you are hot, worth of lust, and –necessarily- that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women’s work. It is not enough to be successful, right and accomplished: Even women like Couric and Jackson and world-champion swimmer Haley Clark, women at the pinnacle of their fields, feel compelled to display their solicitude. As that girl gone wild put it, this has become “like a reflex.”

-Ariel Levy

Big things are coming my way and I believe that if I keep on dreaming that they will happen, I will be content enough to survive. At least, so I hope. “Let’s do big things”, is what I will say when we meet. And we will. You can change me forever. We’ll be in love like dreamers often are (perhaps more so in our dreams than with each other) and we won’t ask for anything else.

Here is my post card to you all.

If your wall looks empty after cutting one person out of your life, I hope you have learned your lesson.

The night is cold and you probably wouldn’t be if you were with

Anybody but her.

Everyone around is all arms, arms and hands.

Hands on his waist, hands on her back

Arms around the body, arms linking other arms

But you’re arms are flailing about as if you were drowning.

Hands on her face and a kiss on her lips

That’s more than hands and arms, but

It’s mostly hands and arms and smiles and warmth

And even though the wind is blowing

And it’s actually cold, everyone seems to be content.

Except you.

It seems as if you are the only one feeling this bitter coldness

You’re beginning to resent her

And she isn’t too fond of you either.

But you play the game that you are told to play and hope that the other

Isn’t really in this.

You’re not a heart

Breaker, per-se

At least, not recreationally

Or professionally for that matter.

But you do what you can to get by.

Everybody is so happy

So you do what you can to get by.

You seem so happy.

But you’re doing what you can

And hardly getting by.