Be My Backdoor Man

After weeks of reading the entire Sookie Stackhouse series and brooding like a hen, I'm out of the funk. This morning I woke up and read a random passage of Simple Abundance. I hated it. It was about asking for what we want. I felt, if at all possible, even broodier. I hurrumphed around the bathroom and gallumphed down the stairs and harrumphed into the office and worked. I considered canceling my afternoon appointments. I enjoyed my surly.

Then my buddy Colorful Child IM'd me and we chatted about feeling stumped in our respective developments as sentient beings, women and artists. We chatted and had breakfast and inserted a few "brb" and eventually came up with a really fine idea for promoting ourselves through the efforts of one another. There is nothing more nerve wracking than promoting oneself. Tim Ferriss makes it look easy, but it just isn't. I can run someone else's multi-million dollar venture and go to the mats over 1 cent, but I have problems remembering to attend to my own affairs much of the time. I've tried personal assistants. They make me batty, all that telling someone else to do when i can just do it, or think about doing it, myself. Then managing the end product, oy vey!

So, we will barter promotional efforts to one another. I'll do her, she'll do me, at least in the earliest stage and see how it goes. We've nothing to lose, we're both too squirrely to do it for ourselves.

I had tea and rum for lunch with a bit of McDonald's and enjoyed the fine guitar-picking stylings of Fatback Deluxe and decided it's just a Blues kind of period. I have been frought and distressed and generally put out, which is Blues living if ever there was any. There has also been plenty of "doing plenty of things I don't want to and hearing the whip crack on my back" going on. Today was unseasonably warm as well, so Mississippi Delta, I'm with you in spirit.

I found an old email exchange with one of my personal idols, The Sweet Potato Queen, Jill Connor Browne. Don't you just hate when someone says something and you think "that's not true" but then discover, much to your horror and mortification, that they were right on the money? Money. They were right about money. They were right about another person. They were right about another person and money. It's like feeling a pebble drop from the back of your throat into the pit of your stomach with no digestion, that's what it's like to read words of wisdom and realize just how transparent you were to someone else when you thought you were occluding everyone.

Today after the chat and before the rum, I thought about myself. I thought about the hallmarks of my personality. I'm ruthless. I'm occasionally feckless. I'm stubborn and I'm single-minded. I'm smart and tough and fragile and quite worldly, but that comes at the expense of knowing a lot of American cultural hallmarks. So, taking all of that, I am going to create myself out of spiderwebs and spanish moss.

Weird Girls get all the Boys

Proven Fact. Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman just announced their engagement.

Weird girls are intense and quirky. I have three little sisters. To borrow a line from the Bard, they are Weird Sisters, but mine. I have extremely weird friends. One friend, she's a little scary in a completely soft and lovely manner, she declared over dinner and while I was 1.5 vodka gimlets into drowning my troubles that she's going to stop telling people she's stupid. I thought this was a fine idea because this is a girl who makes her living tutoring people in advanced mathematics - she doesn't deal in anything less challenging than calculus, it isn't worth her time and she bores easily. To keep conversation going I asked why she was suddenly going to stop telling people she was stupid. She explained, in an offhand manner, that there are a lot of stupid people in the world and she isn't one of them, but when she says she is, the stupid people start talking to her and they really don't have anything in their heads. She gets bored. And we're back at the original statement, she's not stupid.

Weird girls are worth the trouble. In our extreme youth, we are often dumped for simpler girls. I have a testimonial: when I was a senior in high school, I loved a boy. He was exotic to me and I'm pretty exotic for most other people. I got him into college. Weird girls are brilliant, we just don't flaunt it because then people ask you to do things like run their corporations (sub-testimonial, this happened to me and it's been a six-year headache). So, there I am, in the blossom of love and hormones when he dumps me. Just flat-out says "We can't date any more." I ask all the relevant questions, "is it because your family is orthodox?" "No" "is it because of our ethno-cultural differences?" "No" "Do you not find me attractive?" "I find you very attractive."

This was a true stumper. Finally, I had to ask, "well, what IS it?" And bless him, he told me "you're too smart. I can't get over on you and I get tired of thinking." Well, huh. I thought about offering to play stupid, but I was too busy thinking of 5 guys who could comfort me. Three days later I saw him at a nightclub with a girl who was my physical carbon copy save the vacant look in her eyes. Ding-dong and no one but a yap-dog is home. In that moment I was incredibly hurt and insulted. A stupid girl is a great insult. This girl was about as quirky as a dead amoeba.

Weird girls deserve weir-but-socially-acceptable partners and should not settle for less. We tend to settle or go single for years at a time. We deserve love, our love is so rich and multi-faceted, only an idiot could get bored and idiots LOVe weird, smart girls. They don't even understand our multisyllabic language, but they like our big words. We like their big hands. It's a complementary relationship. But we deserve brilliant, weird guys/girls/significant others who make us laugh and can do our homework when we want to read romance novels or play sorority life or just sit in a corner and obsess about particle physics and chemistry