How to do Happy

I am at a very happy time in my life. I'm very content. Things are great. I'm dating someone who is excelling at loving me. Really doing a top notch, grade A job. So I'm pretty blissed out in general.

Where do you put that in a standup routine?

The thing about grief is, it should be performed in front of a crowd. Because when you express grief to one person, they think, "Oh god, what should I be doing right now? How am I supposed to make things better?" But when you perform grief in front of a group of people, no one thinks they have to do anything besides be quiet and listen, which is the correct thing to do when faced with grief.

Happiness, on the other hand, should not be shouted about to the masses. The masses don't know where you're going with this. They feel resentful and they roll their eyes. "We get it. Everything's great," they think, pursing their lips, "Can you point us to the nearest 4 car pileup?"

Happiness should be spoken about privately, one on one. "Yes, I'm very happy," you should say quietly to a friend while walking them to the door. Or wait for them to guess. Everyone can see when you are happy anyway.

Happiness, like money, should not be flaunted. Bring it out when it can be of use to others, keep it hidden otherwise. Those are the very best secrets to have anyways.

The Church acts Nutso, some more

Ooohhh, I got riled up at the Catholic Church yesterday. RILED. And it was justified, because this article about the Philippines leaves no room for any other conclusion but that the Church really dislikes women and wants them to have hard, sad lives.

I'm trying to find a way to spin this optimistically. Optimistically, when people push back it's because they are really threatened, and the Catholic Church has been lashing out at women like crazy recently, what with investigating American Nuns, and making a play for Anglicans who don't want female priests, and let's throw in saying condoms in Africa are making the AIDS crisis worse. That should be considered aggression against women because women are so much more likely to catch HIV from unprotected vaginal sex than men are. All this insanely anti-woman garbage must be being spewed because us ladies are really getting somewhere. Cross your fingers.

I am totally on board with Maureen Dowd's last column. The very best aspect of the Catholic Church are the nuns and lay Catholic women (who in any parish do all the work besides giving the homily and wearing the robes). And the Church really tries to find any opportunity to slap them down.

I couldn't deal with this stuff and had to get gone and get down with another church. (Also, how was I going to date women and take communion on Sunday? I guess it would've been sort of funny to confess the same thing every Saturday. "Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's been one week since my last confession. In the meantime I've been launching a blitzkrieg on compulsory heterosexuality.") But I do think my friends and family who have stayed with the Church (almost all women, we are such martyrs) are doing a good thing that was not within my emotional abilities to do. Who knows what will transform the Catholic Church into an institution that is interested in the well being and full potential of all of it's members? The people who are working inside of the Church will probably have much more of an effect than the people who jumped ship.

Well, maybe. I would feel more sure of that if the Church was a democratic institution. In the meantime, why not light a votive candle for access to birth control for everybody?

Using Liminality

A liminal state is a threshold state, being betwixt and between, having left your identity in the larger community and not yet having a new one. We leave our daily role in the community, and often are reincorporated with a stronger emotional bond after our liminal time. Like a Catholic mass every week- you go to mass, and regardless of whether you are a lawyer, a sex worker, or a dog walker your role in the mass is the same. Social distinctions are left outside, the group acts together, and then after the mass you go back to your identity impressed with the idea of your place in the community.

I am in a particularly liminal state right now, what with being unemployed and homeless. Homeless is a histrionic, misleading word to use: I am relying on the kindness of friends and taking up space in their home. Unemployed, however, very correctly captures my state. And I am experiencing communitas: that sense of anonymity and kinship with all the other anonymous weirdos. We're all in this together, even though that's not gonna get us anywhere.

The mechanics of what identities people fall into, the reality of the roles they fill for others, but up against their inner recipe for fulfillment. That is the usefulness of liminality. Your roles fall away and maybe you can get at that recipe. But then what if you never get back from the liminal state? What if society never hands you another role again?

Point being, me and a friend are going to write some songs about the Sun God now.

What's so funny?

One of the reasons I have a tortured relationship with standup comedy is that I have a tortured relationship with my own funniness. I have a long history of getting big laughs when I was being serious. The more serious I am, the bigger the laugh. When I was a freshman in high school I wrote a very serious essay about how much I hated 6th through 8th grade, and my english teacher wrote in her comments that she laughed out loud. At a recent job I got huge laughs during a staff meeting for asking a very serious question about insurance coverage for birth control. When I am very serious I am hilarious.

This is especially true about sex stuff. I have some brand new material about masturbation. But I hesitate to call it 'material' because there are no jokes I've written about masturbation. The 'material' is just me saying what I think, which is that all of us could use a lot more masturbation in our lives, and that if people took their masturbation more seriously both our sex lives and our non-sex lives would improve drastically. We'd all be a lot more chill, and that's what the world needs right now, for everyone to be way more relaxed and optimistic. There isn't a joke there. But it gets laughs.

I don't resent the laughs; obviously I'm seeking them out, why else would I be at a comedy open mic? But I was surprised at those laughs nonetheless, because I hadn't thought of a punchline, and I thought there would be a big laugh free break in my set. The entire thought is a punchline to people, I guess. Maybe the punchline is someone who looks like me saying the thought. I once got approached by a stranger at a Red Lobster who asked if I grew up on a farm, because I looked like the most wholesome country girl to her. I grew up taking the bus and never seeing the stars and feeling very creeped out when I did end up in the country. But I will take the farm girl image, if it means I can tell people to masturbate without making them feel threatened.

How important is it to be viewed as a serious person? It's very important if you think you might end up running for the presidency, and there must be thousands of people out there keeping that possibility in mind and editing their interests accordingly. But is it important to try to be viewed as serious when in fact your interests do not fall into the serious category? More importantly, is there even a choice for me here? When I'm hanging out around 'serious' people (private school students, law students, lawyers, organizers) I inevitably end up being the wacky one.

I'll take it. I'm a pleasant looking young midwestern woman who thinks it's very important that we all work on orgasming more. The earnestness is the joke. That's not such a bad schtick, and we all gotta have one.

Why are Orgasms Important?

I was a real annoying kid in college. I went off to college thinking I knew better than every other college kid ever, and thus was a serious person, and would not be bothered with flippant things. This manifested in some regretful choices- a total avoidance of the women's studies department, a near total avoidance of the psychology department, two years of comparative politics courses. Where I got the idea that learning about the miraculous healing powers of U.S. enforced 'free market' policies in Zimbabwe was more serious than a psychology course, I don't know.

In one instance of startling obnoxiousness, I dropped the women's studies 101 course when the professor passed out a list of vocab words including "gender" which defined gender as separate from biological sex. I rolled my eyes so hard I could've been playing marbles with them. These indulgent, silly, disconnected from reality liberals! Why weren't we talking about real women's concerns, like paychecks? It did not occur to me that there were people in this world who had to worry about both their gender and their paycheck. Or that gender could be a much more reasonable thing for an American to be worrying about than what the best policy for us to force on Zimbabweans would be.

There's some Zen piece of advice that says the trick to life is to take great care with the small stuff, and take no care with the big stuff. So treat brewing your morning coffee (well, you should be drinking tea if you're into the buddhist stuff) like a life or death matter, but decide whether to join the Army by rolling a dice. Although don't join the Army. Peace Corps, let's change it to Peace Corps.

This is all build up to say- of course closing the orgasm gap (3/4th's of American women don't orgasm consistently in partnered sex, compared to 1/3rd of men) is a silly, silly cause. Because people are going bankrupt after getting cancer from wearing lead-filled makeup made by slaves. Also, the oceans are rising, and the government has secret prisons to put all of us in. Many horrible things are going down at the moment.

But after an orgasm, I feel much more relaxed, and creative, and less scared, and more like-able. If women everywhere felt a little more relaxed, creative, less scared, and more like-able, maybe we'd get around to fixing cancer, slavery, lead and prisons. Or maybe not. Maybe we'd deal with the aftermath of cancer, slavery, lead and prisons better. Maybe our standards for how much happiness each human being is allotted in life would rise.

If the expectation for partnered sex was that both partners were going to have a blast, I think the discussions surrounding rape and consent would be simplified. There'd be none of this, "Well, what was that mature looking thirteen year old doing hanging out with Roman Polanski anyway?" Our reaction would be, "He knew that would be no fun for that kid! What was he doing, having fun at a thirteen year old's expense?"

If our expectations for partnered sex were higher, maybe our expectations for relationships in general would be higher. Maybe we could internalize the idea that there's no reason to rely on other people's misery for our good times. Maybe if we got some training paying attention to how our actions affected other people in the sack, we could get better about paying attention to the people in front of us all the time.

Yes, the lack of women's orgasms is the least of the world's problems. And so maybe it's the right problem to be tackling at the moment. And let's not forget, it's one of the only big problems where no one will suggest the solution involves a war. That's enough to sell me on it.

Why do Women have Sex? Because People have Sex, and Women are People.

One more stroke has been added to the vast painting of female sexuality as passive, not motivated by the experience of pleasure, and above all STRANGE with the release of the new book "Why Women Have Sex" and the accompanying media coverage.

I haven't read the book, but from the coverage, it does appear that the pursuit of pleasure is acknowledged as a motivator. But can you imagine a book coming out with the title "Why Men Have Sex?" It would be the biggest joke. Everyone would laugh HARD at the notion that there is even a question of motivation. The popular conception of manhood is that men have sex because the pursuit of sex is a defining characteristic of manhood. The drive to have sex underlies every other pursuit a man undertakes- whether painting, or physics, or politics, it's really all a scam to get women to go to bed with you. At least according to TV.

Why do women eat? Why do women breathe? Why do women sleep, every night? Why do women put on more clothes when it gets cold? Because being a woman is a subsidiary experience of being human, and human beings eat, sleep, react to temperature changes, and also, we have sex.

You couldn't title a book "Why Men Have Sex" because a man's experience of sex as pleasurable is assumed. Culturally, we are not convinced that sex for women has to do with pleasure. Women have sex to damage themselves, or to rebel, or for money or status, or to express love. In actuality, since sex is an impulse, and since most people have impulse control and make choices about when to act on their desires, people of all genders have complicated reasons for when and with whom they express their sexual urges. Men have sex for money, and have sex to show they love someone, and use sex as a way to hurt themselves. But we don't look for those subsidiary motivations when we talk about men's sexuality. A man has sex because sex feels good. It feels irrationally good, and thus, men act irrationally in pursuit of sex.

Both stories- that women need a secondary reason to want to have sex, and that men don't have secondary reasons for the sex they have- do not describe reality. People's lives and inner motivations are infinitely complex. But I object to this complexity being reserved for women. Especially since it denies our right to the very simplest explanation- "I had sex because I knew it would feel good."

I would like a world where a woman could have sex because she likes sex, and a man could paint because he likes painting. Where we don't assume that our genders make our participation in basic human experiences a mystery.

Contained in that interview was another one of my popular wisdom pet peeves- the explanation that women don't respond to porn the way men do because we are inherently less 'visual.' The idea is that women need the written word to get turned on. This doesn't account for the differences in content between most pornography and erotica. Erotica doesn't rely on themes of degradation and humiliation of women as much as pornography does. Of course, if you go looking for it, there's lots of pornography that doesn't rely on that either, but a girl's first experience with pornography will very likely involve the woman in the scene being talked to or physically treated like a subordinate. And then why would she look hard for pornography that depicts something different? If a woman isn't turned on by a visual representation of degradation, is it that she's not turned on by pictures or she's not turned on by what the pictures show?

And here's where I acknowledge there are many women who are aroused by scenes of degradation, and I don't think that weakens my argument that the "less visual" explanation for why more women aren't into pornography is facile. The "less visual" explanation ignores facts about what pornography generally depicts and doesn't address whether women are aroused by that content communicated in a different way. I think that a woman aroused by scenes of degradation is going to find a lot of visual content out there arousing. And there are probably millions of people who really do prefer the written word over pictures, and I bet half of them are men.

And anyways, what does "less visual" even mean? Women notice visual stimuli less? We attach less importance to it? Our nervous system doesn't respond as strongly to what our eyes take in? How come this "less visual" thing doesn't manifest itself outside of the arena of sexuality? Do we go to movies less? Do we care less about art and interior design? Do we remember faces less?

It bugs me to no end that the very obvious explanation- women don't get turned on by pornography because most pornography shows a woman being treated badly- is jettisoned in favor of a much more complicated explanation- women are inherently different from men. And this isn't a moral judgment on what pornography should depict, or what is okay to be turned on. But it is a moral judgment on rushing to believe there are huge differences between men and women. That's mean. Especially when under the guise of description we are actually prescribing a "normal" experience of sexuality that is less oriented towards pursuing pleasure than the "normal" male experience.

The belief that women are people first still makes you a weirdo, apparently.

I don't want to be burnt, by chemicals or otherwise

I got my First Aid and CPR/AED certifications for infants, children, and adults today. Some of the things I now know:

- I don't want to have an open fracture
- I don't want to go into cardiac arrest
- I don't want to have a stroke
- I don't want to go into anaphylactic shock
- I don't want to be burnt down to my bone, whether by heat, chemicals, or electricity
- I don't want to suffer from heat stroke or hypothermia
- I don't want to have a laceration or puncture wound

I could've guessed at these opinions before, but after looking at photos, I now KNOW, deep in my heart, how badly I'd like to avoid these things.

I feel pretty confident in my ability to save the lives of those around me. I missed just one question on the test. My CPR rhythm is quick and dancey. I know when and how to look in your mouth for what's blocking your airway and scoop it out. I know to put the AED stick'ems (that's the medical term) on the chest and back of an infant. I know to put pressure on your bleeding wound and make you lie on your back and put your feet up when you're going into chock. If you're diabetic, I'm gonna make you drink juice. If you're having a stroke, I'm going to ask you to smile at me, raise your arms, say a simple sentence, and I'll give the time your symptoms started to the emergency dispatch. I know to always CHECK the accident scene for danger, CALL 911, and then provide CARE. When you have a huge shard of glass lodged in your arm, I will apply bandages around it and will not attempt to remove it. So don't ask me too.

But more importantly, I have two more cards to put in my wallet.

Funny fact about women giving birth- you, as a trained first aid provider, should not stick your fingers in their vaginas. Write it on your hand if you think you might forget.

I didn't like watching all the accident scenes today. I have a high amount of physical empathy. No amount of poor acting will stop me from cringing when our hapless victim falls from the ladder/ scaffolding/ roof.

Oh, also, if you get a pencil stuck in your eye, I'm going to secure it and keep it from moving, perhaps with an upside down paper cup. So keep having your buddies launch those pencils at your eyes. You've got a friend.

Watch Yer Back, Iowa!

We got a Marriage Equality Bill! So soon we will be a state with gay marriage and the Mr. Leather festival.

But all of us queers, whether full time, part time, or seasonal, need to assert ourselves as an interest group and call up our state representatives to get this bill passed.

Since I'm in Logan Square, my state representative is Ms. Toni Berrios, who you can call at 773-235-3939. My state senator is Ms. Iris Martinez, who you can call at 217-782-8191.

I'm so excited for Illinois to join the ranks of the freedom to marry states because I want my drag queen performances of 'Single Ladies' to come from a place of personal meaning for the performers.

It's pretty cool this is happening while I'm unemployed, I certainly have the time to visit some offices and whatnot.