Day 11

So, what am I thinking about today? Halloween!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my favorite holiday is Halloween. In my teens and twenties, I was something of a flamboyant dresser. Everyday was Halloween. When did I get so respectable?

The village Halloween parade finally announced their theme. This year, it’s reverie – which pretty much leaves it wide open. Of course there’s no reason that you have to dress according to the theme. For me, it’s just a starting off point to try to think of something inventive. I have a few different ideas kicking around in my head. I haven’t quite decided what to do yet, but I’m starting to narrow it down.

As it happens, I was looking to make some molds for another project.

As an aside: If you didn’t know. I love projects. The messier the better. The only thing that gets in my way is living in a small Manhattan apartment. Even then, I usually just go ahead and make a big mess all over my coffee table. I want to live in another dimension in which my apartment is a small, modern, sleek thing, but inside it, somehow, there is a big garage or basement with a slop sink, a work bench, all sorts of tools for when I’m feeling macho. It’s kind of like my Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By day, or rather by weekday evening, I’m a nice, respectable, mild-mannered, sophisticated urban woman. Weekends, I want to retreat to my man cave.

Where the hell did that “man cave” thing come from anyway? Why don’t we have woman caves? (Besides the obvious joke that we carry one with us. But it’s too small for power tools!) How did a “room of her own” become a “room of his own?” Many of the companies from which I’ve bought my supplies tend to have projects for “man caves.” It sort of irritates me a little. I really hate the fact that so many people think that because I was born with a vagina I’m supposed to have a very definite set of likes and dislikes. Lately, as in the past few years, the damned thing has seen remarkably little use anyway. And not for lack of trying. That guy I gave my phone number to never called. I’ve given up trying online dating, although I toy with the idea once every couple of months. The truth is, I’m too old for men to want to have anything to do with. Guys a few years older than I am drop not so subtle hints that they would like someone even younger. Worse yet, if they can’t get someone younger, they’d rather masturbate to pictures than sleep with someone near their own age.

Eh, I don’t want to go there. It’s all a bunch of whining and it never changes. I could put up the same damned post about my sexual frustrations at least once a month. My last few attempts were such humiliating failures, I’m not sure I want to try again unless a man seems genuinely interested. I thought about writing about my last several attempts at sex. I had a pretty good sex life when I was younger. My recent experiences, however, were awful. I found myself asking, has something in the culture changed or have I reached a different stage of life and now people behave differently? They were awful in weird ways. As I said before, they were oddly humiliating. That’s sort of a new experience for me and to have that happen three times in a row with three different men is odd. Actually, since then there has been some fairly routine sex that was okay. So, I guess I should count that. Of course, to explain the bad sex and what happened would involve a pretty extreme level of self-exposure. I’m not sure anyone really wants to hear it.

Then maybe it was just bad luck. We all have a bad streak now and again, don’t we?

It was easier when I was young and attractive. It probably shouldn’t be that way, but when you know you’re the sort of woman men want you can behave with a certain level of confidence. Also, men treat you with respect. You’re a valuable commodity. They’re afraid to blow it. When you’re older and commensurately less attractive, men take you for granted. The don’t really care if you walk away. What makes it so annoying is that they’ll still go out on a date with you, but they won’t treat you well. They’ll be very critical. And sex is suddenly all about their needs. Suck their cock and leave. Or worse yet, take it up the ass. So, what’s in it for me? Where’s my pleasure?

You’d think something or someone triggered that outburst, but not really. This goes through my head on a regular basis. I just keep it to myself because to whine about the same thing over and over is just boring.

How did we get from Halloween to here? Oh, right, projects.

I used to feel like I could make my own way in life. Be my own person. Define myself the way I want to be defined. Now, everything is identity, identity, identity. But they don’t mean identity and any sense of the word as I used to understand it. Identity is just a code word for the little box they want to shove you in. It’s the ultimate result of commodification of everything. We’ve let the way advertisers and marketers view the world seep into the way we see ourselves.

So, I don’t like being forced to do things that are defined as women’s things because of my genitalia. Does that mean that I’m not “cis-gendered?” I don’t think so. When I read that Facebook had a huge number of gender options, my first reaction was to think that was good. Then I thought about it more. There are a few options that might describe me more accurately than cisgender woman, androgynous, bigender, gender fluid. (Gender questioning might fit, but it reminds me too much of the “bi-curious” thing which has always irritated the hell out of me. That’s a rant for another day, I suppose. But it’s probably outdated these days anyway.) You know, I don’t want a damned flag. I want a life. All the options might make it seem as if our perceptions are being refined, and maybe that’s good, but there’s a down side. (If you haven’t gotten used to the fact that I don’t see the world in black and white… I don’t have a conclusion for that if. I guess you’ll be disappointed.) When we only had two big boxes, male and female, it meant non-conformists (gender non-conforming and otherwise) had to slip out of the boxes. We found ourselves in a great big territory with no maps and no markings. We defined ourselves however we wanted to be defined. Now, the “straights,” for lack of a better term,” have just made better boxes. I don’t feel like any of those terms actually improve my life. I don’t want to be trapped in a ready-made identity, confined in a thing like an iron maiden. I don’t need or want other people to validate me. I can validate myself. My identity is who I am inside and it’s okay if you don’t have a word for it. I don’t need a name, or a flag.

We need to make lives that we want to live everyday as a subject, and how we portray that to other people as an object is a consequence. All these words put that order in reverse.