friendship in the time of consumerism

What you are about to read began as a love letter. Perhaps it is still a love letter of sorts—it’s definitely an ode, to someone who is all at once fleeting and everlasting. Her name is Whitney. I’ve known her for a couple years now, but I don’t even know her last name. She is a salesperson in the handbag department of the Barneys in San Francisco. I’ve always thought of her as “my” salesgirl but perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am “her” buyinggirl.

I first thought about writing something about Whitney while I was preparing to come back to the East Coast from my usual summer in San Francisco. As I was packing my summer loot, I was suddenly struck with the thought that over the last few years, the friends I’ve had in the Bay Area have kind of faded into a distance that feels sadly like the past (This is mostly my fault—self-enclosed solitude is an easy instinct for me). Aside from my dearest sister, I was really not going to miss anyone in San Francisco. Except Whitney. But if this strikes any of you as a pathetic admission (“You think your salesgirl is your friend?”), I don’t care. It is true that Whitney is not my friend. But Whitney and I do have an intimacy.

Whitney is a young woman, probably in her mid twenties. She is tall, and in the teetering stiletto pumps she favors, she’s even taller. Chicly, her limbs are about the width of a toothpick. All of this, combined with the fact that she has a cute, doll-like face, makes her a shoo-in for America’s Next Top Model. Her long black hair is usually middle-parted and styled in soft waves that make you think ever so slightly of Farrah Fawcett, but pulls you back right at the moment of full-on 70s retro nostalgia. Of course she is always dressed perfectly, a femininity that seems simultaneously strict and floral. Maybe it’s the fact that she wears glasses (black Ray-bans) and resin earrings in the shape of roses in bloom. Her voice makes me think of raspberry peppermints.

Last summer, Whitney sold me my first Proenza Schouler PS1 bag. In the couple weeks leading up to my finally settling on (of course) plain black leather, Whitney welcomed my obsessive stalking of the bag with salesperson perfection: she encouraged me to test the tactility of various models (urban environment is rough in suede), try swinging various sizes off my shoulders, offered handbag camaraderie as a customer (she herself ownd the Givenchy Nightingale and we bonded about the inability of boyfriends to understand the primacy of expensive handbags). Whitney guided me through my investment with the strategic focus of a general and the soft leniency of a psychotherapist. And unlike a lot of snooty bitch salesgirls old and young who regularly ignore me in high-end shops, Whitney indulged me sweetly week and after non-purchasing week, even though I was wearing a cracked-out Danzig t-shirt and raggedy rolled up jeans.

And out of that came a familiarity that became, this summer, a kind of intimacy. A week before leaving San Francisco, I dropped by to check out the pre-Fall wares, and while we were doing our usual loose small talk, she impulsively (it felt like impulsiveness to me) revealed: “I got engaged this summer!” We hugged and hopped up and down. I felt so happy for her I felt emotions gushing out of every pore. We grabbed each other’s forearms while she told me all the details of how her man proposed to her, when and where the wedding will be, showing me her ring. We were acting like old girlfriends, and so lost in our moment that Whitney almost lost sight of the unhappy-looking old woman waiting to be shown a bag. “See you at Christmastime!” she chimed in that inimitable raspberry peppermint voice as we parted for the summer.

But what is this intimacy between a buyinggirl and a salesgirl? Our relationship is predicated upon the capitalistic system of purchase and exchange. She is the employee of a corporation of consumption and I am a consumer who keeps that corporation going. It could be argued that her friendliness to me is fake, a performance necessary for her job and function. But if she began her friendly overtures to me as the performance of “salesgirl,” is it necessarily so that that friendliness remain “fake”?

Obviously, I don’t believe so. A couple weeks ago, I actually had a discussion about this subject of performing friendliness with my boyfriend (My boyfriend refers to it as an “argument”). We were talking about urban affects, specifically the difference between New York and San Francisco affects. Being a boy who escaped from the South, my boyfriend prefers the bluntly abrasive affect of New Yorkers to the gliding-the-surface niceness of Californians: he found the post-hippie affect of San Francisco to be “fake,” on par with fakey Southern so-called charm, whereas New York aggression may not be nice, but it is always the truth. But my argument (OK Roddy it was an argument) was: performance is always performative. That is, you begin acting a certain way, knowing that the act is a fiction necessary for a certain kind of survival, but do it long enough and you find that you have become the fiction. You have turned yourself into the embodiment of the fiction, you have turned the script into an emotion. You have crafted fact out of fiction.

I believe that the affect of aggressive bluntness is a performance, too. If you are mean or abrasive to strangers, you are communicating a desire for, and in fact, effecting, a basic foreclosure of any desire for future friendship. (No matter how probable or fantastical that future may be.) On the other hand, You may begin “acting” friendly as an act, perhaps because your job requires you to, but if you are any kind of human at all, you do it long enough and you find that the friendliness becomes you because the feeling has actually produced real happiness, detached from the original context of the performance.

This is the way I think about the intimacy between Whitney and me. Behaviors that produce contact points between humans have a tactility. I just prefer that it be soft. Whitney and I bonded over an outrageously expensive handbag. Our intimacy was negotiated and produced over the barrier of a brass-edged glass counter with a discreetly hidden cash register of which we were always acutely and silently aware. So the original form of our “friendship” was, quite simply, hierarchical: salesperson and customer. But with her consistent California salesgirl affect, Whitney pulled me down from the perches of customer and made me instead a baggirl—like her. Her wedding is set for next summer, and of course I do not expect an invitation. But I don’t need one; I’m giddy enough envisioning her as the radiant young bride I know she will be. Even if we never see each other again, Whitney will always be my friend, my California.

hard white resistance

I have tiny red scissors, Japanese, made of stainless steel, red plastic handles that fit around my fingers like rings just one size too big. With their mean little points, they are for prying off bruise-blackened toenails or trimming long bangs. I was doing the latter last week when I sliced through the pad of my left middle finger. I cut myself quite often when trimming my hair because I cut my bangs vertically rather than laterally in order to create ragged ends. The blood flowed out crazily and for a moment I felt that old adolescent electric shock of my body coming together.

In Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, the husband tells his wife that he no longer enjoys sex with her because he is sick of fighting the “hard white resistance” emanating from her body. This hard white resistance, this feminine barrier, is how I’ve always experienced the rhythmic bloodpour of self-mutilation. I used to cut myself because I wanted to escape the tyranny of the visual. I hated seeing myself: mirrors. The pour of blood from blade is coming out of the girl in my head, from the prison of my imagination and taking glossy form in the oxygenated external world. But sometimes my gender dysphoria gets so swollen that I can’t stand it, and even the blood pouring doesn’t help. My body just starts spreading out evil and slow out like Exxon at sea. In my head, I am such a contained, specifically female thing—to confess, Angelina Jolie most of the time. I get up in the morning, put myself together to make my body simulate that specific female thing and I just shatter.

Now, I feel like the little outfits I put on are totally inadequate for containing the goo spilling around in myself. I hate skinny little jeans. I hate 70s hippie bellbottom jeans. I hate 50s rolled up jeans. I’m sick of seeing myself. I want to FEEL myself instead. More and more I want to be naked all the time, naked except for maybe the heavy metal bracelet I bought in Providence in May (the girl who sold it to me for $5 couldn’t take the price sticker off so inside the bangle it still has the sticker—except she added a zero to make it, as she says, “seem more expensive”). I want to be naked without mirrors, I just want to be naked in bed all the time, being caressed into Angie by the hands of a boy rather than the crackling zipper of jeans.

The last time this happened was last summer. Let’s call the boy Drew (not his real name): he fucked me into the girl in my head not because he fucked me like a man but because he fucked me like a lesbian. We would fall into bed kissing and he would put his strong arms around me (arms that were harder and bigger than his chest—the common mistake of boys who work out and not pay attention to body proportion work) and pressing down on me like a pin to specimen, he would fuck me not with his cock or even a finger or two but with his kiss. I’m not coyly describing analingus. We were naked, he was on top of me, but his hard cock was simply pressed into my tummy. Flattening me with his weight and muting me with his lips and tongue, he would just masturbate me while kissing me roughly and creatively, making me realize that kissing has like a hundred different positions. He was manipulating my sex organ by making me forget about it, so hard was the kiss and the body that was breaking mine in its embrace.

We stopped dating after a few dates. On one of those last few dates, we went to see the Angelina Jolie movie Salt. I was enthralled (as usual) by the sight of Angie kicking ass: no actress wears a dykey black pantsuit with crisp white shirt as well as Angie. Drew was not so thrilled. He kept cracking jokes about her big lips throughout the film, which irritated me. As we were leaving the movie, I went on about how much I loved it.

“You love these movies where chicks kick ass, don’t you?” he asked me.

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“Not really. Maybe if it was a really good-looking guy doing the ass-kicking I would like it.”

We went back to his place where he fucked me like a lesbian. He fucked like a lesbian but he certainly didn’t think like one. I don’t talk to him any more, and while I do miss fucking him sometimes, I don’t mind not talking to him anymore at all.

children get older

I have a white hair. I had a white hair. In the early morning light of November 9, 2010, that fucking one white lock was glaring at me, daring me not to pull it out. I yanked it out. I want to believe that it is a fluke of vegetarian vitamin deficiency, but I’m afraid that it is really the start of an ambush of aging cells.

In fact, I had a foreboding of this getting old thing just the week before that fateful morning. My buddy Trace and I were putzing around downtown Boston. It was a Saturday, the day before Halloween, and at the Marc by Marc Jacobs store on Newbury Street, cute tweenies were planning a costume party:

“Yeah, totally dress up and come over tonight. We’re having a party and the theme is 90s grunge. It should be so fun!!”

As we walked out of the store, I nudged Trace: “Did you hear what those shopkids were saying?” She hadn’t, so I repeated it, and then got a bit hysterical: “Can you believe this. ‘90s grunge' is a costume for them! But it’s not a costume for me; ‘90s grunge’ is MY LIFE!!”

Which is true. It’s not just about operating my brain to the rhythm of Hole’s “Miss World” and Liz Phair’s “Glory.” It’s putting myself together in a way that grunge music pours of me like a too heavy perfume. This personal aesthetic is dictated by the epic slogan of a Nirvana t-shirt:

FUDGE PACKIN

CRACK SMOKIN

SATAN WORSHIPPIN

MOTHER FUCKER

OK of course not literally. But I take the nihilist spirit of the text and turn it into a styling structure of feminine dissonance: stiff jeans, simpering t-shirts, limpid flannel; careful jewelry and sloppy make-up; big fat hair, small posture; clean skin, filthy mind. I used to think all of these things represented me. But the layers of the years, nay, layers of decades, have fused these things to my skin and I, me myself and I, have become a representation of those things. In other words, I used to think I wore these things on my body to carry with me the ideas they symbolized. But when twenty-year olds see me as an extra in a costume drama about the 1990s, I myself have become the symbol, I myself have become the costume. Bag me up, price me up ($6.66) and staple a cardboard fold-over tag on top: 90S GRUNGE COSTUME.

But unlike how the white hair makes me feel, I like this feeling of being a prepackaged costume for children ages 15 to 25. Like my insides (Born in Korea, moved to Iowa, had bad acne, was gothically gay, went to University of Virginia, blah blah blah ofpersonal history) have been scooped out clean and replaced with a jittery expectation of being filled by a younger body who wants to embody an idea that my body has become.

So growing old means: I’m becoming hollow. Hollow like a costume waiting for October 31^st, hollow like...a handbag. As you may or may not be able to tell on my most current masthead, I have been feeling fused to my newest and most favorite handbag: a Proenza Schouler PS1 in black leather. The intense level of attachment I have to this thing has been something over which I’ve been wrangling with my words, but is captured nicely in the publicity video for the PS1 in patent:

Skin-sheathed body becomes reduced to handbag. When the cute tweenies unknowingly labeled me so old as to become costume, they also turned me into a handbag. And this is not a bad way to learn to grow old: you become not a role model for youth, but a role, as in, a shell to put on over complex flesh.

Being a role, being a shell: If I am an empty handbag, who is going to carry me around? I ask that, rather than: who is going to fill me and with what is that person going to fill me? This is a totally different self-pedagogy of growing old than the tired one of waiting for that one (that man) who will make my soul feel like a blood-enriched vaginal cavity. But what does it mean to think about the sugar walls of my brain as the jacquard lining of a luxury leather good? Rather than mark the passing years by the dread of not finding the man who will fill me thus complete me, I will instead imagine how the children who grow older with me will, in their brain, skin me and pull me around them to have youth adventures in the world. I might not know who or how many have done this to me. But I’ll know that it has been done: my skin has become leather and is having fun, out there, everywhere.

sappho

I’d been stalking...a jean jacket. It is a Lee jean jacket circa 1971, with a stitch-supported collar. It was only $34, but because I get cheap at weird moments, I’d been half-heartedly haunting it at Wasteland, my favorite San Francisco vintage clothing shop, for the past couple weeks. Thursday morning, I finally decided I would buy it. When I got to the store, I saw that it was gone from the rack. Lost it through indecision, I thought. Then I looked up and it was hanging high on the wall, hugged over a Culture Club t-shirt. I asked a store employee to use the big fat whaling hook to get it down for me.

The gal who got the jean jacket down for me was also the one who eventually rang me up. Whaling hook in hand, she asked me if I was wearing Amber. When I replied No, Daphne, actually, she commented on the scent’s nice nostalgic warmth. Like all the clerks at Wasteland, she was in her early twenties. She was a tall, vaguely Nordic thing. Thin, but voluptuous—perhaps deceptively so. She may have been neither thin nor voluptuous. But she was quite pretty. The detail that really made her pretty in my eyes was that she had an odd, dark red-purple wound on the bridge of her nose. It was a purposefully artsy splatter on her otherwise flawless typing-paper skin.

The total of my purchase came to one of my favorite number combinations: 49.28. (I threw in a ragged three-clover tee as well.) She had actually given me a little discount. We chatted as she rang me up. I told her how much I liked the long black knit dress she was wearing. It was a crewneck one-piece with long sleeves, a black bodice and color-blocked maxi skirt. “I love those little knit dresses,” I said. Then she said the cutest thing I’d heard in a while:

“Yeah. It looked so dumpy on the rack, but I had faith in it.”

“That is so cute—you had faith in the dress!” I said before she asked, “What’s your name again?” “Again,” as if either she knew my name already or ought to know it. I told her, she told me hers.

“I’ve seen you around a lot,” she said. I almost replied, Well, I’m at this store a lot but instead, but self-conscious of my shopping addiction, I just smiled and said “Awww, really?” We had a nice handshake, nice sweet wave goodbye and see ya round.

The encounter put me in a weirdly god mood. I felt kind of romantic. Of course I am homosexual and I cannot imagine desiring to use my penis with her (I have a hard enough time desiring to use my penis with boys) but I found this gal very pretty—as in, attractive. I haven’t felt that bisexual in a long time. And while the feeling was unfamiliar, it didn’t feel at all puzzling or destabilizing. Her openness, her willingness to just pour herself out in words spoken out loud, her instinct to create immediate intimacy: I connected with that, because I am that. These are qualities I value in humans, but what they really constitute is the defining quality of woman: a willingness to take risks with the ego. With this pretty Nordic gal, that quality gave her a high gloss. Thus she made my most sapphic moment.

Big purple Wasteland bag in hand, I then walked about the Castro to pick up some magazines and restock on Dunhill International menthols. As I walked up and down Market and 18^th and Castro streets, I inevitably saw a whole lot of fags—and in the small afterglow of the Nordic gal, they grossed me out. Their muscles, facial hair, the sheer physical room they took up on the sidewalk, all seemed barriers to intimacy. Femininity shoots towards closeness; masculinity is about closEDness. Masculinity closes in on its own important sense of self. The masculine closedness of gay men I saw made them so ugly it shocked me to think that I’d ever found bald heads, beards, and pectorals to be an unquestionable formula for sexual attractiveness. At that moment, and for many hours afterwards, I found that pretty Nordic gal to be a preferable sexual partner, in spite of my sexual preference.

i am shelby lynne

The singer Shelby Lynne shocked the hell out of us when she came out on stage. In person, her body was smaller than the voice on her records would lead you to believe, and her voice was much bigger (not louder—BIGGER) than the voice on her records. She does with her voice what all great troubadours do: drug you into wanting things that you thought, or been taught, you’d never ever want. Like when she sings a sad lyric comparing herself to an old mangy dog: you want to feel love so hard that you feel that depressed. You want to be the dog she turns herself into with that song.

The desirability she produced on stage was something I haven’t experienced in a long time. That smaller-than-the-voice-would-allow body: it’s not just that at 42 years old, Shelby Lynne is so thin and fit that she embodies everything that I want to be in seven years. (In an interview a couple years back, she famously declared: “I wouldn’t trade my life for what Carrie Underwood has. I’ll be 75, and someone will ask me to sing. And I’ll still be cute.”) As a woman artist working in an industry that prizes toothless girlishness or over-the-top “artsy” femme decadence (you know the cultural perpetrators I’m talking about), Shelby Lynne is, right now, the kind of girl I want to be. Not just physically, but in work. No big hits, eight-album combined record sales that fail to add up to a million, yet she’s still working and working passionately at her art. I like to think that Shelby and I travel the same road: it takes at least three rough decades of work to become a proper girl.

But back to that body that houses and manufactures that voice. That night, Shelby wore, without a bra, a simple black lycra camisole (Probably Victoria’s Secret. My little sister and I too wore black tank tops to the show that night, except ours were Rick Owens. This is the only night when Victoria beats out Rick for coolness and beauty), black Rock & Republic jeans (tight, but not too tight: wrinkly calves) and black buckly boots (“Like you buy on Polk Street,” my sister assessed). The ensemble was apt uniform for the booming femininity she projected on stage. Her interaction with her band (well, a guitarist and a percussionist) and audience revealed a femininity that was stretchy and tough as that black lycra tanktop. Bossy (getting pissed at her guitarist for changing keys: “It’s in G now, Ok?” followed by angry silence. Was she joking? Hard to tell!), gracious (“I appreciate your lovin’, I really feel it in my bones now” she said before her encore), never pandering or cutesy (Never a flirty sexpot, she scowled and worked her way through her guitar playing and communication with her guitarist. Lynne’s reaction to some male geek audience member who yelled out at the end, “Don’t be a stranger!!”: SILENCE). “She’s so hard!” my sister whisper-exclaimed to me moments after Lynne took the stage. She was right. Sensitivity that shoots through a perforated black carapace: that is Shelby Lynne’s femininity.

At the San Francisco Yoshie’s where my sister and I saw her this week, we were seated at our table with a cheerful middle-aged middle-class couple from Concord who had just discovered Shelby...through NPR. “I’ve been following her since the 90s!” I snottily and warmly offered. And while I’ve been co-opting her voice to blow up my own little heartaches since 1993 when I bought a tape of her Nashville album Temptation, Shelby’s look has never compelled imitation in me. Until now. Not because she’s not pretty (she is very pretty) but because she’s always been a bit too pretty (blond, blue-eyed, blah blah blah). But Wednesday night, she showed up with short hair and made me want to crawl inside her black carapace. Her hair was pitched—and I mean, pitched, like a bale of hay or a wall of Phil Spector strings—somewhere between a Teddy Boy’s ducktail, Morrissey’s flop top, and Etta James’s peroxide poodle cut. The hair could have gone so wrong (i.e. small town white dyke) but instead it went so right. (And note: the short hairdo was not a Rihanna ‘do. Rihanna cut her hair to be a “good girl gone bad”; Shelby Lynne has never been a good girl. Plus, Lynne’s hair is not ironic/ flamboyant/ science fiction. Instead, it’s historical fiction that is indecisive about the particular decade. Rihanna’s hair poses aggressively towards the future; Shelby Lynne’s hair muscles aggressively into the past. Shelby’s short hair is definitely retro—but it decreates itself and its human source.)

For the first time in many years, I felt not only a bit dowdy but downright boyish in my scraggy long locks. Shelby Lynne made me believe I could achieve a better kind of femininity if I chop my hair off short. It gives some hoping room for the futurity of a girl whose male genetic destiny may include a receding hairline. I haven’t taken up the scissors yet, but I’m not afraid to think about it. I don’t know if a floppy beehivey ducktail will work with my hair, but Shelby made me want to find out.

only doctors bleed

I was sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office. I was wearing my sensible jeans. A pair of soft black Levis that, instead of clinging to, tread around my hips: easier to zip them off when the doctor examines my rectum. All my life, I’ve been kind of preternaturally inclined to rectal bleeding. My little spotting had been diagnosed as nothing medically serious, merely the consequences of overzealous toiletry. So I’ve always shrugged off blood in the toilet with an ease that bordered on affection. Years ago, when I told my ex-husband about my spotted toilet paper, he replied: “You probably like that.” It wasn’t a recognition of my masochism (although he knew about my cutting past) but an affirmation of my desire to be a woman: mimesis of menstruation.

I went to the doctor this week though because my regular heavy flow days had gotten a little too heavy, a little too flowing, a little too regular. So I sat there waiting like a good little girl in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, reading magazines I’d never read (Newsweek: “Michelle Obama: My Fight Against Childhood Obesity”), being wan but aloof, waiting to hear my name called.

“Dr. Lee?”

Is that me? It is me. How strange it is to be called a “Doctor” in a doctor’s office. The young teenage girl with neon patent leather Nikes who was also being a good little girl, there with her mother or grandmother, looked a little surprised. But I was a little surprised too, though I shouldn’t have been. It was all my doing. I am a doctor (a Doctor of Philosophy) and I circled it as my title of choice on my patient survey.

The form asked me to choose: “Prefix: Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss Dr.” I am all of those things but since discussing excessive bloodletting into the toilet is not an academic matter, I feel that I have to choose a “Prefix” that reflects, if not the accuracy, the inevitable outlines, of my flesh. Thank God then, for the gender-neutral “Dr.”

But I’m not so sure that “Dr.” is a gender-neutral prefix. For me, anyway. Even on the medical survey, the category of “Prefix” is an odd one because there is a separate section for indicating gender. So “Prefix” seems to ask for some other, more social information, even though it is essentially that of gender: one way to say “male” and three different ways to say “female”....then one way to say “post-graduate degree.” Thus, in picking the post-graduate degree, am I not saying that my education bears the same weight upon my psyche and body as my sex and marital status? To push that even further: I wonder if being a Ph.D. is some kind of gender for me.

Is being hyper-educated a gender? Not “gendered” but “a gender.” What I mean by that differentiation is, I’m not interested in how hyper-education is represented along traditional lines of masculinity and femininity. For example: being a bookworm means you are less muscular and able-bodied thus more feminine than masculine; or being learned means you are not a housewife thus more masculine than feminine. No, what I mean is the functionality of hyper-education as a gender.

Gender marks the fleshly plugs and sockets we use to sexually and romantically connect with other human beings. If we apply this formulation to “Dr.” what we are essentially asking is: How does your identity as it is comprised by what and how you’ve learned dictate a specific mode by which you become sexual? Does my Ph.D. in American literature really shape my sexuality? Is it that my expertise with words and books gives me a special nubbin and/ or dent that can be petted to orgasm? Or that the ease and pleasure with which I dissect the prose of Mary Gaitskill or Anaïs Nin constitute a body part that longs for a specific kind of spit-and-stroke rhythm?

I think so. Even if I haven’t figured out exactly how, I think so. Being a doctor as a type of girl doesn’t mean that I’m looking for my twin in educational degree. This is not a match.com profile. Rather, I think of this boy I’ve recently been in love with. He is not a Ph.D. in literature. But when he talks about writing and reading he talks in a way that puts his entire body into it. His hands have been trained to hold tools other than books but when he talks about books I love that he talks in a way that feels soft and firm at once. His desire to love and find meaning in words I love and find meaningful is so palpable it’s fingertippy. And when he talks like this he’s talking to ME, the Doctor of Philosophy. This is who defines my gender. Someone who knows how to touch my body of knowledge and education in a way that makes me feel more like a girl and less like a human.

the pleasures and functionality of forgetting

Such an underrated, or perhaps more accurately, unfairly maligned process: forgetting. Maybe I’m wanting to twist forgetting into a valuable feeling because I’m in love and the boy whom I love might forget me in the summer months to come. I might not have any control over his forgetting about me. I want to forget him too. But not forgetting as obliteration.

One always assumes that to love, you constantly have to be thinking about the love object. You have to keep saying “I love you,” you have to keep phoning them, you have to keep texting them, you have to keep emailing them, you have to keep reminding them that you love them, you have to keep reminding them to remind you that they love you. These are what Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, calls “the lunatic chores” of love. In order to love, you seem to have to maniacally guarantee against forgetting. It’s constantly bearing evidence of love. It’s burdensome.

Actually, what it may indicate is a kind of emotional misfit. You keep performing your love as a fight against forgetting because in the back of your mind, you might not really feel it.

So maybe forgetting your beloved can be a symptom of love. In forgetting the loved one, you integrate him into your emotionality, your material existence. The loved one is important enough to become a seamless part of your everyday life. Of course, this has to be a very specialized form of forgetting, because there is a thin but hard line of differentiation between this loving forgetting and taking for granted.

Which is why the above quote from Christophe Decarnin, the current designer for the French fashion house Balmain, is so resonant with me right now: “It’s a success when you forget what you have on.” The successful love is like a successful pair of jeans: in the morning, it makes your heart flutter when you see it, bunched up or folded up, but waiting, just waiting for you; it makes you jittery and charged when you’re out of the shower and naked and you touch it and hold it up and shake it out to prepare to put left leg in first; then you put it on and button it up close to your navel and get on with your day, and it is so beloved that even if it is not skin tight, its weft nevertheless fuses with that of your skin. And then you forget it as you’d forget that your muscles and bones and organs are covered by your skin; you forget it in such a way that if you ever lost it, you know you’d just die.

big fat legs

I finally did something to make me feel completely woman: I ran my first half-marathon. I ran in the Providence Rhodes Races last Sunday, and I dressed carefully for my debut: strategically broken-in Nike Air Pegasus with “JOONY SCHECTER” embroidered on the tongues; 70s-style Adidas running shorts that flap out silkily like a half-slip; and my vintage Hole Live Through This t-shirt. Actually, the choice of the Hole t-shirt was a bit of thoughtful impulsiveness. Up until the night before the race, I had planned on wearing one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac Rumors shirt from the 70s, whose cotton was thinned out, as aerodynamic as any athletic microweave polyester. But suddenly, as I was going to bed, I thought: HOLE.

And so I got up the next morning and switched. This wasn’t a practical consideration. The Hole shirt, as thin as it is, is much larger than the Fleetwood Mac shirt, and would weigh more heavily on a running body. But I didn’t care. I’d bear the weight because I had to represent the team I was running for, which was that of grunge femininity: I’m Miss World. More than that, somewhere deep inside, I had an intuition that running the half-marathon was going to be a bodily operation that was going to give me the Hole, a physical, visceral feeling of the vulva in my brain. I took the photograph above the morning of the race, in the pose I’d carry in my brain even through the fierce desperation of swinging arms and pumping legs it’d take to power through the last couple miles of the race: GIRL.

I finished the 13.1 mile race. I was going to be happy if I finished under two hours, and joyful if I finished it in 1 hour 45 minutes. I was in ecstasy. I finished in 1 hour, 39 minutes, 26 seconds. Of course I was grateful that I had finished the race ahead of my goal, but I was ecstatic because “1:39:26” felt like a christening of my body as woman. The results page lists my name, age, sex, and finish time. But I feel like “1:39:26” should be placed under the heading “Sex.”

Running the race made me feel voluptuous. Not sexual: voluptuous. I’m not talking about being flooded by endorphins I didn’t know I had, nor the cheap dirty chuckling I got out of the pain in my inner thighs and butt the day after. Not sexual: voluptuous. The pain I was feeling in the lower half of my body was not really pain, but a signal of change. If it was pain I was feeling I didn’t know it, because what was more visceral was how exaggerated my legs and butt felt—and now feel—in relation to the rest of my body.

My legs have been feeling fat lately. The seams on my Bettie Page-y APC “Petite Standard” jeans (100 percent cotton, no elastin or polyester in the denim) have been stretched out close to popping. This was cause for alarm at first: MY LEGS ARE GETTING FAT!! But then I began to give into the fat leg feeling. Because isn’t that what voluptuousness is about? Converting an overextended, hyperbolized asymmetry into a sensuality of feeling and being? Pin-up girls with outsized breasts and hips; plus-size models with rolling thighs: “voluptuous” is the word that articulates their bodily asymmetry rendered in fat as sensual beauty. But why should useless corpulence—the fat of breasts and hips and thighs that don’t lift or carry anything—corner the market on voluptuousness? Why, for instance, aren’t ballet dancers, with their outsized equine flanks, never thought of as “voluptuous”? Because they use those thick legs to vault themselves into the air: their asymmetry is functional. Paul Newman once described Elizabeth Taylor as a “functioning voluptuary,” and I take inspiration from that, although in a different context. If these legs carry me through 13.1 miles are the very legs that feel fat, why can’t its very functionality make me voluptuous? I think it does.

I don’t gaze at myself naked very often. The last time I really made a habit of looking at my body in flesh was in my early twenties, when I was obsessed with building muscle to get a specifically masculine look in gender and sensuality: to get not just a hard body, but a hard and symmetrical body, in which the well-developed pecs and biceps and delts balanced out those of the thighs and calves. I stripped and looked at myself this week and I saw total asymmetry. My legs felt like they were huge tree trunks attached to teensy-weensy twig s of torso and arms. But quite unexpectedly, I was pleased. I liked the off-balanced picture I saw. I look in the mirror naked and this is what I see:

I was a skinny gal. Now I am a grown-ass woman with big fat legs. Of course my legs are not “big fat legs” in the strictly cellular sense. But thinking of my runner’s legs as big and fat, as the stilts of a functioning voluptuary, I am finally rejecting the remnants of the boy’s sense of body that equates perfect symmetry with beauty and sensuality. I have big fat legs, and for once, I like that, the feeling of bottom-heaviness. It’s my own version of a D-cup: when my claves force the seams of my jeans to stretch and burst, it’s my version of my cups running over. Looking in the mirror at my naked body, I feel kind of like a bulimic because I’m seeing that which is not there. But it is a kind of renegade, reverse-bulimia: looking in the mirror, seeing fatness that is only in your mind, but instead of hating it, just loooooving it.

stereogrammed

Yesterday was the first day I wore my rather embarrassing new running shoes. Publically embarrassing because I wore these Nike Air Pegasus to run errands rather than do my usual 7 miles, making me the kind of slovenly hausfrau that I usually get snotty with. But more secretly embarrassing: if you got up close to my feet, you’d have seen that the shoes’ bright red soft foam-fleshed tongues were monogrammed. As Courtney Love once said about herself, I say: “I’m not very good at asserting myself.” I custom-ordered these personalized runners from nike.com (shipped directly from the manufacturer in China!) despite the fact that I was the kind of kid who hated putting my name in anything. When we were forced to permanent-marker names onto gym tee-shirts or have mothers sew our names onto art smocks, it felt like defiling the purity of the object with the mere awkwardness of my identity: I hated asserting myself, my name, so tangibly. Even as a kindergartner, I was a Virgo. So it was the remnant of that feeling that came out yesterday when I was walking around with shoes that said, when I put my feet together: “JOONY SCHECTER.”

But in having this particular monogrammed thing, I wanted to create a different experience of a monogram. I felt like there had to be something between the polymorphous commercialism of the logo-monogram and the WASP-fascist possessiveness of the initials-monogram. In both of these traditions, the monogram functions as an aggressive assertion of the sureness of self. Corporate monogramming congeals the capitalist value of a company into one aesthetically attractive distillation of its name. The compacting of the company into cute little letters you can hold in your hand allows the consumer to transfer the company’s power upon the body through a public display of the wearer’s high credit line. (Even if it’s just posing: like my very FAKE Louis Vuitton Murakami)

After the advent of corporate monogramming, monogramming cannot simply be a practical way to never lose your bags. When you get your initials embroidered on to your possessions, you are saying that your name is as important as a corporate logo, and deserves to be branded on this poor helpless brainless shoe/ bag/ sweater/ handkerchief. You are asserting your ego to the world by displaying your power over the object. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, this idea is pushed to its limits, egotism morphing into terrorism: the monogrammed belongings of a beautiful and headstrong dead first wife are quite literally “possessed,” afflicting, even without its owner, psychological violence upon the meek and insecure second wife.

But what I like about Rebecca (not just the film, but the fictional character as well as the negligee case) is that here, the object seems to have liberated itself from enslavement to human and ironically, exacts revenge through collaboration. The objects monogrammed with Rebecca’s “R” are in a kind of ontological limbo. Even though their owner is no longer existing, the things bearing her monogram carry on as if she were still alive. They do what we imagine Rebecca would have done to the nameless second wife were she still alive. The monogrammed objects themselves constitute the feminine body of Rebecca. In the film, we never see Rebecca, but everyone in the film talks endlessly about her. So in fact, she is a text, a kind of living monogram. Or more accurately, it is the monogram that actually gives her flesh as a text.

This is the kind of monogramming that I’d want, but is there a way to merge flesh and thread through words without having to be dead? Is there space in the world of monogramming to have something that allows you to navigate between the free-for-all (who can afford it) legibility of the logo (self as object/ text to be possessed) and the taunting opacity of the personal initials (self as self-possessed body)? Something that allows you to be read as if your limbs and scent were printed words, and yet not compromise the fact that the sheets upon which the words are printed are in fact flesh, and inexpendably flesh: to have those words make sense as text, you need my body. This desire is part of a bigger desire to reassert that which is obvious, but is often taken for granted: the mind is an organ, a part of the fleshly body, just as the fleshly body is an alphabet waiting patiently for syntax and orthography.

Perhaps what was really embarrassing about wearing my monogrammed shoes was that I was kind of OK with it: that I in fact didn’t feel the full-on Virgoan embarrassment I should have felt. These shoes are the first things I’ve ever had monogrammed, and they are not monogrammed in the purest sense of the practice since “JOONY SCHECTER” is neither my initials nor my real/ official name. Does it count as a monogram if the name you’ve put in thread is actually a fiction? What if your things were monogrammed to assert not your ego but your alter ego?

Here’s another way to think about this business of fictional monogramming: Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Spanish Vogue, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana dress silkscreened with the image of Marilyn Monroe.

“Marilyn Monroe” is neither brand nor name in the traditional sense. It is the name of a human, but being the name of a famous human, is immediately recognizable and open to commercialization. Wearing “Marilyn Monroe” on her skirt, Lohan is asserting an aspect of herself that identifies with Marilyn (last year, Lohan posed nude for photographer Bert Stern to recreate Stern’s infamous “last sitting” with Marilyn): young white woman setting herself in aggressive ambivalence against a celebrity industry which simultaneously creates and destroys her. Thus, the monogram on the textile is “MM” but it telegraphs “LL.” Lohan expands upon and expresses her own feminine identity through the fictionality of her wearing “MM.” When her hair and make-up replicates MM and she is wearing a dress with the face of MM, Lohan is fleshing out the fictionality of her monogramming as “LL” through textual redundancy which becomes a decadent, heady textual overload. And in the paparazzi candids of the shoot, LL looks so happy:

I think I was trying to do the same thing yesterday, to feel similarly happy. I composed my outfit from the feet up: “JOONY SCHECTER” demanded fictional monogramming all over. So with the shoes I wore a vintage Hole concert t-shirt with the big pink “Hole” logo on the front:

A word shaped to invoke the band’s self-defining aggro-femme album Live Through This, but in the same vein, quite simply an aggressive self-declaration as feminine space of void. Which was then piled on top of a pair of A.P.C. “Supreme” jeans that have the words “Fuck ‘em!” stitched on the edge of the right back pocket:

Words of post-punky nihilism, monogrammed too close to the seam that covers over that alternate soft-cheeked fuckhole. Taken all together, the words on my clothes were redundant in a way that provides volume and dimensionality: monogrammed in stereo. The song: JOONY SCHECTER’S FLESH IS MADE OF TEXTS OF AGGRO-ODD FEMININITY. And I just remembered: the only thing in which I like writing my name is the first leaf of a book I just finished reading. This is not so much an act of declaring possession as it is a lick or a kiss for a loved one. And I’ve always wanted to grow up to be a book.

maternamorphosis

The four scariest strung together words in the English language: “I’M BECOMING MY MOTHER.” Lately, I’ve been thinking without fear about becoming my mother, and not for the usual boring Oedipal reason. I’ve been having some trouble this year trying to get my book of gender-race theory published. While wallowing in frustration, I found that my mother was going through a parallel pain, trying to sell huge oil paintings in this particularly nasty economy. Before I think of this woman who birthed me as my mother, I think of her as an artist. She is a woman who has a degree in textile engineering, who married and gave up a career, followed her future ex-husband to America, then with a couple of weird kids in tow, went to graduate school, got an MFA, and followed her dream of becoming a painter. But my mother was never headhunted by major New York galleries, and making a living as an artist has been a tenacious crazy-quilting of teaching and self-promotion. For years I’ve watched her struggle, and actually be happy in this struggle. Now it’s hit me that I’m doing the same thing she is, except my paint is the keypad of a computer.

The protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy says of his mother: “I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I need now is a son.” With me, of course, my mother is still very much living, and to be completely “her” I would need a daughter as well. But I like this idea that becoming your mother (no matter your gender) occurs way before you become a parent. In the above picture, my mother is about the age as I am now, except that she already has two children, the elder of whom is 9 years old. In my mind, this is how I always see my mother: arms crossed in defiance, hard eyes, jeaned legs in battle position. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to become, considering that physically, it is what I’m destined for anyway. Looking at this picture of my flannel-and-jeans clad mother, I realized that I already dress like her: I am a flannel-and-jeans clad mother-minus-son-and-daughter.

I want to turn genetic destiny into a personal style. Lacking a uterus, and determined that my sperm will remain deadstock in this world, I want instead to dress like my mother in her 30s. But in copying her look, I don’t want to turn to any recognizably symbolic or iconic pieces of traditional femininity. For instance, I’m not going to do anything with her long-sleeved, high-necked dark butterfly print chiffon dress except keep it hung up like a painting. The femininity of my mother that I want to locate for myself is a less intuitive one. One that I know is there but was not always an apparent part of her life as “Mother.” I like to think about my mother as she would have been if she’d never married the man she didn’t like, if she’d aggressively used birth control nine months before my birth. My mother if she’d never been “mother.” I like to think about my mother as never needing to protect and swath her procreative areas with soft skirts, but pack them into a pair of hard tight jeans. I want to wear my mother’s jeans. Not “mom” jeans but “mother” jeans.

Not that “mom jeans” and “mother jeans” are unrelated. Mom jeans connote those jeans produced in the late 70s and most of the 80s, with a singular cut: high waist, give in the hip, restraining at the butt and thighs. The curvy silhouette that their seams suggest led to these jeans being named “Mom”—cuddly, nurturing, soft, feminine body. But the historiography of mom jeans is a little misleading, because they were actually not made for bodies intent on being comfortable as pie-baking moms. Look at this priceless instructive label from a pair of mom jeans made by Levi’s (from my personal collection):

What a cute text. The girl puts the jeans on and is sweating-crying in flabbergastation because they fit so ill; she looks like she’s wearing a barrel, an extra in a Loony Tunes cartoon. But never fear: the jeans themselves tell her to “wash ‘em HOT inside out” and tumble dry them until they have a HOT fit: “the MORE you wash ‘em the better they look and fit!” The “after” picture shows the same crying girl now all in smiles, with jeans tightly hugging her curves. This arduous process of making your jeans look HOT with hot water and air seems akin to churning butter. In this age in which elastine has invaded the jeans world, gals hardly need to go through a particular process in order to get the tight femininity they want from their jeans. But if this anachronism is what makes these particular jeans maternal, they are hardly “Mom.” “Mom” implies familiarity, ease, mundane comfort. These jeans are not actually that. These jeans are a process of becoming intimate with an unyielding and unfamiliar object, to make it get to know your body, to get your body to get to know the breathing pattern of a textile. So let’s give due dignity back to these kind of jeans, which were not always soft and comfy, but only became that way because their original identity is hard and unyielding: “MOTHER JEANS.”

The Welsh singer Duffy says of her own mother: “Always a good pair of tight jeans—that’s what she taught me. She used to sit in the bath for hours trying to make them fit.” I like it that maternal pedagogy here doesn’t have anything to do with nurture, kindness, or warm milk, but crafting the perfect denim pedestal for your butt. My mother never gave me this lesson explicitly, but I like to think that a woman who wore tiny miniskirts in 1960s Korea and fearlessly yelled back profanities to boys who made lewd insults would have gone in for some hard jeans that required hot water baths to grow accustomed to her body. The fabric of my mother’s jeans in that defiant photo doesn’t look particularly hard but I like to imagine that they once were.

Even if “Mother” is an identity that is granted by the use of one’s uterus, why should it automatically have a “soft” cultural identity? I never thought of the womb as a squishy place anyways. It seems less like a warm wet cavern and more like an industrial workshop in which fetuses are stamped out. Like the reverse of a callous: a hard skin that becomes soft with use. Mother jeans are hard jeans designed to give a hard outline to a soft shape. My mother may not have worn hard jeans, but she’d weathered enough shit in her life to give meaning to their designation. Mother jeans should produce hard femininity. After all, my mother expelled her children not through soft natural childbirth but a caesarian. Every time I put on my hard jeans, I’m stepping into the depths opened up by a gaping sliced mouth on my mother’s belly, and her legs are my legs.