24
Feb
2008
Kameron Hurley
“I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.”
- Vita Sackville-West
Archive for February, 2008
24
Feb
2008
Dating 101
If you go on a date with a girl and:
1) she does not contact you for a week (no call, text, e-mail)
2) you do not contact her for a week (no call, text, e-mail)
She will likely make the assumption that you’re aware she is not interested, and has already happily assumed you are not interested as well.
So when you do call, a week later, she will be very Perplexed.
I have book deadlines now. Tra-la.
At this point, it’d take a pretty swoon-worthy date to pull my attention away from the book deadlines.
I have yet to have one of those.
22
Feb
2008
Bowling, Beer, & Brutal Women
Steph and I went bowling tonight for free with a bunch of her coworkers. She works for a fairly large medical practice, so they’d reserved 26 lanes for their annual bowling tournament. Because the weather was icy, the other folks who were supposed to be in our team didn’t show up, so it was me and Steph bowling, badly, in lane 26, drinking beer, calling out insults, giving each other high fives and snark for 3 games.
I dressed in one of my most comfortable, relaxed outfits. Long flared jeans and green T-shirt with a black zip up vest and hemp necklace choker, and I spent a lot of time with my thumbs hooked in my pockets and sidling up to the lane and being all cocky and walking tall, and oh man, it felt good. And as I bowled with Steph I realized, again, how good it feels to just act like myself. To swill beer and snark and walk like somebody who has her shit together. I actually haven’t done that in awhile. People find me intimidating sometimes, and out here, I just feel…. well, this just doesn’t feel like a place I can be me, sometimes. A lot of this came from the not-Boyfriend, I realize, who was terrified of the fact that I talked too loud and walked too confident, terrified of how I presented myself; not because he didn’t like it (oh indeed he did), but because he was terrified of what other people would think of me. There’s a lot of that “but oh God what would the herd think!” mentality out here.
And as I looked at the assembly of Steph’s coworkers, I realized, again, how obviously and absurdly we just don’t fit in here. Or, at least, in this subset of Ohio. These people have completely different values. They consider different things when they pick a spouse. Lives are run on guilt and obligation more than independence and commitment. It’s like, you’re supposed to have a life that’s a certain way, and that’s the life you make, even if you want something completely different. You build what you’re supposed to have, even if it makes you miserable.
It’s the weirdest thing out here that you get people my age who are on their second marriage or divorced and already have 3 or more kids. The “starter marriage” thing gets started early out here. You pick somebody based on… I don’t know. I’ve always been incredibly picky about that. You build a life based on… I don’t know. Not what I base mine on, that’s for sure. Your goals, hopes, dreams, aspirations… nothing at all like mine. Interests, passions… I have so little in common with anybody out here, and I realized how odd and out of place that’s made me feel.
I like my strong, butch personae. Not only has it gotten me pretty far, but I physically feel better when I step into it. When I try to quiet down and fem up, I feel stupid. I feel like a liar, and I feel weak and completely powerless. I’m just not me. But at least I “fit in” right?
Fuck that.
As I bowled, badly, and swilled beer tonight, I realized how far I’d come from where I’d been. I liked who I was (also, I really miss drinking, but I digress). I miss feeling safe, among folks who accept me for who I am. I don’t trust anybody here to accept me for me. Not one bit. Everybody I’ve met out here wants me to change to fit their conception of what a good little girl should be (except Steph and the Old Man, of course).
And you know what?
That’s not me. I don’t accept your religions blindly. I don’t agree with your politics. I don’t agree with a lot of your hypocritical family values. I don’t believe your gay son is going to hell and I don’t believe your daughter only has her looks and breeding potential going for her. I don’t think the height of refinement is beer and pizza on a Friday night, but it sure can be fun. Now let’s discuss some literature and do explain to me why you think Bush’s foreign policy is making friends and influencing people. Show me you can use your head. Demonstrate to me that you’re not a sheep. I don’t care what you believe so long as I know you got there by actually thinking about it. Do you just accept things that people tell you? Is what you have always enough?
Because it’s never enough for me. And I realize that, out here, that makes me weird. It also means I’ll never be as happy as most of these folks. Will I live a more interesting life? Maybe. Depends on your definition of interesting. One life isn’t any better than the other, but I’m clear that the life that’s OK for most folks out here isn’t OK for me, and I get tired of feeling like I’m in the figurative closet all the time, trying to figure out how I can dress better and fem up and lose weight and dumb down my conversation so people take me seriously.
Fuck that.
God, you know, sitting there swilling beer and trading insults with Steph, I realized how much I miss being me. I miss being the me I was before I got sick. The whiskey-drinking, risk-taking nomad who never got attached to her lovers and ran around the world writing books. I liked that. And you know, when I came here, and my body had betrayed me and my world fell apart and it didn’t look like the books were going anywhere, I built another life for myself, in my head. A life that would be different than the one I had. Not better or worse, but different. I found somebody I loved. I had a job a loved. I could get a little house and a garden and a dog and put my energy into building a life and a family and doing all those things that folks out here did. Not better or worse, just… different than what I was.
And tonight I realized just what I was planning to give up, how much of myself was getting lost along the way. Not better, not worse: different. A different self.
Did I like that different path? I don’t know. Again, it was just… different. It wasn’t what I had. It wasn’t who I was tonight.
My dad said that my blog sounded a lot different since I moved to Dayton, and it’s true. When you get hit with a shovel, when your whole world gets turned upside down, you have to decide where you’re at, what happened, what needs to change. I wanted the boy and the dog and the garden and the house, not necessarily in that order.
Now I have no idea what I want or who I am, because all I want to do is swill whiskey and fuck the night away and chain smoke and get on a plane to Marrakech… and then I realize I already did that, and it brought me here.
So where do I go from here?
I don’t know. I feel alive on nights like tonight, yes. But I was happy with the boy and the garden and the dog, too. Maybe they aren’t mutually exclusive.
When somebody loves you, they love you for everything you are, good, bad, butch, brutal, bad bowler. And I’m all of those things and a lot more. Pretending I’m not, hiding it, covering it up, pretending that *all* I want is the garden and the house and not the midnight fucking in Marrakech, is a lie. It’s gutting half of myself. It’s sacrificing one to get the other.
I shouldn’t have to sacrifice it. Those parts of myself should make each other stronger. Gutting one guts the other. I can’t live a life that’s half a person. I can’t live half a life.
Now how do I get the house and the garden and the fucking in Marrakech?
This is the real question.
22
Feb
2008
Shit
I feel like it.
Since last Friday when we agreed to the book contract, I’ve been allowing myself to eat pretty indiscriminately (there have been Chipotle runs, beer and cake, frosted cookies, chocolate cream pie, nachos, and more), and I’ve only worked out once this week. Some of this also has to do with a lot of work and lingering personal life stress, and the stress and unhealthy eating habits feed one another. The more stressed I am, the more I want to eat shit. The more shit I eat, the worse I feel. The more shit I eat, the more I don’t care that I’m eating shit and feeling like shit. I haven’t eaten so much shit the entire time since I got diagnosed as I have this week.
I’ve spent the whole week feeling up and down, mostly eight kinds of down, and now I’m just kind of weepy and exhausted.
I hate that I have to be so hyper-vigilant about food and exercise all the time. I hate that I can’t eat what I want. I hate that I feel like shit, and the only way to get feeling level again is to tighten my control back up again and practice that hyper-vigilance.
I think that sometimes I just get tired of living under that tight control all the time. Sometimes I just want to bust out. Then I do, and this is where it gets me. I have to keep myself under control if I want to live any kind of life worth living.
Whine. Whine. Whine.
22
Feb
2008
Quote of the Day
“A useless life is but an early death.”
- JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Iphigenia in Tauris
20
Feb
2008
Revelation
Man, it’s been awhile since I got behind on e-mail. My day job is eating my life. In a *good* way, mind. It’s keeping my brain busy, challenging, rewarding, but yeah, after this big sales project is done I’ll need to slow down a little.
19
Feb
2008
Because the Spice Must Flow
“She found him in the magicians’ gym, where she should have expected him all along.”
Which then explains why I was stuck for two months while she stood there waiting at his door. She was looking in the wrong place.
And just like that, the words come purling down the pipe once again.
Funny how that is.
18
Feb
2008
17
Feb
2008
The Only Reason to Live in Ohio
Cause after I pay off some debts in May, I’ll have freed up $450 a month.
And then I’ll get something like this.
It must be Spring Fever. I’m dying for my own place, even though Steph and the Old Man are happy to have me another year and staying here another year would make more sense.
We’ll see how the job goes and what the bills look like this summer and see what makes the most sense.
But man, I’m itching for my own place.
17
Feb
2008
Still Waiting at the Door
I’m about 2 months behind on my self-imposed deadline for Black Desert.
I was supposed to have a draft by next month, but it looks like it’ll be May instead, with heavy revisions and something of a caliber that could be submitted to my editor by September or so (yes, I’m a heavy rewriter. Not just as I go – which is also heavy rewriting – but heavy rewriting after I have the draft. Until I know the final shape of the book, I can’t edit it properly. It’s complicated. I’ll rant about it another time).
In any case, I usually have some trouble in the Dreaded Middle of a book, and tax season and heartbreak didn’t exactly help the already muddy middle.
This weekend, I realized my sticking point in the narrative was that point in the book when Nyx knocks on Rhys’s door for the first time in six years. And then… I stopped.
I wrote some scenes ahead of that, the scene where she meets Khos and Inaya, some later scenes of violence and destruction and trippy shapeshifting, but it was this point in the story, when she’s gotta knock on the door of the guy who turned his back on her to make his own life that stuck me.
I’ve continued writing around the scene. I just keep staring at it. Tomorrow I’ll be writing the thing out in a plain old notebook. Sometimes when I get stuck, taking it to another writing medium helps.
There’s more I want to say about this particular sticking point, but I think I’ll leave it at that for now.
Tomorrow I get through it, cause I’ve got two full-time jobs here now, and deadlines, yo.
Novels
