Not very creative with the pumpkin carving this year

Where it hurts

Dooce wrote a post a few days ago about depression and what it feels like. It's strange to pass on second and third hand information through a peculiar ring of strangers connected only by the fact that they like to talk about themselves online, but the article she referenced and the psychologist the author of the article referenced too were both some of the most painfully eloquent accounts of what a life with depression looks like, feels like, sounds like. It's necessary reading for anyone who's ever suffered from depression or has someone in their life they're trying to help. At the very least it sheds light on a disease that seems so common, so easily curable but also so easily sucks out life and leaves a path of devastation in its wake.

I don't have a great deal to add to what's already been written; their words have far more clarity than mine and I believe the world only requires so many mental illness-aware bloggers in it. But there are a few things that, for me personally, make depression far more insidious than its name represents:

The first thing I can only describe as an inability and a disinterest in dealing. I use that phrase a lot because a large source of my personal humor comes from mocking shallowness and vanity and the characteristics of such afflictions. Several months ago at a restaurant with my brother and my friend I picked at a salad and made the comment, "I cannot even deal with how healthy I've been today." We all laughed because we each knew people who would've said that in seriousness. It's become a favorite in my lexicon of stupid things to say..."I could not deal with Grey's Anatomy tonight." "I cannot even deal with how much laundry I have to do this weekend." It's just something to say to make the mundane ridiculous, and so therefore enjoyable.

But when depression hits you, you actually stop being able to deal, especially if it's the symptom of something major and traumatic. Human beings are designed to let emotions pass through them, to experience grief and sadness and anger and then to let it process out of their hearts and minds and into some other part of the world so they can go on being normal again. For someone with depression, those emotions settle in a pool around their feet and while it doesn't necessarily devastate them immediately, it drags them down. Depression means feeling absolutely nothing at all while your brain is silently screaming in white hot rage. A friend of mine describes it as the ultimate torpor, and he's completely right. You just can't move.

And so because you cannot deal with what you're feeling, you begin not to be able to deal with the things that happen around you. Once, a napkin fell off my lap during dinner and floated to my kitchen floor. I stared at the napkin, fork in my hand and mouth half open ready to eat and suddenly the effort of bending over to pick the paper off the ground felt so monumental I just couldn't fathom the idea of actually doing it. The napkin stayed there one day, then two, then a week and soon the fact that I couldn't handle picking up the napkin made me so angry that I started not being able to handle anything else. Unloading the dishes from the dishwasher made absolutely no sense because there was a napkin dirtying my floor. The idea of taking a shower was preposterous when my kitchen was ruined by all the piled-up dishes. I didn't want to go to work early anymore because the likelihood that the normal adults would see my pale face and unwashed hair was completely unbearable. The author in Dooce's link described an afternoon where he waited at a gas station for all the other cars to leave so he could pump gas, but when he realized there was never going to be a break in the traffic he left with an empty tank because he just couldn't deal with seeing people. In both cases, there were major, huge, life-altering circumstances that we should've recognized as the real problem, but they were overshadowed by the hundreds of things in our lives that we just couldn't do anymore. Depression is a silent, vicious, underhanded disease that picks away at your ability to keep your head above water until there's absolutely nothing left worth convincing you to stay afloat and you are no longer a spouse or a friend or a coworker or a person at all. You're just a shell, unable and unwilling to fight the inertia of a slow death by lack of serotonin.

The other thing that I'm always surprised that depression writers don't mention is how desperate we become for a connection. When you expend most of your energy trying very hard not to betray that fact that you are slowly but surely losing your shit, it's difficult to work up the desire to talk to a loved one about it, and it's even harder for them to hear. So you spend afternoons at the hardware store or the post office wondering if maybe you could make eye contact with one person there, they might see how lost you are and would be willing to help. I am sometimes absolutely terrified that someone I know will ask me how I'm doing, or that they'll see the despair in my eyes and ask what's wrong because on the wrong day or at the wrong time, I might just actually tell them the whole truth. I'm scared to death someone will think I need a hug and they'll embrace me and then I'll never be able to let go of them. I have no desire to transfer the guilt and the rage and the fear that goes through my mind on a daily basis to another living person. No one who's depressed does. So we smile and say "Fine" when nothing at all is fine, and our eyes move past that friend, searching for the stranger who will ask the magic questions. The one who'll be strong enough to offer salvation. The one who won't hate us when we suck them dry.

The last thing, the biggest thing maybe for a lot of depression sufferers, is the guilt. If 20% of Americans are depressed, how bad could it really be? That's a disease statistic better relegated to something like toenail fungus or acid reflux, not mental illness. How in the world can 1 in 5 people feel the way I did...I do...and the world still keeps spinning? How can I possibly indulge in such enormous self-pity when nothing really truly bad has happened to me? At the school where I work there's the ubiquitous handful of kids who get carted off to our "padded room" at least once every day. They're the ones who go insane when they've been slighted in some way, the ones whose anger makes them shut down so completely they have to be carried out of the classrooms, and the ones who sob like infants and cling to your neck when you hug them and tell them they're going to be okay. These kids have been abused in horrific ways and they're the children of drug users and drunks and they have every right in the world not to be able to deal. How come I see so much of myself in their behavior? What right do I have to mistrust and hate and fear so much of the world when the world hasn't done me all that wrong? The wretched, overwhelming guilt I feel for not being a successful, happy person like every other individual around me appears to be is the most horrible part of my depression, and maybe it's ultimately the one that keeps me down, afraid to ask for help from the people who really want to give it. Because admitting there's a really huge problem in an otherwise great life isn't just whining, it almost seems sinful.

There is, of course, always a way out for anyone with depression, whether your path leads you to therapy and medication, or whether you simply choose not to deal with any of it anymore and you check out of life for good. I spent a little bit of this afternoon with my grandmother who is dying of lung cancer. She spent 17 years in a cloud of anger and depression after her husband died and the inertia that now challenges me bore down on her too. Strangely though, now that I've seen her in her bed, ravaged by a different disease that seems to be beating the shit out of her a little more each day, I can see that my grandma is trying to deal. They're giving her too many drugs and she's ill all the time and the chemo and the radiation is absolutely ruining her body, but we waited around long enough for her to be lucid again and when I looked down into her eyes I could see that the cloud that had been there for so many years had lifted. She was fighting to be able to eat, to talk, to stay conscious long enough to see her family. In the face of her own death she's chosen life, even if that life is measured only in months or weeks or days. I always assumed that when my grandma ever became seriously ill, she'd just let herself go. She's always said she was ready to die whenever God wanted to take her, but I think this final stubborness on her part isn't out of fear of death or spite or will, but because she actually wants to live out every precious second of the life available to her.

I didn't sit down with plans to write this entry. It's not something I've ever wanted to actually disclose about myself in detail, but after visiting my grandma I received two emails this evening. One was from a former colleague reporting the death of my teaching mentor who was also diagnosed with lung cancer, and another one was from a former student who had been rescued in the middle of a suicide attempt and wanted to let me know she was alive and getting help. One death and one near death, and while both were deplorable situations, I am furious that the latter could've been prevented by my friend or someone close to her. Depression is basically just another slow death until you discover the tools to help you deal, or you hasten your own journey to the end. So please, if you are depressed, know that there's a way out. If you love someone who's depressed, find out everything you can about the illness and remember that they don't always have to be this way.

Above all, no matter what your situation, choose to deal with it.

That's a Winner

One of the really good things my husband gave me while we were together was a rekindled love of baseball in general and a fervent adoration of the Cardinals in particular. I've long been one of those people who actually do believe in the church of baseball as was he, and as corny as it sounds, baseball was one of the few things that brought us close together during many terrible days in which we lived like strangers in one house.

J, I'm happy for you tonight. I hope you got to watch it with BaPa Harold.

Cold War

I'm in the middle of writing a rather arduous post about "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up". I had to decide between that topic and the equally compelling "What I Did Over my Summer Vacation" and since my summer mainly consisted of refolding towels with embroidered elk on them and drinking many, many bottles of six dollar wine, I decided the former would be a bit more appropriate in terms of me having something to say. Plus, you know, it's just better for the children.

But today the Productive Blogger part of my brain has been kind of roadblocked by a discussion I had with a friend today. Not a discussion so much as an argument actually, and made worse by the fact that I hardly ever fight with this friend. We usually have the kind of effortless friendship where you feel so good after spending time with that person, it effects your entire day in really fantastic way. In the few instances in which we did have conflict, it was resolved so quickly and with such good humor between us we both commented that our ability to get along should qualify us to write a New York Times Bestseller on relationship advice. We defended our respective genders to one another, we delved into music and politics and dating and marriage and why I shouldn't be driving a car with such a big engine, and we basically just had a superb time getting to know one another over the course of a year or so. He is one of those people in my life I count as truly valuable to me, and I feel extremely lucky for knowing him.

But, the fight: The particulars aren't important of who said what and how and with what motivation, but the bottom line was my feelings were hurt and he didn't understand why and didn't see the need for apologizing for something that was the truth to him, and so our friendship became strained which bothered me and the fact that it bothered me bothered him and it just got worse from there [horrific run-on sentence ends here]. So, clearly we're not quite ready to save the world, but at least the fact that it irritates me so much that this is even happening lets me know how much I value my friendship with him. At least there's that.

So my question is, how do you get past a mess like this and de-awkwardize the situation? I'm inclined at this point to just divorce myself of the relationship, not to teach him a lesson or to be spiteful or anything like that, but to get away from the anger. The fact that I can't get him to understand why I was hurt and how it still eats away at me, and the frustration of waiting for him to just say "I'm sorry"--even if he doesn't really mean it--it all just festers and grows and makes everything awful. I know we're both such stubborn idiots that if I declared a moratorium he would too and then the wall would just go higher and higher with each passing day.

Is it possible to effect a cooling down period for a month, three months, a year, and then just pop back into each other's life with a "Hey, friend" and a smile? Can one's pride ever be that pliant? I honestly don't know. Maybe this is an indicator of how strong or weak our frienship really is. Maybe we'll both figure something out about ourselves and how we interact with the people in our lives. Maybe he hasn't given it a second thought because it's really just NOT important to him, and so I'm worrying about something that isn't worth repairing anyway. Maybe it'll take an entire year for one of us to just sigh and break down and say "hey" and then we'll be off and running again and talking about music and who we're dating and who we're breaking up with and everything will be just fine.

And if we don't, I think I'll really miss it.

Verbal Diarrhea

I had a moment of cognitive dissonance today while in the bathroom of the Summit Woods Super Target. Since it was early on a Sunday morning, there weren't many people there and when I went into the restroom there was only one other person in a stall besides me. I went into my own stall, and I froze when I heard her voice talking loudly in the bathroom.

"Heeeyyyy....How are you?"

There's a lot of attention paid to the way guys panic and can't perform in restrooms when they're accosted by some gregarious individual at a urinal, but I think too little credence is given to the amount of effort a woman will put into muffling her own pee sounds, especially when she is trapped by a Bathroom Converser in the stall next to her. I'm pretty squeamish about bodily functions, so most of my life has been lived in a state of denial about possessing any sort of digestive system that actually results in waste being expelled in public areas. I have to achieve a Zen-like state of focus and concentration and acceptance of the fact that eventually I WILL have to pee in a Target in front of other women.

But when other women who happen to be complete strangers also sitting with their pants around their ankles and their hands folded in their laps and a prayer to God in their hearts asking please...please don't let anyone hear me pee...when those ladies decide they want to talk to ME? Well, that business just utterly freaks me the hell out. I mean, I kind of get it. Maybe if we all engage in nervous, loud conversation we can work together to achieve sort of a group-abnegation of our collective digestive systems. It's an admirable idea in theory, but it never, ever works that way.

So when this lady started talking to me, my bladder gave up any notion of ever being relieved, and mind went out of my happy place and into the dark barren land of WTF AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? A strangled sound akin to the sound a fox must make when it realizes its leg is caught in a trap and a man with a gun is smiling benevolently down at him escaped from my throat, and I managed to half-whisper, half-croak the words, "Are you saying hi to me?"

And for a brief second I was blissfully, radiantly happy when she didn't answer back. Strangely, though, she just kept talking so I peeked under the row of stalls to look for a third set of feet. Nothing. Just her scuffed blue Sketchers in the unit next to mine and no one else. And then, burgeoning in me was a slow, indelible sense of horror and outrage as I realized two very important facts about our situation:

1)The woman in the stall next to me in the public restroom of a retail store was on her cellphone

2)There was clear audible evidence that the woman WAS NOT IN THE RESTROOM JUST TO PEE

People, I am completely permissive of all sorts suspect behavior. Feel free to wear rubber clogs in the winter with wool socks. I will not judge. Put 1,200 dollar spinners on your 7,000 dollar car and Turtle Wax its exterior every Wednesday afternoon while you smoke Swischer Sweets and check out the 12 year old girls sitting on the curb because you don't have a job. You're skeevy, but still above my censure.

But there are just some things I will not stand for in this society. You should never beat your children in the petfood aisle of a Wal-Mart. You should never be rude to waiters and waitresses. If you are a man, you should never cross your knees and then loop your foot around your stationary leg. And you should never, ever, ever in any circumstances HOLD A CELL PHONE CONVERSATION WHILE YOU ARE TAKING A CRAP IN PUBLIC.

So as I was leaving the restroom, I decided to exact some sort of passive-aggressive revenge and went back to my stall and flushed the toilet three very loud, lengthy times, so at least the person on the other end of the phone could figure out what was going on and would be as disgusted and outraged as I was. As I was washing my hands and pushing open the door I heard the woman titter and say "Sounds like the girl next must have had some tummy troubles today."

Urgh.

Abundant Sunshine

I was reading the forecast on the Weather Channel page and they called for "abundant sunshine" on Sunday. I like that. Someone there must have a touch of a poet's soul.

Last night I attended to an orchestra concert, mainly for two reasons: I wanted to see a friend who performed with the ensemble, and also because I was in desperate need of hearing music that didn't involve farmers and dells or old brass wagons or scary ghosts and jolly pumpkins or any possible affiliation with Disney's High School Musical (Zac Efron's apparently a tween McDreamy).

I stayed late at school and worked that day and drove straight up, so I didn't have a great deal of time to think about the evening before I actually got there, but while I was driving I started considering whether or not actually going to this concert was a very good idea...whether I should just turn around and go home and claim car trouble or lingering illness and just watch Grey's Anatomy in my sweatpants instead.

It's a deplorable reality, but for people who've gone through some sort of major depression, everything has to be approached in terms of "Will this be a good or bad thing for me?" It's a bit mindblowing to find out how incredibly fragile one can become after a bunch of really bad things get to them. Two descriptions of me over the course of the separation and its aftermath really bothered me: when a therapist at the time said I had symptoms of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from a combination of everything being so bad for so long, and then having the really, really bad things hit hard and fast during the course of the summer; and when a close friend described me in an email as having a "haunted, sad look when she thought no one was watching." Neither of them seemed accurate, because in my own mind I'm usually fairly cheerful, except when I'm not. If I'm quiet, it's because I'm thinking about whether I need to buy cat food or where the last place I saw my cell phone was, or whether I should tape The Office on Thursday. I didn't realize I was still damaged.

But I guess part of being that damaged is that you don't really get to know your own mind; you have to have someone else diagnose it for you, at least at first. I don't think it should be any surprise that I emerged on the other side of this marriage a changed person, but at the same time I had no idea how translucently fragile I came across to everyone else. It's a pathetic reality, being hyper-conscious of your own emotional shortcomings, but it's also kind of essential.

My shrink stressed at every session that before I do anything...however trivial, I need to assess whether it's going to be good for me, or whether it'll plunge me back down into some sort of spiral. So something as simple as a Hot Pocket for lunch can become an ordeal, and I have to stop and ask the same ridiculous questions: Are there any particularly happy moments attached to the preparing and eating of a Hot Pocket that will make you feel lonely and empty right now? Did a Hot Pocket ever get thrown at your head during an argument? (one of the reasons I avoid cranberry juice now) It's incredibly tedious to have to do this--to walk on eggshells around your own self--but I've been to Crazyville, and I'll do just about whatever it takes not to go back.

Since, I left straight for last night's orchestra concert from work, I really didn't think through the "Will it be good for me?" questions until I was on my way up there. Immediately I started getting nervous, because the last live concert I attended was the very last one I ever played. It was Bruckner in the second half...it went well and I got pats on the back for my solo playing. When I went home, there was a fight waiting for me. It was arrogant, and maybe even sinful to pursue a career in performance, he said. I'd never be able to support us on a freelance salary, and I wasn't all that talented anyway. And since I had absolutely no idea who I was at that point, I gave in to make the arguing stop. I just nodded...yes, yes, yes...I'll be done with it. I dropped out of ensembles and focused entirely on getting a teaching job with a decent salary. We never spoke of it again, but the quiet screaming in my head whenever I thought about it was evidence that I had cut something incredibly vital out of my life.

So coming to this concert, I wasn't really sure what to expect of myself. Bitterness? Tears? More inconsolable rage that could only be mitigated with a bottle of tequila? I sat nervously in my seat and folded my program into a bastardized origami swan over and over, waiting for some sort of insanity to start creeping into my brain.

Strangely, nothing happened. I don't know if it was because my friend was generous enough to hang with me after the concert and we both sank into a very comfortable, sugar-high fueled conversation and I got to laugh more than I had in months, or if maybe somehow I've become a whole person again. I really don't know. I just know that I was okay when I didn't think I would be and knowing that is a really, really good feeling.

Abundant sunshine. I really like that.

That's just super.

I think it is a safe and accurate assertion when I write that no one in my family is a cosmopolitan individual. Minx, judge not...and I know, but I also make such claims while sitting in my quadplex in the absolutely armpit of the Midwest between my neighbor the juvenile justice officer who seems to collect delinquents and apparently recently met her 20 year-old rapper boyfriend (his Dodge Neon has spinners!) through her fostered teenage boys and the ladies who evicted the assisted living residents on the other side of me and are now living in their apartment for the same subsidized rent their clients were paying. Way to put your GEDs to good use, gals.

So basically, we done up and caught the redneck, ya'll.

I didn't get to accompany my brother and the parents to Connecticut to drop him off for his freshman year of Yale, but thanks to my generous text messaging and daytime minute plan I got a play-by-play of every single minute. I was in teacher meetings at the time, and I could hear my phone buzzing like a Mexican jumping bean in my purse, so I snuck it out and checked my messages during a particulary scintillating lecture on prose/poetry workshops in the high school classroom (made EVEN BETTER by the fact that most of us were elementary teachers). My family was at a meet and greet for my brother's dorm and they had stood in line for the cocktails next to the Denzel Washingtons, my brother had best befriended the son of the man who wrote "Man of La Mancha" and who subsequently retired in his 5th Avenue apartment to count his millions, and the next day at freshman convocation my mother saw Steven Spielberg take a picture with his son on the quad and washed her hands in the restroom next to Kate Capshaw.

Thrilling events, indeed, and they certainly replaced me and my 1995 backstage encounter with three members of the Monkees (I handed Peter Tork a water bottle...swoon!) in the H. Family Hall of Fame for "Best Celebrity Sighting". Denzel was declared to be even more handsome in person, and Mr. Spielberg had "a great deal of hair." I saved those text messages in my phone, if only to hold on to the feeling of crushing, unadulterated bitterness I felt for my family as I sat with my colleagues and our two inch thick pile of medical forms during our "MetLife and Philly Cheese Steak Luncheon".

Since September, my brother has become fairly blase about celebrity sightings, because apparently Yale just gets 'em by the dozen each week. So this evening, when he spent three hours watching the Cards beat the Mets in NLCS game 7 with his suitemate Tsega and their freshman mentor and his girlfriend Sarah...when my brother told Sarah that there had been a package for Sarah Pettigrew in the mailroom for three weeks and she needed to pick it up...when Sarah told him her name wasn't Sarah Pettigrew, but Sarah Hughes...

...when my brother's brain worked like this over the course of fifteen minutes:

Sarah Hughes.

Sarah Hughes.

Sarah Hughes?

Sarah Hughes.

SARAH HUGHES!

He was just the tiniest bit embarrassed. She was really gracious about it and said that most people were weird to her because of her Olympic fame and he apologized for being awkward in a completely opposite way. Then he called me and I Wikipedia'd her and found out she was a Mets fan, so that was too bad for her and then we cackled a bit about how he had laid on a bed watching TV with an Olympic gold medalist for three hours and didn't know. And then we realized we were both kind of ridiculous.

I'm still proud of touching Peter Tork's water bottle, though.

And that's the way it is.

I just spent the last hour looking at burlesque dancers and fetish models.

I have this friend who, when he asks me what I'm doing, invariably gets answers like "I'm reading about polyamory" or "I'm searching the Kinsey Reports for the words 'rubber chicken.'" It's not that I'm an excessively prurient individual; I think he just has uncannily weird timing when he clicks my IM avatar to see what's up.

Today was no exception, and when he asked I fessed up and told him what I was doing. Fortunately, he's used to this by now and even suggested a few corset models for me to check out. I was pleased he and I had reached a point in our relationship where we could both look at semi-pornographic photos together in reasonable comfort. I really think that's what we should all be striving for, yes?

The reason I had these burlesque chicks on the brain started with Carmen Electra at lunch today. I eat with a group of teachers I secretly call the Wisteria Lane set, because they don't seem to like people who don't own that one Tiffany bracelet and they definitely don't like that I dare to eat an entire veggie wrap AND edamame while they pick at their Yoplait cups and talk over their stomachs growling. The ringleader of the Wisteria Lane set, a 30 year old mother and wife and and part-time aerobics instructor and first grade teacher (her four most important priorities in order, she says) has admitted she has five pounds to lose before her husband says she's the right size again. Apparently, in the course of the lardbusting initiative in their household, he's purchased a treadmill, a Gazelle, and a Bowflex for her to use IN FRONT OF HIM WHILE HE WATCHES. It's usually at this point I spit my Propel water onto my shirt and one of the Wisterias hands me a napkin with a slender, perfectly French manicured hand.

This afternoon the ringleader told me her husband had surprised her with the Carmen Electra Aerobic Striptease video so she could "shape up her paunch while he enjoyed". How sweet...he seems like the kind of guy who'd get her liposuction for their 10th anniversary as a present to both of them. Anyway, the discussion meandered around all things Carmen Electra and stripping until one of the two male members of our faculty walked in and we quickly started talking about school picture day on Friday.

When I got home from work, my curiousity about exactly how my colleague would be gyrating her paunch away was raised enough that I googled Carmen Electra and her eponymous video. From there, I discovered a bunch of links for the Pussycat Dolls, then for burlesque performers like Dita von Teese and Catherine D'lish, and then finally the grand dame of the burlesque world, Bettie Page. Someone told me the other day my new haircut made me look like Bettie Page, so I was thrilled to see that her hair was not overwhelmingly Prince Valiant-esque, as I feared mine was.

What I noticed, while looking at all these people, is how very much more appealing they were to my eyes than the porn starlets who were featured in the little ad columns on either side of their websites. There was something completely charming about the retro corsets, the great big cheerful smiles even while they vamped nearly naked for the camera, and they way everything about them seemed so clean cut and healthy and innocent despite the fact they were clearly sex models. When my eyes glanced over to the "traditional" porn models, I saw pouts and grimaces and dirty blonde hair and bodies shaped like those long flat pencil erasers we had in fourth grade topped by two big huge (sometimes off-kilter) Milk Duds in the front.

This entry is not going to be one of those "Why can't men just accept real women?" screeds. I think the world's every bit as tired of that argument as they are of capri pants and Paris Hilton. Biology is why men prefer hot women to average or unattractive ones, and that's never going to change. If scientists can travel to the deepest, darkest depths of the rainforest and get tribal elders to point to the silhouette of the 50's era Playboy bunny as their ideal body type, then there's clearly something bigger than advertising or MTV at work here. I'm all for the "Love the Skin You're In" message and I admire the hell out of Dove for their initiative to rectify body image issues in young girls, but at the same time, the 49% of the population who has "things and you knows" instead of "hoohahs" (I learned those terms during 4th grade bathroom break last week) is going to want to put their thing in the hoohah of a woman who looks like they're biologically fit for raising incredibly healthy children, and the hotties win in that regard.

So the idea that we've evolved to the hourglass figure as our ideal body shape makes sense. I think the world tends to strive for symmetry in pretty much everything unless you're my mother who recently declared decorating symmetry passe but spelled it "passay" in her email, so it's natural that men would want a body that flares out at the hips and cuts in at the waist to flare out again at the chest. That totally makes sense. What doesn't quite jibe with me is how we've managed to move beyond the hourglass body and now we've made a 40 billion dollar industry out of watching stick insects with boyish hips, no waists, and ginormous breasts grimace and pant for a grainy videocamera. It's all just so unbalanced and grotesque and not at all a natural boday shape. How did we lose the beauty in porn? Where did it go? Why I am lamenting the lack of aestheticism in the adult entertainment industry? What should I have for dinner? I'm just so troubled right now.

Being the intrepid wannabe Carrie Bradshaw that I am, I inquired with a couple male friends about their thoughts on porn today and why they'd much rather see a Jenna Jameson than a Dita von Teese on their computer. What it basically boiled down to is nudity. Men just aren't turned on by a hint of sex. They don't want women to imply they have breasts, they want them to prove they have them, preferably amidst scenery found in beaches or barns or jungles, because that's where women are most often struck with the urge to take off their shirts. Likewise, if a woman is going to pose with the whips and the chains and the chickens (holla back, Professor Badger!) my male friends reported they wanted to see interesting and shocking things done with, or to, those particular instruments of hedonism. They both enthusiastically agreed that they'd rather see the slightly more ample burlesque girls any time they were given a choice, but only if those girls stopped posing and decided to do real porn.

So I guess I'm somewhat relieved that all is still in order between the sexes. Women still eat yogurt cups and watch Dirty Dancing because it hints at sex without showing it, and billions and billions of men around the world will sit in the eerie blue glow of their computer and watch women who are 12-year old boys from the waist down and Coast Guard-approved flotation devices from the waist up contort their completely naked bodies in a variety of interesting and enlightening positions because that's just they way we like it.

It's kind of comforting and old-fashioned in a way. Like something out of Lake Wobegone, except with a lot more silicone.

It's not you...it's us.

A few nights ago, a friend and I semi-facetiously filled out the first round of applications for eHarmony. I say semi-facetiously, because while ridicule for Dr. Warren Gray and his 29 dimension of compatability was flying high that evening, I think we were both kind of curious about who we'd see on the other end. Having recently been thrust back into the single world, I've been experiencing some bouts of Estelle Costanza-esque panic about being "out there". I wondered if there could somehow conveniently be a guy on there so wonderful I could instantly forgive him for transgressions like owning dark brown Orlon socks and not knowing that the saran wrap always goes in front of the aluminum foil in the drawer because clearly saran wrap is the much more frequently used veggie wrap accoutrement, so wonderful that he knew how to make me laugh at the right times and cry at the right times, so wonderful that he would happily sit down with me and contrive a reasonable story about meeting one another in the bulk food aisle at Whole Foods in Overland Park and how he helped me reach the basmati rice because we're both self-conscious enough to not want people to know we met online, so wonderful even that I might just let this thirty something Eagle Scout propose to me in front of God and Warren Gray and all the Nielsen TV Families in all the world and I'd start wearing khaki capris and button downs without a hint of irony and we'd live together in suburban bliss in our 3 bed, 2.5 bath home with our children Cooper and Thatcher, or McKayla and McKenzie or Tiffani and Amber Thiessen, and and and...

Anyway, the eHarmony questionnaire is actually worlds more complex than the commercials lead one to believe. I spent about 25 minutes filling in little Likert scale dots about my interests, my values, my expectations, my personality. Then there were the essays, with such charming 7th grade language prompts like "I'm thankful for...". On every essay page there was a reminder that "your potential mate will be reading these responses." Essentially, a last ditch reminder telling me DON'T SCREW UP. THIS IS YOUR ONE SHOT TO BAG A MAN BEFORE YOUR OVARIES DRY UP AND YOU BEGIN SKIPPING WORK TO WATCH YOUR "STORIES". I did not screw up...at least I don't think so. I spun words about my life into saccharine stories so heartfelt, so profound they should've been narrated by Maya Angelou for the Hallmark Channel. I was quite confident that I had passed the first eHarmony barrier.

I was wrong.

About 80% of the way through, the questionnaire focused on innocuous subjects like age, location, and marital status. Since I was trying to be as honest as possible (although the idea of being matched with a male version of me is vaguely terrifying) I submitted that I was legally separated rather than divorced. Three pages later, I received a notification that my application could proceed no further because I wasn't a legally single person.

Touche, my cyber-Yente. Touche. (Funny how without the accent over the e, it's just "toosh")

Undaunted, because I really really wanted my free personality index and at least a glimpse into the mystical realm of eligible men, I re-registered under a new name and redid the entire thing over again. This time, because I wanted to make sure I didn't get weeded out, and evidently because I have more free time than a salaried state government employee rightfully ought to have, I made sure every answer was absolutely perfect. I cross-referenced questions for consistency, and I even agonized for a full half minute over whether I enjoyed camping "somewhat" or "more than somewhat". My essays were an orgy of effervescent language and intimate insights into my personal life and expectations, and when I bit my cheek and selected "divorced" on the demographics page, I did so with an exuberant sense of triumph that I had, in fact, nailed the eHarmony initial questionnaire.

Until I was rejected. By Dr. Warren effing Gray.

Apparently for 1 in 5 people, they are unable to make a match because we represent a "low energy" segment of the population. They directed me to a disclaimer page that stated eHarmony was so committed to maintaining a quality dating pool they'd rather refuse service than try to match me up with someone who couldn't deal with my love of activities that occur primarily in a supine position. That sounded bad. I mean TV, pervs.

So basically, I am not fit for online dating. Not demonstrably perky enough. Maybe a little too honest in the "melancholy" part of the feelings inventory, and certainly not nearly interested enough in snow sports and pottery classes, I'm afraid. But still, what makes me wonder is why they wouldn't take the money from the low energy set? Are we so irredeemable because maybe we've had to start over, pick up, and figure out how to love again? Are we so reprehensible because we took that ridiculous uestionnaire seriously and were honest about how we felt about ourselves? If the 20% of us who were booted out of eHarmony were on first dates, and we told our dinner companion that we weren't satisfied with our lives right now, but we were very hopeful about the future, does that mean our date would have to leave us at the taxi without even so much as an "I'll call you?"

At the very least, wouldn't it make good business sense to make us drop the 60 dollars for a membership and then string us along for a couple of years until you tell us we're too losery to ever even begin to experience the "life-long enduring romance" you so tout on your commercials?

I dunno, eHarmony...you're making the possibility of romance by the flax seed bin seem more and more plausible every day.

It all began..

Writing the first entry in a new blog is always a wonderful mood lifter for the rest of the week. I always seem to do this on a Sunday evening after I've had the weekend to overthink, to get antsy, to want to sink my teeth back into writing.

Why Mighty Minx? I bounced the title off a friend this evening and got a cyber snort and silence as a reaction. It definitely doesn't have the Daria-esque feel of my other blogs, I'll admit.

My last set of writing occurred during a fairly tumultuous time in my life, following a nasty separation, a new job, a financial crash and recovery, and a slow descent into Crazy Cat Lady-dom, from which I've only recently emerged. I really liked that blog; it was, at times, some of the most raw, intimate writing I had done. I was comfortable with my readers, and I even was satisfied enough with my template not to tinker with it more than once a week. I was pretty content with the whole thing, and I intended to write there for awhile.

My life doesn't seem to sustain contentment for long, though, and I soon found out a former student and a friend of my brother-in-law had found the blog and passed it on to my ex-husband's family. A small furor erupted and I shut down the blog for my own protection as well as my ex's. I learned my lesson: you're never as anonymous on the Internet as you believe to be.

For awhile, during the two months or so in which I didn't write "publicly", I kept a private blog where I chronicled each excruciating day of a heavy depression and recovery. It was fairly dark and twisty, and probably nothing a reasonable person would be interested in reading. Thankfully...mercifully...finally...I have managed to move on past those dark days. I think I'm healing, and I'm slowly becoming a reasonably functional person. I might even be a little bit boring now that I've lost some of my pathos. We shall see.

So, over the past two months since I've been gone I started a new job, I became Harry Truman for a day, I accomplished three more things on my summer to-do list, I was threatened with a lawsuit, I cleaned out my house, I temporarily befriended a homeless transvestite who lived with four kittens, I tangoed and quickly stopped tangoing, one of my cats disappeared, and I bought 4" suede boots that my students say make me look "fancy".

I have few revelations on the subject of love or life or anything else at all, but for what it's worth I feel so much healthier, older, and wiser than I have in years and years. So for this particular blog's reign in my life, I chose a slightly more upbeat moniker. A good friend of mine calls me a minx when I'm being particularly saucy, and I just like the idea of it...Mighty Minx, a superhero in her own mind who can fix a garage door, make the best scrambled eggs in all of Christiandom, and sing every song from "High School Musical" with her students without messing up one word.

It's not much, but it's a start. So, onward and upward.