Category: Writing

I am the thing lurking below your bed underneath your goody box of condoms, lube, porn and sex toys. What you don’t dare shove into your closet among a sea of skeletons gets secreted beneath the bed, adding to my power and causing you a fitful night’s sleep.

Every night, I seep into your head, your subconscious. You toss, turn, brew with unsettled conflicts emanating from me. My mountainous putrid manifestation denies you sleep.

You suffer my deathblow pummels nightly like a train that’s never late. Your futile efforts to protect yourself, clinging to the bedspread; however, the comforter brings no comfort. It is under my command, and with serpentine motion, slithers around your limbs, impeding your movement. Slipping around your neck, nocturnal noose apnea.

My gang of vicious dust bunnies marks out their territory amid the increasing density of things you hide under the bed. Burrowing through the festering labyrinthine trash heap of unresolved issues, each generation growing less empathetic, more adventurous, exploring additional dark lurking spaces to take cover. Laying in wait for you to forget they’re there and slip your hand unknowingly into their briar patch to retrieve some innocent thing that dropped and rolled under the bed. And fool that you are, you reach for it blindly. Oh, you got a flashlight, but you think you only need it for a power outage. Don’t you know things done in darkness recede before the light? Yet in the dark, long fangs of fear nip at your fingers.

Some of your demons have human faces. They lodge deep into your mind. I spring them free despite your eclectic collection of useless succor ritual: voodoo dolls, amulets, lucky charms, fervent prayers, sacred chants, mind-altering sleep aids. Everything but your most powerful mojo–standing up for yourself.

Until you do, you’re my little bitch. You wish you had insomnia. I’m something worse. I know your secrets. Your vulnerabilities. The things you don’t want said, I say. The things you want to forget, I remind you. I tap dance up and down your last nerve while pushing all your buttons.

Guess what? The cliché is true: you are your own worst enemy. You made me. You are too much of a coward to destroy me.

Geniuses are innovative thinkers who break from conformity, doing things no one has ever dreamed of doing before. Problem is, so are the mad. How to distinguish one from the other? Usually, it’s a matter of money. The rich are eccentric. The poor are crazy. Poor people live day-to-day in crisis mode while rich people live in fashion mode. And the only people who believe money can’t buy happiness are those who have it. FYI: poverty sucks. By the way, money buys happiness if you have the right set of priorities. Is that radical idea genius or madness?

Sometimes the distinction between genius and madness depends upon genitalia. The cry for an innovative social change focuses attention on an unjust situation or on the marginalized messenger. A woman’s legitimate grievance, time and again, has been trivialized, ridiculed or dismissed with a deprecating female hormonal or body part reference.

Yet a madman, especially a rich one, captures the world’s attention with his solutions to social challenges. Is there a Rosetta stone for his illogical mansplanation? Some linguistic strap-on to aid women through penile reasoning? A Dr. Doolittle to translate and transform the gender-biased belittle? Genius or madness?

It all boils down to privilege. And that’s a boil the privileged don’t want lanced. The most precarious of them all are the ones who’ve attained their positions of power not through any merit, but solely through privilege. Oh, they’ll go on and on about the benefits of a merit-based society, of cream rising to the top. Truth is, they secretly acknowledge they are not the cream. Any talk of leveling the playing field or doing away with institutionalized “isms” just sets off their fear, expressed in the form of anger. Angry because the nonprivileged have the sheer audacity, the highfalutin expectation to work hard and obtain the just rewards in life.

Ho, ho, ho, Santa Claus ain’t coming! We the nonprivileged aren’t expected to be good for goodness sake. We are expected not to disrupt the foundations of privilege. We are only rewarded as much as we help maintain the bonds that bind us. Anything else is just madness.

Freedom, equality, innovation…all the lofty ideals for those who can afford to luxuriate in self-actualizing. Everyone else is lower on the pyramid and the lower we are, the more our time is invested in maintaining the pyramid rather than achieving our own personal aspirations. We’re actually shamed for thinking in terms of rising to the top, which would make any incompetent, privileged person tumble.

Don’t you see? Any innovative solution that threatens those who benefit from the status quo isn’t wanted from those who maintain the status quo. Ever wonder why a simple, logical solution isn’t implemented? Because not everyone wants the problem solved. Why it’s madness, I tell you!

Can a free society only exist if there is a class of people who aren’t? They don’t have to be called slaves. They just have to be denied equal access, justified by any pseudoscientific explanation, fear-mongering logic, or hate-based religious belief. Any combination of those can severely hobble some category of nonprivileged people.

Genius, madness, insider, outsider, innovative, disruptive. How much cultural capital can you invest in promoting your own novel ideas?

We are all winners! Born into this world already having defied tremendous odds. Don’t believe it? Consider this: healthy men can ejaculate between 40 million to 1.2 billion sperm cells and healthy women will ovulate between 300 to 400 eggs during their reproductive lifetime; so the fact that we’re all here means we’ve already beat incredible odds.

Still not impressed? How about out of all the 1700 planets that NASA scientists have discovered, only Earth has life? There’re only four others among them that scientists suspect may have the “Goldilock conditions” of liquid water, conducive atmosphere and a comfortable temperature to support life.

With the improbability of ever having popped into existence, all we have to do is keep the momentum going and make the most of this journey.

Odds are we’ll fall in love and have our hearts broken. We’ll say mean things in a fit of rage. Then apologize later in a fit of regret. We’ll cry for joy and due to sadness. We’ll breathlessly boast about our swashbuckling adventures and times that took our breath away.

We’ll experience déjà vu, motivating contemplation about past lives, third-eye clairvoyance and wormhole time travel. Other experiences will be what George Carlin called “Vuja de,” the eerie feeling that none of this shit is familiar.

We’ll defy some odds while trending within others. Thanks to the inviolable Law of Probability, smart criminals will eventually get caught and dumbasses will sometimes get lucky.

Throughout life, we’ll gamble, risk, advance, retreat—always toward a moving target with ever-changing odds. Circumstances in flux. As soon as we know the answers, the questions will change. As soon as we change, we will be questioned.

Navigate. Celebrate. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Always remember what it took the universe, time, space and the genetic probability of sexual reproduction to pop you into existence—for a limited time only.

Never allow anyone to make you feel bad about how old you are. The fact that you’re aging means you haven’t died yet. And while you’re still alive, live it to the fullest. Negotiating through life’s probabilities: health, financial, social, political, sexual, existential.

Everything’s merely a casino game of chance. Life’s not turned out the way you hoped? Perhaps you’re playing with trick dice, marked cards, or rigged slot machines. Or maybe you’re going for the nearly impossible. After all, there are only 4 ways out of a possible 2.6 million 5-card combinations to get a royal flush.

The real trick is playing the hand you’re dealt and the other players. How good is your hustle? Turn the music up loud get your hustle on!

Every physical trauma I’ve experienced in my younger days have returned to reminisce in my middle-agehood. Blissfully forgotten skinned knees and elbows, deep wounds embedded into my bones, muscles and joints, aging me from the inside out. I may not look my age, but I feel it with every mysterious new pain. The faint echo of wilder, faster times and fearless adventures.

Growing up, I climbed every tree in the immediate vicinity. Queen of the monkey bars. I played hard and I played loudly. Mom never had to wonder where I was. She only worried when things suddenly became quiet.

And I never walked anywhere when I could run until I outran my left knee—at least that’s how my ten-year old self saw it. The doctor referred to the prominent lump on my left shinbone just below the knee as “Osgood Schlatter.” He tried cheering me up, by telling me that many professional athletes suffer from this condition. Yet I wasn’t a professional athlete. I was a prepubescent girl who loved to run, but the doctor only saw a “puny” girl who needed to start taking a children’s vitamin.

(I was so skinny, Mom had to buy me the “slim” version of whichever size I wore and then take them in.)

Next the doctor announced the most devastating news: I had to stop running for at least a year. Although there are many therapies to help athletes strengthen their quads until the condition goes away, the doctor didn’t think that was important for me.

“You’re trying to ruin my reputation,” I told him. Mom just laughed at me.

You see, once again, her baby had uttered another ridiculous thing, not realizing its sexual connotation. Like the time for inventors’ day in the fourth grade, I took apart a wire hanger and shaped it into a crude capital Y. I hypothesized that by striking the hanger against an object, I could distinguish the material it was made of based on how much the hanger vibrated. Of course, I named my invention “The Vibrator.”

But I digress.

In eight grade during an afterschool gymnastics club practice, I was doing mad pull-ups at a good clip on an improperly grounded portable high bar. As the bar tipped backwards into the bleachers, I managed to let go of it except for my left index finger, which became the first bone I’d ever broken. About twelve years later, I broke that same finger, blocking a kick with my hand in hapkido. To this day, if I ever were in a fight, I wouldn’t dream of blocking a kick with my hand rather than dodging.

Around the same time, I suffered my first serious fall, doing something remarkably pedestrian, walking down rain-moistened steps. I injured my left hip and elbow. Since I was teaching in South Korea at the time, my insurance covered acupuncture. Although I would have preferred not to fall, the results from my first acupuncture treatment amazed me. I went from not being able to hold anything in my left hand, to regaining full use of it.

From South Korea, I moved to Colorado. Who can resist hiking around the mountains? In Boulder, just a little over an hour north of Denver, I hiked around all that rugged terrain and managed to twist my left ankle on flat land when I tripped over a rock. Despite the interesting feeling of stretching rubberbands in my ankle as I tumbled over in slow motion, it swelled until I had another acupuncture treatment.

Not to be outdone, the right ankle had its rubberband stretching experience years afterwards when I’d finished diving in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt to see the remains of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I was walking down some dilapidated stairs that had been covered with astroturf, camouflaging the extent of the damage. Although a group of us had used those stairs, I was the unlucky one who tripped.

Around this time, I began to suspect my ankles were cursed. A few years after that, while decorating my science classroom at a private American school in Honduras, I became so absorbed with the process of hanging up stuff on the wall, I temporarily forgot that I was walking on a countertop, which had sinks. Well, one of my feet unexpectedly sank in a sink and I ungracefully flipped onto the floor, injuring the left side of my body from the hip downwards.

A good masseuse realigned the fascia in my lower left leg, but I unknowingly learned to walk with an altered hip, locked into the wrong position. The body is an amazing thing. For several years I managed to bellydance, dance salsa, tango and samba, even play capoeira, a Brazilian martial arts, which people mistake as mere dancing, all on a locked hip.

Until, in the middle of carnival, pain radiated from my left knee in all directions. I bought a knee brace in order to walk. A week later, I had my first chiropractic appointment. That bone magician performed his snap, crackle, pop magic and poof! the radiating pain instantly stopped and he handed me my knee brace with a confident smile, saying I no longer needed to wear it.

Three years later, I wished I only needed a knee brace. Instead, a capoeira sparing accident landed me in a clinic with a broken fibula. Normally, one needs to stay off the ankle for at least 6 weeks. But I got the full experience since the bone displacement was greater than 2mm. Six metal pins and five weeks later, my ankle recovered faster than my orthopedic surgeon had anticipated. I started referring to myself as “bionic.”

For someone who was a running fool as a child, being on crutches angered me. I always thought people on crutches were in a bad mood due to pain. That may be true for some, but it was the marathon of mundane movement and loss of freedom that got me. Everything I needed to do took at least three times as long. Plus, I had few things I could do.

The only hidden benefit of being on crutches was isolating my core muscles. So as the weeks whiled away with my left leg muscles atrophying, my abs got a terrific work out!

Now that I go to yoga four times a week, I’ve been working through all the injuries life has hurled my way. Remember the left index finger I’ve broken twice? Thanks to yoga, I can no longer predict the weather by it. Also my hips are more even, but there’s still a ways to go with the lower left side of my body. No matter how injured I’m feeling from one moment to the next, I remember Mom’s sage advice: Always take the time to stand up erect. To some degree, walking around with your head held high improves your posture and reflects that the trainwrecks of life will not keep you down.

Some say the word “Amazon” derived from Greek, meaning “without breasts.” Others prefer to derive “Amazon” from Armenian, meaning “moon-women.” Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I was six and wanted to be an Amazon when I grew up. I was fascinated by their strength and fighting skills. A few years later I was crushed when I read that Amazons only existed in myth.

Yet there are experts searching enthusiastically for archaeological evidence that Amazons existed just as there are experts equally enthusiastic that Amazons exist only in the realms of popular myth. Real or myth, political or religious, there are common elements to the Amazonian legends that are intriguing to us women who live outside societal expectations of what it means to be a heterosexual woman. Proving the existence of Amazons is as elusive as it once was to prove that women have a G spot or are capable of ejaculation.

I remember when I was a child watching a TV commercial for a popular cheap perfume where a sexy woman sang about bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan and never letting him forget he was a man. My child’s curiosity wondered, “If she could buy and cook her own food, why did she need the man?” As an adolescent, I heard about the modern myths of the “career track,” “the mommy track,” and the looming “biological clock.”

In my early twenties, I figured I must not be a “real” heterosexual woman since society repeatedly told me that such women wanted to get married, have kids, wear makeup 24/7, and wear so-called sexy, uncomfortable clothes and shoes. And starting robustly with my generation, there was an assumption that women would do all that and pursue higher education and a career. When and how were real heterosexual women going to accomplish all that? Even if we did, that would not be a guarantee that we’d be respected, especially if one is a woman of color.

Just like my favorite slave heroine, Sojourner Truth, who lamented in her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech about the notions of womanhood since she labored like a beast of burden and bore 13 children and occasionally the lash yet was never invited to stand upon the pedestal of femininity.

Amazons reportedly lived in all-female societies where they only sought sexual interaction with men once a year. The female babies were cherished and raised to be the next generation of Amazons. Some myths state that Amazon girls had their right breast removed at age nine so it wouldn’t interfere with their archery skills. Other myths say that Amazons wore a leather restraint over their right breast or that the massive buildup of their back and shoulder muscles just made it appear that their right breast had been removed. And the fate of the male babies born to Amazons? According to the various myths, newborn sons were either killed, maimed so they wouldn’t grow up to overpower women and kept on as servants, or returned to their father.

Despite this annual mass impregnation of Amazons, they considered themselves to be virgin warriors because men could not claim Amazonian vaginas as their property through marriage. If you think that’s a strange way of defining virginity, think about the myriad of virginity definitions swirling around today’s society. Is she a virgin if she’s only had oral sex and/or anal sex? Is she still a virgin if her hymen is no longer intact after a nonsexual activity? Is she still a virgin if she never consented to sex but was raped? Is she still a virgin if she’s only had female lovers? Does the word “virgin” also apply to males? Now, after looking at some of the shaky assumptions we currently make about what constitutes a virgin, the only thing that’s curious about the Amazonian definition is that women defined it. If they actually existed, that is.

For his 9^th task, Hercules had to steal the Amazon queen’s girdle. Hippolyta’s girdle was a snake made of metal or leather and signified female sexuality, suggesting that female sexual power was deadly. The loss of Hippolyta’s girdle meant the loss of Amazonian independence. The defeat of the Amazons was the start of another myth, the Dorian Invasion that displaced the ancient Greek goddess and nature worship with the Greek classic patriarchy. In a classical Greek wedding ceremony, the groom loosened his bride’s girdle to signal the end of her virginity and the beginning of her fertility to her husband. Since Athenian women had so little freedom during classical Greek times, the Amazonian myth is speculated to have been created to show that an all-female rebellion had already occurred and had ended in the female warriors’ defeat.

Yet, aren’t we women still fighting battles to secure our vaginas? Couldn’t we consider Senator Wendy Davis a modern-day Amazon, who instead of wielding a bow and arrow, came armed with a back brace and powerful words to fight with conservative male republicans? After all, some conservative male republicans don’t even want the word “vagina” uttered in their presence, but they’ll surely agree to heavily regulate them.

After being raped by Poseidon, Medusa’s beautiful hair was replaced by venomous snakes that would turn an onlooker to stone. One modern interpretation is that no man could gaze upon or handle such powerful uncontrolled female sexuality on display.

As daughters of Ares, the god of war, Amazons were women who fought for their autonomy. Whether there was a bona fide Amazon society no longer concerns me. “Sex” has been defined as what’s between one’s legs and “gender” has been defined as what’s between one’s ears. Amazons are among us. I accept myself for who I am. A modern-day Amazon.