Live Nude Woman

Today, November 29, 2010, roughly fourteen years after I first conceived of the idea, I did it! I took my clothes off in front of a room full of mostly svelte college students and contorted my body in various poses for nearly three hours. My mom would be so proud that I’m putting my Master’s degree to good use (ha ha!).

Now, for those of you who might think I’m out of my freaking mind, in some ways you would be right. Maybe you do have to be a little bit, of a different mindset to do what I did.

I could tell you “desperate times call for desperate measures” and my unemployment is about to run out and all that jazz, but the truth is, as long as there isn’t a mirror in front of me, I’d much rather be naked than clothed almost any day of the week, in almost any situation. I loathe, loathe, loathe clothing and I dream of a world that is warm enough for all of us, yes, ALL OF US, to run around NAKED, without a stitch of clothing on, ever-unless we get cold or are getting sunburned or maybe just feel like covering up. But the point is, in my ideal world, clothes would be like scarves and mittens and costume jewelry-frivolous but permissible to wear if one wanted to, yet certainly not required.

This view is by no means endorsed by anyone else in my family, so please don’t think that they are a bunch of self lovin’ nudists like I am-that couldn’t be further from the truth!

In addition to loving being naked (except for when I’m cold), as an artist, I am completely enamored with the naked human form. Probably always have been. Although as a kid I do recall being horribly torn-both aroused and embarrassed at my Aunt’s nude female art work she so brazenly had displayed around her house. I mean she was single and all, so did that make her a…lesbian…? And the art work aroused me…so did that make me…a lesbian too? And with the exception of “The David” I never saw any nude male artwork and really, his bits are covered up by a damn fig leaf or something, so that was hardly a turn on! Such confusing thoughts for a young kid, and of course we never talked about these things in my “very open household”!

I distinctly remember the first time I saw my first naked person, that I was supposed to draw I mean. It was actually a rather traumatic experience for me. It was autumn of 1996 during my college Life Drawing class, which, after this experience I took to calling my “Naked People Drawing Class.” Our first model was a man.

Now, I’d seen a few naked men before, even one or two with my consent, but even I was so stunned at the depth of my ignorance and denial as “Mr. Incredibly Tanned Ass” took off his rob and mounted the modeling platform in the middle of the room, I didn’t even recognize myself. I’m nearly certain I turned a billion shades of red and prayed for anything in the world…a tsunami, an earthquake, a sudden death in my family, my immediate and untimely death right there on the spot, a giant black hole to swallow me up…anything to happen to me so that I did not a) have to be in that room and b)that whatever he did, however he positioned himself, that I didn’t have to see that god-awful thing between his legs!

I sorta got one wish granted and I think you can figure out which one that was. I was so appalled at my reaction to his nudity and so angry at my Professor for not warning us that the model was going to be male that I spent most of the class shaking with rage and seriously considering that I should either drop the class or get some psychological help. That night, my drawings were for shit.

There was something in the realness of it all, in my first experience seeing a naked man who didn’t want something sexual from me, which completely unnerved me. I had no idea what to do with a nude man standing before me whose sole purpose was to teach me how the human body worked, how it looked in various poses. On some level, after the initial class, I realized this was a huge part of what made me tremble with rage and with time I was able to relax and even enjoy drawing other models, even male models and their penis’s. Sometimes, though, all these years later, I can still recall how I felt when I saw my first nude male model…his great tanned ass… and the occasional glimpses of his little penis hanging limply between his balls and I feel a mixture of sadness at my initial reaction and an intense desire not to illicit the same responses in students when I pose.

Live Nude Woman Part 2

As traumatic as that first experience was for me, and as grateful as I was that I did not have to draw a penis in my very first nude model experience, my Life Drawing class was one of my most favorite classes in college and certainly one of the few classes which fundamentally shaped who I am as a person today. To be able, as an artist, and even more importantly, as a human being, to witness other human beings bearing, not just their naked bodies, but in some ways, parts of their souls, to a room full of strangers, and strangers who are, generally speaking, physically in the prime of their life, is a profound gift that I doubt very much I even had the capacity to fully appreciate at 19 years old.

To be a model, to be a good model, you have to do so much more than be willing to get naked for money in front of people. You have to be willing to share part of yourself, parts of your passion, parts of your story, parts of the twists and turns and flexions and posses that only you can bring to a session. You have to be willing to let people look closely, possibly closer than you would ever allow a lover to look at you, under glaring hot lights, for 30 seconds to an hour or more. You have to allow strangers to critique your cellulite, your scars, your uneven breasts, your sagging ass, pierced nipples, fading tattoos, spider veins, crow’s feet, pubic hair, dimples, missing testicle, uncircumcised penis and everything else you might cringe from in a dressing room mirror, but which ultimately makes you a beautiful model to teach students how the human body works and how your body moves and behaves differently from everyone else’s body on the planet.

I think ever since my Life Drawing class, even while in the class, I thought about how I would do things differently if I were the model, but for some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my Professor how to get into this line of work, even though I had a great relationship with her. At that point in my life I was still battling my anorexia and child abuse and had never been to a clothing optional resort, nor was I comfortable identifying as a nudist. I still had a very long way to go in my own journey before I was ready to take the steps that lead to me taking my clothes off today.

Nevertheless, the idea of being a model never left my head and it wasn’t until this summer, when finally visiting a clothing optional resort very close to where we currently live, I met a guy (I shudder to think of him as a man) who claimed he was a model in the area, and while blatantly staring at my bare breasts, he told me that I should “get into the business.” He offered to show me all his moves, and give me his contacts, if I took him back to my room, (most nudists I’ve encountered are not this smarmy be the way!!) at which point I repeatedly declined and wondered what the hell was taking my lover so long in the bathroom. The conversation, as disturbing as it was, ignited a fire in my brain though and almost immediately when we returned, I started researching modeling in “the Valley”.

Who knew it would be so freaking frustrating! Maybe I should have brought that guy back to my room after all-with my lover as the body guard to make sure things stayed legit! I had no idea you needed experience to take your freaking clothes off! I thought you just took the damn things off, strutted a few poses, held them for awhile, stayed as still as possible and viola, everyone is happy! Yeah, not so much. Not only is it not that easy, not only do you need experience, you need references! Well, how the hell do you get references if you don’t have experience?

I called one school, and in sheer desperation, and asked if taking a Life Drawing class and being a nudist counted as experience. The Administrative Assistant didn’t sound terribly impressed with my credentials, but told me to write a cover letter and e-mail it to her and she’d see what she could do. Ok great. What the hell was I supposed to put in a cover letter? “Hi so and so, I’d really like to get naked for your young art students. I have a pretty good body, although I’ve put on some weight in my middle. My breasts are a 38D and they are pierced, as is my nose. I’m a nudist and an artist so I’m comfortable being naked in front of people and coming up with unusual poses….” I felt like I was trying to be a porn star. In the end, I said more than I needed to (go figure) and didn’t hear anything for months. Oh, and I only sent my cover letter thingy to one school because I was so discouraged by how the phone call went (so much for following through on your dreams baby!).

And then, lo, one day, towards the end of October, when I was feeling all sorts of fat and down on myself, a guy named Jason e-mailed me about my availability and I said yes to every date he had (doctor’s appointments be damned!) and the day after that THE WOMAN I was supposed to train with in the Valley contacted me about a workshop she was running in few weekends (for only $30) for wanna-be models! It was all starting to fall into place and I couldn’t believe it!

I scheduled my debut with Jason for today and my workshop with Pat for a few weeks ago. Pat and I really hit it off and since then I’ve observed her at another school where she introduced me to the person I need to know to get scheduled for next semester and I will be posing with Pat on Thursday near where I used to live and will hopefully get hired there as well. I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm in check, but I had a great time today and the feedback from the Professor, who knew it was my debut, was that “It was like (I) had been doing this my whole life” and it pays a whole lot better than most jobs I’m likely to find in Public Health…except for the fact that there aren’t any benefits and the work is very sporadic.

No matter how long the “gig” lasts though, someday I’ll either write a book about it or tell great stories about how I was a live nude model. Hell, maybe I’ll do both! After all, how many people get to say that at a cocktail party and mean it?

A Finger In My Arsehole

Yesterday was the dreaded day. The day when I, well, my insurance company really, payed someone to put their finger in my arsehole…all in the name of healing. Now, I realize that I haven’t written in awhile about what I’ve been doing to manage my chronic pain issues, which in many ways, became the focus of this blog last October when my life was torn asunder by a multitude of unexpected diagnoses. And I realize I probably could have found someone on Craigslist or some other internet site who was more than willing to stick their horny little finger in my rectum for free-hell, maybe they’d even pay me for the pleasure of doing so (but that gets into all sorts of murky waters and possibly illegal issues and who can afford to lose the job they don’t have?). But now dear reader, I’m back at it-giving you a glimpse into a world hopefully you’re grateful that you aren’t living in.

Seriously though (I have a really bad habit of joking about the things that scare me the most) I had to undergo a humiliating and excruciatingly painful rectal exam by a Colon Surgeon before I could even be cleared to have someone paid to put their finger in my bum! Perhaps I’ll write about that procedure some other day, when I’ve recovered a bit from the shame of it. Oh, and speaking, err, writing about shame, my early childhood abuse experiences left my anything but ready for yesterday’s procedure!

However, I feel I am at my wits end. Sitting, hell, sleeping on my back has become such a source of pain that I can no longer do many of the things I formerly enjoyed in life like riding a horse or a bike (for fuck’s sake riding my partner is even a rarity!). Long, rambling car rides, writing for hours on end…anything that requires me to sit on my beautiful ass for more than 45 minutes to 2 hours (on the best of days and a heavy dose of pain killers) is just about out of the questions. Fuck, I’ve even been woken up from the little sleep I manage to get because the pressure on my rectal region is too intense…from a friggin” mattress!

I haven’t written about this yet either (although I swore I did…that’s the problem when you are always writing in your head…you tend to forget what you actually put down on paper, or cyber paper), but over the summer I was diagnosed with Pudendal Neuralgia by a specialist in New Hampshire who was fairly adamant that the only way to relieve my pain, if there was even a way to relieve it, was to have MAJOR surgery, which would involve two cuts deep inside my each side of my vagina to, “vaporize the ligaments which (are thought to) entrap my Pudendal Nerves”. This too, is a blog for another time, but in a nutshell, the doctor hardly evoked confidence from me, as he could not, or would not, answer most of the questions we had for him and he repeatedly stated that this procedure worked best, when it worked at all, on people who had this problem with a short on set; in other words, not so much with people like me who can easily remember being 5 years old and unable to sit without severe pain!

In the months that have followed the bittersweet and very uncomfortable 8ish hour drive to New Hampshire, I have received an intense amount of pressure to have the surgery and to not have the surgery. I left the doctor’s office in tears, all but refusing to have it done, unless it became all but impossible for me to sit, at all. I figured I’ve managed to cope with it, on so many levels, for the better part of my life, why the fuck would I want to undergo an incredibly invasive procedure, having yet another man I don’t trust violate my body once again, to have my vagina sliced open, to be on bed rest for roughly two months? And if all goes well after that, have to wean myself back into sitting at 5-10 minute increments and wait possibly 2 years for results which might never happen??? The whole concept seemed ludicrous to me!

The research I did, which in and of itself, was a difficult process (try Googling Pudendal Neuralgia and see what you come up with!) also helped confirm my belief that surgery, at least at this point in my life, even if, as my mom likes to declare, my insurance should pay for all or most of it, is not the right choice for me. So, that is what led me here…to having a finger in my rectum.

Here I was, again with Karen, my Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist. She’s the blessing from the universe who helped stretch out my vagina (although I may have used a pseudonym for her in earlier blogs, Karen is her bona fide first name) when I was suffering the worst of the Vulvadynia and Pelvic Floor Dysfunction (see earlier blogs). Now, after being cleared by the butt doctor, Karen was going to stick one of her slender, gloved fingers into my rectum in the hopes that doing this-for who knows, maybe a few sessions, maybe several months, would be enough to release the tension on my Pudendal Nerves and thereby avoid any need at all for surgery.

Although I was scared out of my mind, wanting desperately to clench my ass so tight that she couldn’t do anything at all, and spent the week leading up to my visit with her dreading THE DAY, even going so far as to make “jokes” on Sunday about how I was going to have a finger in my ass on Monday, there is no one in the world I would let do this, other than Karen. The amount of trust it takes, probably for anyone, to be curled up in a fetal position while someone lubes you up with Slippery Stuff and as gently as possible inserts a gloved digit into your poop shoot, at least in a medical setting, is tremendous. Now, this doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed some forms of consensual anal play in my day, but the very nature of it being done in an attempt to correct a medical problem, well, for me, that changes everything! That and the fact that the Ass Surgeon who had me bend over a rectal table for her exam, about broke my tailbone in THE MOST PAINFUL RECTAL EXAM EVER!!! I was none too keen on having anyone back there in say the next three millennia or so. Then again, my little air cushion that I bring with me everywhere I might want to sit, isn’t helping much and I’m not too keen on surgery either. Pasta fungul!

And so, after a plethora of questions…yes she knows what Pudendal Neuralgia is, yes she’s treated lots of women with it, no she doesn’t think I should have surgery if it isn’t what I want, and so on, we finally got down to the butt business. And as long as I kept reminding myself why I was there, why this was happening and that I needed to breathe (and of course, resorted to my defense mechanism of continuous questioning) it wasn’t that bad. That is, as long as she stayed away from my tailbone. If Karen’s finger was anywhere near my tailbone I wanted to projectile (vomit?) heave her out of my areshole it hurt so much! And as with my vaginal stretching, I was inexplicably tighter on one side (this time my left) than the other.

The entire procedure lasted maybe five minutes and that was that. She removed her finger as she promised she would and left the room so I could wipe the remainder of the lube of my rump and get dressed in privacy, although after that ordeal does privacy really matter? What I would latter find out was really the worst part of the whole finger in ass process was the most horrific smelling fart I’ve ever released in my life about a half hour after I left Karen’s office, enroot to my therapist’s office; and believe me, I’ve impressed some guys with what I can unleash! That and an almost uncontrollable need to shit every two hours or so. And I’m not talking about a little bowel movement here and there. I mean, the hardcore, been out drinkin’ all night, or Thanksgiving shits-the kind you worry could break the damn toilet and certainly leave a trail of evidence behind when you flush! All friggin’ day and most of the night long I crapped into the porcelain god. My bum began to bleed from wiping so much and even though we’ve stocked up on what I thought was enough toilet paper to last into 2011, I’m afraid if I keep seeing Karen (and it is supposed to me twice a week starting next week) and my bowels keep moving like this, we’ll need to buy a storage unit just to hold toilet paper! She has such tiny fingers too and she only used the very tip, I don’t get it. I will definitely have to ask her about this before she does any butt work next week.

Criminy I hope this is a better idea than slicing open my vagina! Ugh! Just re-reading that last sentence makes me want to vomit all over my keyboard…yes, yes a finger in my ass sounds much better than cutting open my vagina any day! I saw the movie Seven, and while not quite the same thing, it still conjures up images of the razor embedded leather cock harness. I’m fairly certain that’s a sign I’m not ready for surgery even if I have to shit for hours after seeing Karen!

My Bathroom, My Space Station

When I was I kid, around the age of eight or ten-old enough to know it was never going to work, I would sometimes hideout in our downstairs bathroom. Always the downstairs one, never the upstairs one. Bad things happened in the upstairs bathroom, or at least they did when my dad lived there. And when he finally left, the memories of what he did left an indelible stain on all the bathroom surfaces, especially the shower, so I never sought refuge there.

The ugly blue, beige, brown down stairs bathroom, as I remember it, was a different story. Long before it became a place to surreptitiously pop my zits, I would sometimes delude myself into believing it was my secret, savior space station. When life was at its lowest of lows, or I couldn’t starve myself anymore, or I wasn’t in the mood to entertain suicidal thoughts, or maybe I just wanted to get away but it was too (cold, rainy, dark, scarry, whatever) to run away, I would lock myself in the bathroom.

Then I would begin my secret rescue ritual. I’d sit on the toilet, with the lid closed, put my youngish left hand on the yellow handle of the plunger, which always sat faithfully next to the toilet, close my eyes, maneuver the magical handle forward in an intricate pattern, and begin my commands to the space station as we prepared for lift-off. Depending upon whether or not I thought I would be heard by anyone else in the house, I would either speak my commands aloud or murmur them under my breath; but I had this fervently held belief that if I wanted to be rescued, I must say the words out loud. I have no idea where I got that notion from, but I believed it, heart and soul, despite the fact that my bathroom space station rescue missions never worked. And believe me, I tried these rescue missions for far longer than I am willing to admit here!

I am reminded of my bathroom space station tonight because one of my deepest fears seems to be coming true-that once I no longer am able to maintain control over the ironclad, zillion-times sealed walls aptly confining my tears, my anguish, I will never be able to do anything else but drown in the mire.

I started crying uncontrollably on Monday, when Thomas, my most favorite of our now four cats, escaped from the deck. I hadn’t noticed he was missing and hence had no idea how long he was gone. Stupid me! I thought for sure THIS TIME I had managed to cat proof the fucking deck! I was beside myself with fear and panic that he might get hit by a car or kidnapped and cooked by our motherfucking neighbor (yes, I hate him and he rents a restaurant next to us and hates us as well, so it is possible that he would do such a thing for revenge!).

I spent what seemed like forever looking for him, hell, I even prayed to God to bring him back and offered up all the other cats in exchange, before I apologized for praying to a God I don’t believe in and offered up my prayers to the universe instead (yeah, I was a wee bit of a basket case)! When the fat fuck of a cat finally tried sneaking up behind me, my eyes did not believe my face and it wasn’t until I tried hoisting all 25 pounds of him into my arms that I realized he was truly alive and safe and home. And I lost it. I was sobbing and shaking. I mean snot pouring out of my nose, gulping sobs that caused the people going to the restaurant to gawk at me. I was clutching Thomas so hard the poor cat was gasping for air and I didn’t even notice, my crying was that uncontrollable.

When I finally got us both inside, I collapsed on the stairs, still hysterically crying while my seemingly bewildered cat, who was probably expecting to be locked in the bathroom for escaping, tried to console my by rubbing up against me, purring his head off…until he got bored with me and I finally got a grip on myself.

Except that I never really did.

What felt like the fatal loss of my most favorite animal companion ever, appears to be the final push that catapulted me into a chasm of pain I have been doing lifelong, mind boggling acrobatics to avoid peering into, never mind confronting head on. And now I feel as if I am spiraling, otherworldly, out-of-control, guts heaving, can’t focus on anything else, where the fuck did this come from, into something I intuitively feel is only going to get uglier the farther I fall in to it.

Even though I finally stopped crying external tears when Thomas became bored with consoling me, I haven’t stopped the deluge of internal tears that began falling that Monday. Now it is Friday and the taunt gossamer threads of denial which previously held my lonely life precariously together are obliterated by bitterness and acrid tears. I feel little but resentment towards my partner (?) who is rarely here and even when he is, does little more than offer physical proximity to me. I feel trapped and isolated living here in “the Valley” and enraged at my dumbass self for ever suggesting that we move here. I feel friendless in an area where I once had several friends. I feel in constant pain that few take seriously and no one (that I don’t pay) wants to hear about. I feel sleep deprived from the constant nightmares that keep me up, tossing and turning all night, while my partner slumbers on, oblivious to my nocturnal thrashings.

I feel my teeth ache from the spontaneous outburst of tears right before he came home from work today. From the crying almost all the way to couples therapy-our big Friday night date, and the crying on the way home, and when we got home. And on the bathroom floor, after he fell asleep. Which is what reminded me, as I sat sobbing and rocking myself on the chintzy bathmat, of my useless bathroom space station, and the fact that as an adult, if that is indeed what I am, no matter where I live, I still try to keep the plunger on the left hand side of the toilet-something I never thought about until tonight.

I guess my hope that I can rescue myself dies harder than I thought it would. And the pathway out of hell, or healing as my therapist likes to call it, looks like it’s gonna take a whole lot more out of me than I ever bargained for, if it doesn’t wreck me first.

The Bi Phase

This weekend, while humoring my partner and seeing, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” I was reminded of a “trend (?)” which incenses me. And that is, “The Bi-Phase”. For those of you who haven’t seen (or suffered) through the movie, the main female character tries to escape her past “ex’s”, which her none too bright, sorta boyfriend keeps referring to as her ex-boyfriends. Although she constantly corrects him by calling them her seven evil ex’s (we never learn why they are evil, despite how long the movie drags on, but that is besides the point), he never notices the corrections she makes. Nor does he make any connection to the female who accosts him, ninja style, in an alleyway.

Now, before you go all nerdy video-gangbusters on me here, I understand Scott Pilgrim was hardly a glowing example of anything other than “the nerdy guy beats every guy who ever beat up on him and still gets two hot chicks in the end” kind of movie, and that isn’t where my beef is (well, not in this blog anyway). What’s got ants in my pants, bees in my bonnet and whatever other trite expressions you can think of for being pissed off, is the whole concept of a “Bi-Phase.”
In this particular movie, you would have to be beyond a nerd or live in a darker cave than I do, to not realize that Ramona (female character with 7 evil ex’s) has had a relationship with a woman. That’s certainly cool with me and I speculate that it is probably cool with the nerdy 95% male dominate population in the movie theatre. What’s not cool with me; you know, me who identifies as bisexual, is that when it comes time for Ramona to ‘fess up about her relationship with her evil fem ex, she merely shrugs it off as, “I thought I was Bi. It was just a phase.” And, to kill the ending of the movie, much like “Chasing Amy,” Ramona decides that she’d rather be with a man. How convenient.

How sad.

How fucking much it pisses me off that in the few movies I’ve seen, bisexuality is still being presented as a phase, a joke, a temporary, desperate period of exploration until a man is found.
How oddly, eerily biblical-as if finding a man is the true answer to what every woman is really looking for, and yet, if she can’t find one, she might be able to get away with being edgy enough to be “bi,” but only if it is a passing phase. And of course, that discounts all the bisexual men in the world!

Clearly for me, this is a deeply personal issue. For most of my life I was torn, often to the brink of suicidal ideation, over my sexuality. My very first crush, as I’ve already blogged about, was on a boy my age that lived across the street. However, in hindsight as an adult, I often wonder if he would have been my first crush if I hadn’t had heterosexuality rammed down my throat and bashed into my head at least since the time my first, and only, male cousin was born- a mere six months after I was. We were constantly referred to as “kissing cousins” (whatever that means…By the way, it turns out he’s gay and I’m bi, so that whole forcing heterosexuality thing upon us didn’t turn out so well!) And ever since I can remember I was asked if I had a boyfriend-I mean from the time I was THREE or so on!

Come ON! Talk about inappropriate questions for kids! We don’t even give children a chance to develop their own sexuality in our American society. We form their sexuality for them: based on religion, based on fear, based on tradition and our own expectations of weddings and what have-you and we start bombarding them, at the earliest ages possible, that they are to be heterosexual and that is that. It is almost a carefully re-written version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, except here children aren’t being taught to hate, they are being taught whom it is permissible to love and when and how.

Once my first crush moved away, my attention turned to a girl who lived on the next block from me. I was smitten with her in a way I’d never felt before, in a way part of me already knew I shouldn’t be, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Yet on the rare times when we would walk to Sunday School together, the longing inside me to reach out and hold her hand was so intense I was certain it was worth any price that awaited me in hell. In our younger years I could get away with doing so under the guise of skipping to school to make it there faster, but all I really cared about was being closer to her. My crush on her lasted ages, or at least from second or third grade through fifth or sixth grade, when she turned to the ‘80’s Brat Pack and whatever boys Teen magazine told her where hot and I lost her forever. Two decades later though, I can still squirm in my seat as I think about my early childhood orgasms I’d have with her as we became too old for holding hands and skipping to school but not to self-conscious to avoid wrestling each other alone in my basement; our legs brushing, crushing each other’s clitoris’s, our barely developed breasts rubbing against each other’s breasts, hot, sweaty faces gasping for air, lips poised inches apart from lips, in a kiss we never dared.

The Bi Phase Part 2

Unlike Amy and Ramona and whatever her name(s) were in all those other movies that depict bisexuality as a phase, I believe it is something just as real as heterosexuality and homosexuality and probably about as understood as bestiality, although maybe slightly more accepted. Perhaps it is a phase that some people go through and that is ok, I’m just sick and fucking tired of it being marginalized, shoved off to the side, dismissed, laughed at, denied, denigrated and in some ways, treated as the new homosexuality-the new thing you can’t talk about.

In my life, I am only aware of three other bisexual people. One person is openly bi. One person’s sexuality was revealed to me under penalty of losing my friendship if I revealed that information to anyone else and the last person (who was also the first person I ever knew) was a co-worker at the time and I discovered her bisexuality when she began hitting on me after her relationship with her ex-boyfriend ended. At the time, I was not out to anyone, including myself, about being bisexual. At that particular period of time I probably thought I was a lesbian. I have no idea what kind of relationship my former co-worker is in, but the other two bisexual individuals are in passably heterosexual relationships, as am I, which tends to make people assume that we are straight (a term I loath-I’ll save it for another blog!). Perhaps this is part of what helps to weaken the view of bisexuality as it’s own, verifiable place within the realm of human sexuality.

Other reasons I think people label bisexuality as a “phase” are a) because we are conditioned to think (generally) in terms of two categories (on/off, right/wrong, black/white, gay/straight, female/male etc.) and b) because it is (or appears to be) so much easier just to chose one category to belong to. There were times when I thought I was going to go friggin’ nuts over trying to decide if I was heterosexual or a lesbian. So many times I just want a clear cut answer that neatly fit into one fucking category goddamn it and quite frankly, I didn’t care which one! But when I decided I was hetero, it negated the feelings I’ve always had for women and when I decided I was a lesbian it was always from a place of intense anger or hatred towards men and negated the few positive experiences I had with men. I’ve come out as gay. I’ve come out as not gay. I’ve tried being asexual. I’ve tried just being loyal to my sex toys. None of it worked because none of it acknowledged the core of who I was.

Once I grappled with that beast-that all along I had been denying the core of who I was, and who I am is a sexual person who is attracted to sexual people-I don’t care if they are gay, or bi, or hetero, or intersexed or gender-curious, things began to make more sense to me and I began to be more at peace with myself. Still, it was a long time before I told anyone that I was “bi” for lack of a better word that seemed to fit how I identify.

Still, talking about being bisexual, at least for me, and I am someone who is incredibly vocal about what I believe in, has not been easy. My honesty on this issue has played a role in ending relationships, as at least one boyfriend all the sudden felt the need to worry about every friend I went out with, in case they became competition. My current partner spent years grappling with my jokes, for example, when it was pointed out that something in our house wasn’t straight (to which I’d quip, “Neither am I!”) as well as the more difficult issue of how could I be “bi” and still be with him. My family doesn’t understand how I can claim to be “bi” if I haven’t ever had sex or made out with a woman (past child abuse doesn’t count). Even thought I’d explain, “Gee, maybe she wasn’t interested in me, or I wasn’t interested in her, or the timing was wrong, or she had a boyfriend, or someone walked in on us….” None of it seems to matter. Until I’ve had sex with a woman, my family appears steadfastly unwilling to see me as anything other than heterosexual, and I’m pretty sure even if I did have sex with a woman, they’d ask me how I “knew” it was sex. And when I explain, again and again, why I fight for the right of all Americans to get married, it doesn’t sink in that I am also fighting for my right to marry a woman, if that is what I chose to do some day.

Perhaps the ultimate reason bisexuality is dismissed as a phase, as opposed to part of the continuum of sexuality, is because it is too much for many people to deal with. Instead of see-sawing through attractions for women some of the time and men at other times or possibly both all of the time, it is just easier to grab a box, preferably the one labeled “heterosexual” and shove yourself inside it. After all, it’s only life, love, sexuality, emotional fulfillment, orgasms, closeness, ones’ self, one’s partner, society’s edicts, pleasure, pain and reality you have to deal with or avoid, and aren’t those pesky tasks anyway?

How To Make Your Partner Feel Loved

Tell her how beautiful she is when she gets diagnosed with a whole bunch of health problems and promise her that her beauty will never fade in your eyes.

Tell her that there are endless ways to be intimate without having sex and promise her that you'll have fun finding those ways together.

Promise her that you won't leave her even if she can never have sex again and even if she will never blow you again (that blow job thingy was part of the original dating agreement).

Promise her that you'll do whatever you can to support her.

Then, as time goes by tell her how beautiful she is but do it from further and further away from her, until it is impossible to touch one another.

As time goes by, keep your physical body in the same room, but "check your mind out." Forget about her doctors' appointments. Let her continue to try and manage life the same as she used to-you know, manage the housework and all that other "womanly stuff". Fail to see that she doesn't meet your eyes (because they are full of tears) when you ask if it's ok to do whatever it is that takes you completely away from her when she needs you most

Then, as more time goes by, and she is having "yet another flare-up" and "can't have sex again" tell her how every night you think about rubbing one out. And do so, as she, half-heartedly encourages you to because she no longer has the courage to ask you to hold her through her pain instead.

And when you fight about it, as you surely will, remind her how beautiful you think she is, even if you can't remember the last time you touched her shoulder or her fucking toes. Remind her of how hard you try to be there for her, even if you can't remember when you did more than drive her to the occasional doctor's appointment and make so many squeamish faces as the needles were about to be inserted deep into her, that you were more of a hindrance than a help. Promise her you'll call the counselors and repeatedly forget. Say "I'm sorry" more often than you say "I love you".

But most of all, if you really want to make your partner feel loved, especially when she feels like a loathsome, diseased piece of pond scum, tell her that she is beautiful from the other side of the house, while you're washing dishes and remind her that you'll do anything you can to help her as you race off to the burdens of your world, leaving her ugly and untouched to handle everything you promised her, all alone.

My Gigantic Diseased Organism

Lately, say for the past 10 months or so, I've been feeling that old familiar feeling that I'm not living in my body anymore. I thought that those feelings had more or less ended when my dad went to prison and the abuse stopped and I could pretend that I slept soundly at night.

But now, with my diagnoses, that one friend (?) put it, my doctor, "fucked me with!", I feel less and less like I live in my body or any body for that matter, unless I am standing naked in front of a mirror. Then I suddenly tend to feel like I am transformed into a walrus with blond hair, glasses and an eyebrow piercing, but a fat, tusk-less walrus nevertheless.

The more things hurt and the more intimate areas where things hurt, the more detached I feel from myself. It's kinda funny in a way. In a humbling, humiliating sorta way. I used to fancy myself a sex educator before all of this. I was open minded and outspoken and I firmly believed that there were endless ways to have sex and intimacy, which are NOT the same thing, without, in my case, ramming something into my vagina.

However, once Dr. E told me I had Vulvadynia and Lichen Sclerosis and all other pleasant sorts of vaginal diseases, I began again to view my vagina (and I'm using the term incorrectly- I really mean the vulva-the outside part and the vagina-the inside part) as one more thing that was wrong with me, albeit one more thing not too many people would see. Ha! That was before I realized how many doctors and specialists I would see and how much poking and prodding I would get by a nearly endless stream of people. Now I could probably have an entire gyn exam done in the middle of Times Square and be nonplussed!

The more that old familiar feeling (I hate that I vaguely feel like I'm quoting Frank Sinatra here, even if he was from New Jersey!) of loathing my genitals (a word I despise) crept over me, and eventually overtook me, becoming part of my identity again, the more worthless I felt. The more hopeless I became about my prognosis, although I generally pretended to be just fine to most people since I didn't trust them to care any way.

With sex becoming a cruel and distant memory, and spontaneous "flare-ups" between my legs occurring more often, I retreated further into denial. I went from someone who used to get dressed up in lingerie when I had the house to myself, and masturbate in front of a mirror for the sole purpose of turning myself on, to someone who wouldn't even ask their partner to look at my vulva, perineum, rectum, whatever, unless it was so fucking painful and it had literally been plaguing me for days!

As the pain and denial continue to intensify and I continue to feel less and less like I live in a body and more like I inhabit a flow-blown diseased organism, I have flat out refused to look at my "private parts" at all. That is, until today; when the excruciating pain of the worst sunburn ever, combined with an endless onslaught of paper cuts, mixed with lemon juice and saltwater, in my labia and perineum, ceased to get better, and in fact, got worse over the past two-ish weeks. Nothing. Absolutely nothing was bringing relief for more than an hour or two at best and I'm using up my Lidocaine so fast that my insurance company is gonna refuse a refill!

Only this morning did I haul out the super magnifying mirror and flexible reading lamp and arrange it all between the blob that used to be my vulva.

Perhaps I should have done this sooner, because I noticed the reddest inflammation I've ever seen along the inside of my outer labia (the lips the pubic hairs grow on) and bumps I can't explain along my labia and perineum.

I about flipped out before I remembered that I was no longer living in a body and therefore not subject to things like STDs (of which I've always tested negative for, so has my monogamous partner of 6 years). And then I got super pissed off for not looking at myself sooner and insisting that the doctor see me sooner than today's scheduled appointment so I could be healed. After that, I got super pissed off at myself for breaking my denial and looking at my "down there" in the first fucking place-like I was gonna know what to do with whatever the fuck I saw?

Turns out Dr. E doesn't know what the bumps on my blob are either, but he isn't concerned about an STD. I guess that's good. It would be hard to explain an STD when you aren't even fucking yourself!! He just proscribed two courses of Diflucan and thought it might be a latent "flare-up" to last month's antibiotics and told me to avoid sex, swimming and everything else that might bring me pleasure. And we're going away for the weekend for our anniversary.

I barely avoided a nervous breakdown in his office as I thought about how little my partner touches me now anyway and I left feeling like an even more loathsome and diseased organism than I did when I first arrived.

F'ing February

February has been the darkest, most loathsome month of my life, ever since I can remember. It's an era in which the tentacles of hatred, frigidity, sheer indifference to the world, to myself and to life in general, have always threatened to obliterate whatever narrow shards of my heart I was foolish enough to leave vulnerable from the previous months' holiday revelry. February contains my least favorite holiday on earth. The wretched month takes on a power, a possession so intense that I fail miserably to explain the effect it has on my to anyone, especially myself.

Even in the best of times, in the rare, "less than dastardly" days of February, it is difficult for me to exist, never mind to try and thrive.

This past February, 2010, I gave up all pretenses of trying to exist. I stayed in bed until just before my lover would come home. I wouldn't shower for days. I ignored everything that existed outside of my bellybutton. I pulled so tightly into myself that my old bindings which had cloistered me together for so long began to wither and crumble under the additional burden. I was light years beyond the usual Seasonal Affective Disorder that usually impales me at this time of year.

I pulled away from all that I used to enjoy, which really wasn't that difficult since sex was already taken away from me and chocolate was becoming less appealing since one of my meds had caused me to gain nearly 40 pounds in TWO FUCKING MONTHS!!!!!

About the only things I continued to do regularly were feed the cats, attend my doctors' appointments (so no one would suspect there was anything wrong with me)-I showered on these days and berate myself for being such a sexless, jobless, useless, unattractive, worthless, taking up too much space on the planet, good for nothing loser.

I was falling apart all over the place-inside myself, outside of myself, in my spiritual self, in my quasi-relationships with the few people I even bothered to make a pathetic attempt at maintaining a relationship with; and yet no one seemed to notice. Not my family-most of whom don't seem to believe there is anything wrong with me in the first place. Not my friends who are consumed with babies, careers and planning a wedding and most of all, not my lover who sometimes goes with me to my appointments and sees me fall to the floor in random spasms of uncontrolled pain.

All of the pretending, all of the trying and the lying to myself came to a crashing halt at the very end of February. My lover had just bought a "new" used car and we were at the dealership getting ready to sign the paperwork, of which I had made it perfectly clear, in advance, that I wanted no part of, because I had already applied for some government programs to help me get health care and food assistance and I was afraid that this car purchase would jeopardize all the work I had done, and besides, like me buying my car, it was supposed to be something he was doing all on his own. He assured me he took care of everything ahead of time, which should have been an enormous red flag that he took care of everything but the obvious stuff, and what ensued was a disaster!

When it came time to sign the papers, it very quickly became clear that my beloved had not taken care of much of anything and I, already a mess from whatever new concoction of meds I was on, was very quickly becoming livid. The dealer was probably never so uncomfortable in his life as I started first just yelling at Luke (we were the only customers in the dealership on a Saturday afternoon-weird right?).

Then, as I began to realize the depth of what he did not take care of, I started yelling a stream of expletives I will not repeat here. When I do that (which isn't terribly often) Luke grows calmer and calmer, which turns me into Mount St. Helen and I erupt, red face, spit and curse words flying, until I collapse from exhaustion.

It was fucking wonderful! If anyone had recorded it and put it on YouTube, we'd probably be mini-stars.

When I finally stopped screaming at him and he had a chance to speak, he said, with tears in his eyes, that the car wasn't worth all this and we could just wait until....but I stopped listening. I knew by the look in his eyes and the wounded way he was holding himself that I had hurt him very badly-never mind the fact that I had humiliated him in the dealership, I had done something much deeper than that, something that in my own hurt and rage I couldn't comprehend yet.

I knew I was wrong to have done what I did and I knew that he was wrong to say that he took care of everything when he didn't. I also knew that there were so many other options for how to handle this situation, but something inside me literally snapped.

That's the only way I can describe it. There was a complete break-down inside of me and I didn't care about a goddamn fucking thing anymore except lashing out. I wanted to hurt everything in my path-probably even my nephews too if they were there. I didn't care about hurting myself-I wanted to hurt myself! For a fucking change I wanted to know where the pain was coming from and why. I wanted to hurt my lover because I was tired of him living a presumably pain free life. I wanted to hurt the bloated car sales person who kept staring at my tits. I wanted to hurt the whole world. I wanted the whole world to feel February.

In the end I gave in, as I so often do, and screamed something at Luke along the lines of "Well FUCK YOU! You pay for all the groceries now any way! If you can't try and respect all the goddamn fucking work I've put into helping us try and save some money, what the fuck do I care if you fall farther into debt by buying this car and paying for all the groceries? It's not like we're fucking married or anything!"

I ended up scribbling something that could never pass for my signature on an endless ream of papers I never read and finally the Ford Focus was all his. Or was it our? I'm still unclear about that one.

I stormed out of the dealership after helping myself to one or two of their pens and Luke and I left in separate cars-no congratulations on your first financed car or anything and headed to a mutual friends house where we did out best to ignore each other all night. It was grand!

I bet the car dealer couldn't wait to see us go!

Where Oh, Where Has Elizabeth Been?

If anyone out there has been paying attention (and I know at least one dear soul who suffered a similar catheter fate read my blog recently! And Nurse Ratchet sister of mine, neither of us enjoyed the experience as much as you seem to enjoy inserting them. There's something wrong with you girl!) it has been almost 5 months since I last posted anything on my blog. I hope that some people have missed me...I know at least Nurse Ratchet's husband would read it during his down time at work (oh the luck of having a job) but I don't know if I've missed me these past five months.

See, when I was first diagnosed with everything, I made a vow to write it all down, even the painful details-ha!, as if there would be much else to write about! But before too long, I was back into my old ways.

Even though I am no longer physically capable of running, I have been running, terror stricken, from the realities of my life for at least these past five months (and much, much longer...it's just that here, with this blog, I was trying to address some of them for a change).

I don't even know how far back I can go and accurately recount what has gone on in the months since I've failed to write. I only know that part of the reason I am here now, writing once again, is because my lover is away on a too short business trip.

As usual, I spent the entire day struggling to figure out what I wanted to do with the day, with MY DAY. And, as usual, the day was over before I came up with an answer and fell gratefully into a long, uninterrupted nap. It wasn't until I was brave enough to lay naked outside on our deck (don't worry prudes, it was well past 10 pm and not a soul could see me-how sad actually), on the uncomfortable wicker love seat, watching the fireflies sparkle through the sultry night air, that I realized what I needed to do was to clean my mind out and not the living room like I had planned on doing.

So now I sit, still sans clothing, on my trusty seat cushion and try and recount how it all went awry and why I haven't written in so long. And I try to keep my thoughts on this serious business of writing and purging my feelings while trying to ignore the sweat coagulating between my breasts because it is too fucking hot out, even at nearly 2 am and the air conditioner is too loud and makes me need my inhaler, which I am completely inept at using, having just recently been diagnosed with asthma.

I'm also simultaneously trying to ignore my stomach's craving for Vienna Fingers and milk because we ran out of milk before I dropped Luke off and I didn't feel like fighting the righteous Sunday shoppers for a quart of organic milk. And hell, I've already gained a bunch of medication related weight and had vanilla ice cream (with a fresh peach) for dinner, so why have a healthy dessert? And I'm somewhat happily alone, so who the hell will know what I eat anyway?

Mostly though, I'm procrastinating. Like all good writers, I'm procrastinating telling you how it all went wrong. How I really feel. How angry I am. How doubtful of everything and scared of nearly everything, I am. I am trying to avoid the ugly and draw upon the pretty, which is something that would probably surprise most people who know me, but then again, most people who know me only know a me they want to see. I am trying to avoid reliving the pain because no matter how many years of therapy I've had, and continue to have, I never quite believe them when they tell me it never hurts as much the second time around.... Is that because you can't re-amputate a lost arm or because you can't re-shatter an obliterated heart? I've yet to figure that one out.

At any rate, February was when the worst of it all happened.

That's So Gay

Recently my youngest sister has adopted a habit I find both annoying and offensive. I don’t know where she got it from, or why she thinks it’s ok to say this, but she’s started saying, “That’s so gay” whenever she thinks something is dumb or annoys her. Not only does this bother me on a personal level, I wonder how it will affect her as a manager at her job if she is heard saying this. Even though she is my sister, I think language like this should be seen as potential harassment and at the very, very least, certainly inappropriate at any level in the workplace!

Now, I’ll be honest, this wasn’t always a saying that bothered me. In (a deeply embarrassing) fact, there was a time, before I learned to think for myself, that I was very vocally homophobic. (For those of you who know the area, picture me saying repeatedly and loudly, while at a public parade in New Hope, Pa, “There’s no hope for New Hope” and other obnoxious slurs.) However, somewhere around high school, perhaps when I began to admit, at least to myself, that I was either confused or ambiguous about my sexuality, I began to question and challenge homophobic statements.

Now, also in all fairness, I have not always stood up to people who arrogantly, ignorantly or hurtfully hurl anti-gay statements, but with my sisters, I feel I must establish a firm line here. I feel this way for three primary reasons, 1) They know, although don’t really accept, that I am equally attracted to men and women and therefore feel these kinds of statements are a direct insult to me as well as to humanity; because it is never ok to put down one group of people in order to feel better about one’s self, or for any other reason. 2) My entire family knows I made a vow, many years ago, in my single days, to not get married until all people could get married. (I confess, I have amended that statement to currently mean all American citizens and I have inserted a medical clause in there in case either myself or my partner should need medical treatment which we are only able to afford by getting married and being added onto the other person’s health insurance policy). I didn’t make this vow to be cool or start a trend or emblazon my views upon my chest. Instead, I made this vow because once I decided I could spend my life with a man, a woman, both, either, neither or someone who claims to be gender neutral, I couldn’t stop myself from seeing marriage as an federally regulated institution which alienated me. And 3) Because once my sisters started having children, it became an imperative for me to be at least one voice (and hopefully not the only voice) to tell my nephews that it is perfectly acceptable to love and date and marry or not marry whomever they choose.

Before anyone freaks out, if you haven’t already, I made sure to check with both of my sisters when their kids were still infants and get their permission to talk to their kids about how we feel it is ok to be gay or to love anyone you want. My little sister’s recent inappropriate comment aside, both of my sisters said it was fine with them if I had these conversations with their kids, but they wanted to be the ones to have “the sex talks”.

When, in a recent phone call with my youngest sister, I heard her say, “That’s so gay.” I cleared my throat and replied, “Excuse me, what did you say?” At the same time her eldest son overheard her expression and loudly enough that I could also hear him, objected to what she just said. In my opinion, my sister proceeded to cover her ass by exclaiming, “What? It could also mean happy!”

I didn’t buy it and neither did her son (who had probably never heard the word used that way before). My sister, in an almost combative manner, challenged her son to get a dictionary and see who was right about the meaning of the word “gay”. According to the CHILDREN”S dictionary she used, she was right. The book said it meant “happy”.

Lest she get too triumphant about her “victory”, I told her that while the CHILDREN’S dictionary she used might say that the word means happy, I still sided with her son that she used the word inappropriately. I also told her I was offended that she used that term the way she did. In fairness to my sister, she told her son what I said, word for word and he even more vocally voiced his gratitude to me, as well as to himself for also being right.

Later that same day, my partner and I were headed to my youngest sister’s house to pick up her four kids (ranging in age from just over 1 year to 8 years old) for a mini-family reunion at one of my aunt’s homes. My sister was unable to attend because she had to work and my partner and I were going anyway so we figured it was no big deal to bring along a baby and three slightly older kids…good thing my little sister let us use her minivan or we never would have all fit in my little Scion xD!

Before we left to pick up the kids, I replayed the conversation my sister, myself and her eldest son had on the phone, to my partner. I told him that it was very important to me that we make sure to discuss the many different meanings of the word “gay” with the kids and to reiterate how we feel about the rights of all people to love whomever they please. I asked my partner if he was comfortable having this conversation with the kids during the hour or so car ride to my aunt’s, and to my surprise, he was very willing to talk this over with the kids.

Naturally, since we don’t have kids, it took longer than I thought it would to corral all of them into the minivan and be on our merry way (already late for the reunion!). One of the first things I said to the oldest boy, who was seated next to the baby, as well as to the other two kids in the way back of the van, was that while their mommy was right that the word “gay” can, and probably was originally used to mean happy, that isn’t how it is usually used today. I asked my eight year old nephew what he thought the word gay means now. He fumbled his way through an explanation about a boy loving a boy or a girl loving a girl. I told him that he was right and I asked him if he thought people usually said the word “gay” as a positive or negative word. He told us that in school people seemed to use it as a negative word. He went on to say, with an upset look on his face, that one of the kids on his bus calls him gay. This surprised me as he had never told me this before and I made a mental note to tell this to my sister.

Both my partner and I told him, and all of the kids, that it is perfectly fine for them, or anyone, to love boys or girls or both at any time in their lives. Both the oldest and second youngest immediately chimed in that they had girlfriends (at 5 and 8 years old!) and I said that was fine but if they ever changed their minds and liked boys or girls or both or no one, that was fine too.

Since the two kids in the far back of the van seemed more interested in their handheld videogames than this conversation, I asked the eldest how it made him feel when someone called him gay. He said he didn’t like it, that it hurt his feelings. I said I could understand why it would hurt his feelings and that when people use the term gay in a negative way, it hurt my feelings and his uncle’s feelings too. He was completely confused at this point and wanted to know why, if we were a girl and a boy that loved each other, would we be hurt if people used the word gay as an insult. I tried to explain to him, as I have tried to explain to him since he was 3 or 4, that it is ok to love whomever you love, be it a boy or a girl and that his uncle and I don’t think it is ever ok to put someone down or hurt someone’s feelings. I tried to explain that this issue is so important to us that we are refusing to get married until all people in this country can do so, in the hopes that he and the rest of our nephews will have a much easier time having their choice of partners be accepted than we did when we were growing up. I tried my best to reassure my nephew that what the kid on the bus was saying was wrong and that he was welcome to talk to us or his parents about how it made him feel.

Finally, he asked me how the word gay could be used in a positive way. I gave him the two best examples I could think of at the time. I said, “Well, if you are talking about your male cousin, in a positive way, you could say that he is gay because he loves boys.” Even though this is at least the second time I’ve told the kids this, the eldest still expressed surprise, perhaps because since they have been old enough to pay any attention to their family member’s partners, my cousin has been single. My second example was, “If you are having a really good time, then you could say that you are having a gay time.”

Not missing a beat, he quipped back, “Well, can I say that I’m having a gay time now and it would be positive?” To that I responded, “Are you having a good time now?” When he said, “No. Not really.” I laughed a little and said that if he wasn’t having a good time right now than it probably wasn’t the most positive use of the word; however we wanted him and his brothers, whom I assumed were ignoring me, to know, that while some people don’t think it is ok to be gay think, it is perfectly fine in our eyes for them to love whomever they want, whenever they want.

I’m not sure how much of this conversation the kids understood.

Shortly after making that point, the car ride was interrupted with the unexpected surprise that we probably didn’t have enough gas to get to our destination as well as my need to give pesky directions since we dared to travel without a GPS. The gay conversation seemed to be over, for now and as far as I know, did not come up again during the reunion.

The car ride home was full of such deep philosophical questions as, “If you could be any superhero in the world, who would it be?” and “If you could be any animal in the world, what would you be?” Although three of the four kids fiercely protested that they weren’t tired at all when we got in the car, all of them were sound asleep before answering both of the questions. One of our nephews even fell asleep in the middle of telling us why he would be either a land turtle or a sea turtle.

My god I love our nephews!

I Just Skinned My First Chicken!

Hey Everybody,

I thought I'd take a break from writing about all my pain and health problems to tell you about something I've never done before.

In an effort to save money, I got this brilliant idea to buy a whole chicken because it was $.78 a pound. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to cook the damn thing but a bargain is a bargain and it is harder for me to pass up then sex (well, when I was having sex anyway!).

I didn't know what to do with the whole chicken, so I tossed it in the freezer and forgot about it. However, we have a very small freezer thanks to the old school ice cube and cold water dispenser feature that takes up a huge amount of space. The refrigerator/freezer was a bargain I found on Craigslist...Do you see a theme here?

Since I've discovered Amelia's Grocery Outlet a few miles from our house (and also located near a Goodwill...oh the bargains...oh the fun!), I have spent a lot of time and little money buying lots of frozen and non-perishable food. Eventually (like in the first shopping trip) I bought too much frozen food to fit in the freezer and it became obvious that I could no longer avoid cooking the chicken.

I must admit, I was deeply intimidated by cooking this thing. I used to be a vegetarian and I really prefer that my meat look as little like the animal it came from as possible. Also, I could still hear the humiliating laughter of my friend Sara as she showed me in a hostel in Ireland, in front of a guy I had a huge crush on, how easy it was to cook a whole chicken and how silly I was because I didn't have a clue how to do it. Clearly there is trauma everywhere associated with turning this bird into our future dinner!

After I let the frozen block defrost for two or three days in the refrigerator (I know, I know, that is too long but I got busy, I got distracted, I got intimidated....) I knew it was now or never. Fear or not, I didn't want to waste the bird who, without any choice, gave it's life to us. So I googled, "how to cook a whole chicken in a crock pot" and found this amazing blog: http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/ and I confronted my fears head on!

Like the author of "A Year of Slow Cooking", I am thoroughly grossed out by skin on my chicken and any visible fat. Non-visible fat in my ice cream, chocolates and other "less than great for me foods" are ok, but the nasty yellow, blobbish fat on meat is horrifying, so it had to go! Again, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but I figured, "What the heck, people have been skinning chickens for generations, so how bad could it be?"

I began the denuding with inadequate tools and I struggled with my non-kitchen, barely sharp regular scissors, to open the chicken's package. This resulted in a lot of blood running all over the cutting board and the counter, but fortunately not on my favorite white tee shirt I was foolish enough to be wearing while mutilating my chicken. With my cheapo knives and scissors, I began to recklessly attack the skin before I remembered that I had to remove the innards. That part really was more fascinating for me than I thought it would be, as I briefly tried to identify pieces before dumping them into a bowl next to me. when I was finished stripping my chicken, I dumped all the innards and scraps in the backyard so whatever carnivorous animals that live near us will benefit from my experimentation. I saw this as a sort of giving back to the earth for the once living chicken I plan on eating. I hope that wasn't a bad idea!

The entire process of removing the skin and all visible fat took me about 45 minutes and was a far more effective anatomy lesson than dissecting a frog in high school ever was! It was also cold, slimmy and sometimes gross. However, it did give me a greater appreciation for the food I am hoping to eat tonight (especially when I removed what I think are the kidneys...they are so tiny!). At some point in time my hands began to burn and itch like crazy (is that a normal reaction?) so I decided it was time to stop, even though there is still some skin on the ends of the drum sticks and some persnickety fat which refused to be removed.

If you are curious what I ended up doing with my new, naked chicken, I took pictures of it with my partner's new digital camera, in case I can convince him to post them here. I then put about 1 cup of water in my crock pot before going crazy with the seasonings.

In generally, I rarely follow a recipe all the way, preferring my "Goddess Method of Cooking by Intuition". I gathered up the rest of our rather old garlic, and a few clementines we weren't eating and shoved those inside the chicken...hopefully as a flavorful replacement for what used to be it's vital organs. Then I created a mixture of white pepper, oregano, rosemary, thyme, double ground mustard and a dash of cumin. I stirred it all up in a bowl and rubbed it all over the chicken and tossed the rest inside the cavity with the garlic and clementines. I also added some clementines to the top of the chicken because I thought it looked pretty.

Why this combination? Well, because it seemed right to me. I have no idea how my naked chicken dinner will turn out, but it smells pretty good cooking right now. I'll have to follow-up and let y'all know how it turned out!

What Hurts The Most

For quite some time now, I’ve been uselessly debating what I would tell people if anyone other than someone I pay, asks me “What hurts the most?” Would I say that it hurts the most in my right side, an area which no one can figure out why it hurts? Would I try and describe how it feels like there is a large, ever growing lamprey living there, with teeth so sharp it feels like razors eating into my flesh…and that is on a good day? Would I tell someone, as I try to nonchalantly limp away from the table to pee that the inexplicable pain in my side currently feels like minions of fireballs searing, tearing, paralyzing me with pain, and that when I finally reach the bathroom stall I cry silently to myself unable to endure what is happening, scared to death about what might be wrong and desperate, so desperate for an answer…any answer…as long as it is the correct answer to what is causing this pain? Would I confess, when I rejoin them at the table that I was away for so long because I couldn’t stop myself from crying, that I couldn’t wipe the tears away fast enough or pull myself together quickly enough to devote my energy to the conversation?

No. I’d probably lie and say I was fine…fine...always fine. Because no matter what I say, it isn’t all of the truth anyway. Whether I am writing about my ripped rectum or my constant need to pee, even when I can’t, I’m never really telling the full truth about what hurts the most.

Well, I once told my Physical Therapist that what hurts the most is my ego and self-esteem; both so wounded and in pain that the mere act of getting out of bed is pointless. She did the best she could to console me but that isn’t her area of expertise. And I’ve tried to talk to my partner about what hurts the most, as the tears pouring down my face blur the distance between us…blur the space where all I want is a strong hug and a shoulder to absorb the snot gushing out of my nose and instead becomes the space where somehow it is about him and how he needs to fix things he can’t even understand. I guess those experiences, as well as a lifelong bludgeoning into my brain that pure truth is rarely what people are looking for, are a large part of what keeps me lying, to everyone but myself, about what hurts the most.

If I were to be truly honest, (will I ever learn my lesson?) as I prepare for one more whack in the face, I would say that what hurts the most is the indifference, the denial, the complete and utter forgetability of what I am going through. What hurts the most isn’t the physical pain…I’ve got pills for that as well as well honed childhood skills of separating my mind from my body when things hurt too much. No, it is what lies deeper and far more invisible than physical pain that hurts the most.

It is the lack of visible proof that something is wrong with me. It is lack of phone calls or e-mails or text messages with the sole purpose of seeing how I’m doing. Sure, people still call me, for whatever it is they need and want me to fulfill for them and sometimes, as a sort of cursory “pleasantry” they will ask how I’m doing and inevitably become too busy, too sidetracked, to one-sidedly selfish to really listen to my answer, if I bother to give one at all. Sometimes it is just so much easier to lie and say, “I’m fine.” in a false staccato voice which does not belong to me but isn’t heard anyway.

What hurts the most is that I envy people who are on crutches or temporarily in a wheelchair or have a cast or sling or brace on their arm, even people who are in the hospital, because “those are the ones who truly have something wrong with them.” Those are the people whose pain is easy to acknowledge…it is easy to do things for them..say, hold open a door or autograph their cast or give them special parking places until they get better. The people who are in the hospital get ‘round the clock questions about how they are doing. They get cards and flowers and visitors. They get obvious acknowledgement of what they are going through, even if it is only temporary (the acknowledgement and the suffering).

Believe me, I am not wallowing so deep in my depressed navel gazing that I truly believe this is the case for all people who are suffering this way. I know that I am romanticizing and glossing over and being selective or downright creating my own reality about what I want to see, but right now…today…last night…this week…for god only knows how long, that is of little consolation to me.

Because that is what I so desperately want. I want the money “wasted” on cards and the fucking flowers that are just going to die and make me sneeze anyway. I want a cast on my arm that people can write encouraging things on it like we used to do in school. I want the “I’m only calling to see how you are doing” phone calls. I want the visits where people are stopping by with homemade chicken noodle soup, or chocolates or hasty get-well drawings from their kids. I want visits and phone calls where people, for once in my goddamn fucking life, are asking no more of me than how I am doing and for once in my fucking life, are actually listening to the answers…the ones I give out loud and the ones I give with my body language. I want people to see through my false self-deprecating jokes that they can help me by “just cutting out whatever is wrong with me.” I want acknowledgement of the hurt and fear and pain and foreboding sense of hopelessness inside me. I want to know that there are people that I can lean on, that will put aside their own super busy lives, if only for a ten minute phone call or a quick visit that’s all about me…that is not a ruse for their own needs or desires for me to be a living “sounding board” for their problems, hopes, failures and despairs.

I want to be seen as someone who is sick, if even temporarily, and needs other people to lean on.
What hurts the most is this ridiculous game we keep playing that I am strong enough to get through anything AND that I can handle everyone else’s problems too. What hurts the most are the people…friends, family and professionals, who outright tell me, or subtly and cowardly, imply that if I just got over my anger, my problems would go away…I’d be able to shit without medicine, walk without pain, fuck without guilt, stand tall and proud without stabbing pains in my lower back. If I just changed me, without medicine, without anger and without help, I’d be fine.

That’s what hurts the most…that my problems are either my fault or that I am strong enough to handle them alone, and that I should fix them by myself while simultaneously being there gleefully supporting the rest of the world and the very same people who don’t call or send cards or stop by to visit but still want me to help them heal their wounds, their pain, their problems.

My Shit Stool

In our bathroom we now have a shit stool. It’s a lovely golden thing with fringes around the middle that the cats like to tear off. It’s cushiony and has a neat pattern on it for me to stare at in flights of fantasy if I need to.

It used to reside in our living room, in front of the wooden rocking chair with the woefully thin blue cushion. It never matched the rocking chair but it sorta matches our ugly gold sofa and it theoretically served as a great place to rest your feet if one was ever to lounge in the rocking chair with a good book and a stiff drink. I rarely ever did anything more than rock myself back and forth when I would cry in our last apartment, so I could sort comfort myself and not wake my partner up by crying in the same room. The foot rest seemed superfluous when I was crying as well as when we were moving for the second time in a year last year, but for some reason, we never got rid of it.

Now that golden stool resides in our bathroom. I bought the wrong color “oops” paint at Home Depot and we didn’t prime the walls before we painted them, so the bathroom has a rather morgue green hue to it. However, that is only relevant to this story to highlight the fact that this stool does not match the bathroom anymore than it matched its old mate, my rocking chair.

Whether or not it matches anything is irrelevant overall though, because the sole purpose of the stool in the bathroom is to help me move my own stool better, more efficiently, and with as few anal fissures as possible.

I learned about the shit stool when I was discussing my current pain problems with my physical therapist. At the time, it felt as though my bowels drove a Mac truck through my anus and left shred marks to prove it. Shitting was just as painful as sitting and it was a fascinating topic of discussion for that day’s therapy session. Turns out, my beloved physical therapist has a) heard of this problem before and therefore wasn’t openly repulsed by what I was describing and b) had some possible solutions in mind. Hell, she even had a diagram to send home with me that shows the proper 90 degree angle at which one should sit in order to most productively shit!

She also discussed the possibility of trying pelvic floor stretches via my anus (that reminds me, I probably should write about what happens in PT!) and getting a stool for the bathroom to help me achieve that perfect angle. For the meantime, I opted out of the rectal stretches in favor of the shit stool (my words, not hers).

Being either frugal or cheap, I did not want to rush out and buy anything as unglamorous as shit stool (I’d much rather spend the money I saved on one of my post-BI shopping trips.) so I went home and thought deep thoughts on the crapper as nothing came out of my bowels. Finally it occurred to me to use the plush, padded, mismatched stool we already had in our living room and see how that worked out.

For awhile, all I could do was shoo our white cat, Jezzabella of the stool, since she now thought it belonged to her, and maneuver it in front of me before I sat down on my throne. I would place my feet upon it as I sat there trying to expel a trickle or two of urine, since nothing was coming out of my little Wal-Mart.

My partner and I have taken to calling my anus my little Wal-Mart when the stores around here got the less than brilliant idea to change their symbol to what my beloved claims, looks like an anus. Initially I did not agree that’s what the symbol looked like, but that was before I spent so much time contorting myself to look at my own anus for cracks, tears and fissures and to apply the once or twice daily ointments to that area. Then I began to agree with my lover that Wal-Mart’s new symbol and my anus do bear a striking resemblance! Although I swear Wal-Mart has an easier time moving shit out of its orifice, err, store than I do.

It never ceases to amaze me what you can learn to talk about and become comfortable with in a relationship, since I’ve never discussed this part of my body with anyone so openly and frequently as I do now!

Even though I couldn’t shit for a while, I rather liked the feeling of having my feet propped up when I peed. It gave me a more comfortable chance to impersonate Rodin’s "The Thinker", as I tried to expel something, anything, from some lower hole in my body.

Eventually the Miralax and the three stool softeners I take each day kicked in and something festering inside me for entirely too long serrated it’s way out of my colon and my anus. And I was somewhat more comfortable as it tore slightly less of my ass part now that my perch perfected that sought after angle of release.

The shit stool doesn’t stop the anal tearing and it certainly isn’t something I’m going to take with me everywhere I ago, but now that I am used to it, I find it much easier to crap with it’s help. Plus, since many of my medications make me constipated, and I know it takes a day or two for the Miralax to work, I am rarely caught off guard with the need to shit. When I am, I now try to replicate the 90 degree angle by sitting on the throne and pushing my knees up as high as they will go while simultaneously trying to balance most of my lower weight on my tippy toes. This usually results in very sore toes, wobbly legs and an occasional cramp in my arches…a small price to pay for an easier crap I’d say!

Pee Envy

I am starting to suffer from pee envy. It’s a condition I either developed or became fully aware of yesterday.

See, I was in the bathroom stall at the hospital, needing desperately to pee for the second time in less than five minutes, when, presumably, a woman entered the stall next to me. In the time it was taking me to line the seat (again) with toilet paper and sit down, the woman next to me was already getting down to business.

As I paused to consider whether or not she had taken the time to line the seat before plopping her ass down on a much used seat, my urgent need to pee was, for a millisecond, outwitted by my deep pondering. My deep pondering was interrupted by the noises that issued forth in the stall next to me.

As I sat, impatiently trying to wait patiently for my urine to spew forth, there was an active geyser jettisoning its way into the toilet next to me. I was aghast. I was stunned. I wondered what the hell was going on over there! The woman seemed to be peeing as if her very life-force depended upon it…as if she drank an entire pot of coffee mere moments ago…as if she was trying to disgorge something in time for a drug test…as if she weren’t human.

I was still sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting for my “urgent pee” to come out and this woman must have pumped a gallon or more of liquid into her throne. I say liquid because the sound lasted for so long that I began to doubt it was really a human being urinating next door. Perhaps it was just someone pouring out all the leftover stale beverages from the holidays…into the toilet…when it would have been so much easier to empty it all out in the sink. I thought about looking under the wall, you know, quickly and inquisitively like you did when you were a kid, but at 32 I felt too old to risk the reaction I might get.

Then I considered that maybe there was a horse in the stall next to me, which would obviously explain the ferocity with which urine was pummeling the toilet. Again, I resisted the urge to stick my head under the partition and instead, I surreptitiously surveyed the floor next to me, in case it was a horse, not a woman, making all that ruckus. To my dismay, I only saw two feet when I was hoping to see four hooves.

I know that this might sound utterly ridiculous, looking for horses in a hospital bathroom, but hey, it may have happened somewhere! Yet what it really came down to was a realization that smacked me between the eyes as my own urine trickle, trickle, drop, dropped out. I was jealous! I was insanely jealous of the ability of the person next to me to urinate freely and with such force she could probably propel herself into another universe if she tried not to pee at all during an 8 hour work day. I was jealous of the fact that she was out of the stall and washing her hands as I, who got there before her, was still trying to coax more urine from my bladder. I was jealous that she doesn’t pee like someone who has IC, and truth be told, her ability to do so, made me want to cry about my own inadequate urinating abilities.

I know I wrote recently about the things I was grateful for, but right now, I’m having a relapse. Mentally I am forgetting the brief feeling of relief I had when my pains had names and treatment options. And physically, for reasons I cannot figure out, I seem to be “flaring up” as bad, or worse than I was before I started all my treatments.

Now, having the powerful, “I will stomp on small children and elderly ladies in the way of my getting to the bathroom” need to pee after physical therapy doesn’t surprise me too much, I just didn’t think it would last ALL DAY! And even that doesn’t explain why, seemingly within the last week or so, I feel the need to pee far more often and produce far less urine. I’ve been, with the exception of chocolate, ridiculously good about trying to stay away from any “problem foods”, even over the holidays. And even if I did have three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc on New Year’s Eve (and I took my Prelief!) it shouldn’t be causing a “flare-up” so many days later!

I’m getting sick of writing down everything I eat and drink (which is only water and milk and I think milk is gross!) and when I pee and when I shit and how I feel when I feel it. I’m getting sick of watching what I eat and still seeing my weight go up. I’m getting sick of feeling ridiculously strong urges to pee and not being able to fill a thimble, or even better yet, feeling like my clitoral hood and/or urethra is being sliced apart with razor blades when I finally dribble something out. I am no longer amused by the AZO Standard (over-the-counter pyridium) I take before my bladder instillations which turn my urine Easter egg shades of yellow and orange…as well as my underwear if I forget to wear dark colored ones and our white sheets too!

I don’t mind the oral medicine so much, even when the Elmiron lodges in the back of my throat like stifling cum, but that is probably because I haven’t noticed any hair loss, or other unpleasant side effects which may occur. Nor have I noticed any marked improvement, but I was warned that could take 3 to 6 months and I have only been popping those babies for a month or so.

I am beginning to loath the bladder instillations. Even as much as I like the nurse who does them, there is NOTHING FUN about having a catheter shoved in your urethra and to do that for 9 weeks in a row is beyond madness, it might even qualify as a form of torture! Another nifty thing about BIs is that when the catheter is removed, and I am finally allowed to pee, I almost always produce a profusion of air bubbles which make me feel like I am farting from the wrong place. Sometimes those air bubbles hang around for many feeble urinations afterwards.

During my last BI, as they are called in the office, the nurse suggested that it was possible that the IC spread into my urethra and the treatments that were supposed to make me better (the BIs) might be causing me more pain. So, I stopped going for several weeks over the holidays because my urethra hurt and burned and felt fingered by Freddy Kruger so much that air, never mind underwear, was causing me intense pain. Everything hurt that area…sitting down, laying down, standing up, walking with my feet as far apart as possible, being naked. Everything.

I am often frustrated and disgusted. I feel like one treatment option exacerbates something else. Sure, I could stop the BIs and continue with the Elmiron, but realistically I couldn’t stop urinating, no matter how painful it may be. And as much as I love to be naked, it is too fucking cold to be tottering, legs wide apart, throughout our house and I am too damn cheap to pump the heat into the 80’s so I would be more comfortable naked. And it never occurred to me how much I envy some people’s ability to urinate until yesterday, until the full reality that I really do have a problem, finally sunk in.

Today alone, I have peed 16 times. Sixteen times and it is only 8:30 at night! If I were able to collect all the urine I produced in one day, I sincerely doubt it would fill a pint glass (which is what the woman next to me yesterday was able to produce each millisecond!!). I used to think my urge and frequency was normal, but now that I know it is not, it is really fucking with my life. A few weeks ago I thought I was getting better. Now I feel like I am just getting better at peeing through the pain.