after enlightenment, the dishes

Summer rain showers that scent the air first, then drench everything, sending us running to close the windows — but only after we’re sure that it’s raining in. When they let up soon afterward, the temperature has gone down ten degrees, and everything smells wet and green and soft.

Macaroni shells cooked a little past al dente, onion and garlic red sauce, homemade garlic bread, with the last of a glass of lemonade to drink.

For dessert, homemade iced mocha and a little schadenfreude via Chopped. (First course: beef shoulder, fish sauce, and canned pumpkin! Yeah, that sounds like my cupboards.) And the windows are open again.

I love iced coffee, and there’s going to be a lot of it at my place this summer … especially because I’m not using anything special, or large quantities of anything expensive, to make it. Simple, easy, cool, delicious, comforting.

That’s the theme of tonight.

I am sore and grieving now, not because Michael Jackson is dead — but because his death ripped open a scar I’d thought had healed.

As longtime friends know, I was raised by fundies. Mom and Dad sheltered me from (then-current) pop culture as much as they could; I grew up watching old 50’s and 60’s shows on Nick at Nite, and listening to the local Christian or oldies radio stations. My dad thought MTV was immoral and called the cable company to turn it off before it even reached our house, and he did it every time the channel lineup changed. My best friend was sheltered like I was, and I had no siblings. Not knowing what I was missing, I merrily went about my church-focused childhood. It wasn’t even a problem until I got to middle school, and especially high school, when my classmates would ask “Did you see the Simpsons last night?” No, I didn’t; I wasn’t allowed to watch. “Did you hear that new song on the radio?” No, I didn’t; I didn’t even know how to find the rock stations. In fact, one of my first acts of rebellion came after I learned to drive, because I was sick of not hearing what everyone was talking about: I found one of those rock stations and kept my car’s radio tuned to it.

But this was after the damage had been done. I didn’t hear Nirvana until the summer of 1999, after Kurt Cobain was dead but not long enough for most people’s nostalgia to kick in. And I didn’t hear Michael Jackson until after the accusations of child molestation hit the news, when he was the butt of jokes, so I never attached a whole lot of significance to him. All this reverence for the “King of Pop” is, frankly, a little shocking to me: Wait, we liked him? A legend? WHAT??

Unlike Jill at Feministe (who was born two years after me!), I vividly recall a world without Michael Jackson, though maybe it’s not the same 80’s she participated in. I don’t know the lyrics people are using in their RIP posts. I can recognize the song “Thriller” (mostly from recent SoBe ads), but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the whole thing; unlike Mark Morford, I can’t say when I “first witnessed … ‘Billie Jean,’ the ‘Thriller’ video” — because I haven’t seen them at all. (And I won’t now, so don’t bother linking.) Actually I was just skimming the tribute post at Shapely Prose and got mad because someone talked about part of the Thriller video, and she might as well have said “Dumbledore dies”, because now I can’t watch that video and be surprised or scared by it. I can’t have the experience that everyone seems to be so nostalgic for … though I arguably couldn’t anyway, because I was so far out of that pop-culture milieu when it came out. I can only see it now in the context of catching up on what I missed.

I was telling The Hubs yesterday that I can kind of understand why my parents made those decisions. They were trying to raise the best Christian kid they could, and structured my upbringing in line with their beliefs, the same as any crunchy parent expects to be able to. They didn’t hedge in case I chose not to be Christian, in case I chose to join the world they left; they didn’t raise me to make that choice. I did anyway — and it left me with this scar, this sensitive place, in which I feel like an outsider all over again and begrudge them for it and underestimate the work I’ve done to feel normal, to forget how I was raised, to get to a point where I can confidently choose not to participate in some aspect of pop culture without feeling too paranoid about it.

For too long, I’ve defined myself in terms of what I haven’t done: don’t have a passport, married the only person I ever had (adult, consensual) sex with, never lived alone, didn’t have my name on a car until 2007, the list goes on. Because I hate that I haven’t had certain, seemingly common, experiences — ones like dating, that a lot of contemporary writers define as universally human experiences — I haven’t been able to value the ones I’ve had. Like, I’ve had many people tell me that they wish they could have found the love of their lives so young, to have avoided the whole dating business altogether (or maybe just a couple of horrible boyfriends/girlfriends), to have gotten married right away and not had kids … to have what I have. It’s hard to see my experience in that light, instead of seeing it as a lack of relationship experience or sexual experience or independent experience.

Eventually, I think, I will get to a point of integration, of understanding that a perceived lack is still a part of myself and who I am, and that I don’t have to defend missing out on 80’s pop culture any more than I have to defend not being in the Craft in the 70’s. Eventually, time will pass, and I can talk about pop culture (and the Craft, for that matter) in the early 21st century, where I was and what I experienced and what people around me said, did, and felt. Eventually the scars will heal and I can own all of my experiences. Eventually.

Today is not that day.

Here are a few subjects of my recent ruminations; they’re also things I’d like to post about on the blog.

Witchcraft and Paganism
I’ve been some kind of Pagan for nearly 10 years now. Over the last five years, I sought, found, and have begun practicing Traditional Wicca. I’d like to write about some of the experiences and issues that have come up for me — and I’m working on a post for Pagan Values Month — but I’m still navigating how to put numinous experiences into words and how to find the line between “suitably general for public reading” and “too specific, not the public’s business”.

Self-knowledge fits under this heading, I think. Practicing witchcraft has given me the tools and the courage to dive deeper into myself, and paradoxically, I’m a better social person for it. (Not that the hermitty witch stereotype isn’t comforting sometimes. See social anxiety.)

Chronic Illness
My not-yet-pseudonymous husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis less than a year ago, though the relapse that drove him to seek treatment began last June. It’s taken at least that year for both of us to get some sense of what his diagnosis means, how our lives need to change (in temporary and permanent ways), and how to relate to each other again. Hubs is fighting an unstable body — last year’s relapse took his hearing for six weeks; his energy levels have never quite been the same; a current relapse is numbing his left side, especially his left hand, making it difficult to type or pick up his cellphone or wash a plate — and I’m fighting a sense of loss. He’s still here, he’s still himself, he’s just … changed. Some of the things he used to do (housework especially), I now have to do them or figure out how else to get them done. Some old things are simply off the schedule, and some new things need to be scheduled in. Hard to handle gracefully.

My own chronic illnesses are rheumatoid arthritis, which doesn’t affect my daily life all that much, and social anxiety, which does. And I tend to mention the anxiety when it’s affecting something I really want to say or do; from what I understand, this counts as activism among people with anxiety. If so, I’m glad to do it. If not, I’d probably do it anyway.

Feminism, Fat Acceptance, and Politics
These three things are intertwined for me, because I use each of them to understand the others. I didn’t care a whole lot about feminism until college and my changing political choices made it natural to self-identify as a feminist. And through my journey toward wholeness, self-acceptance, and ultimately fat acceptance (via Shapely Prose), I came back around to feminism by way of blogs like Shakesville … which also tend to be heavy on the politics (especially in the last election). I’m still not heavily invested in politics, but I may link and bitch from time to time. The same goes for feminist issues and/or fat issues. Here be your warning.

Hello, world! As they say. This isn’t my first blog, not even my first WordPress blog, but I’m already thrilled to be here. I’ve waited years for this domain to be available, and now that it is, I think I can make something of it.

I’ll hold the intro post until later; if you’re here this early in the game, you probably know me from LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, and thus need no introduction.

Big changes are a-comin’, oh yes. It’s going to be a blast making them happen.