Confessions of the Flesh

On the way home from The Kid's rather raucous 5th grade graduation party, I commented to him that it would be the last graduation party that he would have to attend with his parents... that he will soon be going to new and different kinds of parties.


"Yeah," he replied, "the kind of parties where girls take off their tops."

The Partner chimed in, "Those kind of girls are called strippers..."

The Kid: "Whores."

I balked and, tripping over my slack jaw, began, somewhat firmly, to correct him. "Um... no... not prostitutes..." The Partner then took the reigns and tried to explain that "whore" isn't the most socially acceptable term nowadays. (He suggested "sex worker" which The Kid totally rejected, and rightfully so... I mean, middle school and sex worker don't exactly jibe, do they?). So, in any event, I tried to differentiate taking off one's clothes for money from having sex for money.

The Kid's response?
"Well, the girls I know will not be taking off their tops for money... they'll do it because they are drunk."

Le Conflit

Why not read about Conflict: The Woman and the Mother for a cursory, NYT synopsis of what I suspect this text actually contains. I definitely like the idea of a critique based on ecology, ethology and essentialism -- especially the latter since it is, from where I sit, the bane of popular feminism today. More on this once I actually lay my eyes on a translation of the text.

Anyway, I am happy enough with Badinter's closing quote, whatever The Times was trying to communicate with it. It's not often you hear such sentiments from feminists today:

"I’m a mediocre mother like the vast majority of women, because I’m human."

Solitude of Ravens

Masahisa Fukase

Yes, I Deliver

The circus nurse is now, officially, a (paid) labor and delivery nurse.
Goodbye academia, hello life.
Praise be.

I Feel Bonnie

Basically, AWESOME.

You're a Feminist, Boy!

Yesterday when I arrived for pick up of The Kid from his after school program, he wasn't in his usual spot in the library. Instead, I found him sitting quietly doing his homework in another classroom, supervised by an infamously strict male teacher and surrounded by other boys.

So, somewhat reflexively I asked, "Why are you all in here...did you guys get into trouble?"

"No," says he, "Joanna sent us away because she was having a talk with the girls... ONLY."

"Oh... sex ed?" I asked, confidently.

"No," he replied, "feminism."

The Wonder Show of the World

New bonny bonny album is out... available from Drag City.
Stop by for a copy.
In the meantime, why not pick up a Billy-inspired cork as well?

Don't ask me, I just deliver the bonny news.

Water Flowing Home

Sherman Alexie's War Dances has been selected as the winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Excellent.

Read more from the Seattle Times.

Rest Your Soul so Quietly

I still have no words of my own to fill this space.

For now I ask that Laura Munson's Haven* meet my yearlong silence with her touching entry Stop the Clocks.


How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life? - Zhuangzi

*formerly These Here Hills

Go Ask Alice?

Another piece of work from the incorrigible Peggy Orenstein.

Femivore? Really?

The most I can muster about this is that The Partner's comment, "Femivore... I'm a femivore!" brought tears to my eyes. I like it so much better as a perversion than a cause.

He also provided this nicely timed piece, both to counter the femivores and to take on some of the issues plaguing our own troubled Bay Area education system. It nicely articulates the well-intentioned, if misdirected, work of Alice Waters in area schools.

More action, fewer causes, that's my new motto.

- Photo credit: Thomas Heinsner

Bonnie & the Cairo Gang, Oakland

@ The New Parish
April 9th & 10th

It Rained, It Poured, It Rained So Hard...

Thank you, Love♥

Fatal Flower Garden

Little Sir Hugh

And other variants.

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant

Tell me Bruce Dern circa 1971 doesn't bear a striking resemblance to a young Will O (sans the schnoz).

War Dances

Sherman Alexie's War Dances is a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. It's about time. The winner will be announced March 23rd.

Last year Alexie published a tremendous book of poetry entitled Face. One of those rare books, like many of Alexie's, that one should hold onto forever. Another was this 1992 book entitled...

I Would Steal Horses
For Kari

for you, if there were any left,
give a dozen of the best
to your father, the auto mechanic
in the small town where you were born

and where he will die sometime by dark.
I am afraid of his hands, which have
rebuilt more of the small parts
of this world than I ever will.

I would sign treaties for you, take
every promise as the last lie, the last
point after which we both refuse to exact.

I would wrap us both in old blankets
hold every disease tight against our skin.

Shift Work

Some of the best moments of the weekend:

Delivering a baby girl to a young mother - one of nine sisters and two brothers - with five sisters and one niece present. The youngest of the 9 sisters, aged 16, cut the cord.

A nurse, about to take a break tells her break-relief, "Don't let that Doc near my patient..." Sticking my head out of a delivery room about twenty minutes later I hear that very nurse singing sweetly and find her sitting side-by-side with that very surgeon while he strums away on his ukulele.

One nurse says to another, "You don't believe in God? Not at all?"
"No. Not at all." The first nurse hugs her tightly and then holds her by the shoulders at arms length and asks very seriously, "Then who do you think made Berkeley?"

Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit

Last year, some anonymous person cruelly sent me a gift subscription to perhaps one of the most trashy magazines in circulation. Priding myself in not being a huge consumer of pop culture, I now, weekly, have to fight the demon known as US magazine. And, sometimes, I am weak. For example, this week I learned that Gisele Bündchen not only didn't have to wear maternity clothes during pregnancy, she also didn't have any pain in childbirth. I think the exact quote is, "It didn't hurt a bit. Not in the slightest." What kind of cruel joke is this?

After two months as an L&D nurse, I can safely report that this representation is one for the books: as in, a non-reality... and just one more reason why the confusion of pop culture and feminism makes me squirm. 99.9% of woman have been officially alienated. Thanks, ladies.

p.s. I totally forgot about orgasmic birth. Though, a couple of weeks back, a patient's husband did mention it to me when she was in transition. That was, perhaps, the worst decision of that man's young life.

Service with a Smile

This week a patient came in, via ambulance, to deliver at our hospital. She was 1cm dilated, (read: not much) huffing and puffing and crying out with every contraction. I met her, along with her Granny, in triage. As we prepared to walk to her room she, naked from the waist down, wrapped herself in a blanket, grabbed her enormous silver purse and said, "Let's get outta here."
Her granny looked a her and remarked, "You better not lose that blanket or you'll be showin' off the goods!"
She replied, "Well, I ain't worried about the goods! I'm worried about my eyeshadow. I ain't goin' nowhere without my eyeshadow. Not even to have a baby!" She turned to me, "I don't wear no make-up... 'cept eyeshadow." Which was true. She had on tons of dark grey and silver eyeshadow.
I just nodded and nodded as this conversation proceeded until we reached her room, at which point she turned to me again and said, "Okay, now I want a hamburger and french fries. I want it medium with pickles and no onions. And a glass of grape juice. And mustard."
Somewhat stunned, I chuckled, turned around, and walked slowly from the room. I was off for some grape juice - thinking that maybe childbirth makes women delusional (she seemed to be mistaking the hospital for McDonalds).... or just really, really hungry.

The Game of Life

At The Kid's football play-offs (that's flag football) this past weekend, talking with some of the other parents, one father had a lot of big-life-questions that he was trying to work through. He remarked, "I wish I could visit the homes of other parents... what do they do with the artwork? Do they keep it all or just the three-dimensional pieces made of sand?"

He went on: "Remember, the box top from the game Life? Everyone was having such fun. Do you remember playing that game?"

"Yeah," I said, "I remember that you could sell your children when you neared the end of the road."

The man just stopped and stared at me, blankly.

I was momentarily confused...didn't everyone try to accumulate children when playing Life so they could sell them at the end?? Apparently this was a goal only to those of us of a certain social strata... because I looked over and another woman about my age and, um, caliber, was bent over laughing her ass off in recognition.

BTW... I think this child selling arena was actually the space on the board entitled "College" wherein, now that I read the rules, one is supposed to pay $40k (this can't be the 1977 version) or some such sum. My brother, being the good, red blooded male that he is, convinced me, perhaps rightly, that he should be reimbursed for his progeny. That boy was way ahead of his time.

(And the answer to the question in the back of your mind is: Yes. He has 4 children... so far.)

Doppelgänger

The celebrity doppelganger is sweeping the net. Well, facebook anyway, and I closed that account. But my sister and I have been having a ball with this on our own. Here's mine.



I know, this blog is anonymous. But, you may notice the remarkable resemblance between Liz, above, and Circus Nurse, stage right. Coincidence?

Ladies' Night

Will Oldham, guest programmer @ Cinefamily L.A. January 7, 2010.

Congratulations, it's a....

Walking down the hallway on my second weekend as an OB nurse I hear another, significantly more seasoned nurse laughing so hard that she's holding her knees.

"And so," she says between breaths, "apparently these parents had decided to describe childbirth to their little guy, who was about three, in a very concrete way... they were very educated, you know? Anyway, when the dad bent down with the baby, this little guy peered inside the blanket and you should have seen his face wrinkle all up...he literally screamed: 'But you told me it was a puppy!' The parents were horrified but I couldn't help it... I laughed and laughed! I guess they learned their lesson.

It's like I say," she quipped, "you should always follow one simple rule: Never compare humans to food or animals. Someone always ends up disappointed."

Storklike

I work in labor and delivery now. Isn't that amazing? No, it's not a paid position. We're in the middle of a recession, so I'm told. But I am now actually a nurse and on the job every Saturday and Sunday. So far, I have been witness to a number of squinty little eyes blinking wildly at the new world. More on that soon, but I thought, for the time being, you might like to know.

Waking the Dead

We watched The Howling night before last. Having seen it at the way-too-early age of about eight with my older brother I remembered being scared to death, so during one particular scene where his breathing was becoming labored and his feet were inching closer and closer to me, I asked The Kid, "Is this okay?" "Yesfineitsfine" was his reply, eyes glued intently to the screen.

Yesterday I asked him about the movie again, this time in relationship to the Italian zombie movies for which he has absolutely no tolerance. "It was fine. The scariest part was the fully naked woman and whatever they were doing by the fire."
"Yes, but what about the werewolves? When they changed, that was pretty scary, right?"
"No. Not really. It was cool the way they pulsated."
"But zombies are still too scary?"
"Mom, don't you know that the undead is a lot more scary? The undead are real. Werewolves are just fantasy." And with that, he swiftly moved on to asking to see An American Werewolf in London.
To think that I was once somewhat proficient in the folklore of demonology. Not anymore, apparently.

Variety of the Human Sort

On a couple of gifts received this holiday season...

The first is a newish memoir-stroke-expose which pretty much violates every IRB and HIPAA regulation known to medicine -- not to mention some sort of personal honor code one should have to adopt in order to become a physician. Anyway... written by a attending psychiatrist at the (in)famous Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the US, Weekends at Bellevue is perhaps the worst book ever written on severe mental illness and the role of the provider. Not to hyperbolize, but any doc who refers to her patients as "crazy" (she's a psychiatrist for chrissake), who writes about her propensity for literally sniffing out male pheromones, intern sex (ew), how her ass looks in scrubs and, let's be honest, has a lot of unexamined contempt for the mentally ill, gets her book tossed swiftly in the trash. Sorry, Santa.

But, never fear. There is also the now-quite-ancient and excellent book entitled Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body (2004) written by the intriguing and somewhat controversial Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist and lecturer at Imperial College London. This history and popular-science sampler is humane and insightful, taking on difficult questions of genetic variation and social interpretation. "Injustice creeps in through the cracks of our ignorance... It is to finally close off those cracks" that we should be looking at human variety. He is speaking about genetics, of course, but mayn't this well be applied to other work, needing not to be resurrected here? I think so.