If Bush is a Chimp, Hillary's Human, but Obama is "Brilliant" (A "Don't Turn Back" Followup)

I still have so much respect for Hillary. And for my own peace of mind, I have to give her the benefit of the doubt. Like wives of powerful men everywhere I figure it to be so much torture to be that close to power, yet see it just out of reach. And Hillary supporters must see her like a big mama, there to rescue everyone in the sandbox from Baby Bush and the Obama bullies. I can't help but see a generation gap in all this.

Obama supporters like Obama for a number of reasons, no reason outstripping the validity of the other. But where generational thinking is concerned I see self-assured, self-reliant Latchkey-kid-mentality with Obama. He talks to everyone as if they are the adults. He's not calling for mama or papa to come. He'll talk all the kids into believing in their own ability to redeem themselves. It's the difference between appealing to our greatest potential and preying on our worst fears. And the latter we've had long enough.

In another time Hillary would have been the perfect president. Say what you will; even Michael Moore at one point had to give credit in SiCKO when he reminded us that Hillary did try like no other to bring about universal healthcare. She is an extraordinary figure in our collective history. And I cannot imagine what it is like to be in the position she is in, to be caught between doing the right thing and having all her decisions held to some feminine gender standard. Being soft on war, bowing out of the race, even owning up to mistakes—these are all things good girls do and not an exalted CIC. And to constantly try to balance that with being likable and gracious is a schizophrenic thing to do. It all presents her as a largely insecure person, not sure of who she is. And as human as it all is, it also means she's not ready to be president.

Yes, at another time Hillary would have been the perfect leader, when the size of your schoolyard weight was how well you could diss and bag on the other—The "Ooo she told you" juice she had on the boys' turf was awe inspiring. Or if this were not the era of youtube, Hillary would have been our girl. (Even four years ago, the ability to send a video clip around the globe catching you in a "misspeak" or advertising your less known, more charismatic opponent did not exist.) But our expectations are greater now. Our sense of what's possible expanded.

It has to be if we are to look in the face of the doom-and-gloom we have been promised is coming and imagine a future beyond it. Because if we cannot imagine that future, we all might as well just drink the kool-aid. Ludicrous that it sounds, it is no more so than the "realists" are beginning to sound to me. Your-housing-economic-environmental-medical-terror-nightmare-is-coming-and-you-can't-do-a-thing-about-it-so-vote-for-me logic is over...

No, with each passing day I am becoming more and more convinced that everything that has happened has been for the good of this moment, that every lie and betrayal a growing pain so-to-speak, to rattle us out of a life of complacent mediocracy.

Would an Obama be without a Bush?

Would an Obama be without a Clinton?

There comes a time when hitting rock bottom is seen as a turning point. So that it's possible to say I needed that floor to fly. I thank Bush for being that floor. I thank Hillary for just walking on it.

Don't Turn Back

Hope, the question I asked, and the answer I received when LOA teacher Abraham-Hicks talked about King and sparked a connection. Suggestion: Read the Blog entry before watching the video. Then take on the Challenge.

I don't normally do this but here I go...I don't like all this attention to the Rev Wright's statements. And what's worse, I don't find Obama's "Race Speech" to be all that uplifting either. I find all this to be powerfully depressing, not because it's something new to me but because I was just starting to get used to the idea, you know that tickle in your gut when your brain fixates on the idea of an Obama presidency for a pure 3 seconds, that smile that suddenly starts to form out of the corner of your mouth despite yourself, that welling of tears when you realize that powerful desire you've had so long is shared -- to be free from fear. But with all the speculation taking place in the last few days, do we really have to wait another generation for it to be real? Does fear grip us so tightly that we're bound by our parents generation's overwhelming sense of inadequacy? All I have been seeing and hearing the past two weeks is fear. And the irony is that for all intents and purposes Obama has already won the delegate race. So what's the deal?

Who cares the reason why one person supported Obama over another. We are not all the same cloned people. We don't all have to have the same exact reason for voting for someone. There is no magic correct formula for liking a candidate. You have to like their policy, but don't like their racial-ethnic (or gender for that matter) background. They must inspire, but not too much. They must have healthy support, but not from "those" people. People are always qualifying themselves trying not to offend someone's sensibilities. And all this demeaning of support for Obama is fear-mongering and dividing. And it's making me sick.

I don't know how else to put it.

…because it's demeaning everyone. Case in point: I liked Bilary before and always had respect for Hilary Rodham. But as the growing negativity has arrested my attention, suddenly her sense of entitlement is unbelievable. The get-in-linistic idea that she somehow earned the right to become president (as opposed to the younger more idealistic Obama) is nauseating. The smugness of her second place sense of superiority dumbfounds me. And this obsessive desire to stomp with the big boys no matter who gets hurt in the process makes me question the emotional state of the little girl underneath.

Don't get me wrong. She's not to blame for my weakening morale. She's just a convenient scapegoat. No, at this time, as far as we have all gone, pushing expectations closer to the reach of our desires, the collective we are forever changed.--The path ahead to the place we've always dreamed of being is more visible now than it has ever been. I guess I'm just trying to figure out why we, why I in this case, in the last few days keep turning around and looking back.

And the answer --*click* (sound of the tv turning off)-- don't.



Challenge: Why do you like *blank* as president? Whether you like Obama or H R Clinton write me reasons why? What's that picture in your head of the hours, days, months and years of what your country and world is like with your guy or girl in the "House". How do you feel in the morning when you wake up? What do you see when you look around you? No reason is too trivial, no answer too emotional. Just make it honest and your own. Email me. Inspire my next blog. I'm satisfied for now...

Nose Snobs and Smelly Stories: The Identity Politics of Feminine Fragrance

(Lifts her arms) Yes, I still smell like fabric softener. I'm online now trying to locate my favorite deodorant. It's disappeared from the shelves. And Whole Foods says the company has discontinued making deodorant altogether. So here I am combing the web for sites still carrying the remaining few, might I clean them out until I develop a preference for a new signature scent. Because how often does one find a scent like "wild yam" whose name and fragrance so perfectly embodies my personality both symbolically as well as olfactorily. It's natural. It's organic. It's mysterious, distinctive wild yam!

Most smells today are a barrage of man-made chemicals so widespread they've become more "natural" than natural smells themselves. Who could tell me what organic substance produces the ever so marketed scent of "spring breeze"? A potion of chemicals made popular by Proctor & Gamble in products like Downy and Secret—"strong enough for a man, but Ph balanced for a woman." Yes, balanced enough to burn a whole right through my arm. It was just at the time of puberty when odor camouflage suddenly became a necessity and clever commercial ads had me convinced my delicate preteen arms required the odor-corrective surgery only their product could provide. I've never worn such an aggressive neutralizer as propylene glycol and aluminum chlorohydrate-rich Secret. And I never will again.

But if I don't want to smell like obvious man-made chemicals I could smell like baby powder, that I did at one phase in my life, and smelled like—you guessed it—a baby. There were a plethora of deodorants and perfumes smelling like baby-bum batter which I wore up until my late teens, giving the pedophilic passerbys even more food for fodder. But as Anika Noni Rose said so fervently in Dreamgirls, "I'm a woman na!"

(Sigh) Without wild yam, it seems as though a woman wanting to smell like something safe for bodily consumption has to choose something saccharine-sweet-boring like honey or acid disinfectant like lemon, which evokes images of dishwashing liquid. Or vanilla, which evokes images of cookie-baking. Neither domestic image appeal to me. I'm wild, not domesticated.

Which leaves me to the four-star cliché of feminine fragrances—flowers. Apparently the most popular is that odiously pungent one known as lavender. There's a grown-up smell for you. (Sneeze) I guess the bigger you are, the louder you smell. A wise blogger once said, "Those who wear suspiciously loud perfumes are really insecure about the projectable range of their own personalities." Just a little "naked truth". Socially timid? Let the obnoxious fumes speak for yourself. But in all sincerity, my perfume-challenged sisters (and brothers) out there, a fine smell is like quality underwear; it should be worn for you, not others.

Yet again I digress. I ask myself, "If the selection is really so scarce why not be like the rest of the world and go o'natural?" Well, for a person rather obsessed with fragrance it's not so easy to settle for unscented. For nose nerds like me, this is life or death.

I've been there before, one year ago to be exact, when my favorite soap suddenly vanished from the shelves. This French boutique specializing in soaps and lotions based in the butter produced from the African tree Shea had a natural soothing scent. It was called Fig. Then suddenly they were gone. The high-nosed sales clerks telling me, "L'Occitane is making room for its new fragrances." New fragrances! (Coming unglued) Fragrances like obnoxious Verbena (smells like old lemon) or been-there-done-that Lavender!? But fig was so fresh, so different. So—(sniff-sniff) I smell, as the adage goes, a rat.

What is this fascist fragranicracy we are all in where we smell the same, walking lock step in line with three or four natural scents and a bunch of chemical concoctions? One company has already found a way to keep me returning to their stores for nose-related reasons and they aren't even selling perfume—Free People clothing boutique. They (along with their sister label Anthropologie) have a wonderful exotic fragrance permeating their stores. Finally, I get up the nerve to ask Free People staff what it is called, might I go out and buy, and thereby satisfying the olfactory hunger at will. "It's a potpourri that Free People has patented," the kind sales clerk informs. Not fully computing the meaning of what she has said I repeat, "So what's it called?" "It doesn't have a name," she replies, "Free People own it."

Now that's an irony if ever I heard one. Free People own this potpourri so that none of us olfactorily deprived minions can smell it anywhere but in their stores and on the clothes they sell, that is until we wash them in "spring breeze". In a word: Genius. The rest has already been said.

A Holiday Poole

Because Christmas means something different to everyone...

Pink Please

Apparently, a group of neuroscientists at Newcastle University have completed a study confirming that boys like blue and girls like pink. And this is because during human evolution, pink represented the color of ripe fruit that as gatherers women generally did while the men were away hunting. I thought about writing a rebuttal. I thought about writing how flawed a study is for attempting to prove the existence of a biological basis for color preferences between sexes when only adults between the age of 20 and 26 were used. I thought about pointing out how these evolutionary psychology studies get away with such circular logic that says, “Our behavior today is innate because it was our behavior before; and it was our behavior before because we say it is today.” I considered writing about the 3 year old boy I knew who loved pink to the dismay of his father and thus had to (re)learn how to love blue. I considered all these things, but thought that it would be a waste of time. Instead, I think I'll post an excerpt to a book I have been working on for nearly 7 years...now that I proudly call myself a pink.marigold:

...When I was a girl my favorite color was pink. I don’t know why or how, but everything I owned had to be covered with the stuff. My bedspread was pink, my clothes, my school supplies. My pink markers, frayed at the tip, always ran out first. Oh, I was proud of that color. I was proud of being a girl. All the other girls in my class liked blue or purple. But not me. I stood by pink. Pink was girly, the most wonderful thing to be.

Then one year suddenly I hated it, detested it with every inch of my being. If I saw the color I made gagging noises. All pastels, relatives to the pink monster, became abhorrent taboos as well. I even hid my pink bedspread and replaced it with navy blue, wondered what on earth possessed me to buy pink bed covering in the first place. Pink was girly. Pink was for losers.

I carried this with me all the way through college.

Then I came to Japan for my junior year abroad. And everything was in pastels. I went about gagging at everything I saw. Everything looked like my bedroom at age ten. Everything was pink. Japanese folk don’t have this American aversion to cuteness. So it wasn’t unusual to find young men wearing pink clothing. Buildings were pink. Bulldozers were pastels. Men and women lugged pink suitcases while talking on pink cell phones and passing by stores selling pink comic books. I can’t describe the emotions I went through as I cursed my surroundings. I can’t explain the anxiety that fell over me when I entered department stores filled with pastel electronics, an oxymoron for certain. I left Japan still not fully understanding it, thinking Japanese people were somehow lacking in maturity. They were too girly to be adults.

Well the second time I came to Japan, the instant the plane landed and I felt myself transformed into that childhood bedroom, the sense of peace I felt as a girlchild came back. Not like before when the onset of those ungrasped girlhood feelings became anxiety provoking. This time I understood them. I understood how my man-member monolatry buried the girl in me.

I could even bring myself to buy pastels and to look at them with a sense of calm, that is, all accept pink. For months I would sit and stare at pink in fear, trying to remember what it was like to adore the shade. But I could not remember. I saw a pink chair and I looked desperately for a blue one before I reluctantly sat down. It was as if by sitting on the chair, all of the attributes associated with pink, weakness, vulnerability, naivety, would attach itself to me and be naked for all others to see. I would buy cleaning supplies and notice myself using the box’s color, not the price as the discerning factor. A weak-colored bottle of detergent couldn’t possibly be strong enough to get the stains out. No pink supplies enter my shopping basket. From hangers to notebooks, while all around me, pink seemed to elude me.

How could a color I once loved so dearly, wore so pridefully impress upon me as an adult something to detest and fear? The question is not one of those mysteries in life that we commonly shrug off as inexplicable. The answer is in the phrases, “You da man!” and its complimentary “You go! Girl,” whose nuances bespeak the valued condition by just being in one and the command that one catch up imbedded in the other. The answer is while I could embrace the pastels and soft hues that embodied the safe world of formative years, years of phallocentric inculcation personified in the single aversion to the color pink was harder to overcome than with just one’s sheer will to resist...

Anecdotes aside, I understand that these studies like the one done at Newcastle are more about getting continued funding for further research than anything else. But if nothing else, haven't we evolved enough yet to know that not everything is black or white or in this case pink or blue?

Streams of Consciousness: A Postmodern Tirade on “This Woman’s Work”

Well now I know why I like the song “This Woman’s Work” so much. It’s a remake of an 80’s tune from a British singer named Kate Bush. I heard it while reluctantly watching the John Hughes film “She’s Having a Baby”. As soon as I heard and recognized the opening lines, I rushed to my computer to find its author. After downloading it, I listened a number of times and then suddenly it became clear, as I will attempt to elucidate, that this song hauntingly laments about the longing to be one, while tacitly revealing that we already are.

(WARNING: Proceed with caution, as contents may cause confusion.)

Here is a song about a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And Maxwell, covering the song, is imitating a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And I, a woman, am identifying with this man imitating a woman imitating a man empathizing with the woman giving birth to their child. Still there?

Of course, conveyed in the film, there is an even deeper meaning, or superficial one as it would be, almost mystical in its ability to capture that indescribable moment when, at the birth of a child, everything, it all makes sense. Childless, I can only romanticize what that might be like. But this much seemed to epitomize my place in the whole mess, what we, so awkwardly term “this generation”, finds itself doing again and again—unable to either eliminate or stop trying to eliminate its boundaries through an enigmatic process of unending self-imitation.

It does nothing to less complicate matters that Maxwell is a black man imitating a white woman. It fits quite nicely in what black-and-white has always been, especially in this country, a two-sided truth that can neither be fused nor separated. No matter how hard black tries to imitate white, or white black, the essence of difference is never eliminated, while, at the same time, also never stripped from one another as it uses itself symbiotically to devise meaning. That is, no one can ever know what white is without knowing what black is, and vice versa. So the pain of difference can never be eliminated even as this pain motivates us to desire its elimination.

The closest any modern cultural icon has ever come to eliminating the cleave between black men and white women without clearly representing one or the other has been Michael Jackson. And we all know the wrath this attempt has ensued. What other ostensibly benign figure has been the subject of such contempt outside of Jesus? I can hear the offended gasps now.

Truthfully, something bothers us about dissolving difference; it’s interpreted as dissolving oneself, ethereally of course, even as attempting to do so seduces us. Who would deny that they all had a crush on RuPaul, who bell hooks once described as a big black man trying to become a little white woman. It was an exciting show, an intercourse that climaxed and pulled out back into this reactionary Dubbya period.

So I give up. I fold. Pushing against the residual manifestations of our desires, in this case the desire to erase otherness necessitating the existence of others, has left me both frustrated and weary, especially now that I realize that an idea can never be demanifested or destroyed, only a withdrawal of our attention to it. Moreover, I digress. In the simplest terms and without the guilt, I like the song “This Woman’s Work” because, another example of life imitating art, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art until we forget where it all began, it reminds us that we are all one…thought. The rest has already been said. I’m satisfied, for now…

Good Manifestations II: Mom’s Manifestation

As usual, I was watching a film—this time it was Something New—and I had one of those a-ha moments, this time, with respect to my mother.

As a side note: it has taken me most of my life to realize that I was born to my mother, not out of some cosmic joke, but in large part because of the questions she was asking the universe to answer. For some reason or another, she was not in the place to receive the answers directly. Nonetheless, she kept asking, desiring. Hence, I was born. I grew up answering those questions, quite easily it seems, because I didn't desire them as much as she did. So in the spirit of tradition, I offer this piece…

Metaphysicists say that through living our lives, which naturally cultivate desires in us, we create and cause universal expansion. In other words, just the desires themselves manifest expansion and change. The catch is that we ourselves have to catch up with that expansion in order to personally take advantage of it; otherwise, while it most definitely will serve humanity potentially and the universe immediately, it will not necessarily be enjoyed by you individually, that is, within the lifetime of your focused ego. But if you catch up with the expansion, the equivalent of believing and knowing that, as an extension of the expanding universe, you already have what you want, then within your lifetime, immediately as you believe, as soon as you come to speed with the desire, you will experience it—its essence will manifest.

What does it mean to know and believe you have something that is not in that very moment present in your reality? It means being excited, happy, anticipatory—it's going to sleep Christmas Eve, knowing that Santa's coming with your presents.

Incidentally, there's a reason why we have this Christmas ritual in our culture. It reminds adults of the reason for our existence—getting stuff we want. Even though children are eventually told that Santa Claus is really just their parents—a traumatic rite-of-passage which serves only to foster permanent dependence on our parents for the things we desire—in actuality, the only real lie we are told is that Santa Claus doesn't exist. The same as saying God, source, the universe—whatever name one chooses for the infinite intelligence of which we are all a part and which creates all things—doesn't exist, so doing is the reason why hearing the lie, or more accurately, believing it hurts so much as children who are so much closer to their god-self to begin with. Along that line of reasoning, any attempt to disprove the existence of “God” is an attempt to perform suicide. The good news is neither is really possible.

So what the Secret and the whole LOA gang are getting at with all this "get happy" nonsense that seems to irritate the permanently pessimistic is really self-empowerment. In order to enjoy in this dimension, in this lifetime all of the goodies we have subconsciously been creating all this time, we need to wake up out of this self-loathing trance we have been under and get happy because, simply put, happiness is the key to self-empowerment…and not, as the time-old misconception teaches, the other way around.

Which brings me back to the first teacher of time-old misconceptions—mother. Mine has been writing, imagining a story for the last 30 years. It’s the story of a black woman and a white man. It’s the story of interracial love. As I mentioned earlier, I was watching this film “Something New” the other day, and something dawned on me. It dawned on me that this is the story my mother envisioned! So you think, “Yeah, well, so what? That’s not hard to imagine.” But even bolder than that, I assert that she created the story. She may not have been in the place to receive it into her own reality (i.e. get credit for it), but there it was. And aspects of the film so closely mirrored my mother’s life that I am sure the universe were putting up neon signs to prove it. The amusing little coincidence that the place the main character took her daily walk is the exact same place my mother takes her daily walks, for instance. It just goes to show how, like a baby discovering its own hand for the first time, discovering our ability to manifest, a higher level of the same self-realization process, is meant to be amusing.