Random Acts of Awesome

I never understood women and men who said they didn't have a voice. You always have a voice. You just have to choose to use it. And I thought that choice was always easy. Why WOULDN'T one choose to be heard? What ramifications could possibly be dark enough to make you lose your voice? When I was a child, I never shut up. No matter how much trouble it got me in. I was quiet, for the most part, but when I felt the injustice of my voice being stifled, I spoke up. I got grounded countless times, slapped in the face a few times, even got the belt a time or two, based on my inability to stop my voice. And even when I was being punished for it, I felt the respect it garnered. My parents would joke about my inability to allow them the last word if I thought I was right, but underneath their joking was the knowledge that they were raising a strong daughter. A woman who would stick up for herself. I felt their pride in that knowledge, and it strengthened my voice, regardless of the...

Interesting. Listening to your cruel bullshit, your rapey jokes based on your hyper alertness to the fact that women are listening to you, is making my sexuality feel gross. I'd been reading T.S. Eliot, rubbing my necklace against my lips, imagining a warm, slick dick in its place, coating my lips with salty cum. And your falsely deep voice, your pathetic juvenile mating calls disguised by the voice of a man, is making my pussy dry up. You're turning my sexuality into something to be used against me. With nothing but your voice, your stupid words. You don't even mean them. You're trying so hard to impress the woman next to you with your warped version of masculinity that you'd say anything. And she's laughing. The two of you are seriously harshing my sensual buzz, and I really want to grab you by the back of your head and smash your lips into the wood of the table in front of you. But that would make you interesting. And you don't deserve it. You are borin...

I was thinking today, while sitting on the bus and feeling trapped and desperate, that I've been living my fathers life for a long time. This sense of desperation to GET AWAY, to run somewhere that isn't here... it's followed me around since I was a child. And I remember seeing it in my father. I remember recognizing his frustration and rage for exactly what it was, a futile banging at the glass of his life. I think the first time I saw it clearly I was 12, and I had just watched him and my mother get into a fight. He slammed his way out the door, grabbing his car keys off the table, and she sat down and cried. Half of me sympathized with her, and I did my best to comfort her with a pat on the back. But the other half of me realized he was running away from so much more than a fight. And I empathized with him. I started to want to run away myself, though I didn't know what from. I didn't have the pressures he did, the 5 hungry children, the emotionally immature wif...

One of, if not the most, pernicious ideas keeping us from happiness in this day and age is the knowledge that we are broken. And if we are broken, you are broken too, for loving us. Also, the idea that who we are right now, in this moment, is who we will always be. I feel my brittle-ness so much more since I've started taking public transit again. It highlights how little strength I feel inside myself, when I am surrounded by strangers, forced to imagine myself inside their skin. My own skin cracks and crumbles at the thought of allowing another inside, at the knowledge that these broken, imperfect people can see me. Can analyze me to their hearts content. Because that's what I'm doing to them. The man sitting across from me, with the deep set eyes that speak of allergies and Elizabethan England, I wonder if he knows who his ancestors are. The woman playing with her thick curly hair right next to me, using it as a shield between me and her boyfriend, I wonder if she rea...