ariel? ariel!

So I just wrote a 531 word comment (edited down!) about butch/femme and its limitations on Sinclair’s blog. Clearly, I am having some feelings.

Last weekend I had what I can only term a lot of gender experiences:

• Being asked to be a butch go-go dancer — or peer pressured into it? — only to not, in fact, be invited to be a butch go-go dancer;
• Spending a lot of time at a conference that was run/headed by a lot of High Femmes who seem to date primarily on the masculine spectrum;
• Feeling totally erased by all of this butch butch butch on one side and all this femme femme femme on the other, neither of which resembled me;
• Having so much angst over this that I left a party, only to get mad at myself and go back (”fuck it, if they don’t think I’m hot, it’s their problem, not mine, and I am going to just go be fabulous despite it!”) — and then explain it all to a friend of mine, a high femme bottom friend of mine, who totally did that thing you hear about in books of validation and ego stroking my fragile self that was getting no love from the rest of the world;
• I don’t even remember what else.

I just throw up my hands. I love gender. I love the game, the art, the construction, the way you put together symbols to make a message. And the people I am attracted to have a lot of gender. I think femmes are hot. I think butches are hot. And here I am watching people crow on and on about the butch/femme dynamic and honestly it breaks my heart.

Where does it leave me? I am some weird in the middle. No lover has ever looked at me and said “Ariel, you just have this kind of energy.” I have never gotten that feedback. And I hear again and again about these butches, these femmes, finding each other and seeing each other’s essential soul and having hot sex and complementing each other perfectly and zigging and zagging and yinning and yanging and holding doors and arching eyebrows and all I feel is despair.

I am not either one of those people. I am something else, something parallel maybe, or to one side, at some other stop along the way. It is a sexual economy I want to participate in but I don’t know how much of myself I am willing to sell along the way. I don’t seem to fit in that world — I am not exuding some essential quality of one side or the other that makes me marketable. And so I don’t get to do that.

I am interested in the homosexual and heterosexual as “same” and “different” rather than “gay” and “straight.” There are homosexual queers and heterosexual queers. I think I am  a heterosexual queer — I get off on difference, not similarity — but the differences I get off of are these two that seem to fit so well together. And then there’s me. I can play femme; lord knows I have before. And I think I am learning how to front butch, too; it’s a different skill and I find it scarier, but it is one I am trying for. Learn to embrace that which terrifies us!

But every time I hear people go on and on about their natural gender, their comfortable essential femme self, I get a little sick. Because I do want a lover to put me in a box. I do want someone to look at me and say “Ariel! You fit here!”

Sometimes I wonder about all of this mouthing about how butch/femme is so subversive and whether it is just a front for another kind of gender normativity that at least in my case is not experienced as liberatory at all. I do not want to look at ads on Craigslist or look at people in a bar and think “oh, she’s talking to the femme girls, she wouldn’t want me” or “oh, she’s so high femme, what would I ever do with her, I’m not qualified.” And of course, I know; there’s no way to know for sure until you try. But this is how gender systems and systems of power work — they shut you down and make you feel impossible for not living up to expectations that you didn’t even ask for. Sometimes I wonder, here in this system that is not aping heterosexual norms but is at least in dialogue with them, how much that gender brutality can be avoided. How many people worry about being “not femme enough” or “not butch enough” or “the wrong kind of femme” or all these other things?

I love my ridiculous life but some days I just want to have a straight path to what I am after. I want to not feel impossible. I want to feel like my desires have a place, and a time, and a validity. Maybe this is sour grapes at my own inability to put these things together, but maybe it’s more than that.  I just do not want to feel like I am a fool, a ridiculous fool, because I want to sleep with that person but I wear pants and button-down shirts and ascots. I do not want to feel like a fool because one day I’m in a tie and the next I’m in a pleated skirt. Gender norms are gender norms, and that’s how it is, and maybe I just need to wheel my shopping cart to a different aisle.

But it’s hard to do that without a sense of loss.

my friends, do you know about daft punk?

watch and be thrilled. i find these so satisfying because their aesthetic is so well-defined and the music is the kind of electropunk i love so. just look at the worlds they create! so satisfying!

I overestimated myself.

My own ability to keep my pants and my heart separate. Or to keep my head out of the game. To do something. Anything. I feel like I am exploding, overexploding, overwrought, making bad choices, and driving myself nuts. I haven’t let myself do this in a while and that is how it goes, I guess; I am out of practice. I hate every time I have felt like this, this overextended, this unable to trust it all. I feel unqualified.

I don’t know why the system is so threatened. But I feel it in my guts, threat, danger, a need for resolution, a need for clarity, or at least a need for contact. Too much in my head and not enough in real space, in the real world, in the articulated space. You speak and words become waves that move particles that move particles. Maybe it’s not a butterfly in Osaka that causes hurricanes; maybe it’s the answer to an unvoiced question, the static from a cell phone connection bursting into space and back down again. The beep from a voice mail.

I don’t know what I want. I believe that I do not want definition or some pat answer. I want to know what the framework is. I want to know what galaxy I’m playing in. At least a little. I want to know how — I was going to write how safe this is. But nothing is safe about this. Nothing at all is safe about this. Nothing is ever safe about feelings even if those feelings are whatever these feelings are, or whatever the polar opposite of these feelings are, or any feeling in between.

I am satisfied that I looked up the etymology of “visceral” and they said from the Latin for your bowels, origin ultimately unknown. Who knows where this comes from, this intestine pigshit of emotions going thousands of ways. Who knows how to ride it, the stink, the swell, the bile, all of these uncomfortable things. I do not know who or what I am or who or what I want. I want a phone call. I want a sign. I want to look at these intestines and be able to divine just enough that I can find some peace. I am not good at creating my own peace. I can’t sit still because this comes back to me, too much, too much, bilious and gutwrenching, unable to get rid of the tiny kernel of hope that sits in my gut and irritates me with wonder. What if. What if. What if.

This is not a road I can go on. I cannot be watching my phone for signs of life. My only response is the cold turkey one. Turn off the ringer. Put it away. Hit ignore. Hit pause. Distract and create. I am excited to get in the studio and make things. I am going to make things right now. Make and destroy, make and destroy, gutwrenching and bilious.

There is so much I want to write about and I have been drafting and drafting but I cannot even begin to construct a narrative.

Because I am still sitting on a rooftop, processing under the Brooklyn sky, having one of the most intense conversations in recent history between one kiss at a time. I am still lost in the one moment when I took a risk, pushed the envelope, knelt between her legs, and watched her lose her train of thought entirely.

She lives in Boston, I live here. She is one of my best friends. I don’t understand what happened and I don’t know what will happen.

I did not go home with her that night.

I don’t keep up on comments. I don’t read enough blogs. You all say smart things and I try to remember to put you in my google feed. But even in my google feed I get overwhelmed. My weeks are full and my weekends are fuller. I am online a lot but usually trying to get work done. I am so sorry — I just saw Summer posted a response to some of what I wrote about gender, other folks have written things too, and it is 12:34am (make a wish!) and this is early to bed for me this weekend and tomorrow morning there’s work and it is going to hit me like a ton of lesbian bricks.

I wish my life weren’t like this. I wish tomorrow morning I got to wake up, eat breakfast, stretch and go to the gym, write, work on my clown piece ideas, go to my Purim writing meeting, go to my IJSN study group meeting, and call it a day. Instead I am going to wake up too late, throw whatever clothing I can find onto my body, run to the train, commute with a frown face, be embarassed and continue my 80% late to work trend, do things I don’t really care about all day, run to the gym, run to the writing meeting, run to the study group meeting, and get home about midnight. Then Tuesday, different meetings, same basic agenda. Then Wednesday, then Thursday I am done at 8 (posh!), then Friday, then it is a three day weekend (thank Gd) where I will not catch up on my sleep because even if I am in bed at 4:30 in the morning I am awake alert alive and enthusiastic by 10:30. So I am always tired, I am always buzzing around, I am always too busy, and I never get to concentrate.

I hate it. I want to savor every word you people read and write thoughtful comments back. I want to write more posts, more about New York, about fashion and gender, about sex, about kissing your friends. I want to do more of my other work, more organizing, more artmaking, more going to the gym; I would settle for more sleeping. I hate that so much of my time is dictated by this job I have that I fell into that I feel trapped in but I can’t see my way to what is next. I don’t have the time for any vision quests. I get a ludicrously generous amount of vacation every year and I am still running a deficit right now — taking time off for performing, taking time off to see my family, and taking mental health days or sick days because I just don’t maintain myself and sometimes I crash out even though it’s Tuesday rather than Saturday or Sunday.

They would keep me at my job if I would let them. They like me there. I like the people and sometimes I like the work. Lately I have run out of steam; my energy is better used elsewhere and I resent my job for making me use up my precious few resources on staplers or copy machine training or all of the work I do so that other people can do the work of the organization. I admit that it might be easier if I got to be a little closer to the action at my job; I stay behind the scenes. It is hard for me to be doing this; I want more, more, more. I either want my job to consume me in the happiest way or to stop making so many demands that feel like such poor fits. I feel immature for saying it but it’s true. I want my time to myself. I want to create things when I work that matter. I want to not feel like the weirdo who goes out, who performs, who has to sew her costume on her lunch break.

But what am I going to do with my life? The fact of the matter is that I am going to have to work and  the question of where and how and for whom is starting to press on me. In 8 hours and 13 minutes — or 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or who knows — I am going to have to sign in for another week doing work that ultimately I just don’t care about and that leaves me exhausted and gasping because I have to fit the rest of my life in between the hours of 5:30 and 12 or 1 or 2.

This never resolves well for me. It hasn’t been resolved since I have lived in New York. When I quit my old job and was temping I was so desperately broke — counting subway rides broke, eating pizza three meals a day broke — but in some ways it felt so free. I do not know if I can deal with another round of that stress kind of broke, barely making rent temping, not paying my bills — this money is comfortable and it’s nice to be able to cover my ass. I am debating trying some new paths and they’re all killing me; I’m scared. I know I am a good administrator, but what else am I good at?

Clearly not commenting on blogs.

it’s a tap dance tour of youtube. Life has been exhausting me and all my writing has gone into self-care and journalling.

But you need to see these. Sound up, caterpillars.

The Nicholas brothers are the most amazing tap dancers that, if you are not a tapper and/or only follow white Hollywood, you may never have heard of. Just watch this. They are such showmen. I am starting with them because I feel like later tappers are more into the “loud and fast” category and I want you to watch them first because this, this, this is how it is supposed to be. They build their act so well and what a final kapow.

It’s Fred and Ginger. I just picked one I love because honestly there are too many to pick. Everybody knows this song — or lots of people do — but the tapping is just amazing, and on skates no less. I can’t say anything new about them because they’re just classic. But you know what, this is what kills me — oh, to be a professional. That was their job, learning to tap on skates and doing it again and again until they got it right. It makes me wish I got to really be a performer all the time and work on it and give myself over to the art. I am really jealous of movie stars who get to, for a role, go learn something new 8 hours a day with their bodies. I love how carefully the glidey skate noise has been preserved.

I love Gene Kelly, but I love Donald O’Connor. I love this number so much. He is such a good technical clown. His hat tricks! His slapstick! Oh Donald O’Connor. Just watch it. It’s amazing.

That’s all for now because it is now ridiculous o’clock in the morning and I have been watching old theater on YouTube for hours. I wish I knew more about the Cotton Club scene and the Nicholas Brothers’ contemporaries, but I don’t; that is the racist system we live in for you. That is definitely a point of more research for me. I also am hoping to see more of Donald O’Connor’s work soon.

What dance kills you? What’s your favorite old movie? Do you know more about black Hollywood? Let me know!