Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

June 7, 2010

What Is That In Your Junk Drawer?

(Thanks for stopping by to check out my censored post. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think – could I have ruined someone’s life/career/family with this piece?)
I’m going to break some kind of land-speed record for how many times I use the word penis in this post. Just so you are prepared. Those too virginal or squeamish should turn away now. And so we’re all on the same page, junk is the term used for the whole package – the male genitalia as it were.

I am always somewhat shocked when a man displays his junk – who can ever forget Michael Douglas on Leno or Derek Hough on Dancing with the Stars? When it’s on TV you can just snigger into your gin and tonic, but when it’s in person I don’t know where to look or whether or not he wants the world to see it or just had an unfortunate case of pant size confusion. Especially fascinating are Italian men who wear their clothing to deliberately advertise their junk. From what I’ve heard, Brazilians and Argentinians are happy to stuff their junk in a package that’s meant to display their wares like cellophane-wrapped ham hocks around New Years. Then you have entire regions of American men who wear pants baggy enough to be skirts and you have to wonder . . .

What was that you said? It’s like cleavage on a woman? Oh no. It’s not. Boobs are universal. Junk is not. And junk is an illusion anyway – it’s not like the package on display is really telling the whole story. Of course, then you have the picture above – now if men with their junk all out and about looked like THAT perhaps junk exposure would be more appealing?

I grew up with only a sister so until I started my foray into womanhood the male junk was sort of a mystery. Then I had husbands, and a son, and it became just one more thing around the house to maintain. So, here is my practical guide to the junk drawer.

Five Penis Facts from, I swear this is true, CBS News:

1. A penis does have a mind of its own. Men in fact have less control over their penis than they do their arms or legs. It’s tied to the nervous system. The arms and legs, however, should remain under the man’s control, which should allow him to walk away and put his hands in his pockets. Tiger Woods and Jesse James may not have known that this is how it works.
2. As far as size, there are two varieties: Growers and Showers. A penis can grow anywhere from the width of a paperclip to the length of a Blackberry. Hey, I’m sitting at my desk and that’s all I had on hand. So, that penis that looks puny may be a grower and the one that looks temptingly like a good nudge might yield results may be a shower and it’s already given all it can give.
3. The Penis Is Shaped Like a Boomerang. The root of the penis is tucked way up in the pelvis and when actually detailed on an MRI it’s, yes, a boomerang. Which explains why it’s always getting itself stuck in the same old spots, doesn’t it? And you can totally picture how that MRI session started. The copier was broken and the techs had to do something besides photocopy their asses . . .
4. A Penis Can Be Broken. Contrary to the whole “boner” thing there’s no bone, but a penis can be fractured. Those of us with husbands over 30 ought to be really thankful because a broken penis tends to be a young man’s problem. Now, if anyone is going to take up Courgaring be warned, the younger the guy the more rigid the penis, which can lead to great joy and happiness, but also a chance of accidental breakage.
5. Most Penises in the World Are Uncut. Only 6% of Australian men are circumcised. 20% of Brits and 30% of Canadians. Who’s up for a field trip to do “research?”

Beyond the basic facts and junk exposure – there’s that question most women have pondered at least once. Why are men always adjusting their junk? Is it to get our attention? They don’t quite understand the female mind if that’s the case because when I see junk-adjustment going on the first thing I think of is: infection. I don’t adjust my boobs in public and I’d like to ask men to refrain from adjusting their junk. Although I’d have to guess frequent boob-adjustment would earn me a fan club.

Five Reasons Men Adjust Their Junk:

1. They have junk pinchage
2. Their junk is sticking to their leg
3. Their pants are too tight, causing junk compression
4. Their junk ventilation is insufficient causing suffocating junk
5. A woman is within a mile and she might like to be reminded that they have junk to share

I’m sure previous generations of men would have scoffed at this, but the current crop of men (none among the men I know – I did an informal survey) seem to be more sensitive to junk-aroma. Did you know they have begun making toiletry products aimed specifically at junk? Don’t believe me? Go to www.manjunk.com and see for yourself. I think this is great payback for the past fifty years of Summer’s Eve commercials.

If you’d like to see the worst instance of Man Junk ever on record, here’s a You Tube video for you:

And people wonder why I live intown! So, who has a good junk story? What are your feelings about junk exposure and adjustment?

June 4, 2010

The Freedom to Read. The Freedom to Write.

My daughter recently went on a trip to the Midwest with my mother and encountered some pretty narrow thinking. She came home and said, “Mommy, I’m glad you’re raising us in a place where I know all kinds of people and how good they are.” She has friends who are of every racial group. She has friends who have two mommies and friends who have two daddies. One of her best buddies is Jewish, another is Presbyterian. We attend a Methodist church and I sometimes read her tarot cards for her. She reads voraciously, yet I do manage a little what she reads by allowing her to read controversial stuff and then talking with her about what she’s read. If a book is questionable, we read it together and then discuss it. I’m against censorship. I don’t understand how someone’s moral core can cause them to think that they have the right to say what can or can’t be put into the world. Censorship hurts artists and it kills the artistic process. Is everything ever composed, written, painted, or photographed appropriate for every audience? No, of course not. But no one has the right to say that something should not exist or not be allowed to come to fruition because it rubs the wrong way against a morality belonging to a select group.

Neil Gaiman has a great letter from a librarian on his blog and it’s worth reading.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/02/last-last-word.html

Some books you may not have realized were censored:

Aesop. Fables.
Anonymous. Go Ask Alice.
Boccacio. The Decameron
Boston Women’s Health Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Brothers Grimm. The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Cervantes. Don Quixote.
Cinderella
Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Eliot, George. Adam Bede.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Frank, Anne. Diary of Anne Frank.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sorrows of Young Werther.
Hanford, Martin. Where’s Waldo?
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Homer. The Odyssey.
Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon.
King, Stephen. Carrie.
L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time.
Lawrence, Margaret. A Jest of God.
Lawrence, Margaret. The Diviners.
Lawrence, Margaret. The Stone Angel.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
Little Red Riding Hood.
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.
Miller, Jim, ed. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll.
Molière. Tartuffe.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women.
Orwell, George. 1984.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Rumpelstiltskin.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Sanders, Lawrence. The Seduction of Peter S.
Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear.
Shakespeare, William. Othello.
Shakespeare, William. Richard II.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night.
Speare, Elizabeth George. The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Suzuki, D. T. Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels.
Thoreau, Henry James. Civil Disobedience.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit.
Tolkien, J. R. R. Lord of the Rings.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Voltaire. Candide.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House In the Big Woods.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House On The Prairie.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. On The Banks of Plum Creek.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie.

As an English major I’ve actually read every single book on this list. And I’m proud of that.

If you care about censorship and want to take a stand, please visit:

http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/

Why am I writing about censorship today? Because until today I was part of a blog group of romance writers. I’ve just tendered my resignation because a post I wrote was read in draft form and found to conflict with the moral sensibilities of some of the other writers. The blog group had everyone from writers of erotica to inspirational writers. For those unfamiliar with what “inspirational” means – that refers to books that are in the romance genre, but that are sweeter, more innocent, and of a bent to be more acceptable to those of a religious nature. I support the rights of those writers to speak about religious topics, but apparently the support of divergent view points is not a two-way street.

My post – the one that was questioned by the group and suggested had the possibility to do one or all of the following:
A) Ruin careers
B) Keep people from being published
C) Be used as ammunition should one of the other blog members ever be sued for sexual harassment
D) Cause us to be labeled as man-haters
E) Lose the religious audience
F) Shame other members in front of their families

Well, it will appear in this space next Monday. I would welcome you to see for yourself if my post had the power to do any of the above.

May 5, 2010

Kitteh Love

I live with executioners. Unblinking, unwavering, undaunted killers. And they both LUV me. How does a kitteh show his love? (Put your lunch down right now if you’re smart) He leaves you presents – furry, feathered, used-to-scamper-and-frolic presents. The first week of spring yielded my very own horror show version of the 12 Days of Christmas.

On the first day of spring my beast of a kitteh gave to me: One dead white bunny.
On the second day of spring my beast gave to me: One stiff robin.
On the third day of spring my beast gave to me: A still twitching chipmunk.
On the fourth day of spring my beast gave to me: A field mouse, gray with pink little paws.

He stopped there THANK GOD because if I came out the front door and screamed for a fifth morning I’m pretty sure my neighbors would have been miffed. They’re musicians and they don’t get up at the ass crack of dawn like I do. BTW, all their musician friends greet my chief killer cat by name affectionately as if they are on intimate terms. I think he’s over there sitting in on jam sessions when he’s not out killing things.

So, how do I know all these delights were meant for me? (really, put the sandwich down) They are always left on the front door matt and are in perfectly preserved condition. The bounty he takes for himself ends up in pieces and parts and requires a hose to get off the porch. I hated dissection in school, but I passed, so I can tell you what a mouse spine and a chipmunk liver look like as the water wooshes them off the porch.

The carnage had stopped for a while until this morning’s offering of a beautiful little gray mouse. The creepy part is that said mouse had been totally licked clean – maybe like a kitteh Popsicle or something. I gave the cats a little bowl of milk yesterday. Really, I would prefer to have been thanked another way – maybe by a nice lap snuggle or a keyboard crawl.

Have you ever been given a gift out of the “heart” (get it!) that you really would prefer to have not gotten?

September 24, 2009

Mind the Swale

September 21, 2009

Poetry Monday – Abujerar

September 3, 2009

Re-Blondification

September 1, 2009

Poetry Monday – August in Wildwood Canyon

August 26, 2009

Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee . . .

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start posting naked pictures of myself on here. That. Would. Be. Bad. This will be an entry about exercise. It’s a leap, I know.

I’m trying to love and accept myself as I am, really. I’m struggling with the idea of that, though, because I don’t much like my body right now. I think liking your body too much when every chart on earth says you are a fatso is not such a healthy self-esteem thing. Personally, I think it’s better to acknowledge that the old bod is not so great anymore than it is to be in denial. Denial is not your friend. I’m on the outs with denial, remember. Denial and I are no longer chatting on the phone every morning and deciding to wear matching outfits.

I was flipping through my stack of diet books (a post for another day) and came across this really interesting quote in a Jorge Cruise book.

Exercise is a form of body praise.

Hmmm. I like that much better than my old form of body praise, which went something like this:

I don’t care if you have rolls and you require lycra and a good bra to get into clothing – damn it, I still love you.

I don’t hate my body, exactly, I’m just in a little tiff with it. I’d like to get back to praising my body, but I need to find another method besides my Frenemy, Denial.

You know what you get when you search for Praise for your Body? You get Donne – To His Mistress Going To Bed – a poem in which Donne is smoothly talking the pants right off some chick who’d rather be having sex in the dark with her linen nightie pulled up a chaste amount. That’s some pretty nice praise in that poem, but it’s sort of meant to result in him getting lucky. I’m sure it worked – what girl doesn’t want to be the subject of a poem? In case you missed this one in English Lit, you can read it here:

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/elegy20.htm

So, I also came across the Gâyatrî Mantra in my search. In case you missed your Islamic Mysticism class one day, here it is:

We meditate on the glory of the Creator;
Who has created the Universe;
Who is worthy of Worship;
Who is the embodiment of Knowledge and Light;
Who is the remover of all Sin and Ignorance;
May He enlighten our Intellect.

But that one is about the brain, not the body. So we have the extremes here: Wooo Hooo Go Naked and then Remove Sin and Enlighten Intellect. Sigh. I do love the search engine Google, but sometimes you get the gamut.

So, I think I need a new mantra to praise my body and I just realized how simple it is, really.

To My Legs Before Going To The Gym

Get thee up, thou full-fleshed and lazy limbs;
Work out hard – for that’s what the Creator intends.
Treadmill, stair-stepper or just a long walk,
Off your lazy ass; waste less time on talk.

August 24, 2009

Poetry Monday – Autumn Migration

Autumn Migration

Throw up your dinner at the break.
Beside all the gawking starlings
in the bathroom, you’re a macaw,
fuchsia stripes and ruby slashes,
but under the stadium lights
you look healthy. Rub Vaseline
on your teeth so your painted lips
slip into smiles. On the field
the minutes march away until
the band cranks up Louie Louie
as the players depart to pray.
and you count into position
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . .
When you feel the base’s hands grip
your hips, you stop hearing music,
the crowd rumbles away. You bend,
his fingers pinch your waist until
he raises you up in the air
like a falconer. Your feet rest
in his hands for a four count, then
you stick it, right foot in your palm
and left foot gripped hard in his hands.
You squeeze your cheeks until your thigh
becomes a rod of hardened steel
pinch a penny, pinch a penny, pinch a penny
Even from this distance you look
in the eyes of parents, stoners
and old graduates in the bleachers
and see them bound to the earth,
their bulk absolute and leaden.
Out of the corner of your eye
you see the other flyer tossed
like a released homing pigeon.
She comes out of her tuck, touches
her pointed toes, then swan dives down.
Later, she will tell you about
seeing, over the crowd and past
the bleachers, the long line of cars
on University. Eight counts
left, but his hands begin to shake.
One count early you feel him bend
his knees, propelling you airborne.
You twist into a perfect V
and ride down into the cradle.
Pop out of his arms, wave in time
with the waning beats of the song.
Only some have bones light enough to fly.

Notes on Autumn Migration
One of my favorite aspects of being a modern poet is the ability to play with that almighty ruler of poetry – Form. Just as poets in the 18th and 19th century took to and used hymn meter because that was the rhythm they heard in their daily life, modern poets can take whatever beat they want. We’re not as constrained by the notion that there is one right way to apply form.

This poem is about cheerleading, of course, but not any cheerleading – the basis is the gravity-defying aspects of doing stunts. Throwing another body into the air – or being the body thrown in the air – requires a certain mental toughness and a deep belief in your partner. It’s hubris in a short skirt. The manner in which I tweaked form for this poem is in the line count – each line is 8 beats – which is the count in cheerleading. Every motion is dictated by that magic 8 – so I wanted this poem to fall within that hard and fast rule. When you can get the form and the subject matter to marry so closely – well, that’s pretty satisfying. The last line is not 8 counts because the stunt has ended.

Oh, and a little inside tidbit. The cheeks in the poem are butt cheeks. Every flyer is taught the mantra that they repeat in their head – and sometimes outloud – Pinch a penny. They have to squeeze their butt cheeks as if there’s a penny in there and their life depends on keeping it in place. In order to defy gravity the flyer has to keep their body within a single plane – if they move any body part out of that plane then the base can’t hold them and they fall. Watch ESPN cheer competitions some time and you can catch a few of the flyers mumbling up there in the air.
Pinchapenny pinchapenny pinchapenny.

August 17, 2009

Poetry Monday

Pacing at 2 am with Telia

The neighbor’s house is nothing but black geometry
as I walk the floors with my infant daughter —
lost in half sleep, in the desire to dream.
She reaches, grasping at my hair,
and anchors herself as a moonflower vine
grows small spikes to find purchase on a wall.

Of all the strange fancies
my grandmother keeps in boxes
what she wants the most is her mother’s hair,
arm-length, chestnut and tightly braided.
A marvel to hold when I was a child.
The trophy none of my friends could top.
I find it on a high shelf in her bedroom,
muslin wrapped, looped with silk lily-of-the-valley,
plastic case clouded, label smeared.
Seventy-five years it has lived with her.
Fierce desire for this one thing
has been triggered by a recurring dream –
she’s sixteen and come home from school
to find her mother on the edge of death
her knee length hair gone by order of the doctor.
That long braid, turned gray by age, sickness,
was buried with her body,
but the switch, culled from a hairbrush
and used to make elaborate coiffures before the sickness,
haunts my grandmother,
makes her reach out to hold
the brittle strands in her trembling fingers.

I’m posting this as my first poem because it’s about my grandma. I stopped blogging last year so abruptly because my grandmother fell and hurt herself. She was 94 and the fall she took ended her life after three painful and hard weeks. I just sort of, well, entered a mourning period. So, I thought it fitting to “publish” this one about her as my first foray into getting my writing out in the world.
Because I’m a teacher I have to give some explanatory notes for each poem. Were I giving a reading I would do the same thing for the audience to introduce the poem. Here’s the deal with poetry – it’s mostly meant to be an interaction between the audience and the poet. It’s okay to say what a poem is ABOUT. To me, poems where you have to delve deeply to figure out WTF is going on are just an excuse to not pay for therapy for the poet. Some of what I write is autobiographical and some is fiction – the switch in the poem is real and a pretty cool object when you think about how long ago my great-grandmother died.
The style of this one is a pretty modern construct my favorite professor, David Bottoms, is the master of. The first stanza is an in-the-moment riff, then there is a break, and then the second stanza reveals the meaning and the theme. The two sometimes look like there’s a big leap in logic or a breaking of the space-time continuum, but if the poet has done their job the two halves form a circle that reveals something powerful without coming out and saying it or hitting you over the head with it. It’s sort of tied to the stream-of-consciousness movement in fiction, but there’s a more formal aspect to this technique in poetry.