Breaking the Girl

I am told I must be genuine but must be quiet and nice. I am told I can do anything but how many "experts" are women? (I will now seek to read more female authors). I am told that I am perfect just the way I am; so-long as I am "sweet" and resemble someone on a hiatus in an internment camp.

This makes me angry.

I am told I am not a sex object but I have been grabbed at and objectified from a very young age.

This makes me sad.

I pick up a magazine and not one article tells me I should think for myself or have hobbies; only touts the technique for the perfect blow job. I can read about a thousand ways to degrade myself in bed but no one is going to tell me how to figure out who I was before I was "socialized."

Okay...

It's not okay.

So how do we make sense of the mixed messages?

The Constitution guarantees certain unalienable rights to men.

So what about women? We've done a bit more than stitch the flag in the sewing circle for the past several hundred years.

This is what bothers me--we may need an amendment to guarantee rights to women.

Awesome.

It's as though we were just allowed to read and vote; but rights?

*Cut to: a boardroom somewhere

Guy in a Fitted Shirt: We have failed at brainwashing the female gender.

Guy in Italian Leather Shoes: What do you expect? You gave them the proper propaganda. You initiated the plan but some of them developed an alcohol tolerance and not many of them wanted to take the pills. You can't shut them up.

Shirt guy: But we encouraged everyone to debase them from a very young age.

Shoes guy: Some of them are strong-willed.

Shirt guy: And you couldn't break them?

Shoes guy: We couldn't break them. They were too clever and very angry at how they had been repressed.

Shirt guy: What about the diet pills?

Shoes guy: We've already tried that. They caught on.

Shirt guy: What about fashion?

Shoes guy: We've tried that but some of them don't want to conform to the uniform.

Shirt guy: How about turning them against each other?

Shoes guy: Don't you think that we've thought of that already? We teach distrust of their own gender, create elite social groups and pit them against each other to earn the affection of men; but some of them will not conform.

Shirt guy: We may have to resort to Plan B.

Shoes guy: We've performed some preliminary experiments with Class C level degradation and the studies show that the human spirit becomes stronger.

Shirt guy: Fascinating.

Shoes guy: So some of these women will willingly become slaves to fashion, ideals, marriage, sexism, and some of our more unsavory tactics, but when we implement violence, they become stronger?

Shirt guy: Yes. In fact, some of them become quite irreverent.

Shoes guy: Any suggestions?

Shirt guy: We have think tanks working on the issue; however, we have exhausted all of our current tactics. I need chocolate.

Shoes guy: Now you sound like one of "them."

*****

What I am trying to illustrate is that society creates certain contradictions that women are told they must abide by.

We are given an illusion; a promise of security, so-long as we can meet the standards posed to us.

We have the right to remain silent. More accurately, we are encouraged to remain silent; lest our opinion should matter. We have ownership of our own bodies, but our bodies should meet certain standards of conformity. We have certain unalienable rights, but since we are not "man," we require a judgment or amendment to guarantee those rights.

As far as I am concerned, the only biological difference between me, Napoleon, and the framers of the Constitution lies in a jar in a museum somewhere and is dedicated to the beloved Josephine, and, is infamously small in nature.

I do not delight in pissing contests. I do not believe that the world is against me. It's just the way it has operated for a very long time.

I bet no one would tell Michelle Obama she "can't."

I bet no one would tell a female Supreme Court justice what to say.

No one would say it out loud but it is understood that we are the "weaker" sex.

If you knew my family, you would disagree. I come from a long line of feared women. The men in my family sometimes sigh and sometimes shrug off our opinions, airs and tempers.

Sometimes I think my grandfather loves to fight with my grandmother as much as he loves to kiss her. I don't think she'd be the same if she didn't put up a fight. Her name may be Barbie but there is nothing plastic about her.

Time Capsules

I never realized that writing could be so heartbreaking. I box away and compartmentalize articles of indiscretion.

I open the time capsule a few years later, when I get around to cleaning, and find what I wanted to forget. It is, at first, difficult to look at the pictures of the past; the love notes, the mixed tapes and the mixed bag of misery I was once attached to.

There are always mixed emotions. First, remembering, in hazy detail, the actions performed in the dark--the sweetness, the sweat and the horrible karaoke. Hopefully, no one else remembers the karaoke.

Then something odd happens. Old feelings emerge from a forgotten place. There is the urge to forget; but, as a writer, I delve deeper and it gets a little wild. I remember every emotion, every action, every grievance, every transgression, every intent and stare at them suspiciously.

I wonder how things ever happened the way they did and wonder why in the hell I ever did those things in the first place and why any rational being would ever enter a banana eating contest at a bar and why there was only one banana. I am going to assign a little blame to the bartender in this particular case, your honor.

Perhaps it is hard to laugh at our own folly, but it is necessary and it gives levity.

So here goes nothing.

I hope that I can accept all of the ugly bits and I hope that I can make them funny. The naughty bits are certainly the most fun and the most forbidden, but I can't undo a doing. I chalk it up to experience and hope that everyone will laugh when they learn later on, in my golden years, that I fell backwards into the president of the university on the dancefloor of the campus watering hole. Blame it on the pinot grigio, the stillettos, the birthday celebration, but above all..blame the bartender. I will be sure to make it a cautionary tale and leave no details to be questioned, because the reader is both the judge and the jury.

I will, above all, laugh. I will laugh when I recount the nights that will live forever in infamy and remember that I am now a changed person, and there is forgiveness in nostalgia. For there are no saints; only reformed drunks and liars. Make no mistake; we are all liars, if only to ourselves.

I will now tell a lie and that lie will recount my former life as a rogue restaurant worker, bartender and drunk. The names and scenarios will be changed to protect the innocent and it will be greatly embellished. I will even take it to the furthest scope of your imagination. I will tell you a tall tale, but I promise you that somewhere beneath all those veils and layers, there is some truth. Pardon me while I forgive myself for my transgressions and I hope that you can forgive me too.

Love and stardust,
Kara

Love and Stardust

I've begun to believe that we are all truly made of stardust and that sometimes we align and sometimes we shine.

I feel the stars aligning and shining for me right now.

After a month of introspection, living within my head and extracting my thoughts from mind to paper, I finally finished my 20 pages of fiction to fulfill my admissions requirements for the MFA of Creative Writing at Murray State, but I'm in.

It was ugly.

First, I baptized my poor laptop with wine and it refused to be resurrected. I resorted to writing in a journal, and, with the help of my great friends, I got it typed out. Jackie typed most of it and I hijacked several friends' computers to complete the process.

The creative process was interesting. I would wake up in the middle of the night and write, drink, smoke absurd numbers of cigarettes and collapse into heap; completely spent. I decided that if this submission, which will serve as chapter one, wore me paper-thin, that I may not live through the completion of my work. It's cathartic, but tiring, and the lines pour from me like a slow-dripping faucet sometimes and sometimes like a wave that washes over my consciousness; straight from vein to paper.

So..meet Dani:-) She's my main girl. Dani is based on Shakespeare's Ophelia and is in love with a man who will never love her; an immortal. She kills herself in every incarnation, trying to make it work, trying to overcome their obstacles. She finally listens to her gut and her dreams and realizes that she is immortal as well.

I call her Dani in honor of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Anthony Keidis, who I adore, and names only one woman in any of his songs..Dani:-)

So I had to become Dani and we had a strange journey.

Writing is not unlike acting. You get inside the head of your character and explore.

During this process, I thought a lot, forgave a lot and laughed a lot. I want to thank my friends and family who supported me through this process and put up with my crazy ass.

I emerged from my head with some clarity and some intolerance for bullshit. I began to love myself and from there I discovered a world of love I've never known; especially for Dad, who is most like me..and the vastness of that love is immeasurable.

I called my grandmother and had discussions about everything from literature to why Dad doesn't write more.

I talked to dad about his favorite authors, his philosophies, and I've never felt to close to my family.

Dad, if you are reading this, I will tell you what Gran told me when I was just a little, scrawny thing.

"Write! Write like hell!"

I love you and I am so much like you that it's uncanny. You, my love, are inextricably tied to this legacy, as am I. We are storytellers and it's painful to see you bleed it halfway through newsletters and such. You have a Tolkein-like way of describing things and maybe my voice is a little different, but you made me believe in fairies and other worlds. I thank you for that:-)

I draw inspiration from everything right now because, truly, the story of you is the story of me, and, ultimately the story of us all.

We are all made of the same matter; the same stardust. Sometimes we align and sometimes we shine. Right now I am thanking my lucky stars.



I dig this wild ride through the cosmos.

Love and stardust XOXO,
Kara

A Writer's Manifesto

A writer's life is a curious thing. Like any artist, a writer seeks truth and through fact or fiction, seeks to immortalize those truths into something tangible and leaves that work behind as a living, breathing embodiment of self.

A writer wrestles with himself within the lines of work, struggling to both embrace and detach himself from life in order to examine existence and form new appreciation of it. In the process, the lines of reality blur as the realms of the real, the possible and the ridiculous plot themselves out before us.

Curious minds are, by nature, creative and reality may skew accordingly, if not for balance. One needs a touchstone, an anchor, in order to land; come back down to earth after a flight of fancy.

I could very well become a hermit and resign myself to a life of literary solitude.

Like Dickinson, I could lock myself in an attic and pine away in pages. Or create a Walden for myself, a world away from the fray of the everyday. However, I refuse to become five flavors of mental anguish and one can only live within oneself for so long without losing touch with their purpose. In order to examine humanity and existence, we must walk among it. We must live ordinary lives before we can become extraordinary.

So how do we balance our lives in a way that allows us to make sense of the lives we are living and the lives we create? How do we move through the lives we plot out before us? I'm trying to make sense of that right now.

I feel like a character in a novel, facing an array of trials to test my endurance and constitution. Sometimes I feel like it is my novel and sometimes I feel like I'm not always the author. In all actuality, it is the story of us all.

Every great story begins with a journey, an adventure and characters that do not, at first, realize their full potential. In our own stories, we have our introductions to the world, our struggles, resolutions, and the conclusions we draw from these lessons. We choose to be either dynamic or stagnant. We choose to be either the hero or live quiet lives, but even if we are not the main character, we contribute to the story in the book of life.

We are all searching for meaning, even if our research methods vary. The things that we find meaningful are different and there are many red herrings; distractions that take us off our path.

So if you find yourself caught in a fairytale, or any story, write it down. Write it down so that other characters can learn from your story. Perhaps it's not Canterbury Tales or the brothers Grimm, but if you have a thought in your head, write it. Leave more than your carbon footprint behind you on this little blue planet.

The life that you live is some flavor of human struggle that is ancient as the stars. You, my love, are a unique component of this universe and part of how we make sense of ourselves. So write it! Or use what talent you have to leave your experience behind. Write it, sculpt it, film it, but tell your story, because it is the story of us all.

Perhaps people may not listen. Sometimes they don't hear us, but if we can find a way to tuck our message in pages, hide it within reels, or in lyrics, we can clue them in on what we know. Maybe we can help them seek beauty and truth, when all they find is confusion. Perhaps it is a hard task, but it is a labor of love for fellow man.

An artist's mission must be clearly stated, if ever so subtly, if that makes sense. We cannot scream it, because that is too obtrusive. We must slip it in through the back door, tiptoe through the hallways, find our audience, and whisper to them and sing lullabyes. Whisper words of comfort and truth because everyone feels alone and struggles to come to terms with their own story. If they hear our stories, which resound with universal commonality, they can cradle their own pain and sing them softly to sleep, like little children.

Instructions

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi2pBZGJqj8

Life can be pretty confusing. I'm a woman. Do you think I ever know exactly what I want? Sometimes. So how do we know where to go or what to do?

If someone gave us a specific set of instructions, do you think any of us would follow them?
I'd say, sadly, no. As humans, I believe we are rebels by nature...and it just doesn't work that way because it's not exactly the same for everyone.

So where are our instructions? Where do we look for truth?

Perhaps it is in the plot of a story...cleverly tucked in pages or hidden within reels...a surreptitious set of meanings for the audience...

..But we perceive and create meaning in different ways. It's like reading the "Little Prince." Two people could read it and get completely different meaning from the novel. Read it when you are ten, then again at 30. Your story is different and so the book itself means something different to you.

I believe that art is a component of several things--intent, creation, conveyance, and the evoking of thought, action, or emotion.

In that sense, life becomes pretty complicated, because by that definition, life is art. I guess that's why art imitates life and perhaps it's no imitation.

So maybe art is more like a mirror and the artist's intent gets lost in the whole process..unless it is clearly, clearly expressed. So how do we become a mirror to the world? My best solution is to tell stories. Aesop told fables, Jesus told parables and, perhaps I'm the least of the lowly, but I will tell stories. Stories spin a tale with a face that we can relate to on a more personal level, as humans.

So maybe when I'm elbow-deep in snot, watching "The Notebook," it is really a story of hope..hope that maybe one day I'll be loved in a lifelong sense..in a pee-my-pants-perfect kind of way...but maybe it won't be perfect and maybe it will be messy, but nothing will ever happen if I don't do anything.

Nothing happens in a stagnant pool, but if we can learn to ebb and flow and reflect the world in our waters and likewise, learn from the stories that WE tell and from those told before, maybe we can be hopeful and spread stories of hope. Maybe one day the world will see that it's all about our individual stories and how we understand and connect with each other. Because we are all in this together.

If you don't believe me, just listen to NPR. Every great news story has a face. Every great comedian adds a personal story to their act. Every cook has a personal touch to their recipe.

So when we live through this romantic comedy that we call life, what do we leave behind? It's our carbon footprint and our story...and hope.

Life is Knowing Your Ass From Your Apron Strings

The day you wake up and realize what really matters is an unusual day and a day of celebration. I speak as a changed woman; a woman who has not withstood the terrors of war or pestilence or anything so violent, but a woman who has stared her own worst fears in the face.

Fear is a curious thing, really, and nothing is ideally operable under it's circumstance. Fear is not a motivator, but a reactive agent. It is a blazing, fiery red flag. To face fear is to stare at it's flag, watch it as it marches into your life and look at it not as the enemy, but as an indicator of something else. Fear is internal. What makes us fearful? Is it ever rational and what is a healthy response to fear?

I'm not an expert and I'm not sure but I think that fear is never a rational thing because in a state of fear, no one can be rational. No one can be fearful and live a purposeful life.

So what are my fears? I guess it's time to come clean. My fears were many and my myriad of trepidation was completely ridiculous. Let's start with the most silly.

I was afraid of blowing up to ridiculous proportions and that no one would want to look at me, be my friend, or ever love me. So why did I feel that way? I have struggled with my weight my entire life. The fact of the matter; as a matter of fact, is that people love me and could care less what I look like, or if I had my own zip code.

I was the one who could not stand to look at myself. I was the one who hated myself and put myself..my own body..through years of torture and starvation to try to fade away..to shrink within myself. Years of diets, different flavors of the same denial of self, left me empty, hollow and weak. I've tried everything from popping pills, laxatives, starvation, regurgitation, and drowning it out with alcohol (which by the way, makes you hungry.) So what was I really thirsty for?

As I nearly faded away into myself..into a life less extraordinary..I was full of doubt. I never thought I could be anything remarkable and, moreover, I compensated for what I lacked with an exaggerated fascade of self. I was a woman hiding behind a mask of fake self-assurance.

I was an actor. I felt like a fraud.

To be quite honest, I'm not much of a bartender. I am also the worst waitress in the world. I am a complete idiot most of the time. I am clumsy and trip over my own feet. I have created new levels of dumbassery, really.

But why? How the hell did I manage to make it through college, facing even the mathematical nuances of calculus, and graduate with honors. I'm an idiot savant. I'm the rain man of Murray, KY.

That's enough for now. I have to go to work now and try to know my ass from my apron strings:-) Color me a little more perceptive.

Sleeping Beauty

Have you ever noticed that once in a while life seems like a novel or a cinematic caper? It's times like these that knock my head out of the clouds and send me plummeting back to our little, blue planet. So why am I so distracted?

I will chalk it up to misplaced importance of minor details.

So here I am, one of billions, placed on planet Earth which is merely a speck in the sky; a tiny cross-section of an unfathomable forever of stars and stardust. So what?

Who cares about some poet on a bar stool? Who cares about some chick slinging beer and the occasional feature article? I say that as though the words sling carelessly from mind to Microsoft Word, which is not the case, fortunately.

So how careless are our lives and how short is our visit on this planet?

I am the eternal multi-tasker, but I've come to the conclusion that it's not what you do, it's what you do effectively. Sure, I can make drinks, write, and take pictures...

..but how good am I, really?

It's like trying to talk on the phone while you are eating, watching TV and writing a paper..something is going to get lost in translation or you will choke on your yummy sugar-free chocolate truffles in the process.

So much is lost in translation and the confusion is rooted in concentration of thought. If your energy is scattered, your thoughts will be too and that confusion will resonate in your communication. Also, your scatter-brained self will no more know how to tie your shoelaces than calculate algorithms. So what's my name again?

So, I start tomorrow knowing I am a novice and knowing that I am no more than a bag of bones, a mass of carbon-based matter until I can concentrate my energies on something more than the life I thought I wanted, the life validated by someone or something else. It's like asking someone to place value on a lily. It's beautiful and delicate, but what can you say about it, really?

So, we need to be persons of conscience and substance.

So, are we mavericks? No. Are we particularly different than those who have gone before? No.

Like everyone, I've first blamed my parents, then blamed my society, blamed my world, blamed the media, blamed boys, blamed everyone else but the person who was really to blame...

..me.

So this is the story of someone who can finally look at herself in the mirror. This is the story of a girl.

This isn't a fairytale.

Have you ever read the original Grimm's fairy tales? It's more like that. The stories you heard in youth were a watered-down version of the original. I guess that's life, huh? Check it out someday. They are pretty cool. It's not always a happily ever-after and the plot is a little messier along the way, but doesn't that make it all the more beautiful when it comes to the climax?

So, I've realized lately that I have some explaining to do...mostly to myself. You're probably wondering how a girl can graduate with honors and still be a complete idiot. It's mostly about awareness.

I'm beginning to wake up.