madquestionasking

Fucking hell.

Have you ever noticed how men coast through life in the looks department? Some say they even look better as they age. Well, today I was people watching and I made an observation: women at a particular age – I think late 40s – start to look less like women and more like a hybrid between the sexes.

I mentioned this to the person I was with and they whole heartedly agreed, with a whispered “It’s true! But don’t let the cat out of the bag…everyone knows this. It’s just too unkind to mention.”

Fucking hell.

Is it hormones? Or lack thereof? Am I going to morph into a mannish female and not care or even notice because I won’t have the hormones to feel my loss? Jesus, I’m already too tall and too aggressive. I can’t lose my femininity!

So if I’m 36; I have what . . . 10 to 15 years or so before the drain of girlishness seeps permanently from my body, rendering me a sexless morph?

To quell the panic ensuing in my mind, I try to assure myself that maybe I can I grow old gracefully. Sure, I can look as graceful as a swan. . . until I open my mouth, call someone a lard-ass or say a word like “fudge-packer” and laugh my head off as the person who heard me, says “Ewwww Ingrid, what’s wrong with you!” Any visible grace I might have is crushed under the weight of this mouth. So that’s not going to work. I’m fucked.

Am I going to be wearing khaki shorts, three to four inches above my knees, and a salmon-hued polo top, with the collar up, that exactly matches the person I settled for as a “companion” in 15 years?!?

I’m struggling with my current age, the past, the future and this uncontrollable urge to run and, for lack of a better word, hunt; I need to be an animal, to smell, taste and FEEL, to act on this bottled instinct.

My instinct, an instinct that is oppressed by a culture where it’s all about pets, coupons, 5Ks, non-stop charities and fundraising with no cure in sight, wants me to run away from conversations about TV shows (white people fantasies; men wanting to be Don Draper or women wanting to be bit by vampires) and people who talk about buying cute shit at Target while they hate on Wal-Mart as if one is really ethically a better place to shop. My instinct tells me that wearing asinine Livestrong wrist bands and buying pink cancer crap or autism puzzle ribbon stickers are not movements.  All that stuff is just feel-good, heart-string-pulling, FAKE compassion;  junk, polluting the world. The only awareness you’ve demonstrated is that your money is now showing up in some rich corporation’s offshore bank account. My instinct says “fuck you” to food fads like quinoa and coconut water, and on and on it goes. It’s all just clutter. Yet no matter how much my instinct has all this clutter backed up against a wall, my instinct still loses; I never get to hunt. I don’t have a pack to run with; I am alone.

And now, on top of all my angst that never seems to leave me or find me in the comfort of a man (a dreamy, sentimental brainiac who would slip his huge hand in mine and build me a cabin in the woods, in return for which I would adjust his mood, soothing any angry thoughts from his mind as we sustain our lives on books, records, red wine and love alone) I have in my future the blow of losing my visible feminine sexuality and wearing polo tops with the collar up!

Fucking hell.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

A few years ago I found myself about to be arrested for “speaking aggressively.” This wasn’t the first time my mouth had gotten me into trouble. In high school I was suspended a few times, once for standing up in class and telling my religion teacher to “Fuck off” at 16. My mouth is good at lots of things, but especially at saying whatever I need it to in the heat of the moment.

It was the last nice Sunday in the Fall. The kind of day I’d have liked to have sat on my porch and read all day, enjoying the sound of the wind gently pulling the leaves to the ground. Instead, this beautiful day was ruined by a horrid, very loud, embarrassingly lame benefit concert in support of breast cancer research that was being held in the park two blocks from my house. All the music was crappy wannabe death metal. To be honest I wasn’t even sure of the genre, it was just shit for music.

The benefit was supposed to be over at 8, my kid’s bedtime. By 8:45 the music was still going strong. My youngest child couldn’t get to sleep with the noise so I decided to find out why the concert wasn’t over yet and walked over there like an angry Momma bear.

I found two cops and asked what was going on and demanded the concert end. (I must insert here that this is classic tired mother/ unhappy wife behavior, this sort of bitchy uptightness can be identified easily in the suburbs.) The cop didn’t like how I was speaking and said “If you don’t stop talking so aggressively to me, I am going to arrest you.”

No, no, no, no, no. No. Nobody threatens me. In fact, my mouth is like a time bomb, waiting for any sort of challenge or threat to set it off, especially from so-called authority.

I paused, genuinely shocked, and took a step forward and said very slowly, “Go ahead.” Then in a tone that mimicked De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me?” I asked “You’re threatened by me? Who else scares you? Your mother or your wife?”

He was silent. Dude was stunned. The cop next to him just squirmed. My final parting words were “Shut it down. Now. It’s past my kid’s bedtime.” And I turned and walked home. I wasn’t afraid in the least. I have a deep personal sense of security and a basic faith in Freedom of Speech that tells me I can say whatever I want, whenever I want, even to a cop with a gun.

The only place (besides creepy Arizona) I ever felt genuinely afraid enough to keep quiet was the visit I had to Moscow back in 2003. I went with a friend who had left Russia as a Jewish refugee some 18 years before our visit. He came to the US with many stories of oppression, one suitcase, his mother and 300 dollars. He got situated in the Russian Jewish community of Northeast Philadelphia, changed his name to Gary and became a pharmacist.

From Russia with Love

On more than one occasion during our visit to Moscow, I was instructed by Gary to be quiet. My very quiet friend Brooke was on this trip as well, her own silence was in over-drive. It was my impression that there is a baseline of extreme uncertainty in the citizens of Russia. There is a feeling that at anytime the shit is going to hit the fan, you can feel it everywhere you go. The feeling is that if you speak out of line, you will be thrown in jail. Russians, speak or communicate with their eyes first. Words are carefully spoken, they do not have freedom of speech.

It’s nothing like here in the US, where we take for granted that we can basically say whatever we want. Although most Americans, seemingly unaware of this freedom to speak, choose instead to be dull. Or worse, politically correct in their language. So bored am I by the news, media and even the art world that I assume that the real perpetrator of this mass dullness is the corporations who control the voices (journalists, artists) that should inspire the rest of us to SPEAK UP.

Watching the recent news in Russia about Pussy Riot, the protest punk band, who had three of its members arrested has been fascinating to me. What their trial is showing, that Putin and his state religion are afraid of a bunch of girls, shows exactly how powerful a human voice can be. It shows exactly why art and freedom of language is controlled by governments and in our case, corporations. Three 20-something girls are challenging a world superpower and all they did was don colorful balaclavas and sing songs in church and this is threatening to undermine someone as powerful as Putin? It’s incredible. I hope the face of Russia is changed by these brave women, that all the control Putin has is set up on its head and exposed through something as ridiculous as the crime of hooliganism.

My own dukes are always up, my mouth is always ready to wallop an unsuspecting oppressor. But I fear that as a society we may not even be aware of how dulled down or complacent we are in our language, in our right to speak. Often I hear friends say that they can’t say whatever they want because of fear of losing their job, or worried they may offend an in-law. This is sad and startling to me, because on some level of relativity we are all held down or agree to be held down. To stay quiet. My own freedom to speak out, to tell a teacher to “fuck off”, to challenge a cop threatening to arrest me (who ironically was protecting the right for the concert to continue from me, a pissed-off house wife) is a right I hope I never lose. A right I hope I never take for granted.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved