The Carruths

I’ve had an interesting train of thought that kind of spread itself out through the day, but finally demanded i write it down. I went from nail polish to how awesome my parents are when it comes to the rather unconventional marriage that Ben and i have. Here’s how it goes.

For the past few months, i’ve had a decided Thing with painting my nails. I’ve already found a favorite brand (SinfulColors), and i’ve decided that jelly colors are better than pearly, metallic or glittery ones. Three coats are better than two, but four coats is just asking for trouble. I’ve got a system.

I picked up black and orange nail polish for Hallowe’en, and that was neat. Not too long after that, i wanted to find yellow and white so i could make my nails look like bits of candy corn. I like doing thematic colors on my nails. It’s like my hands and i are sharing an inside joke, sometimes. Being easily amused is a good thing.

About a week ago, i thought i should do my nails in red and green – it being December and all. But that didn’t even last a day. I just wasn’t feeling it. So i painted them blue and white and that did the trick.

As i’ve been musing on those colors, they brought to mind my heritage and (wait for it) my hairitage. There’s a few reasons i keep my hair very closely cut, and here they are in order of length:

1. perma-bedhead (2 -6 inches)
2. perma-frizz (aka “jewfro”, 6-12 inches)
3. stringy and too thin/soft to stay in any given position; also: very fragile, breaks/splits easily (12+ inches)

My hair is much like my fingernails: thin, breaks easily, and best kept as short as possible. I was telling someone about jewfro the other day, and they’d never heard the term before. A lot of people that i’ve known who are of Jewish descent have frizzy hair. Rather simple, really.

Almost a decade ago, i was talking with a coworker about how frustratingly soft and thin my hair was, and she asked me if i was of Ukrainian descent. I stuttered out a question asking her how on earth she knew that, and she told me that she used to know a lot of Ukrainian women, and they all complained about having hair like mine.

And a few years later, when comparing notes with another coworker about Russian/Ukrainian ancestors, i told him how my great-grandparents’ families and their friends had all come over from Kiev en masse. He’d asked if they were Jewish, and i asked him how he’d guessed that. He responded by saying that that was a common thing for Russian/Ukrainian Jews, to all emigrate together like that.

Perhaps it’s not so strange that i would find these two conversations very reaffirming. They reinforced the idea that i’d come from somewhere, that i had history. Growing up a generic-looking white mutt in the Midwest, it was easy to feel like i had no roots. It made me feel out of place to be so separated my ancestry.

But then again, i come from a rather long line of unconventional people. I could ramble on for books about this, but i’ll try to keep it short.

My grandparents (my dad’s parents) had a shockingly unconventional marriage. He was a first-generation American Ukrainian Jew and she was raised Irish Catholic. His family disowned him when they married (because she wasn’t Jewish), and they’d had to keep their marriage a secret because they worked at the same department store. It was policy back then to not have two married people working in the same place. Once they were found out, they ended up transferring him to another store because they liked them both so much and didn’t want to fire either one.

My grandma realized when she was 13 that this whole religion thing didn’t make any sense to her, and she and her husband believed that the golden rule was the only religion a person needed. Be nice, treat other people as you would have them treat you, and look for the good in people. Pretty simple. They raised my father without religion, and that’s how he raised me. My dad once told me that he wanted to raise me to know how to make good choices, and that if i ever decided i wanted religion in my life, i would be able to choose wisely in that regard. But i’m getting ahead of myself, here.

After my father was born, my grandma’s friends would say, “Oh, we’d love to see your baby… but we’re not sure if the neighbors would… approve of your husband.” Whereupon my grandma would respond by saying that she didn’t go where her husband wasn’t welcome. She and my grandpa had a shoe store where they would hire people who were qualified – regardless of the color of their skin. They felt that good people were good people, and that race had not a damn whit to do with the matter.

My dad was an only child; he knew what he wanted to do with his life when he was 8 years old – that, in and of itself, may or may not be uncommon. What’s unusual about it is that he has been involved in that field since he was 14 (maybe younger? I can’t exactly recall), and is still there to this day. He met my mom there, and they did something that horrified all of his mom’s friends: my parents lived together for several years before they were married. Truly shocking, in that day and age. His parents didn’t care: they were used to people being shocked at their relationship, so it wasn’t a big deal to them.

My dad and stepmum had a bit of a rough start in their relationship, given how his relationship with my mom ended (it wasn’t pleasant, and i wasn’t old enough to know the real details – so i won’t repeat them here). My stepmum grew up in London in the 60s and 70s, and used to tell me that because of that, there was nothing i could do that would shock her. In any case, she and my dad lived together for 10 years before they got married.

My stepmum used to tell me, when i was a teenager, that no one could pay her enough to be my age again. She’d hated being a teenager, and that it was a simply awful time for most people. Her advice was to just get through it as best as you could, and keep in mind that Things Will Get Better (she was right) and that the dramas and tragedies of high school were not, in actual fact, the end of the world as i knew it (and she was right again).

When my 10th year high school reunion was coming up, i couldn’t decide whether or not i wanted to go. I decided to talk with various friends and family about it. Most of my friends and coworkers said i should go and just see what happened. My stepmum said, “My dear, you were miserable in high school. You weren’t mainstream then, and you’re not mainstream now – why would you want to relive something that made you unhappy.” Good solid sense, there. I ended up not going to my 10 year reunion… just like i hadn’t gone to my senior prom and my high school graduation – too tedious for me, thanks.

So, long story short: i come from a long line of unconventional folks. Some of them more or less weird than others, but all of them fairly independent. They knew what they wanted to do, and damn to hell anyone who felt they were wrong for loving someone of another religion, or for having the audacity to love someone before being married to them.

It really should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that my parents are totally kosher with the relationship that Ben and i have. He stays home and writes, takes care of the household bits and takes care of the Lindsay bits. I bring home the proverbial bacon and he cooks it. He is the house-husband, i am the working wife. And we like this. We did it on purpose. It was no accident that this came to be the way we live. Typical working situations drive him batty, and my fibromyalgia means i literally am not physically capable of keeping up with the demands of cooking and cleaning.

As an interesting side note: our way of life would have made perfect sense if my ancestors had stayed put: in Russia (and many of the surrounding countries), Jewish families had a similar structure as we do now. The men stayed home and studied religion, and the women went out and worked. What Americans think of as traditional gender roles, if you go back far enough in some directions, aren’t really all that traditional.

So in some ways, i can (and really can’t) understand why our chosen way of life seems to upset some folks. It works for us, it’s not hurting anyone, and we’re happy this way. Ben did not push me into this so that he wouldn’t have to work. I did not push Ben into this so i could control him by denying him fiscal independence. We discussed this for weeks, planned it for months before we put it into action. We decided that the initial go wouldn’t necessarily be permanent: we’d try it out for 6 months and see if it worked. If it didn’t, we’d make changes as necessary. Only it turned out that it worked fantastically, so any changes that we’ve made were just extensions of our original decision.

I’m rather of the same thinking as my grandma about this: the relationship that Ben and i have is not only Our Business, but it is also a primary source of our happiness. It works for us, and if our choices don’t work for you, don’t make the same decisions.

And as my grandma would say, we should all live and be well.

(Originally posted at Babble – posted here because Ben and i co-wrote it and i think it’s pretty damn burly.)

So, yeah. The whole Oprah thing.

She has more wealth than some countries on the map. She’s one of the most powerful and influential women in this hemisphere, and she hates her body.

There’s probably a whole lot that can be said about this, but i think ultimately it comes to this: money can’t buy happiness. Money can’t buy self-esteem. If you don’t like yourself when you’re fat, losing weight might give you a warm glowy fuzzy for a while, but you’re still the same person on the inside. Eventually, that’s going to catch up with you.

If you don’t like yourself or your body, there are no quick fixes. No special book is going to flick a switch that will make all of your negativity go away. No one has a magic wand for this kind of thing. You can’t just immediately love a random stranger on the street, right? So learning how to love yourself means taking the time to figure out who the hell you are. A book can’t tell you who you are. A talk show host can’t tell you who you are. The only person who can figure it out is you.

About a dozen years ago, i was on the tail end of an incredibly dysfunctional relationship. Dude told me, among other things, that he didn’t like my dark bits, my negativity. In my desperation to cling to the remnants of a co-dependent relationship, i decided i was going to be an eternal ray of sunshine. Always smiling, always cheerful, always looking for the good in things. For a while, it worked. After about a month, i started to have the worst nightmares of my life. I had pushed that negativity so far down that it could only come through in my dreams – and boy, did it ever. It wasn’t gone, it was just hiding and festering. It wasn’t until i realized that i needed to accept all of myself, good and bad – and to hell with him if he couldn’t – that the nightmares stopped.

Ben would like to note, here: in field medicine, one of the most important (and slightly counter-intuitive) principles is that you never ever ever cover a wound that is already infected.

I can’t tell you who you are or why you should like yourself – and neither can Oprah. Oh sure, i can tell you why it’s a good idea, but the finer details are up to you. Don’t push any part of yourself away, because i can guarantee you that it will come back to bite you in the ass. No matter what size that ass is.

Again, from Ben:

A note on Oprah: why would anyone be surprised that the message and values from one of the most influential women in the hemisphere would be common? More or less, the kind of thing that we would expect? There’s a bit of chicken and egg thing there, but very few people rise to influence and power (in their lifetimes) by contradicting the viewpoints of their supporters. We don’t support the heroes or leaders that have better ideas than we have. We support the ones that have similar ideas to the ones we have. Given all of the known factors, why would we be at all surprised that the voice of the American Woman is a little fluffy, more than a little superficial, and has at least a hint of self-loathing?

I view Oprah as a very disturbing symptom. There are three parts to this problem. First, that these ideas and that this model of identity is popular enough to have mass support. Second, by virtue of it’s exposure and that popular support, it has a lot of influence. Those two are a feedback loop – they feed into each other endlessly. The more influential, the more support it gets, and vice versa. One of the more disturbing elements of that feedback loop is that this paradigm presents, calls, and identifies itself as revolutionary. And in so doing, all but perfectly subverts any attempt to introduce a genuinely visionary idiom.

This viewpoint quite literally owns the copyright on radical feminine identity. The mainstream can and has claimed the dynamic social energy that is the rightful property of any force for change. Anything that puts itself out there as The New And The Different, it’s a very effective mechanism for retarding social progress: take the banal, take the bland, take the mainstream, and (at worst) take the most ineffective, vacuous, and insubstantial version possible of the kind of change that people want and will support, and label it as the revolution they so desperately need.

That ties into the third element of this that i find disturbing – that this is a message and perspective which is presumed to be of widespread enough appeal, and reliable enough appeal that it is viewed as a sound investment. This is a message that is sufficiently safe that those that are in the business of making such decisions do not feel that sinking a fortune into airtime, advertising dollars, and franchising is an economic risk. This is, in a social sense and a fiscal sense, a safe message. Now, consider that within the context of identity-focused feminism, and concerns about the way women are portrayed in media, in the images they are fed, and general objections to ideas that women are taught to hold true of themselves. Now ask: is a “safe message” one that you want?

Think about all of the things that a message would have to be in agreement with, or at least non-threatening to, in order to be considered economically safe. And then ask if this is a thing, firstly, that you wish to support, second: if/when the spokespersons for said safe message express self-loathing, dissatisfaction, and an incompleteness of personhood that can only be alleviated by opening the wallet – if, when this occurs, you have any right to be surprised.

There are few means of social and economic control as reliable, as virulent, and as pernicious as control over identity.

Tangent: we would do well to be cautious in our selection of heroes. One of the loudest and most swiftly-forgotten themes of the mid to late 70s punk movement was summarized very simply and aptly in the title of a documentary dedicated to the subject: Kill Your Heroes. While people at the time, and even now, may associate that phrase (or the idea that it implies) with an unrequited love of Jodie Foster, or the tragic loss of John Lennon, the spirit of the idea hearkens back to a far older phrase: “When you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.” This is why i say punk is, in many ways, very loud Buddhism.

For those unfamiliar with the idea, the essence of it is this: a hero in the flesh, speaking, talking, acting at the same time that they are worshiped, can be strings tied to the joints of your idealism – with the other end held by hands unseen. This does not necessarily mean conspiracy or conscious manipulation, but rather that you have, in allowing your ideas to be invested in the form of another person, put the value, endurance and character of those ideas in hands whose actions you cannot see. When you call someone a hero, you cannot know, can never know, why they are a hero – can never know the internal conflicts, the decisions, the compositional indulgences, or the second thoughts that go on behind the things that you see, and to which you assign this quality of hero. You are setting yourself up to be betrayed by the humanity of your heroes, and you have betrayed your heroes in making them less than human.

There’s more.

The other lesson of Siddhartha and Sid Vicious is that the living hero is your declared boundary of virtue. They are the paragon, the apex of that to which you aspire. To wit, a line you are not willing to exceed. There are few experiences as potentially painful and horrifying as surpassing one’s heroes. This is an experience of such terror that most will recoil from the idea, devalue or reject their own progress and accomplishments, rather than acknowledge the simple proposition that, having been inspired by someone who did well, they have done better. Or, having been inspired by someone who did the best they could, we have done the best we can – and that perhaps those results look different from those which we sought to emulate.

There’s still more.

Still another lesson, directly intended by the Buddhist phrasing and subsequently commented on at length, is that when we can point to the best – the best thing, the best idea, the best person, the best virtue, the best saint – our ideas have become fixed. We can no longer change, we can no longer adapt; we no longer observe, digest and integrate: we compare and emulate… A necessary activity, a necessary process, but a very poor substitute for being able to do these things – and others as well. A theme frequently repeated in Eastern thought is that there is no one thing, one idea so good as to warrant the exclusion of others.

Still another way to approach these truisms, and they ideas they impart, is a slight rephrasing which may make their intended message clearer to the modern ear: kill your ideas of your heroes. Ruthlessly search your thoughts, search your ideas for the cold, inflexible, ageless alabaster statues of your heroes – and smash them to pieces. Those mental statues that we construct in honor of people – who are people as we are people – all too often, for us, become substitutes for the people. It is entirely too easy for us to envision our heroes living as we have enshrined them. It is entirely too easy for us to, on some level, believe that that is actually how they lived. That we do not build statues because of what they did, but because they did what they did because they were, in a sense, already statues.

Oprah Winfrey is a woman in a position of cultural and economic power because there are many for whom she makes an acceptable statue. Before we judge too harshly those who put an offering bowl at her feet, let us consider carefully those who have already placed their coin in it. As we do so, we would do well to do so gently and charitably, as we must (if we are honest) eventually recognize our own coin within the coffers.

(And yes: i was the one who typed it all out as Ben was saying it. Which means that my hands are a bit tired, but also means that any grammatical oddities are the result of taking all that dictation. Wooga.)

So Ben and i were talking about a post i’d made over at my FA blog. After reading it, he rather audibly voiced frustration in my direction, saying “You need to make another blog!” This has been coming up more and more as of late. He feels that i’ve been raising a lot of good topics over there, and the things i’m writing have a much farther reach than the specific topic of that blog. Basically, i have some really good things that i’ll write, and then at the last minute, i think of a way to tie them in with fat, or fat acceptance or body acceptance. (In the future, i’ll probably just post them over here. We’ve decided this is a “whatever” kind of blog, and so it serves as a good catch-all for, well, whatever.)

And to some extent, i agree. The things i’m writing about over there are important and partially relevant to the main topics over there… but they ultimately have a larger scope.

Right, so we were talking about why the discussion of Being Weird is important, and he said something that made me want to quote him:

It feels like everyone is at a themed costumed party, when i thought i was attending a support group.

At that point, i started taking dictation, typing out what he was saying. The rest of the quoted bits are what he said.

I know how problematic questions of authenticity are, but i feel like we can take those sorts of questions at least a little seriously, given that we can recognize authenticity, and that the recognition of it has such an impact.

When you meet someone who really is Whatever, there’s no question. It as certain as that there is air in your lungs.

(Side note: i originally typed “lunch” instead of lungs, and after i snickered, i had to explain to Ben why i was laughing. I then went on to make matters worse (in that he almost snorted his dinner out of his nose) by saying, “it’s the new anaerobic diet!”)

It really is much on the brainmeats lately, because given the strangeness factor, it feels like i’m not allowed to ground, to connect with what i really need to connect with to rejuvenate, to center myself – to rest or recoup. It feels like a skin-dive, where i’m never allowed to come back up for air. Maybe more like a scuba dive, where i’m only allowed to go back up for fresh air tanks when no one’s looking. “I’ve been breathing CO2 for ten minutes, but dammit! The fish are still watching!”

A lot of that’s been really up in my face, with me running errands in the neighborhood, with me mingling as much as i do – because man, there is no middle ground. There are people who are really cheerful and friendly and curious. They’ll ask me why i look funny – ask me about my ears, about my nose, or if i live in the neighborhood, because i don’t look like i should be shopping here. So there’s that, and there’s silent and varying degrees of fearful hostility. I actually had someone throw up their hands in front of their face as they were walking past me – as if to ward me off.

That degree of reaction is by no means common. My first thought was “Am i so strange as to merit that kind of response?” And then i caught myself and realized that was wrong. That was a false correlation. The right question was: “Am i so familiar that you know how to react, and that this is the correct reaction? Are you so sure that you have me pegged, and that you have me pegged in such a way that you are confident in so extreme a response?” Because of course, the more extreme your response to someone or something, the more sure you better be that you’ve sized it up correctly. But yeah, the question is not “Am i so strange that you respond this way”, it’s “Am i so familiar?”

(Side note from Lindsay: the reaction to me is rarely that extreme, but i have had similar experiences. In Chicago, i’ve had more than one little old lady cross herself while looking in my direction.)

You know what’s surprising, though? There’s the exception of people that i’ve had previous contact with, like the people at the video store – they’re always pleased to see me. But there seems to be a store culture there, they seem to know us. Maybe we’re part of the training: “There are some weird white people who come in, but they’re really nice and really cool.” Most of the people who hang out at the flea market are really friendly – maybe because the flea market is a little pocket of forced diversity. You have some stalls that are run by Vietnamese or Chinese families, some by older black families, some by younger black families, some single entrepreneurs, some who go for the casual attire and others for the formal clothing. With the customers there it’s a very mixed bag, the reactions i get. But the people who work there, who own the stalls, they’re always friendly. Not in that sales-pitch kind of friendly, either.

Outside the people i’ve had contact with, the group demographic that is most reliably friendly is older folks. If their hair is visibly silver, it’s a much better than 50/50 shot that they’ll be friendly. Those are the ones who make small talk in the grocery store line. They’ll flat-out ask about my piercings, and ask if i live around here. Their reactions will be positive, like “that’s neat” or “that looks really nice.” Just the other day, a very old woman (if she’s a day under 70 i’d be amazed) in a motorized wheelchair said, “I didn’t think that could look good, but that looks really smart.” I don’t get that: you’d think that with pop culture exposure, that it would be younger people that would be more accepting – but it isn’t. The younger folks are generally more reliably surly (like that’s a shock, coming from a teenager). I find it interesting that i’m far more likely to engage in some pleasant small talk with people 30 or 40 years my senior, than people closer to my own age.

I find this incredibly interesting. I’ve been taking the bus to and from work for a few months now, and i can count on one hand the number of times that someone has sat next to me on a crowded bus. People would rather stand than sit next to me. On the bus i take between home and the train station, i am the sole white woman on the bus, and that’s very likely a factor here. In the morning, the bus is lit inside, and it’s very dark outside, so the mirrors make great windows. I’ll look “outside” – sometimes looking at the lights that come through, but more often watching the reflections of my fellow bus-mates. I have seen people enter the bus, scan the seats, and stop to look at the empty seat next to me. There’s a brief pause where they consider it, but then they very decidedly move on to another seat.

I’ve wondered: is it because i’m fat, and they think there’s not enough room to sit next to me? Surely i don’t take up that much space. Is it because i’m white, and they don’t want to offend me or something? Is it because i’m weird looking, with my black leather motorcycle jacket, and my buzzed haircut?

The other day, i had a conversation that shed some potential light on the matter. I was waiting for the bus that would take me home. I was standing in the unofficial smoking area, having my much-craved first cigarette of the day. An older black man came out of the train station, looked around, saw me, and started walking in my direction. He made eye contact and looked my smoke – very clearly indicating that he was about to ask for a cigarette. I paused the music on my iPod and took the earbuds out of my ear. He asked for a smoke and i gave him three (he looked like he was a bit down on his luck). I loaned him my lighter when he asked to borrow it, and smiled politely when he gave it back.

After a few minutes of standing there, smoking, he looked at me and said, “Hey, you don’t mind if i ask you a personal question? I don’t want to be rude or anything.” I grinned and said, “Man, i’m from Chicago: i have a different definition of rude. So long as you don’t hit me or spit on me, i’m a’ight.”

He told me his name, and then asked me if i “knew anything about obtaining some pills”. I shook my head, “Nah, i don’t know anything about that stuff. Not my sort of thing, you know?”

A few more minutes passed. He turned back to me and said, “Uh, i wasn’t trying to ask you about anything illegal, you know?” – “Hey, what you do is your business, not mine.”

He grinned and looked relieved. “Well, you know why i asked you right? Why i targeted you?” I raised an eyebrow at the word “targeted”, and thought it might have had something to do with the nose ring or the abovementioned jacket, but i shrugged. “It’s because you’re white. You see all these other black people over here? I couldn’t ask any of them about it.”

I laughed and said i supposed it was a stereotype for a reason. White folks who still have day jobs are probably more inclined to get into “safe” drugs like pills. A few years ago, Ben had a rather unpleasant experience in our old hangout pub. He’d gone to the bathroom, minding his own business. He was wearing a tank top that showed off the jaguar spot tattoos on his shoulders, and even then his septum ring was rather large and prominent. On his way back to the table, a white guy in khakis and a button-down shirt came up to him and asked him for drugs. Ben looked at him and said he didn’t do that kind of thing – and then this guy tried to argue with him about it! “C’mon man, i know you’ve got something. I mean, look at you.”

By this point i’ve strayed pretty far from the original topic of weirdbits. But they’ve been weighing heavy on the mind lately, so i’m sure we’ll come back to that later. This first post is a bit of a doozy (even if only in length), and it’s almost time for bed.