This week’s prompt, in honor of Valentine’s Day, was hearts. I collected quite a few in a Flickr Gallery, but I’m going to show you a few of my favorites here.
I left my heart in San Francisco:
Temple bells, heart clappers. I took this picture in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was quite common to see bells with the hearts hanging from them, like this:
A string of bleeding hearts, which always remind me of our neighbor Esther, from when I was a child. Esther had a Hummel collection, and she told us if we touched the dolls, our fingerprints would stain them. She also had bleeding hearts in her garden.
Hearts (and bones) loteria at the little Mexican shop on Broadway, on Capitol Hill:
Recently I was having a conversation with some people about identity and labeling – specifically around sexuality. One of my friends asked me what queer meant to me. He felt it was vague and unspecific, whereas for me, I feel it’s more meaningful and a better descriptor than the other options that are available.
Erika Moen drew a comic a couple of years ago that encapsulates fairly well how I feel, but yesterday after another friend asked me what queer meant to me, I realized it didn’t tell the whole story.
I came out as bisexual over twenty years ago, and I felt that identity/label fit for a long, long time. I was (and am) attracted to both men and women. But over the last several years, as I learned more about the gender spectrum, I felt constrained by this particular label. As the comments and discussions around Facebook’s decision to allow people to indicate a “custom” gender illustrate, there are far more than the two genders we’ve been led to believe.
But there are a few other components that Erika’s comic doesn’t touch on. Just as lesbians and gay men get a label that doesn’t have sexual in it, neither does queer. If you ask most people along the spectrum of gender and sexuality, I’d guess that while sexuality is a component of who they are, it’s not THE defining quality.
Finally, as I indicate in the title of this piece, I like queer for its OTHER and much OLDER meaning: odd, strange, or weird. I’ve always felt a little bit like an outsider, even within supposedly queer space. I’m too much this or not enough that. I like that queer is inclusive, broad and maybe a little slippery. It makes it that much harder for other people to define me, and that suits me just fine.
I have to admit, I was having a little trouble with the prompt this week. And then I started looking at my pictures from Yellowstone that I took last summer.
I LOVE this one of the wavy orange bacterial mats in the Grand Prismatic Spring disappearing into the fog:
Here’s the same spring from a higher (and clearer) vantage point:
This pinecone, with its zigs and zags:
And finally, these burnt snags, pointing into infinity, but not straight away:
Yesterday I returned from my week-long and now annual trip to Colorado to ski with my family. Last year I flew home with a bunch of guys who were returning from a motorcycle rally. Apparently their rally is the same time as my family’s annual ski trip. I had mentioned to my parents that this happened last year, and sure enough, when I got to my gate, there was a group of guys returning from their rally.
I am notoriously shy about taking pictures of strangers. I always like to ask permission, which I usually don’t screw up my courage to do. I was standing behind this man while waiting to board the plane. He had a freshly shaved scalp with an elaborate tattoo, a long, grey beard and this particular shirt on. I was admiring the design and asked him if I could take a picture of it. He gave me his permission.
As I pulled out my iPod to take the picture, though, the giant young man behind me gruffly said, “Don’t do that.” Before I could react, the man in front said, “I told her it was okay. It’s just my back.”
My subject didn’t make it easy for me to take the picture, so this was the best I could manage. After I snapped it, I apologized to the man behind him, telling him I didn’t mean to offend him. He waved me off, telling me there was no need.
The men, and they were all men, wore some variation of this Bandidos shirt. They marked themselves publicly, dressed up to signify their membership in this group. The second man’s behavior added weight to my impression of their cohesiveness. They had one another’s backs, literally and figuratively.
Here’s how other people interpreted All Dressed Up this week.
I took this a year and a half ago, when my little sister came out to visit the west coast and flirt with the idea of moving out here. I loved that this was the mirror on the outside of the photo booth, and the reminder that you are beautiful was etched into it.
We stayed at the Ace
just down the street from Powell’s in downtown Portland.
I loved it when they painted the Space Needle “galaxy gold” in honor of the 50th anniversary of the World’s Fair. This is the view I have one block from my apartment. And while I do enjoy a good glimpse of the Needle, it’s always the Olympic mountain range behind it that takes my breath away.
One summer day we overheard two bikers as they passed this view – on a day when the mountains were particularly stunning and the Needle was its usual white. One said to the other: “Wow! Look at the … Space Needle.” We’ve added that to our repertoire of inside jokes!
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And a couple of other “wide open spaces”:
I’ve been thinking a lot about Thailand, because it’s been three years now since I visited. This picture was taken in Ayuttaya, out in the countryside:
I am squarely a child of the ’70s and ’80s. Even though I grew up without a television in the house, certain elements of pop culture osmotically made their way into my awareness – particularly if there was a movie associated with it.
One of these elements that cemented itself into my psyche was the Muppets. Not just the Muppets that were on Sesame Street, although there was some of that when we would visit the neighbors. No, I’m talking about the rambunctious and wily characters that appeared first on the Muppet Show, and then in Hollywood with the Muppet Movie.
A little aside: most of the music in our house came from the radio, and it was always set to the public radio station that played classical music, which my mom loved. That was the substrate of our lives. But it was also the adult music. My sister and I acquired a Fisher-Price record player sometime in the mid ’70s. It was plastic and it folded up. When it was closed, it looked like a pair of jeans, with the stitching on the back pocket. I joke that we had three records that we played on it: John Denver, John Denver and the Muppets, and The Muppet Movie soundtrack.
The Muppets of my childhood were raucous and wild and crazy. They were silly. They crossed the lines. There were something vaguely dangerous about them. When I watched them, I understood that they were geared toward adults, but they were letting the children in, too. They stirred something in my heart, a yearning and an understanding that maybe, just maybe, the line between child and adult wasn’t as firm and clear as I’d been led to believe.
Fast forward to The Muppets of 2011, as re-imagined by Jason Segel and Disney. I wanted more than anything to love this movie. But it ended up lacking that transgressive quality that Jim Henson captured so well. Here’s what I said at the time:
It was too sweet and treacly. My mom said it was like old Mouseketeers. At first I thought she had misspoken, but then she explained how Amy Adams was like Annette Funicello – this mix of innocence and sexiness at the same time. My mom said how stacked Annette was. But that was exactly it. Disney has this knack for taking anything and sanitizing the shit out of it. The edge that Jim Henson had was gone. I loved feeling like a badass when I was a kid watching his stuff. I felt like I was transgressing something, watching something that seemed like it was for adults, even though it was for everyone. Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem? PLEASE. GIVE ME MORE LIKE THAT. Jack Black, I love ya, but I don’t think kids find you scary one tiny bit. I could be wrong on that.
The Muppets themselves were always central to the story. They were these silly bits of felt and plastic, who through the magic of puppeteering, came alive. The humans in Henson’s world served the Muppets. But Jason Segel couldn’t see that, and neither could Disney. They made the humans the central figures in the updated version. I think this clip of Steve Martin as the insolent waiter in the original movie captures the inversion so well. He is literally serving the Muppets, and he’s aware of it, AND we know it and are let in on the joke:
Would love to hear your thoughts on all things Muppets, from the Rainbow Connection to Kermit in Russia (yes, I’m such a deeply devoted fan that even though they ripped my heart out, I’ll probably go see the new movie).
We’ve passed the nadir and are swinging back toward the light. The light is lasting longer, even if it’s imperceptible right now.
One of my Twitter pen pals, Lou Knight, asked the other day what our one word of the year might be. At first I thought mine was focus, but as I’ve thought about it more, I’ve decided it’s actually return. Because my focus wavers, I wobble and wibble (hee hee), but every moment I have the opportunity to return to the object of my focus. I get to practice this in meditation, gently drawing my mind back to my breath or my mantra. Likewise, there are a myriad of distractions, and I get pulled by them, and then I notice and return my attention back to the work at hand, whatever that might be.
I told her my deepest, darkest fear: I was afraid that when I fully came out of my shell as a writer, that I’d be a scary, ugly spider instead of a beautiful butterfly, and that people would hate me.
Her response changed my life:
“It’s okay to be a scary spider. The world needs spiders, too.”
And the challenge:
Your assignment: take ten minutes to make a list of things that scare you the most, then the next time you have ten free minutes, write about one of them, and go deep. I guarantee it will be some of your most powerful, emotional writing. For extra credit, post the results on your own blog, and tag me with your link on Twitter (I’m @GG_Silverman) using the hashtag #FearlessWriting, or let me know if this exercise inspired an amazing story. I’d love to hear from you.
This challenge nearly sets my teeth on edge and turns my innards to liquid, but what the hell, it’s probably not going to kill me. Ha! Would love it if anyone else wants to join me in “hugging some spiders” this week. I don’t know that I’ll post what I write, but I may share a snippet. Who’s in?
This week’s prompt was “First Day. The only requirement was that the photo had to be taken on New Year’s Day.
Sometimes a picture speaks for itself, and sometimes there really are no words. Let me just say that this is the front door of an establishment in my neighborhood that styles itself a tavern. A tiny, tiny tavern.
