From the category archives:

Purging

Single and ready to mingle.

by Maria on May 17, 2010

in Joey,Purging

Not really. I mean yes, I’m single now, but not so ready to mingle. I just have always thought that saying was amusing. When else do you get to use the word ‘mingle’ or any of its variations? Never, that’s when. So I use it when I can.

I love this boy, absolutely. He has my heart. As much of it as I am able to relinquish at least. He is sweet and funny and cute and passionate and loyal and giving and amazing and this and that. So much so that this relationship is so uneventful and easy that it’s boring. I have dreamt of marrying him, of living a long forever with his arms around my waist. I can think of no one better to raise my girls with, to set an example for what a man, a lover, a friend, a step-father should be, but…I don’t know.

We broke up over the weekend. It caught everyone off guard because it was a choice I made alone, without reaching to anyone for support or advice. I needed to be sure that it was all me – all my choice. It’s so easy to listen to others when you’re unsure about something; you end up doing what you think you should do rather than what you really should, which usually turns out being what ‘makes sense’ or what others suggest.

Something’s not right and that something is me. I can’t quite figure out where my head is but I know it’s not where it should be. Much of the time lately I haven’t wanted anything to do with him. I am an extremely difficult person to handle in a relationship, for many reasons. I blow hot and cold. I’m impossible to please. I can be very cutting when I’m angry or frustrated (and as sensitive and emotional as he is, that’s a terrible thing). I only communicate when I want to. I could go on. For a while now, sucking’s pretty much all I’m capable of in this, and I don’t want to be that way. I need be out of this. Get my shit together, figure out whether I even want to do this anymore.

I’m confused right now, but certain that I need to be alone. He won’t let me go and it’s making this harder. He wants me to tell him that it’s over forever and I feel like I can’t because I don’t know, but I do know that he won’t stop waiting for me unless I say it’s hopeless. I’m not sure if that’s unfair of me or him. I don’t want him to wait. I tell him yes! this is forever! final! but he doesn’t listen. I tell him I’m not sure. I don’t know. and he takes that to mean that I’m not serious. He brings up the girls, how much they all love each other, how he wishes they were his, how they’ve accepted him as a father figure in some ways and it makes me so mad. They have nothing to do with this decision, it feels like he’s using them as a ploy. If I was making this choice based on what they wanted, I’d stay with him. They love him, and how can they not? He tells me I don’t know how much he loves me, how it isn’t fair for me to do this to him again and I tell him it’s not about him. This is about me. Not them, not him, me.

This past year has been wonderful. I have been happier than I have been in so long. I am still happy: my happiness isn’t contingent on this relationship although this relationship has brought me much of it. I’m not sad about this being over. I know the polite thing to do when hearing this sort of news is to offer condolences, but they really aren’t required, or wanted. For me at least: I can’t speak for him. It might seem cold, but really it’s not. I’m feeling quite a bit, but I think it’s a good thing, mostly because it’s necessary, no matter what the eventual outcome is. It’s fine.

I’m sure this post is incoherent, but that’s just where I’m at. In summation, Joey and I have broken up but the finality of it has yet to be decided. For the next while I’ll try to figure that out. We’ll see how it goes.

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Things I’ve been considering.*

by Maria on May 4, 2010

in Purging

With Sandra Bullock adopting Louis, the age old “white people shouldn’t be able to adopt black children” debate has popped back up. Why it’s even a debate, I don’t know. It’s such bullshit. It’s complained about, and used as an example of the underlying racism in our society that black children in the foster care system are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to adopting. But let a white person adopt one of those bottom of the barrel-bottom black kids and people are all in a tizzy over how that black child isn’t going to learn how to deal with being called a slur or not being able to hail a cab in NYC. I just…what the fuck? Is it really so pressing of an issue that you’d rather a kid stay in the system, pretty likely unloved and unwanted until they are of age? You think the odds for a rich, fulfilled, happy and productive adult life are better? Really?

I just find it silly. More silly even than the argument against letting gays adopt, which is pretty friggin’ silly. And if we’re all supposed to be raising our children with a good grasp of our culture and ethnicity, my black grandparents failed me, and I’m failing my part Mexican children, and their white father is failing them too. Just, silly. I don’t know how the hell to prepare my child for being called a nigger or a spic or just plain ugly. I’m winging it. Like many good parents do, in many situations. I refuse to believe that mixing up races is going to create a whole new breed of black folk that don’t know what it means to be black folk. They’ll learn – trust me. Society will remind them, as long as we have gems like Rush Limbaugh in the world.

My only concern about Sandra Bullock’s adoption of this child is the fact that it was supposed to be done with her ex, Jesse James, whose mistress is supposedly a white supremacist. My common sense is telling me that non-white supremacists don’t screw white supremacists. I’m wondering just how far that trail of breadcrumbs leads, and if it goes back to Sandra. That would suck. For the baby.

- – -

I’ve been thinking and I’m afraid that I might be a helicopter mom. We live in the country; very small town; lots of land. 3 acres, hundreds of feet from the main road and surrounded by woods on three sides. I let my daughters play outside in the backyard where I could see them from the bay window in the kitchen while I made dinner for the first time ever last week. Every time they get a scratch or a bruise (which is rare) I know exactly where it came from and if I don’t I panic a little. I don’t know. I’m big on letting them pick themselves up and not allowing a bunch of crying and whining and self pitying, but still… I think I may try to protect them from too much.

- – -

It’s going to be one hell of a summer this year. It was 97 degrees the other day, in April. Humidity was 70% and it wasn’t raining. God only knows what June, July, and August are going to feel like around here. I hate North Carolina. I hope the fleas and mosquitoes are under control this year.

- – -

I missed two tests in Sociology. There are only five. Extenuating circumstances (READ: procrastination biting me in my fat ass) I’ve completed all of my assignments and everything, but I’m afraid I’m going to get a low B in the class. Which means that I won’t have a 4.0 GPA anymore, after this semester. Which is depressing. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to major in. There’s no money or work in English degrees, I suck at Math, and I’m not interested in going past a Master’s. I also get bored extremely easily, don’t like regular work schedules, or bossing other people around, and want to be able to wear jeans and sneakers every day. For good money. So what do I do?

- – -

I’m determined to get through the entire Vertigo & Dark Horse imprints before I start reading any new comics, or attempting to catch up with my favorite superheroes from DC and Marvel. I read the first arc and 1/2 of the second arc of The Umbrella Academy, and all I really want to say is STICK TO MUSIC GERARD WAY. Pure suckage. I started on American Virgin (Vertigo), got to #11 and quit that too. How long does it take you to form a story and develop the characters to a point where the reader starts caring about them, dickheads? Seriously.

- – -

Okay, that’s all. Here’s a photo for you, if you made it all the way through this post. It’s my very favorite of those that I took last week at the strawberry patch:

4546519789 6053c39c3e b Things Ive been considering.*

*Alternate Title: María may be suffering from early-onset schizophrenia. The rigid stupors haven’t started yet, but the disconnected thought is totally there.

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Listening to: Coldplay – Death And All His Friends

{ 44 comments }

Hitting Women.

by Maria on February 26, 2010

in Family,Purging,Self

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I witnessed domestic violence. I was very young, maybe around six. My younger brother had just been born and we were in California visiting family and seeing the baby for the first time. My grandmother and grandfather went on a second honeymoon of sorts and I was stayed with my aunt and uncle. I hated it. My uncle was very controlling and ran his house like a military base, with the only civilian being himself. He snapped his fingers at his wife when he wanted his glass filled, and forced his children to eat oatmeal every morning while he enjoyed Frosted Flakes. He didn’t like oatmeal. Neither did his children.

I begged my grandparents every day I saw them or spoke to them to let me stay at their hotel with them, but everyone refused. I complained about not being able to eat what I want, about my uncle threatening to spank me for being disrespectful, about my cousins being mean to me. I didn’t complain of having to listen to my aunt’s screams and uncle’s yells coming from their bedroom everyday, or of the bumps and bangs of her body hitting the walls and floor. I remember that I sat on the floor playing puzzles with my younger cousin during one particularly long fight. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing, every sound from upstairs made me jump, but not my cousin. She assembled her puzzle, seemingly unaffected by any of it. It was normal for her. During that fight, I learned to ignore it as well. Pretty soon, my puzzle was finished and it wasn’t until I’d stuck in the last piece that I realized that the violence was still going on. When my aunt came downstairs, her face was dry but her eyes were red. She didn’t have a scratch on her that I could see, but when she reached up to get something, she whimpered and clutched her side.

My aunt and uncle are still together.  He has spoken to me in contrition of the way he treated his wife in the past, during our discussions of my own marriage, but I don’t know if he changed.I have no idea if he still beats her, but he still keeps her under his thumb. You would never know it; from the outside in they seem like a fine couple. They joke and laugh and talk and it’s only in family settings or if you pay close attention that you’ll see the signs. He still snaps his fingers at her.

Another time, I think I was 9, and I was in California again, this time on summer vacation. My grandmother was forcing me to spend time with my mother, which I didn’t want to do. My mother was still with my younger brother’s father, and they fought like cats and dogs. It had been just arguments, until one night. I sat on a futon watching, listening, as they yelled at each other, and my brother’s father kicked my mom in the back when she turned to walk away. Hard. She fell, but jumped right back up, and he knew what he was in for, and ran out of the door. She didn’t chase him, but later on that night he yelled at her from outside as he was slicing her car tires and she ran out of the house with a crow bar or tire iron or some other sort of long metal rod. I couldn’t see what happened in the parking lot, but she came back unharmed. Seething, but unharmed.

When I was 12, my younger sister was born, and I moved to New York with my mother. I don’t remember exactly why. My sister’s father was abusive and a drug addict. During my mother’s pregnancy, he  sold all of her furniture and robbed her of everything else so she had to move in with relatives. As soon as she had her home back in order, she let him come back. My sister’s father treated my brother, who was then 6 years old, awfully. He called him names and bossed him around, he made it well known that he didn’t like the boy. My mother ignored it, other than reminding him to call her boyfriend daddy, rather than by his first name. Her boyfriend tried to puff up his chest at me, but it never worked. I was always a tough, stubborn little fuck, and he would have had to break me into pieces before he could have broken my spirit. He left me alone after a while, and that was to his own benefit, because I’d decided pretty shortly after meeting him that if he put his hands on me I would slice his throat in his sleep.

I moved back home after a while, leaving my brother and sister and mother behind, gladly. A short while later, my mother moved down to North Carolina with us, nursing a broken wrist. Her boyfriend had pulled back to punch her in the face, she blocked it with her arm, and his fist hit her  wrist so hard that it broke. I remember asking her about it and her telling me “well he was going for my face, imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t put my arm up?” with a laugh. And it wasn’t a compensating laugh, it was a real laugh. She enjoyed the fights – she started many of them.

He followed her down to North Carolina  and I lived with them again, off and on, during my early teenage years. It wasn’t so bad, they were pretty tame, save for the one time my mom asked me to call the police because she was losing this battle, pretty badly, but I couldn’t because her boyfriend had ripped all of the phones out of the walls. She hit him with the car that night when he was trying to leave on a bicycle. I was used to the fighting after awhile. I chose sides; I yelled at them both to stop it when it dragged on particularly long and I was trying to get some sleep; I distracted my younger siblings.  It became normal to me too – it’s actually more odd now that they are finally broken up for good.

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and now that I've calmed down a bit.

by Maria on February 11, 2010

in Celebrities,Purging,Televisión y Pelicula

If you know me well, you know that I absolutely, unequivocally, unrepentantly love John Mayer. On many levels, as a person, as a musician, as a celebrity. I’ve been a fan of his for about a decade now, and my love has only grown throughout his career. I’ve never cared about his relationships, I’ve never paid that close of attention to his personal life; I’ve been satisfied looking at his pretty lips, reading articles (from real magazines, not gossip blogs), and listening to his music. If you look at my last.fm, he’s my number one overall everything on every chart. That’s saying quite a bit, because I listen to a lot of music. I honestly thought there’d be nothing he could to that would change my opinion of him, ever. The rest of the world labeled him a douchebag for little media snippets and soundbites, while I appreciated his candidness, the fact that he was willing to open himself up and say off the wall shit, knowing how those that hated him would perceive him. How he didn’t let that stop him from saying what was on his mind. I appreciated that. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, as I’m sure you know, (along with my feelings about it if you follow me on Twitter) an article on Playboy.com was released to the world, and many of his fans, me most definitely included, were shocked to read much of what he said. Things like this:

Someone asked me the other day, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’”

I was just reeling from that. I re-read it a few times, like “did he seriously just say that? seriously?” Now I completely understand what he was trying to say. He was attempting to explain that he didn’t really have a hood pass (which is basically when black people love you so much, we almost consider you one of us) he’d be able to say the n-word. And since he can’t say that, he doesn’t really have one. He went on to explain that realizes white privilege but negated that by saying he identifies in a way with the black struggle, on a one-on-one level. He could have made that point without saying that word. He is white, and therefore he is not able to say that word without repercussions. Only black people, and sometimes not even black people, are able to say that word and obviously be devoid of racist intent. Therefore, no one else can say it, in my book. It doesn’t matter the context. You just do not say it. Period.

I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.

It’s no secret that I’ve said if given the opportunity, I’d make sweet, sweet groupie love to John Mayer. Something about him just does it for me. I think he’s gorgeous. But it didn’t bother me that he said he’s not physically attracted to women of color. I completely understand preferences, there are plenty of people that aren’t attracted to members of an opposite race. It was the way he said it. Comparing your dick to David Duke? Ugh. And he didn’t stop there, he went on to talk about the black women he does find attractive, managing to be even more offensive to women as a whole:

I always thought Holly Robinson Peete was gorgeous. Every white dude loved Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Kerry Washington. She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.” That’s what “Heartbreak Warfare” is all about, when a girl uses jealousy as a tactic.

What the hell is white girl crazy?

I went deeper into the interview, but when he talked about Jessica Simpson as if all she were to him were a great piece of ass he enjoyed pounding, and then stopped himself short, not out of a realization he may offend her, but out of a respect for Jennifer Aniston, I couldn’t stomach anymore. I’m glad, because I was informed later that he went on to say more offensive things. To the point where I would believe him if he later claims to have been drunk or cracked out or something while giving the interview.

Yesterday, I was livid. I was hurt and disappointed and livid. I deleted everything scheduled to publish on Fuck Yeah! John Mayer, posted a snippet of the interview and left it at that. I was seriously tempted to delete the entire site but I realize how trigger happy I am, and how rash I can be, so I held off. I attempted to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my tickets to his show on March 15th, something I’ve been seriously looking forward to, for months. I wasn’t sure if I could go, if I could stomach listening to him trying to be clever and entertaining when I no longer felt him to be for that long, in person. Not only that, but much of the fun of going was being able to lust after him in person, and reading that article yesterday, immediately when I read that he said the n-word, all of that dissipated. As I went further into the interview, I was almost sad that I’d ever thought of him that way. My loins no longer ache at the thought of him, and his penis can continue on being a white supremacist.

As the day went on, I read his apology on Twitter and I believe it was genuine; he sounded completely defeated in those few lines, but he only apologized for the use of that word. He didn’t apologize for the misogyny, for the homophobic slurs, for the other offensive quotes. He should have apologized for the interview as a whole.

I talked to a friend about it, in depth, a fellow John Mayer fan and woman of color. Neither us believe John Mayer is a racist. He’s not a racist. He just really lacks that brain to mouth filter that most people have developed I believe he’s become so jaded with how he perceives himself in the media, that he says crazy things to deflect how fragile his ego probably really is and to prevent an interviewer, a paparazzo, a twitter follower, whomever, from being able to get under his skin before he can get under it himself. I do not know him of course, but this is just what I’ve felt. We both decided that we would sit and wait, we would watch closely what he did between now and forever to make this right, what he’d say, how he’d act. We’d hold off on our boycott of him completely, tossing out his music and everything else to do with him for a little while. I thought about how angry I was at Michael Vick – how angry I still am – but reading his apology after he was released made me realize that it was alright to let him continue on with his life and make something positive come out of this. I thought about how I’d easily forgiven Chris Brown for the physical damage he did to Rihanna. Those things were so much worse than this – this was a mistake of much lesser proportions.

This morning in my email I had a link to John Mayer’s apology last night at his Nashville show. I watched, and saw that man standing in front of thousands of people, so vulnerable, fighting back his tears  with that nervous tick, pulling on his fingers and attempting to make some sort of amends, I was touched. I’ve maintained the entire time that he didn’t mean to offend, but that it didn’t take away from what he said.

So now, I’m not sure how I feel anymore. A little piece of my heart broke yesterday, the wind was completely taken out of my sails, which may sound silly but I really don’t care. I connected to him through his music and it hurts that he was so callous, almost like it would if these things were said in a blog post written by one of you – my friends. I still don’t know if I’ll be going to that show on March 15th. I thought yesterday that if I could separate his music from his person, like I can Michael Richards from Kramer when I watch Seinfeld reruns, that I could still go. My tickets are non-transferable, non-refundable and I spent much too much money on them, but I don’t think that’s possible. Maybe in between now and then, as my head levels, as I stop being angry, I’ll be able to appreciate him as a person again and have no qualms about going. I’m unsure.

All I know is while I’m still perturbed, I’m not as angry today as I was yesterday. I’m taking a breather from him and his music for awhile. Hopefully, I can get around this – never over it – and continue on with my fandom. Time will tell.

{ 34 comments }

"If he loved you, he wouldn't have hit you."

by Maria on November 9, 2009

in Purging

Bullshit.

It’s such a common thing to say, but it’s not true.

Not always.

All relationships are different, just like the people in them are.

It is very, very possible to hit someone that you love.

Love and violence are not mutually exclusive.

Just because a person is not capable of handling their anger in a proper way does not mean they do not care for you,

and while I almost understand why someone would say this,

I don’t. Not quite.

They need to get help.

It is never ok.

But just because they did it, doesn’t mean they don’t.

Maybe they don’t enough.

Maybe they don’t at all.

But maybe they really, truly do.

It doesn’t make someone weak to believe that someone that beat them loved them. Love is not enough, love should not hold them to someone that hurts them in any way, but attempting to convince them that the person that loved them really didn’t is arrogant and cruel on your part. You weren’t in the relationship and you don’t know. And sometimes, that belief is the only thing that keeps them sane; sometimes it helps them maintain their self respect when they can’t for the life of them figure out why they remained in such an awful situation for longer than they should have.

Either way, “If he loved you, he wouldn’t have hit you.” doesn’t help.

FYI.

—————-
Listening to: The Smiths – This Charming Man

{ 18 comments }

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