Living

written July 16th 2008

I am kind of shy. Part of me not shy, the part of me that was doing a little groin to groin dancing with one of the break dancers in Penn Station the other day, not shy. Dirty Doris Day, that’s me. Kind of prim, doesn’t like it when people make jokes or talk about sex , likes things kind of old school, wants to meet someone in a random and romantic way, be brought flowers, danced with to great old music, hand holder, doesn’t like it when people grope each other in public, particularly white heterosexuals, unless their old. Any groping really, its just that white heterosexuals have most of the privelidge in the world, they can contain themselves just this once. So Dirty Doris Day, she likes girls, bald guys with tattoos, hairy, and a few piercings. She’s not with any of them though, getting sexy is scary, more than she feels comfortable with. I have this fear that i will become and that i am a version of Maggie Smith’s Aunt Charlotte in Room with a View and Lumi Cavazos Tita from Like Water for Chocolate. They don’t really get to have their own lives, either of them, they suffer, quietly and not so quietly in service to others, living sexless repressed lives, until of course, when Tita and Pedro are in their sixties and they finally get to be with each other. They combust and die from 50 years of stored love and passion for each other.

People ask me for relationship advice all the time, I find it a little shocking, but maybe its part of the spinsters role, she is a keen observer of the dynamics of human relationships( that’s why she isn’t in them i guess) so she can give some objective advice. I don’t want to write about sex, honestly, its personal. This is more than an issue of sex, its about being comfortable walking in my body in the world, comfort with who i’m attracted to without feeling trapped by a label, the lesbian label, the bi label, or as many people assume, the straight label. Its about letting myself feel alive.