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Ahhh, you've found your way to the heartbeat of The Nid. No, no, come in, come in! I've made it nice and comfy for you here. Don't worry, I'm usually pretty good at keeping the personal stuff private. Ah! I see. That's what you're looking for? Then perhaps you should journey over to my erotic poetry instead.
No? Well then, welcome to my world. For a semi-complete cast of characters, look under Who's who.
| Today I'm going to do something I sorta told myself I'd never do. I'm going to comment directly on someone else's journal entry. The ever popular Columbine no less. I hope I'm not taking on too much. | |||
| Columbine's entry is on his fingernails...the fact that he painted them blue and wants no one to notice. He wants to be "weird" just for himself. | |||
| Columbine should move to the Bay Area. | |||
| I moved out here from Franklin, Indiana, where I had gone to college. I moved because, although I knew that small town pretty well and made pretty good tips off my regular customers at the local pizza joint, I was too weird there. I didn't fit in, stood out like a brightly painted sore thumbnail. Now, I'm female by birth, so my oddly painted fingernails only carried the stigma that "acid green, peacock blue and violet are not natural nail colors".* In fact, at the place I worked, I looked almost completely normal next to the punk rock teenagers with facial piercings that would occasionally gather hysterical comments such as: "What is that thing in his nose? What am I supposed to tell my children!? It's not Halloween! You've got FREAKS making my pizza! That's DISGUSTING!!!" | *And red is? I'll never understand that. | ||
| But there were incidents. One time, I was walking to class, wearing a multi-colored tank top, green shorts, and one of those multi-colored "hippie" hats (the picture on my Photo Gallery page has me wearing it, if you're curious). A pick-up truck (ubiquitous in Indiana) full of good ol' boys (also ubiquitous) drove past, slowly. They leaned out, threateningly close, and screamed at me, "Jerry Garcia is DEAD, you fuckin' hippie! Jerry Garcia SUCKS!" and other such lovelies. They eventually drove off, after harassing me for a block or so, but it was scary. Rednecks get very upset when you don't look like everyone else, and will gang up and attack rather frequently if provoked too often with such visual offenses such as multi-colored clothing or facial piercings.* | *Keep in mind that the grand dragon of the KKK lived just 20 minutes down the road. Or so I was informed. | ||
| But I didn't leave out of fear. Hell, Franklin, for me, was much safer than the questionable part of Oakland I live in now. I left because it was too easy to stick out. It was a breeze to be different, to get attention, to be noticed. I won poetry slams on a regular basis. I was well-known among my friends as someone who would frankly discuss the more intimate aspects of sex.* | *I would occasionally clear a room because a story I told was "too raunchy". It was a running gag with Kellie and Brian. | ||
| What good is that, I ask you? Where's the challenge of being different in the conservative Midwest? My writing might have improved, living there. But, honestly, I had no influence, no real encouragement to write. Out here, there's tons of writers. There's also tonsof freaks. If I wear my cape in Berkeley, the comments (if any) are, "Great cape!". No one notices, really. And if I write a good story, I'm gonna have to revise the hell out of it before someone gushes all over it the way they might have* in Indiana. And no one blinks an eye when I talk about sex. It came up in my last interview that I wrote erotica; they didn't mind...in fact, the HR director already knew because she'd been to this page. | *I only wrote one story, Golden Apples, while in Indiana. And that was for a Creative Writing course. | ||
| Of course, it doesn't hurt that my main group of friends came from Mary Anne. And, as jealous as I've gotten recently about her success, I have to remind myself that it was her casual comment, "I'm not sure my anthology is taking poetry. Why don't you write me an erotic story instead?" that spurred me on to write. Don't get me wrong, I've always written, and as a child I desperately wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I just needed some sparkling competition and a tougher environment to bring it out. |