Dear Beautiful Men,

I love you. I really do. But stop arguing for a minute and just listen.

The reason you fail with women is that you think they’re all the same.

They’re not some hydra-headed beast—many faces, one monstrous being. They’re not the feminine Borg. They do not communicate by hive-mind. We’re just people.

They’re not a physical wonderland to play in, or an inexhaustible cornucopia of delights sent by God to please you. They aren’t a delectable yet deadly flesh buffet. We’re just people.

They aren’t maddening fairies who grant or withhold favors on a whim. They’re not sucking, conniving tar-pits from your nightmares. There aren’t teeth up there. We’re just people.

When we don’t do what you want, it doesn’t mean we’re malfunctioning.

When we do what you want, it could just be our preference too.

Some of us rock, and some of us are jerks.

You won’t ever “figure out women”, because no one person can ever truly “figure out” any other person—let alone find a key in one woman and use it to unlock the whole gender. Those who say they’ve done so are lying to themselves and to you, trying to rob you of your time and money, just like they accuse women of doing. You know this.

So the next time you see a woman who interests you, please don’t freeze up and strategize. Please try to clear your eyes, your mind and your heart. The woman you see before you is not your mother, your string of ex-girlfriends, or your string of rejections. She’s not an aggregate of magazine and video images. She’s just a person.

You have less to fear than you think you do.

Twenty Years of Diary: Part Three

I’m a lucky woman.

I was a kid during the eighties, the last great decade to be a kid, and a preteen in a time when my awkwardness was at least partially disguised by the awkwardness of my culture. The luck continued into high school: the years I went, 1992-96, were some of the last years before Columbine, the last years where high schoolers were seen as relatively benign and unimportant.

Sometimes unimportant is good—you can live a lot deeper while off the radar.

Trying to describe what it was like to be a teenager in the early Nineties is pretty difficult. I find myself wanting to talk about it in terms of the limitations not yet in place, the tragedies that had not yet happened, the behavior drugs that most students were not yet dosed with.

In sum: there was still room. Your insides were your own. Adults’ unconcern meant privacy for you. There was even space left over outside you in the world, wiggle room in which to fuck around a bit.

People still looked at each other and saw physical realities. Money meant a lot, but it wasn’t everything. There was no Internet to speak of—what you knew, you learned from books, from experience, or from gossip. If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to physically go and find them. If you wanted to talk to a lot of people at once, you formed a band, or wrote a ‘zine.

I wrote one. How could I not? It was 1993, and we were wearing Docs, and coloring out hair with Sharpies, and covering our walls with phrases cut from magazines. It was the dawning of the realization that everyone had a story, that everyone’s story was important. We couldn’t wait to tell ours—we ripped and cut and pasted and xeroxed.

The era looks dorky and sweet in retrospect, viewed with the modern lens of present conformity to various styles that were developed back then. But we weren’t trying and cutely failing to conform to any style—we were trying to throw a wrench into whatever kind of conformity we could think of. It was a sincerely-adopted position of stylistic chaos, aimed at opening up more room to be creative. And it worked. For a while.

I found my voice in that era. I haven’t lost it since. Though the world’s constricted a lot since then—become colder, thinner, more fearful—it’s still the era in which I was stamped and minted, my gold standard. I hold myself still to the values I developed then: creativity, nonconformity, opposition to control. Snark, feminism, distortion. Expecting equality. Taking fun seriously. Writing as often as I can, and telling the goddamned truth.

Twenty Years of Diary: Part Two

My middle school years almost perfectly overlapped that weird era when the eighties ended and the nineties began, amplifying all the awkwardness of the times with my own dorky puberty.

From 1989 to 1992, I attended three different schools, and was bullied in all of them. I had friends and dates, but much of the preteen world felt closed to me. So I mostly withdrew, and turned to my own life.

A great deal of energy’s generated in those years of life, and most of mine went to imaginary pursuits. All the creativity in me slowly channeled itself into storytelling. During seventh and eighth grades especially, I wrote tons of short stories, centering on a cast of characters that stayed with me for years. I made up planets, drew maps, outlined novels, and used every doll and toy I still had from childhood as a prop in the endless, morphing tale I was telling myself.

The neighborhood in which I lived was a great place for an imaginative kid, with a lake and an island, a skating path, trees to climb, lots of deserted little corners to break into and explore. Within walking distace was a playground, a pool, a grocery store that sold cheap candy, a movie theater, a fancy beach hotel that never noticed quiet kids wandering through, and of course, the ocean itself.

It was a landscape custom-built for acting out inner stories. I lived half in the real world and half in the overlapping world of daydreams.

I kept a normal diary, but only filled two books in four years. It was during this time that my personal writing became more about my inner life than my outer one. The reality of school was stressful and alienating, so my descriptions of even the most eventful days are matter-of-fact and relatively dull. My inner world took precedence.

And even though it is more of a balance now, the “real world” and day-to-day events have never gained ascendancy in the course of twenty years. I write about who I am, not just what I’m doing. And that habit began during my lonely, nerdy days as a poor kid in Palm Beach.

Twenty Years of Diary: Part One

It all began in 1988. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was on the radio, George Bush Senior was still only vice-President, and my favorite movie was “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” I was ten.

Few people kept diaries, child or adult. It was simply a cliched and somewhat old-fashioned hobby for young girls. I’d learned to write early, and was able to carefully inscribe “cat”, “dog”, “love”, and all my cursewords on the letter-A worksheet I was given in kindergarten. I read everything, composed silly little poems, made up involved and long-running storylines for my dolls. By eight, I supposedly had the vocabulary of a college student. I read so far ahead in my reader in school, that I’d usually finish the textbook in the first weeks. And I couldn’t shut up during class. I had nowhere to put my ideas.

Nowadays, I’d be drugged.

Back then, I was just given the run of the library. In those days, diary-keeping girls usually fell into two camps: the Anastasia Krupnik girls, and the Harriet The Spy girls. Harriet was tough, but I didn’t like her because she seemed almost doltishly insensitive. I found it hard to sympathize with the outcomes of her dumb decisions. Her notebook was all about boring observations of other people, and it got her ass busted. What’s to admire?

At the library one day, I picked up a copy of Anastasia, because she had a weird name like me. In that book, Anastasia kept a notebook of lists, describing her likes and annoyances, things she wanted and things she feared. Her diary was her own portrait, not her attempt to gain power over others. I could relate to that.

And so it began. On a trip into Miami, to visit the newly-opened Bayside, I bought a notebook. My first entry was a complaint about my parents. Some things never change.

Yes, We Did

“Sixteen months have passed since we first stood together on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands of miles have been traveled. Millions of voices have been heard. And because of what you said – because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another – a journey that will bring a new and better day to America.

“Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.”

“America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.”