Monthly Archives: October 2009

Family Matters

Ed. Note: I started this last night and couldn’t finish it.  I realize that the more I unravel my past, the more uncomfortable I feel about discussing the ramifications.  The legacy of my childhood:  toxic secrecy.  What happens in the house, stays in the house.

I haven’t been to Taiwan in sixteen years.  My brother, my niece, and I are scheduled to go two days after Christmas.  We booked our tickets while my mom was here in early September.  I was looking forward to seeing the motherland again because it’s changed drastically since I last went.  My brother has not been in about thirty years.  This is the first time for my niece.  She is eleven.

Now, I don’t want to go.  With the flashbacks coming at me, I don’t want to go face my father.  Years ago, I made my peace with not knowing what really happened.  In the last few years, I made my peace with my father because he is an old, frail man (physically) who can no longer hurt me.  We were cordial to each other, and I was satisfied with that.

Now, I want to punch him.  I want to protect my niece from him.  I want to ask what the fuck he was thinking?

Many many years ago, before the lost years, at the urging of an incompetent therapist, I confronted my father with my mother and my brother present.  I clearly remember my father’s response.  He said, “I don’t remember that happening.  I would remember that if it happened, right?”

My mother:  “It couldn’t have happened.  I would have to leave him if it did.”

My brother:  “I don’t know what happened, but I support you no matter what.”

Immediately after that, I tucked the vague memories I had back into that little corner of my mind and froze my soul.  I felt as if I would tear my family apart if I continued to explore my memories, and I couldn’t do that to us.

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For a Limited Time Only

Ed. Note: This is a continuation of the entry, How to Make the Perfect Sex Doll.  It is not necessary to read that entry first, but it will help.

Guys, are you sick and tired of bitches who talk back?  Bitches who nag at you until you want to smack them across the face?  You know what I’m talking about.  Women these days are real ballbusters, only looking to kick you in the nuts.  You’re tired of having to deal with that shit, aren’t you?

Well, come over here and take a look at this.  For a limited time only, we are offering the Stepford Minna doll.  Not only has she been trained to be the perfect sex doll, she has been broken in every other important way.   If you’ve ever read Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, then you have a hint of what kind of effort was put into training the Stepford Minna doll solely for your pleasure.

If you are feeling sad, she will feel sad for you.  If you are angry, she will absorb your abuse without breaking a sweat.  If you want to fuck her until you break her, well, she will happily comply.  Or rather, she will obediently comply.  I can’t tell you if she’s happy about it, but it’s not important, anyway.

You won’t have to talk about your relationship or worry about how she is feeling.  She feels nothing on her own.  She feels what you tell her to feel.  Genius, really.  You don’t have to worry that she will want to take your relationship to the next level because she is perfectly content to let you define what the two of you have.

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Flailing and Failing

I am failing.

All the brave words I have written to this point ring hollow in my ears.  It’s all just a bunch of shit that I believe for a brief minute before tossing it to the wayside again.

I am falling.

Into the abyss, the same one where I used to dwell.  Every time I think I have scrambled my way out, I find another level.  It’s like Dante’s nine circles of hell.  There are so many steps on the way up, I wonder if I’ll ever breathe free air again.

I am hurting.

I fight the demons.  I fight the sadness.  I fight the pain and the fear and the numbness.  I fight the depression and the tears.  I fight the memories, and I fight my past.

I am tired.

Every moment of respite has an underlying tinge of sadness to it.  I can feel the happiness and the joy and the pleasure, but the demons are waiting, waiting to swoop down and engulf me once again.

I am weak.

I just want to go to crawl in my bed and not come out ever again.  I want to pull the covers over my head and allow Morpheus to take me.  Though my sleep is filled with nightmares, in some ways, they are preferable to dealing with the pain of living.

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How To Make the Perfect Sex Doll

1.  You must start when she’s young.  That way, she has no comparison, and she doesn’t know any better.

“Open your mouth,” he said, gripping her by the shoulders.  A girl of seven, she knelt between his legs.  She was wearing a white flannel nightgown that stood out starkly in the darkness of the night.  Her black hair was too short to cover her face, but she dropped her head, anyway, in a futile attempt to block him out.

She looked at him, her eyes fearful.  She had her lips clamped shut.  She hesitated, and then she shook her head.  Once. Quickly.  Fearfully.

He grabbed her head with one hand on either side of her face and shook.

“Open your mouth!”  He was whispering, but his voice was angry.  He squeezed her face until, defeated, she opened her mouth.  He quickly shoved himself into her mouth, still holding onto her face.

The girl didn’t move, but she must have flinched because he told her to be still.  She must have made a sound because he told her to keep quiet.  “You don’t want Mom to hear, do you?”  She tried her best to not move, to not make a sound.  She couldn’t stop the tears, though.  “Don’t cry.”

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Melancholy Expressed

I have been wrapped in melancholy today.  It’s not the weather because I enjoy cool, rainy, drizzly days.   In fact, they warm my soul, as contradictory as that sounds.

It’s partly political.  I have been avoiding the story about the woman who worked for Halliburton/KBR and was gang-raped by her coworkers while they were in the Middle East.  I mean, I know the basics.  They locked her in a container for twenty-four hours afterwards, and the military lost her rape kit somehow.  There is a clause that only allows these kinds of ‘disputes’ to be settled by arbitration.  My kick-ass senator, Al Franken, introduced an amendment that would allow cases like this to go to court (which seems like a no-brainer).  It easily passed in the Senate, with thirty No votes.  Care to guess to which party all those No votes belonged?  No points for guessing Republican.  In addition, all the female Republican senators broke rank and voted Yes for the amendment.  Here is a look at the roll call for the vote.

It passed.  Good.  But, today, I read this post over at Balloon Juice.  Apparently, several sources say that Senator Daniel Inouye, (HI-D) is preparing to water down the amendment or remove it completely after being vigorously lobbied by defense contractors who are adamant it be removed.

I shouldn’t have read the post at all.  I shouldn’t have read the comments.  I have difficulty dealing with news about rape in general, and this was a particularly horrifying and egregious story that, I fear, was all-too-emblematic of the attitude towards sexual assault by the mercenaries–er, contractors–we hired to work for us in the Middle East.   We got one of the usual trolls bleating about the injustice of going around arbitration.  We got another well-meaning soul saying that arbitration isn’t necessarily biased.

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The Sound of Sadness

I had my therapy appointment this morning.  I was telling her about my sense of shame and disgust over my relationship in Thailand.  She asked me why I felt shame, and I launched into a laundry list of reasons.  I realized that what happened to me in my childhood and in Thailand shaped my future relationships, I said.  I equated love with pain.  I felt broken by it.

She let me ramble on for a few minutes before gently interrupting me.  She said, “You say you feel ashamed, and yet, you’re giving me abstract reasons why you feel that way.  How about something concrete?”  I made a joke, but inside, I was scrambling.   I didn’t know what she meant, exactly.  Or, more to the point, I didn’t want to go there.  I stammered, hemmed, and hawed.  She finally said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened in Thailand?”

Taking a deep breath, I did.  I started telling her pretty much what I wrote in my blog entry about that relationship.  I recited it as if I’d told the story a million times before, rushing through it because I was anxious to be done with it.

At one point, she stopped me and asked what I was feeling.  I said shame and disgust without any hesitation.  After a moment of thought, I said haltingly, “Sadness.”  She asked me why I felt sadness.  I couldn’t explain it to her, though I was in tears.  She said she felt sad because that girl in the hotel had such cognitive  dissonance, she could make herself believe that she could go to a hotel and not have the things that normally happen in a hotel happen to her.

I’m not expressing it well.  I had told her about how I knew about date rape.  I knew that I shouldn’t have gone with him.  I knew I knew I knew.   And yet, because of my loneliness, because of my desperation to be loved, because of my fucked-up childhood and my fucked-up notion of love, marriage, and sex, I denied what I knew to be true.

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Don’t. Want. To.

I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to.

I just had to get that out of the way.

I don’t want to face my past.  I don’t want to remember anything else from my forgotten years.  I don’t want to discover to what extent I was molested.  I just don’t.

I don’t want to know whether the memory of strong hands pinning my wrists to the bed as I scream and cry is real.  I don’t want to know what happens next, so I froze that memory with him on top of me telling me not to cry.

Don’t cry.  Don’t move.  Don’t make a sound.  Lie still.  Give up.  Give in.  Put up.  Put out.  Put it in.  Put it away.

Flashback:  Seven years old.  White flannel nightgown.  Sitting on my bed.  He’s sitting next to me.  His hand is on my waist, just below my chest.  He is pressing a kiss on my cheek.  I am looking straight ahead, and my eyes are empty.

Not a very scary picture in and of itself, but it bothers me more than the others, somehow, because of the gross mimicry of tenderness it displays.  And, because his hand is slowly moving upwards.

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Healing the Break

I’m not done with yesterday’s entry, surprise, surprise.  I do find it funny that I was going to be brief and ended up writing my longest post ever.  Still, when I posted it, I felt as if I still had more to say.  I knew in general what my readers would say in response because I have said variations of the same things to myself for all these years.  I have especially tried the, “What would you say to a friend who told you the same story?” but to no effect.

You see, I expect different things from myself than I do from others.  Hypocritical?  Yes.  Example:  I like women with lotsa curves.  I like women who are lush and Rubenesque, as I have blogged about before.  When it comes to me, though, I wanna be stick-skinny.  Why?  Because.

No, I have no other reason besides that.  For most of my life, I didn’t think I really needed one.  There was a teensy bit of me that held myself to higher standards than I did others, but there was more of me that simply felt like I was a big fat failure no matter what.  I was starting from the premise that I was unworthy, disgusting, ugly, etc., and working my way backwards from there.  In the case of losing weight, I started with the premise that I was grotesquely fat, and I lost weight with the goal of looking skinny.  Oh, I couched it in more reasonable terms.  I wanted to reach the specific weight of 140.  I look less than I weigh (because I have muscles), so that seemed reasonable.  Except, the closer I got to 140, the more jittery I got.  I didn’t look skinny.  I didn’t feel skinny.  I still felt ugly, fat, and grotesque (yes, it’s possible to feel all those things).  So I moved the goalpost to 135, then to 130.  Then, I just kept losing until I hit 123.  I had a 24-inch waist, and I loved it.  Kind of.

I loved my bones jutting out and how my thighs didn’t touch, but I still felt fat, gross, ugly, and disgusting.  Maybe, I thought, if I hit 120, I would magically feel thin.  Well, I passed out at a nightclub before I could hit the magic mark, and I decided that it wasn’t worth it to literally die to be thin.  It was tempting, but it wasn’t worth it in the end.  With great regret, I let that dream go.

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Fight or Flight–or Neither

It’s commonly thought that when someone is in a dangerous or threatening situation, the person has two choices–fight or flight.  I learned at an early age that there is another choice–disappear.  I learned how to freeze my inner soul and then shrink it so it could fit in the corner of my mind.  I learned how to block out my body as best I could and simply exist in my head.  I have always prized my mind highly, anyway, so I was fine living in there.  Or so I thought.

Today, I am going to talk about what happened to me in Thailand, but only briefly.  I have had to deal with it in the last week or so, and I am not really ready to discuss it in length.  However, it does tie in with the topic at hand and with what happened to me as a child, so I thought I would write a little about it if I can.*

I met a guy named Marty.  He was Thai, and he chose that as his American name.  He was not part of the program I was on; he was a local.  He was at a party, saw me, and decided he had to meet me.  He got a friend of mine to introduce him, and he asked me out.  I said no at first.  I had just broken up with the love of my life the summer before (for the third and final time), and I was also enduring a situation at the hotel in which a hotel worker was stalking me.  In addition, we had traveled from Taiwan, the land of my ancestry, where I was informed that I couldn’t be Taiwanese because I was too loud, too opinionated, too…much.  This was before I had tats, but still.

In Thailand, I lived with a host family who pretty much left me alone.  They were very laid-back, which I interpreted as not caring.  So, I was hurt, lonely, sad, and very much fragile.  In other words, Marty found me at the perfect time–for him.  He persisted, and I finally agreed to go out with him despite my misgivings.  He was cute, but he was also macho, not very well educated, and a hardcore drinker.  He got mean when he got drunk, but I didn’t find that out until later.

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Quick Housekeeping Note

I have been asked to provide an email address so readers can contact me directly rather than comment on these pages.  To that end, I have changed my About page to my About Me/Contact Me page and added an email addy.  It’s at the top, right above the categories.