"He was totally smothering me. Called me like two times last week'"

I’ve had a few spectacular geekouts on the O/p board over the years, however as this led to a few  people learning of Firefly I think this probably counts as a good thing. Possibly worthy of a sainthood. Anyway, I am about to excel myself by doing what Douglas Coupland referred in Generation X as ‘Tele-Parablizing: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots' - "That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses."

And that's every bit as bonkers as it sounds, because the following naval gazing was brought to you today thanks to The Guild  And yes, I know that The Guild isn't a TV show. Generation X was published in 1991, times change, work with me here.

In The Guild there is a character called Tink, aka Tinkerballa aka April Lu. Tink’s a young woman who strolls through life, trading on her nubile pocket Princess proportions, and the fact that she is a rare commodity in her world, namely a hot gamer girl. Her basic MO is to lure in hapless men who want her to serve her every whim, use them, and then discard them.  She embraces shallow as an art form, and likes to imply that if you scratched her surface – well actually if you scratched her surface she’d take your eyes out, but aside from that, she likes to imply that if you scratched her surface you’d find the hidden shallows of your most hollow imaginings. 

 

As I'm not a cool, edgy, young Asian woman, or a hot gamer girl either, (oh cruel life), you may be wondering how I could feel the slightest iota of recognition toward Tink, with with her penchant for teeny bubble gum bikinis, and bouncy shiny hair. Well have faith - and remember I've had painkillers.

Tink tends to see human interaction as commerce. So when she meets a guy who understands the score upfront, and is happy with a ‘you give me cool stuff and in return you get to hang out with me’ kind of deal she is happy because he gets her. She can get adoration and gifts from most guys, but this one gets her! Oh sweet day. No more game playing! No need for tiring analysis! Just being!

..... then after a while the fact that he gets her means it stops being all about trading, and she starts to actually like him. Because he gets her. And I get that.Get it?

Nigel was totally down with the fact I can be hard as all living Hell when required. He kind of likes that about me - though perhaps not so much when directed at him ;) But he gets his jollies watching me do my thing. He also knows that I'm a mean sadist and he’s cool with that too, we kind of bonded over it. More than that though, he knows that I am really crap at doing things like talkingaboutmyfeelings or indeed emoting in any obvious manner. He knows that I tend to say 'fuck off ' in response to some things that nice girls are 'meant' to do, and he makes no attempt to ‘cure’ me, change me or understand the ins and out of the why and the how, he just leaves those things alone. Sweet Jesus that’s nice. 

And what do you know? By never trying to get me to be more open/ softer he makes me inclined to be more open/ softer. Being accepted as the whole eclectic package that I am is cool.

I could tell you dozens of stories of people meeting me in one context and assigning some image or another to me based on this.For example;

Genus - Earth Mother type. Sample reasons: Kids, many, including several who weren’t mine. Vaguely hippy type leanings. Nurturing type. 

Genus - Ditz. Sample reasons: I like glitter and I used to go clubbing a lot. 

Genus - Academic, earnest individual. Sample reason: academics are all earnest so you must be.

Genus - ‘Survivor‘ (God help me). Reason: I’m not dead and you can see the scars on my palms. Yawn. This one appeals to people who like to angst all over the place or want to empower themselves.

Genus - Raving nymphomaniac sex kitten. Reason: I like orgasms, I’m bisexual and I have a lot of cleavage. See also Ditz, above.

Genus - Geek: ...   Utterly inexplicable.

Oh the dramas for people when I turned out to be a real person. There was a Buddhist who decided I his perfect Earth Mother Goddess and foresaw a life of us changing the world together, one lentil at a time. He was heartbroken when I turned up for dinner with a teeny glittery bag because I was out dancing afterwards. I could tell you about far too many academics who consider buying an overpriced bottle of plonk at some stodgy conference to be letting their hair down, and assume the same of me. I could go on, but you get the gist.

Meanwhile Nigel just sees all this stuff plus all the other stuff, and gets that it’s all just part of the funny little package known as me. And that is why as time goes by he gets to know the other bits of me too.. Because he gets the baseline; I’m in charge, I am interested in experiencing life on my terms, and that in no way indicates that I want what anyone may expect me to based on whatever the image of me they have in their head may be; I feel far more inclined to include him in the plan.

And the side effect of this is just like the one for the divine Miss Tink. He gets me, as I am, so he ends up getting more of me.  

Life is funny isn’t it?

The sum of my parts.

I am doll eyes

Doll mouth, doll legs

I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait

Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do

Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, but I do too

I want to be the girl with the most cake

I love him so much it just turns to hate

I fake it so real, I am beyond fake

And someday, you will ache like I ache

Someday, you will ache like I ache

I am doll parts

Bad skin, doll heart

It stands for knife

For the rest of my life

Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do

Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, but I do, too

I want to be the girl with the most cake

He only loves those things because he loves to see them break

I fake it so real, I am beyond fake

And someday, you will ache like I ache

Someday you will ache like I ache.

 Doll Parts by Hole.

_______________

I put a thread up on the FL O/p group regarding ‘theme songs’ yesterday. It’s a thread we’ve done before but it’s always fun and revealing, so as we have so many new members in the two years since last time we did it I thought I’d start anew.

In the course of this I linked to the last thread, and had a leisurely read through while I was at it. My own choices were Weak by Skunk Anansie, Born to Fight by Tracy Chapman, and Chinese Burn by Curve. Conspicuously absent though was Doll Parts by Hole. I can only assume I was having one of my phases where I misleadingly think I have evolved and moved beyond such things.  I’m adorable really.

My relationship with this song for the best part of twenty years means it deserved inclusion on the theme songs list, and this was noticed (you people are astute). I don’t like the fact it speaks to me and for me so well, I want to be a fuck sight shinier and more wholesome than that… but there it is.

Let’s start with the chorus shall we?

"I want to be the girl with the most cake"

This is self-explanatory; I want. I crave, I desire, I’m hungry, there are things I just long for. I don’t like settling without trying. My redeeming feature is that I am very easy to please, but perhaps counterintuitively that has never made me feel content to just put up with what anyone else says I ‘should’ do or have or want.  It’s also part of that childlike thing I referenced in my Innocence post.  I like cake so I’m having a big tea party, because I can have one now, and no one is going to stop me without good cause. No one is going to stop me being happy any more Motherfuckers, and if you try you’ll reap what you sow. The choices are sit in the lovely sunshine and have lovely cake with me, get out of my way and leave me alone, or get in my face and see just how much damage I can do with a teapot. I crave and I am driven to get as close as I can to getting what I really deeply crave.

"I love him so much it just turns to hate".

Not ‘hate’ in the literal sense (mostly), but I know sadism looks a lot like hatred sometimes. And for me the big sadistic stuff comes from him being mine, all mine, mine to do with as I will. He’s cake. The more he’s mine, the more I love him, and the more I love him the more I want to hurt him just because I can, because he's mine. My desire to hurt him comes from the fact he’s mine, and that is intertwined irrevocably with love for me.  Screwed up? Most definitely. I doubt you are surprised.

I love fiercely you see. In all ways, not just O/p or other kinky shit. The levels of fierceness that come out in me regarding people I love are overt, and sometimes these are pretty, pleasant passions of which people approve, and sometimes these are brutal in their ferocity. When I love I will go to any length to protect and keep safe and well. I’ll love you fiercely and joyfully and without much of a self protection buffer. People generally nod along at this in theory but the practice can cause overt disapproval.

And with N, my love sometimes morphs into ferocity anyway. Slashing and bruising and kicking and beating him is so much more fierce, more passionate, more intense, more painful, more full of love, and rage, and pain, and claiming, and authenticity because he is mine, and I love him. I couldn't do that unless he was mine.

"I fake it so real, I am beyond fake"

No, this isn’t an admission that I’m actually a male scuba diver from New Zealand, called Zach. That would be less messy, and at this stage probably pretty generic for the internet.

I don’t fake it in the sense of lying but my authenticity is rooted in being ‘fake’. Bear with me. I’m damaged goods. I nearly called this blog ‘Screaming Scars’ rather than ‘Sparkling Scars’ but then my natural urge to make a bad thing good (ok, and not sound like a total emo twat, despite this post with it's broken doll photos). And in a way that small choice is a good example of my authentic ‘fakeness’. I’m naturally Polyanna-ish, and I naturally want to be ok. That’s my nature. The effects of my nurture however fly in the face of that. It’s a dichotomy that defines me really. Being me is tiring sometimes - I doubt that surprises you either.

Being saturated in excessively destructive stuff from as early as I can remember means therefore that everything I have ever been has had that tingeing it. There is no sense of ‘me’ to look back to without that, ever. So I have no idea where the effects of that end and ‘I’ begin, and as such I just am what I am and I can't untangle anything. I had to learn almost Every. Single. Thing that most people take for granted too late, without help, and out of context, and unnaturally systematically, and therefore to an extent everything from there on is 'fake'. But I’ve faked it for so many years now and internalised that fakeness so deeply I have gone way beyond fake. I’m me now. However I got here, I am Me.  I fake it so real I am beyond fake and no one is telling me I don’t exist anymore.

"And someday, you will ache like I ache

Someday, you will ache like I ache"

So left to own devices I am fundamentally one of the most relentlessly happy people you will ever meet ... I feel these tremendous waves of joy that I don’t think most people do, quite regularly over the smallest things, because somewhere deep in my processing I’m comparing. I’m pretty safe! I have water to drink and food to eat! And it’s lovely food! Yum! I’m loved! I’m in a cosy house! I have a comfy bed to sleep in! People care about me! I’m warm! My babies are safe and loved! I have so many luxuries I can’t count them all! I am lucky lucky lucky! This is how my psyche processes the world, almost constantly. Give me the slightest reason to feel happy and I revel in it.

But the fact I compare, even subconsciously, means the other decaying, painful, dangerous stuff full of suffering and terror is still defining me, because as I tried to explain above, that was the base that made me, not an additional factor. So I ache. A lot. All the time. Even when I’m happy it’s there. It comes out in dreams, strengths, fears, passions, responses, abilities, weaknesses, in the very essence of who I am. And more tangibly it smashes me firmly and suddenly in the face several times every single fucking day. When I am knotted up in intense pain from old injuries that my body couldn’t manage any more I’m forced to remember them, the how and the why, and the fact that I am imprisoned forever in the wreckage. When I haven’t done something before and people look at me like a freak because they don’t understand that they learned to do it, and laugh and demand explanations. When I have to tell people some tiny fact that is unfortunately necessary and then they either want a backstory or make horrible  assumptions, that I then have to live with or rebuff.

So I ache. Physically and in myself, and I don’t think it can ever go away, so I get my Pollyanna on and make the best of it. It's what I do.

I’ve felt like a doll a lot over the years and not in a nice way. Dolls aren't real girls, they are subhuman  simulacra, and not usually very valuable. Doll eyes can’t cry, doll mouths can't scream, doll legs can't kick or run, doll hearts can't feel like real girls hearts do, and wasted emaciated bodies have doll like arms with big blue bulging veins that are ripe for bleeding. As an aside, now my body is not doll like in that way (hurrah!), I choose my multi-coloured hair and glitter because I feel more natural when I have pink hair than when it’s natural. As I said, fake is very much my natural state.

Doll Parts is a record of longing and determination that doesn't hide from the recognition of the core truth of what some of us are. We are broken, fucked up beyond repair, not pretty or perfect or particularly treasured, but simply the sum of our parts; our doll arms, and doll eyes, and doll hearts, and doll legs, and blue veins making up the whole. Yet still, despite all of it, we never stop wanting and longing and trying, and we just have to learn to manage everything. 




From Dirty Blonde, The Diaries of Courtney Love. Courtney's original scribbled lyrics to Doll Parts.

 

I want to be the girl with the most cake, and my scars are going to fucking sparkle, and I’m not going to hide.  I may not be a 'real girl' but that doesn't mean I can't have cake. Or a relationship that makes me happy, my way. Or a life - even if it has to be one with knives in it.