Cities of Lost Children
I’ve been thinking a lot about Nathan, my father’s father. I often do when pretty weather makes me regret my solitude.
Nathan was a survivor and he never let you forget it. He also didn’t like to think of himself that way.
He was born in Poland to a determined woman with a schnorrer of a husband. That Yiddish word isn’t in the kind of rotation that other ones are–schmuck, for one. But it should be because schnorrers are everywhere. They’re hustlers who aren’t good at hustling, people (men mostly) who drain your resources without profiting from them. They’re what my grandmother Basha, my grandfather’s wife, called losahs without their mezuzahs.
She was a pissah, that one. Mean, judgmental, super clever.
When my grandfather was alive we didn’t exactly get on because he was funny about women, especially big blondes. When his mother arrived in America with him and his little sister, his father already had found a better-off wife, and here was my great-grandmother not speaking English with nowhere to live, nothing in her pocket. But with two small children in tow she wasn’t about to fall on her face, not while she was young and had spring in her step. So she started going by Mary Banks and turning tricks and well–
My grandfather didn’t understand shall-we-say normal sexual boundaries.
Any sexual boundaries. Continue Reading →
Teach Me Tonight (NSFW, O My)
I’ve been trying to figure out who to sleep with next–really, who to be attracted to. As if we have control in that department.
I always tell my Ruby Intuition clients the best you can hope for is a version 2.0 of what’s erotically imprinted on you. I’ve seen those relationships borne out of someone stubbornly trying Not to Date Mom or Dad and, boy o boy, the no-sex vibe is stronger than Prince’s pheromones are even now.
Strong.
As usual, my shrink has useful advice. She says, “The minute you get that Child feeling, get out.” She means that when I get that desperate, pay-attention-to-me-daddy! feeling around a paramour, I should cut it off. Because once again I have fallen for a charismatic narcissist who would rather drown me in their black hole than make our dynamics about anything other than their ego. Continue Reading →
Skinny and Number-Sixed: 2019 Orthorexia
Recently I was in a room of women who did not eat carbohydrates.
I am exaggerating, of course. I am sure they occasionally ate things like sprouted quinoa in bowls filled with other expensive elements meant to extend their lives by weeks or even months.
That is, if they didn’t choke on their own bile first.
Because these women were unhappy. They were rich women and they were white women and they were women my age. I kept having to remind myself they were my age, because they looked both older and younger than me. Their skin radiated a glow that mine only achieves about an hour after I work out–but really it was a sort of florescent, dangerous glow that spoke of misplaced determination. Their hair also spoke of that determination. It was very actively Not Grey, but not with the generic beige which less clever or moneyed women slap on grey hair. No, their hair was like a trip to the Grand Canyon or South Dakota’s Badlands–compelling flowing layers ranging from gold to burnt sienna–waves of sediment, not sea. Continue Reading →