The Dancing Sausage Web Journal

This week’s jihad: Men who insist that women leave an elevator first, even when they are closer to the door than the women are. An absurd number of men in the building where I work do this. I have consciously avoided giving any indication that I was eager to leave the elevator, hanging back at the handrail on the wall, and even with this noticeable pause they still make a gesture to the door and won’t walk out until I do.

I don’t mind certain forms of politeness; for example, I don’t mind people holding doors open for each other — I do it for other women, they do it for me, we do it for men, men do it for us, everyone does it for the guy with no arms or the woman pushing a stroller — but this is a highly gendered form of “politeness,” and it’s dumb and slows everyone down and I hate it. I’m trying to work up a good comment. What I have so far (none of it is particularly witty, which frustrates me):

• “Are you trying to get a good look at my ass? I’m sorry, I can’t help but think that when you’re closer to the door than I am and you want me to exit first.”
• (while pushing him, imperiously) “Out of my way — my two X chromosomes need to be off the elevator before your Y does, or there may be A CRISIS!”
• or “You know, they’ve discovered that being female isn’t actually a medical condition. I’m in no hurry.”
• “Would you offer to let me go first if I was a guy?”
• “Would you still offer to let me go first if you knew I was a transvestite?”
• “I think it’s less rude if you go first.”
• or simply, “You’re closer to the door than I am.”

None of these really sum up my continually unfulfilled desire to simply be seen as a thinking, productive, non-sexual entity by the people around me who I am not looking to fu(k (i.e. 99.999% of the population). It being nearly summer again in New York, I’m wearing less clothing for the sake of being comfortable, and I am sort of disgusted by how much time I spend angrily stewing my comeback lines so I have a fresh steaming one ready for the next a$shole who whistles at me. Come on, men of New York. Guys in other cities aren’t half so bad as you are. Settle the fu(k down.

(This jihad was inspired in part by one woman’s thoughts on men sitting on subway seats with their legs spread as if their test!cles were as big as their heads. I think she’s entirely right, and I would add that the societal expectation that women sit with their legs crossed makes for excessively tippy subway riding.)

* * *

My absolute least favorite people to interview are small-time government officials. I imagine the same is true of many big-time government officials. It’s nearly impossible to get them to give you a meaningful quote. This morning I called a guy at a Coney Island governance organization for this article I’m doing, and he gave me nothing but a mouthful of cliches. This may be a matter of my own failure in interviewing; I wanted to get a picture of what Coney Island means to him in the kind of the warm, personal, quirky terms that I was supposedly trained to evince as a literary journalist, but even when I asked how the C.I. boardwalk physically looks different in the wake of economic development, he heaped comments about his mother “giving back to the community” on top of pabulum about the local schools having a “children-first philosophy” and garnished it with cream about how people in Coney Island “work together and have a team attitude.” I gave up.

* * *

And now, a public service. The following doctors have REALLY BAD HANDWRITING:

• Edward J. Kinkopf of Centerville, OH
• Stanley Dziedzic of New York, NY
• Richard Wolin of Williamsville, NY

These people are in the job of communicating the nature of ills to other people, in the interest of of remedying them. They really ought to have good handwriting, and they don’t. Fix it, guys. Further bulletins as I identify more doctors with REALLY BAD HANDWRITING.

Went running today. My dad, an inveterate marathoner, used to encourage us to note whether we were leg-limited or lung-limited during a given run; it’s only recently that this kind of take on a body has to me seemed limited. In dance class, I am frequently space-limited, back-limited, or arm-limited. Running must be about something more, too. I remember Li-Young Lee talking about a given poem of his coming from his rib, or from his hip. Surely running has a more spiritual side.

Anyway, today I was neither leg- nor lung-limited; I was pavement-limited. I took what must have been the digger of my life over on 44th Street when I jammed my right foot into a loop of my left shoelace. I scraped my palms, elbow, shoulder, shin, knee, and hip. I think that adds up to more points of landing than the time JT and I crash-landed near the Washington Monument.

To my memory, that was the only unpleasant part of my visit with him in DC, or even the entire summer before I entered college. The sex was good; he’d been writing me profound letters on a frequent basis; he sent me little gifts and I reciprocated; his mom and stepdad had flown me out and I was enjoying spending time with them; Kube came up and visited and we baptized ourselves at the Watergate. A fun time was had by all, I thought.

So it was kind of a rude shock to find that not only was this guy who I’d considered one of the greater loves of my life blogging unbeknownst to me, but he also had a totally different take on that particular period of time. (Inexact linkage; look for the April 18 post, or do a search for “Jill” on the page.)

I don’t know how to take it, exactly. He had a big crush on someone else; he hadn’t mentioned that. Was he lying to me? I’d never thought of him as a liar. Frank and thoughtful, yes. A liar, no.

Then again, memory warps in time, faster than glass does. Was my recollection of that time wrong, or was his? The DC trip was about eight years ago; maybe we’re both wrong about what it was like. Time for some reconceptualization. I’d also always presumed I meant as much to him as he had to me, a preconception which that post and others took apart. It had already proved a dangerous presumption — about three years ago, in some fit of crudely-conceived empowerment, I experimentally asked him to marry me. He backed off speaking in the kind of “nice doggie” tone you use to augment your use of a big stick against a menacing dog. My head was pretty hazy at that point with low-self-esteem in the depressurization period after college, so I probably was too into myself to read him well; I never guessed how that stunt would impact what I read as bemusement in him.

Still, I thought I knew him. There is a terrible thing about going to the kind of school where the same people are together for twelve years or more: you come to think these people belong to you. They are symbols for you to play with. They have meanings which in some ways are the clearest possible distillation of who they are, and yet do not begin to touch who they are. Your meaning fits together with theirs, even if it is not anything like theirs; it can be an opposition, or a complement. And then everyone moves away, and the substance behind those meanings dissolves. For highly affective people like me, the shell of the meaning remains. I think it only gets in the way.

You’ve fallen victim to the crazy hijinks of one of my less pleasant moods. The Dancing Sausage Web Journal isn’t going anywhere! That wacky premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Always keeping things “interesting.” Bet you were fooled!

(sound of crickets)

I promise I didn’t do it for the attention. I was genuinely freaking out. All I’ve probably done is chased away my regular audience… counterproductive.

* * *

Fox recently aired a Beverly Hills 90210 reunion and a “Now-It-Can-Be-Told”-style dramatization of the Three’s Company cast in rapid succession. While my stomach churned, I thought how nice it is that the Internet makes bullsh!t like that unecessary. I mean, think about it. Nobody is ever going to do a Homestar Runner reunion, for example; the whole oeuvre will (hopefully) be right there on the Web for time immemorial, barring the progression of the right-wing coup to total repression of free speech. If we see something like, it’ll be a spoof of the kind of “reunion special” which makes some halfwit sitcom out to be a great cultural touchstone in which everyone participated (which, of course, The Simpsons has already done). Or maybe TV will be forced to do retrospectives of things like 2001’s AYBABTU craze, instead. I can just picture some grey-haired, baseball-jacketed network producers scratching their heads and going “Who the hell gives a shit?”

* * *

New Yorkers, I mean the born-and-bred-and-raised-and-dyed-hard-in-the-wool-type New Yorkers, are CRAZY. I mean CRAAAAAAYZEEEE. They have a warped, twisted worldview inexplicable to the rest of us. I got a call today from a woman running a boostery kind of a magazine in Brooklyn, who said she’d seen my writing and loved my style, and would I like to do some articles for her? The first one she wanted me to do was about Coney Island, and how it has undergone a rebirth in the past little while… in passing, she mentioned the carnival freakshow, the burlesque show, the Mermaid Parade, the polar bear swim club that meets there, and the “unofficial mayor of Coney Island.” All the while she was hemming and hawing, going, Well, seeing as you live in Queens and you’re from California, you probably don’t have an affinity for this story or for Brooklyn.

Let’s take that again in slow motion: She saw my work — which has ranged from pieces on dumpster diving to a performance artist who does an opera he wrote in a language he made up — and she thinks I wouldn’t have an affinity for this story. I’m twenty-six; I have to have an affinity for Brooklyn whether I live there or not. All the good stuff happens there. All the cool kids live there. (When buddy Rob Domingo and I went out the other day to run a half-mile with two giant chickens and their devoted flock of young crazies, he estimated that Williamsburg must have been totally deserted.)

Granted, you can’t get to Brooklyn from here; the G train is a$s and everything else goes through Manhattan. But Coney Island is still the only beach in the city I go to. I was in the Mermaid Parade last year. And she bets that because I live in Queens I won’t have an affinity for the story. I can only chalk this up to the New York mindset that anything outside a three-block radius of your house is Not My Neighborhood.

I told her the only borough I don’t have an affinity with is Staten Island, and I’m taking on the story. She assigned me two articles, actually, both of which sound fun. Various things are coming up Milhouse.

* * *

When I wondered about the ethics of doctors, Catherine sent me a link to the Onion’s “Zoloft for Everything” article. Perfect timing; it reads so much like the stuff I see at work.

Working in the bosom of Big Pharm is making me think. The pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (is there really such a diagnosis? it’s definitely what I have) was really bad this month, longer than usual and involving a few paralyzing crying jags and a sh!tload of unfocused anxiety. Sifting through the doctors’ diagnoses at work, I start to think, Gee, some people deal with depression as if it could be made to go away. I gave up on that a while ago. None of the social workers at Hampshire helped me any. I think I figured on my own that I was more depressed the week before my period — four years ago, which was after about three years of mostly blaming my violent mood swings on my boyfriends, or else riding them out in terror that my body and mind were so unreliable.

It was about four years ago, too, that I told Catherine what I’d figured out about my depressive spells. She said Wow, that’s a quarter of your life. I wouldn’t want to spend a quarter of my life that way.

I mistrust. I have seen people who have taken Prozac up close, and watched them struggle with how it made them feel. I know someone who took Ritalin as a kid, and he has all sorts of weird vestigial compulsive behaviors and doesn’t open up to you. I don’t think drugs can just make these things go away.

I have taught myself, for the most part, to deal with the dysphoria. I remind myself to take things with a grain of salt during that week, as I may well be overreacting. I treat myself a little more gently. Experimentation with placebos — whoops, herbal remedies — seems to have helped a great deal, as have attention to my sleep habits, getting excercise, and making sure I take my usual vitamin supplement. (My serious depression kicked in at the beginning of my second year of college; I have wondered if this is related to the anemia I probably developed when I went vegetarian in the months before.)

The very knowledge that I’m pulling myself out of a tailspin seems to improve my mood greatly. In the same vein, I would also like to try biofeedback, though nobody seems to do that much anymore. I would really like to do without the drugs.

At the same time, these episodes are so violent that they sometimes make permanent marks on my life. I can’t rely upon myself to make major decisions in these weeks. And the continuation of my dark spells as the years go by shakes my faith in myself, which for an aware leftist is sometimes the only thing there is to have faith in.