It's funny… when you write with certain music in the background or in the foreground or wafting through your head, the influence it has on your words is amazing…it's kinda like drugs. Kinda like how the words of so many songs that so many straight people sing and claim as personal anthems, were written in a cloud of smoke in a big room of people having sex. Or the paintings that we all gape at like, "how the hell did they ever paint something like that? And look at the symbolism…and the contrast…and the…"…were painted on some really good high… im sitting here with the beautiful voice of ani d floating across the hallway from my room to the computer room (since my cd player won't stretch all the way in here-- I just have to turn it up real loud)…and it's kinda weird because what i'm about to write will be in part because of what surrounds me.
Influence is both so blatant and hidden in our society. I went through this big philosophical phase about a month ago (pertaining to influence)… my friend from argentina sent me this email about the occurrings of some random day…he had gone into the city of beunos aries (he lives outside of it) with his friends and they had been walking under a bridge and had seen a man lying on the ground. At first, they thought he was drunk and passed out, but when they got closer, they saw blood everywhere and realized that he was dead. And for some reason, something hit me when I read that.
A man died.
To me, he was a random, no-named Argentinian man under a remote bridge in a distant city I have never been to. How could that ever effect me?? But then I thought about influences and the way people work and the the way people affect each other… and what if I was going to meet him someday? What if he was going to meet someone who was going to meet someone who was going to meet me someday?
We all take a little bit of each other everywhere we go…kind of like those big puffy flowers that spread their seeds when the wind blows…they scatter and grow in other places.
People are like that. We talk to each other and plant our ideas in other minds and those minds plant ideas in other minds…ideas that could never
have been planted if the first planting had never been.
And so what if the whole entire course of my life has been altered because of this single dead Argentinian man? Or what if part of myself has been passed all the way down to him through a big chain of people? Then did part of myself die with him? And then what about plane crashes and car accidents and the people that die every single day…? We never really give a thought as to how their death affects ourselves…
So now it sounds like I believe in fate. I don't. because I don't think I believe in god. But I believe that we are all connected in some weird way…through emotion, through influence, through just being alive together on this planet…and for some reason, it makes life a little more beautiful to me.
Just to know that we're all running around together, confused as hell…influencing little minds and pretending we are less naïve than everyone else. We dance around in little bubbles that i create for you and you create for me. We're preoccupied with things that don't matter. We forget that all we have is each other.
--debbie
****I've dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. ~ emily brontë****
3/15/2001
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Two months ago, at the time I am starting to write this, I had unprotected sex. I am normally very sexually responsible, but I had an evening of oversight. I wasn’t concerned about contracting any diseases, I am in a long-term relationship and we both have been tested. Pregnancy did cross my mind, but obviously it didn’t strike me as anything to worry enough about. There were condoms in the room, it wasn’t a question of convenience. It was a simple choice I made. And now I am paying for it.
I hate birth control. I have refused the pill for many reasons, most of which revolve around my general distaste for having my body ruled by drugs, and my questions about long-term use. I would rather wait and see what happens to people who spent time on the pill when they were my age once they are ninety before I try it on myself. Condoms are annoying. It’s not having to buy them or the stopping to use one that bothers me. It’s the using them. As for other methods, I have my reasons.
I know I have to be very fertile. No one on either side of my family has less than two children. My parents both have enough siblings it takes two hands to count them all. My mother got pregnant with my while on the pill. There really isn’t an excuse for what I didn’t do that night.
So, here I sit, pregnant. I am not feeling really shy or ashamed or anything, I made a choice, here are the results. I have also made another choice which I am not shy or ashamed about. I am going to have an abortion. As soon as possible.
Here’s the story on what’s happened since. Two weeks after the unprotected (and great, I might add) sex, I woke up with cramps. Right on schedule. No period came. This went on for two weeks before I began to seriously evaluate the situation. I had cramps every day that felt like tomorrow I would bleed. I felt like I had PMS. My period did not come.
So, I sat down to consider possible reasons why I would not menstruate. Well, I had dramatically changed my entire life since my last period. I added stress, and removed some nutrition. I changed my sleeping habits from 10+ hours every single night to less than 6. I began spending time with lots of new women. My car is emitting fumes which could stop anything normal and healthy. The new millenium had started. There were plenty of perfectly good reasons why I wasn’t having my period, yet. It just needed time to adjust to my life.
I gave it a week. No period. I began to seriously worry. This is now five weeks after the unprotected sex. Now I decide to actually consider pregnancy as a possibility. I still had cramps every day. My body went back to normal size finally (I had been PMS bloated for three weeks). Things started to change.
Everything I ate after 8 PM made me vomit. I was completely exhausted and started going to bed around nine PM when normally I am up until two. My libido vanished. These all could be easily attributed to a sinus infection combined with a new job. Maybe that’s what causing them.
At one point I told my boyfriend that “there’s a very real chance I may be pregnant”. That was about this time. He just sort of agreed and didn’t bring it up again. So, neither did I.
I let two more weeks pass while taking hot, hot baths and talking to my uterus about letting go of whatever it was holding in there. No dice.
So, Saturday, I finally cornered my boyfriend and myself. We went to Kroger and bought the cheapest pregnancy test they had. If I was pregnant, I was pregnant enough that any old test ought to be able to figure it out. I went home, I drank a bunch of water. I peed while he timed to make sure it was at least five seconds.
He went to the couch, I kinda stared over the thing in the bathroom. It was almost instantly that the lines appeared. I waited the three minutes (he was still the designated timekeeper), and then came back in the room and announced we are pregnant. I then walked right by him to the phone book to look up planned parenthood, wondering if I would be able to get an abortion here or if I would have to drive 100 miles to the nearest clinic I know of that performs them. It was a Saturday night, but I thought surely the hours would be on the answering machine. They aren’t.
Then I noticed my boyfriend crying. We had talked about this already in a “what-if” way. We had agreed on abortion with no discussion. He explained that when I said I was pregnant he was happy about it. He had already decided he loved this baby. He admitted he knew it was going to have to go away, pronto, but he was emotionally involved with this zygote thing growing inside of me making me smoke less and sleep more (possibly). I had not counted on this.
I was as nice and sympathetic as I could be, talking about how maybe someday we really would have kids, but not while we can barely afford to feed and house ourselves, and now we know we can certainly conceive. He didn’t seem much consoled. He agrees that we are not giving birth to any babies around here, but he is still sad.
It’s been four days now and I am finally jotting this all down. He seems to be feeling better about the whole situation. I am not, I know I am 8 weeks post conception here and I have to get this thing out, NOW.
Which brings me to my current beef with planned parenthood in this town. I am thrilled that we have one, and I don’t mean to sound like I am taking my reproductive rights for granted (although I do dream of how someday women will be able to). I love Margaret Sanger for founding that organization. My problem is that they are too hard to get in touch with.
I have called at 8 am and at 5:30 PM. Immediately before and after work. I know there is typically a one week waiting period to get a preliminary appointment, and I don’t even know if they can supply me with what I need. I procrastinated long enough. I am trying to take action. What this means to me is that I am going to have to call from the payphone at work (I have a phone at my desk but I do not want the people I share an office-room with to overhear this particular personal conversation on work’s dime) on my lunch break. It also means that I am definitely going to have to miss work for both appointments. Or maybe here I can get it all done in one. I am not sure what the state laws are regarding waiting periods for abortions.
Other information to share with you in this preliminary report… I did some research online and have learned that the whole process takes ten minutes (for a D&C which what I presume will happen to me), and, while you should take the rest of the day to relax, you can resume normal activity the next day. However, you might bleed for up to four weeks and cannot have sex for like four weeks after that. I’m hoping for a Friday appointment. I don’t want to miss any more work than is necessary.
Last night my boyfriend announced that he didn’t think he wanted to have sex until we were ready to actually make children. I responded by saying I intended to suck it up and get on the pill as soon as this was over, and couldn’t we re-evaluate this after the about two months of medically imposed abstinence? He’s not so sure. I guess we’ll see.
The other primary issue is the money. Basically that I don’t have any. I mean, I have enough money I could afford this, but I am counting on it to pay my rent next week. My boyfriend is between jobs right now and cannot even pay his half of the rent (hence my extreme poverty), but he is looking for a job. So, I am trying to save my pennies against the clock.
If I sound like I am not emotionally involved, it’s because I am not. I don’t care about this thing that I have invited to mooch off of me. I am concerned that my boyfriend isn’t going to be able to handle this. I am not second guessing myself, I have always been avidly pro-choice, and I know this is what is best all around. I am scared to death that something is going to stand in the way of my personal choice and being able to act upon it (like time or money or protesters or geography).
I am writing about this for WAM because I want to share my experience. I don’t know if I will change anyone’s opinion on the matter, but I hope I can at least interest you.
3/14/2001
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I was sitting in a coffee shop in Clifton the other day, and I had a strange awakening to an action that I have performed many times, but never noticed.
I was writing in a notebook, when my left hand started to itch. Rather than stop writing to scratch it, I simply used my teeth. I realized though, that I had done this many times before and, in fact, rarely used my hands to scratch any part of me that I could reach with my mouth. At first I was rather amused and infatuated with this odd behavior that I had discovered in myself; soon though I began to understand it.My mind, I have decided, does not operate in a normal fashion... in fact, it operates quite abnormally. Not only does it come equipped with a pause button (I stole that description from Mary), but it operates on several tracks at once. The odd part though is that the tracks are separated by really fucking high concrete walls so that what ever is happening in one track is completely isolated from and oblivious to what is going on in the other tracks. So this sudden enlightenment led me to understand the previously mentioned strange behavior.I scratch my hand with my mouth. Is that odd? Is it odd that I get so preoccupied writing that I do not want to break my train of thought? Is it odd that when my trains of thought collide I become helplessly confused and am forced to murder small animals? Is it odd that I would joke about murdering small animals? I don’t think so.
None of that seems odd to me. However, it seems odd to me to concern one hand with the problems of another.
--josiah
3/13/2001
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"Tell me why - I don't like Mondays"*
Things should never begin on Mondays, as Mondays are the days everyone who has ever read a Garfield comic seem to dread. There is something in the idea of actually having to get out of bed at a prescribed time, in order to continue on the daily haze which is called life. Sunday has evolved into "me" day, instead of participating in some institutionalized religion in order to make me feel happy, generally I partake in what I want to do. It is just that Monday comes around, leaving off where Sunday once was, and it is shock as now yet another week has begun, now it is yet another week to procrastinate doing something.
Actually one of the big somethings that I have been regretfully procrastinating has been simply doing something about the WAM web. It should be easy, as there are already a few articles written, some buffer space to slack. But each Monday comes around so quickly that I realize as an afterthought at about 11.30 at night, that I should’ve done the WAM website. "Oh, well, I can just put that off for next week. As it should start on a Monday, shouldn’t it?"
Maybe the whole apprehension to actually updating this website has simply been, I personally don’t like beginnings, and conversely endings. Greetings seem silly, especially the small talk of "Hi, how are you" in passing persons. (Especially seeing how no one really has the time to actually listen to how you really are, just a "fine" is all they really want to hear.) There seems to be some need/ some want of mine to have some little small talk with you, that potential reading audience, if only to say who/what this is, instead of what I would more rather is that this begins hence forth as if you and I know what is going on (hey, if you know would you care to enlighten me?)
well anyways, enough rambling on my side of things, I really should just do write one thing:
HELLO welcome to WAM
peace love and empathy,
kel
* extra bonus brownie points for those who actually recognize the above quote being from a Boomtown Rat's song.
3/12/2001
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