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Location: Home.
Listening: "Cooling" by Tori Amos.

...or maybe she had no choice in the matter.

I can't pull out of this, not currently, anyway. I'm sick of dealing with it and I'm sick of it being reinforced no matter where I turn.

What is "it"? The notion that my existence, at this point, is really superfluous. I'm about to be twenty-six years old, closer to thirty than twenty, and I haven't done shit all with my life to this point. This is where the child prodigy looks at where she was supposed to be by this time and realizes that she lost every chance she ever had at fulfilling her potential. It's where she realizes that, rather than having a PhD at twenty-four or being a recent graduate of a prestigious law school, she's barely making ends meet, working as basically a Kinko's employee, and aging. Aging, aging, aging--every fucking day that goes by is one more day I can't get back.

Once you get past eighteen, your stock starts dropping. It's a fact that you're just going to have to live with.

Someone said that to me on my eighteenth birthday. Someone kept saying that to me for years to follow. I could have shaken it off as bullshit and moved on without a second thought, except for the fact that that someone was the person I was in love with and, who ostensibly loved me. Again, he insisted he was doing me a favor. It's been playing in my head in heavy rotation every day ever since.

Why shouldn't I believe it? A dj recently referred to Britney Spears as "the aging songstress" because she turned twenty this year. Twenty. Six years younger than I and she's "aging". The comment was not facetious. When I try to buy clothes, I have a hard time finding anything that doesn't make me look like a high school whore--even in shops theoretically geared toward women my age. The majority of examples of beauty I'm given are women younger than myself. I read Peter's manuscript and the only female character who is portrayed as being anything other than a cynical, hardened, thoroughly unattractive bitch is a teenager. She's the only one who the main character can relate to. She's the one who gets the seven page sex scene because it's the only good sex the character has. She's the one who is desireable, because she is the one who is not supposed to be--and every other woman over the age of eighteen is damaged goods. We've had numerous discussions about this. He argues that that is not his point. I argue that the reinforcement of the current media obsession with youth in women is obvious and palpable. I see her as a sublimation of his nostalgia. He sees her as a pivotal symbol in the message he's trying to convey about the current state of society (ie it's fucked up beyond belief). I see her as a pivotal symbol of everything I will never be again--independent, wanted, young--and everything that keeps repeating those facts to me.

I argue that he doesn't understand because he's male. He doesn't have to deal with the idea that time is running out because his best years were theoretically over (according to our current social attitude) before he was really aware that they'd begun. That his overall worth is going the way of the dot.com industry. I want to support his work, but it gets harder and harder when every time I read it, I feel like I'm being slapped in the face with one more value judgement on my worth as a person.

Every day, I think that I need new clothes, but don't want to go shopping for fear of what other unflattering aspect of myself I'll discover in a dressing room. Every day, I look at the pictures we've taken and I want to destroy them so that no record of the way that I look will survive, because I look old and fat and tired. Every day, I sit and I wonder about who or what I could have been and realize that my chances are gone, my choices are painfully limited, my future is irrelevant because it's supposedly "all downhill from here". It hollows me out and there's little left to do but drink a bottle of wine a night and hope I can stop thinking about it.

But do I hate what she is
But do I want to be her?
And don't we love something fresh
Anything new, virgin.

Woman you got too many brambles
Hiding under these bushes.

You can call this what you will--shallow, self-absorbed, hopelessly self-indulgent. I have never made claims to being invulnerable to my surroundings and, right now, I'm surrounded by numerous variables all telling me the same thing: that I'm not what I should have been, but I have no option to change that. I can only move forward and try to make the best of it, try to be the best "despite" I can be because, well, it's the only hope I've got. Try to be a "good person" because that's what you do when you no longer have any other leg to stand on.

As for the "being a good person" part--Peter read my entry of yesterday, with the internal dialogue, and pointed out that I have the limitations I've placed on myself because I have "style and class". I informed him, with no lack of bitterness, that style, class, and a quarter will get you a Coke. Certainly hasn't gotten me much of anything else to date. If everyone else is playing checkers, being a grandmaster at chess doesn't count for shit, in the end. You end up where I keep finding myself--ignored, ostracized, disrespected, and very, very angry.

Well things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl
The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street.
And when they're on a roll, she pulls a razor from her boot
And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet.

So I slept in late today and eventually called into work because I just couldn't justify going. The money will still be there tomorrow because they'll still need someone to copy those 42,000 sheets of paper. Peter is asleep on the sofa after writing all night and being concerned about me all morning. I'm sitting in front of the computer, chain smoking, and wishing I could just be easy--agreeable and sweet and supportive of anything he does, but I can't be this time, not entirely. I can't pretend that I don't read in what he's writing a rationalization for everything I feel about myself right now. There's not a single woman in that piece who is truly redeemable, but when it comes to the lesser of all the evils, age is the deciding factor, and the younger, apparently, the better.

I wasn't a typical teenager. I made straight A's, I didn't drink (although I did smoke for a summer when I went to Governor's School at 15 and occasionally thereafter when I felt like it), I didn't stay out late or fuck everything I tripped over or try to rebel against my parents because I knew it would lead to nothing but perdition in the end. I got engaged to my first real boyfriend, went to college at 17, and then was pretty wholly exploited by someone because I trusted them--and because they liked the idea of being involved with a minor. Maybe that's the root of it, after all. Maybe I feel like I played everything the way I should have and still got screwed. Maybe I'm now realizing that all that effort to be good and kind and everything I felt I should be was wasted because the men I know are still obsessed with the little schoolgirls who acted like Taylor--belligerent, bratty, irresponsible and promiscuous--everything that I have always thought of as common and pathetic. The desire for that sort of person, the mythologizing of adolescent female sexuality, is what gave us "Lolita", and what is still giving us Britney, the resurgence of teen sex films, and a largely open-door policy for a thinly disguised pedophilia in the media and the arts.

I was listening to the radio Friday afternoon, and heard that R. Kelly, a prominent R&B singer, had been accused of paying a female R&B singer for sexual favors from her fifteen year old niece. There are, apparently, video tapes that they are releasing to the media that are so demeaning and so clearly manipulation/rape, that a female reporter in Chicago broke down while describing them on air. She started screaming in the middle of the piece--and then crying. I had been trying to hold myself away from the details, until I heard the intense rage and horror in her voice, and I reacted, violently. I was suddenly dizzy, nauseated, flushing hot and then cold. I could barely breathe. I hadn't stopped shaking completely when I made it home and then, all I wanted to do, was to hide under the covers and cry.

Naturally, the male dj's expressed disgust and fury and vowed that, if the person in the tapes was indeed R. Kelly, that he would no longer be welcome in the music community. I wanted to call them and ask them if they didn't realize the hypocrisy they were perpetrating--if they didn't see that this is what the current social climate encourages, in fantasy, if not in actuality--that this is the fruit of their labors and/or their ignorance. I knew that none of them would understand what I meant. That is the frustration and the anger that keeps coming to the surface--the feeling that one is living in a world that no longer obeys the rules of logic or reason and has become dangerously reckless as a result. I abhor censorship, but one must be able to recognize every possible outcome of one's actions and take responsibility for those actions. To do otherwise is tantamount to chaos.

I know that I am not the only person who feels this way. I'm the only person I know who feels this way this deeply, it seems. Sometimes, it's close to paralytic in scope. I want to believe that I still have time, but everywhere I turn, it seems, I'm told that I'm wrong and I just played the wrong hand.

I could break every piece of glass in this room right now, but it wouldn't change anything. I'd still wake up tomorrow, have to go to work, and have to live with the prevailing notion that I am useless at twenty-six. Really, where does one go from there?

This is cooling,
Faster than I can.
This is cooling.
Faster than I
Can.