Dear Alice,
“I’m on the pill and now no one in his right mind would sleep with me!”—and more!

The following incident might-could have some adverse effect on the supreme powers of a teacher as unquestionable authority figure previously closer in bearing and appearance, from student point-of-view, to some Creative Writing Deity than to an ordinary mortal:

Not that the above is me. But if it were.

Say said-teacher were teaching a poem. An ordinary Monday. Mid-morning. None of the students are responding except the same faithful, eager one or two. But then even they begin to flag and look down at their coursepacks and doodle fake notes in their notebooks.
“Okay, so the speaker compares her current place in life to being in a rowboat without oars(“September,” Jennifer Hecht), here. What could that indicate?”

Dead silence. Teacher reminds class of their participation grades. Asks what’s up. Sighs loudly. Looks around the room and feels a beady-eyed desire to slap all her students in turn, even the nice ones. Makes an effort not to show that through her voice.

“Okay, well, if your life feels like—”

She stops then, because she tastes something—salty—on her lip. More. Puts her hand to her face and realizes that the zit she covered in 1. Zit Begone Stuff, 2. SPF 15 Moisturizer, then 3. Makeup, earlier this morning, is bleeding down her face onto her upper lip, there in front of her class seated around this small table. Bleeding great, big weeping drops.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess I have to go to the Ladies’ Room, now.”

When she leaves she considers never returning, but she does.

I hate birth control pills.
Every time I’m on the pill I have Breakouts Like it’s 1999. Which was, actually, another time my skin was so crappy because I was on the pill then, too. I was never so pimply in real adolescence, only during the weird fake-variety instilled by birth control pills.

Even the brand purported to *control* acne actually has the opposite effect. My facial skin freaks out completely, shouts “Hormones? What hormones are these? Why are there so many? I must make you ugly! And give you pain, too!” These are never ordinary blackheads. They’re big, aching, red pimples with lovely white caps. Giant zits that last for days. All over my face.

My friend Ginger’s going through the same thing, only with uncontrollable, frightening-to-her mood swings. She’s not like this normally. Only on the pill. So what does she do, now—go to a psychiatrist to get some antidepressants and then pick me up and swing by the damn dermatologist’s?

That’s three medications, three different doctors, a heeuge pile of change and drugs all so we can, what, have sex? (If. We even. Feel like it.)

You have to take it the exact same time every day. If I forget a pill and have to take two the next day, I spend the morning puking. If I forget too many pills, I get pregnant. Because I have no health insurance, the pill costs me $40 every freaking month.
I am very, very typical.

In college, I could get the pill for ten dollars a month, and many college students were still paying about that, but then last year Congress passed a bill that sapped Medicaid’s budget and that cost skyrocketed to $40 or $50 even for college students and Planned Parenthood customers like me. (Even if you could still get them for ten dollars a pack, our school’s student health center was all booked up for the year for pelvic exams by the start of this month. Dear Exorbitant Student Fees--thanks! Love, Over Half Your Population.)

The whole deal just blows: the pill sucks, but it’s the best we have. And now it’s getting tougher to get our hands on? Did I hear someone over there saying something about “the best country in the world”? You, over there? Great. Hoist that flag a little higher on the left. It’s a tad crooked.

It sucks enough that women have to even deal with pelvic exams every six months or year because we’re the ones who deal biologically with the horrible effects of HPV. (Most people have HPV, but it more or less only shows symptoms in women, “symptoms” meaning cervical cancer.) The fact that HPV affects women inordinately is no one’s fault. But I’m running out of fingers to count my women-friends who’ve had to go through excruciatingly painful, expensive procedures because of catching the shit too late due to crappy or nonexistent healthcare.

Birth control’s pretty much the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rather unpleas- the ridiculous oceans of shit women go through, having to do with our reproductive parts. But every time I look in the mirror lately, it’s the one that really gets to me.

Look.
Sometimes she can see herself behaving in ways she hates. “Unbecoming,” her father would say. “Ugly,” her southern grandma would say. Sometimes she can see that her singing to herself annoys people around her. Sometimes she swears she can feel her own face betraying itself; she’s been told it’s transparent. These are things she's come to accept. Life equals foolishness; hooray.

But there's worse; there's this: Times when it makes sense to forgive and be friends and she can’t do it. (When she was little, she never shoplifted.) There are situations that are not fair and she can’t help but maintain them as such, even knowing this. (She did, however, cheat at Pin the Tail on the Donkey at church once.) There are things she’d like to smooth over, but doing so would equal lying to herself. There are emotions that make no freaking sense but if you don’t listen to them, you’re a mess. Forgive/don't and who am I to. (There was Mexico. She’s not some innocent.) Forgiveness if you’re lying becomes something else. She begins to wonder how human fairness is, anyway. (“That must be a religious church,” says the Unitarian child to her mother once the shining white cross on the building under construction is revealed.) There is the irreparable. There is the too late. There are things she’s never said.

My head just might explode the very next time I am forced to hear the phrase "deceptively simple." Especially as applied to writing. You, sir or madam, are the one who is deceptively simple.

Everybody panics. That’s what she tells me, a gal who graduated from the program last year: “You’ll totally find a job after graduation. Don’t worry.”
A job?
No, I was freaking out about my thesis: that two-hundred page monster that I’m supposed to be writing, starting…last year? The reason I assuredly tell my thesis advisor I’m here? Sew, sew driven. Tres, tres professional. That’s me.

“Don’t worry, you can do it over next summer,” the poets tell me.
“Don’t worry, just get your ideas together and write, write, write. Don’t worry about whether it sounds good, yet,” the memoir-writers tell me.

No. You don’t understand. I don’t have any freaking material. Research-based project, here. Trips to be planned. Myriad interviews, books to read. And um, I’m not really sure I’m all that into my chosen subject. Gah-!

So, I haven’t written here in a while. So, that’s why.

What am I writing? Why, gems such as these, on student papers: “What’s the larger significance of writing about this acid trip? It seems like it could possibly be one layer in a larger story, but as it stands now, I’m left wanting more.”

“Your grandfather’s death is a great concept for this essay. What would make it even better: Some scenes. An exercise to try: Sit down and consider just one scene during this five year span you cover here.”

Truth: I’m not left wanting to read anything more about anybody’s drug trip, dead grandfathers or the puddles of tears “I could of swum in” tears and more tears dripping, dripping to the floor at their “pint sized feet.” Truth? I just want to be left alone. I think this is Phase Two of grad school. Phase One is a head-snapping adjustment period. Phase two is Leave me Alone with my Thesis. I think Phase Three might involve the acquiring of an eating disorder, or perhaps psychosis. Worth the thousands in loans a year by itself. Because those experiences sell books like mad.

There's terror in paradise.
There’s this awful movie called Snake Island that came before Snakes on a Plane, about this island, see, and these cruiseship people who get trapped there, and, well, there are these snakes.
Tricky plot.
Well, it was while watching this movie that my friends and I were able to define the classic answer to the horror movie question of Who gets killed next? The answer is always the people who deserve it, because they’re either:
A – Having sex. Sex that’s enhanced visually onscreen with saline or silicone, and, more to the point, sex that’s frivolous and naughty, because we Puritans love to see the frivolous sex-havers getting their due.
B – Complaining. Tacky mustachioed whiners are always the second to get killed by the snakes. Followed by all other brands of whiners.

So, to warn one another that we were about to start bitching and therefore probably deserved to get bitten by all manner of serpents, our shorthand became, “Okay, this is totally Snake Island territory, but…”

So, it’s Snake Island time. I've warned you.

Whatever I devote my attention to, I feel guilty; I should be doing something else. Whatever I’m doing becomes diminished in its importance as the responsibilities I’m not turning my attention to loom up and, just outside the corner of my vision, become these huge, amorphous shapes, impossible to gauge and harder still, to overcome; there will always be more.
I should be grading papers, I should most definitely not be grading papers; I should be writing, but writing what? Is it for my thesis? No? Well, then I should be doing research on my thesis, but that feels like nothing but noodling around on the internet most of the time. (And just what has this or that particular goofy little article to do with my focus, anyway? If the answer's not immediately clear, I'm wracked with anxiety.) So, soon I’m back to working on the paper due Wednesday instead. It’s cut and dry; six pages. Thesis, paragraphs, conclusion, all assigned, all straightforward, all utterly forgettable.

When I was in nursery school, I got this evaluation from a teacher: “Alice gets utterly absorbed in whatever it is she’s working on, but has a hard time moving on to a different task.” This was my problem as a reporter, too. I like working on one thing, not twelve. Grad school is like being a reporter, only on acid. No, I don’t know what I mean by that. I need to get back to work, now.

Corollary. See: “Rule.”:
…except where it’s supposed to be.
There’s a bar, see, where an ancient copy of the above poster is screwed to the wall, and there it has observed the pool players and drunken dancing girls in halter tops for ages from behind its dusty layer of plastic. The image was originally supposed to be all sex, sex, sex, but it just gives my friend Ginger the willies.

“I hate that thing!” she shouted again one night, and finally I asked her why.

In response, Ginger set her drink down, walked up to the poster and pointed to that weird space. The crevice. Which, the more you stare at it, becomes more crevasse than crevice. “Look at it!” she said, pointing to the faded, overexposed copy of poor Emmanuelle’s chin. “What is that? What is it supposed to be?!”

She was right. It was weird. Some sort of second mouth. A strange landscape where colonies of tiny people could dwell. No, X never was like this, I don’t think.

Rule.
If you want one web address, but accidentally type in another, you get porn.
If you want one 800 number, but accidentally punch another, you get porn.

Porn is lurking around every false turn in the Land of Communication. (I'd originally typed "nook and cranny" and not "false turn," there, but contextually, that makes no sense. Nook and cranny sounds way more pornlike, too.

There's something terribly wrong with me.)

The Ooh, The La and the Oh No. (a.k.a. The Wherefores of Bad Making Out.)
I have parsed it out. There are four basic kinds of crappy people to make out with and here they are (these examples all refer to the male of the species, by the way, since my experience is more or less in that way limited; you understand.)

1. The Extreme Sportsman.
Keeps a waterbottle by the side of the bed/couch. Is really into Trying out New Things in this way that feels akin to, perhaps, bungee jumping. You have never in your life had any desire to bungee jump. Alternately, may cause your body to feel a bit like a jungle gym. Extreme Sportsman’s waterbottle is very likely one of those squirty-jobbies, and he takes frequent breaks to reach over and squeeze more H2O into his mouth, to “hydrate himself,” proclaiming with a hearty athletic enthusiasm, “This is fun!” You ready your hand for a possible high-five.

2. The Don Juan in His Own Mind.
Thinks of himself as having a technique. Is really, really into both this Technique and his own physique—and yours—but mostly his. Sizes up certain of your physical features a lot, saying things like, “Yes!” Seems to want to re-create movie scenes a lot. Gives you the distinct feeling you could lop off your head at any point and replace it with that of the girl down the street, Katie Couric or perhaps Condoleezza Rice and it would be the exact same experience for him. Lots of heavy breathing, lots of “Oh, yeah”s (reminding you of exactly of the Kool Aid man), little eye contact. Would be just as happy spending the evening with a mirror, perhaps even happier.

3. The DJ.
Has created a CD just for this experience. Gets up to change the music, adjust volume levels and/or album tracks frequently.

(A note on music: Good music can certainly enhance making out, but bad music can raze the experience down to the ground, and there’s such a fine line. One time my friend was kissing on this guy and the public radio station was on in the next room. There was an enthusiasm and a zest to their activities but suddenly, says my friend, they both realized that the new age show, “Music from the Hearts of Space” had come on and the tune playing was this synthesized thing with sitar and howling wolves. She says she busted out laughing and said, “I’m sorry. I feel like I should have on some Stevie Nicks dress and like, some feathers, instead of this tank top.”
And then there’s music that’s too obviously designed for making out. I was, err, engaged in this activity at this guy’s house shortly after noticing that he owned a record by Steely Dan and putting that on. Next thing I know, there’s one of those eight-minute funky 70s-porn percussion and wa-wa guitar things going. I, of course, felt like this soundtrack was urging me to say something like, “Oh, you must be the plumber. Well, isn't that funny. I was just about to step into the shower.”)

4. The Absentee.
After weeks of his clumsy, charmingly endearing hinting that his feelings for you are, err, more than chaste, you finally, finally kiss him. When you do, he says nothing. At all. You ask him if everything’s okay, if this is what he wants. “Yeah, sure, it’s fine,” he says, the way you imagine he responded to his mother when she asked him how his day at high school went. Fine.
Stellar.

On popcorn, and perhaps also, on larger problems Alice tends to muck herself up in.
White cheddar popcorn is supposed to be one of those snacks you savor somewhat, oh, I dunno, daintily, I guess. The shape of popcorn demands a one-at-a-time consumption if you’re not to look like a complete slob. Not that anyone actually does this.
No. Listen. I’m serious.
Popcorn is served in such venues—movies, fairs—that call for this carefree, devil-may-care sort of enjoyment, right? An air of, “Oh, I’m not really eating this for sustenance. I’m eating this for the Victorian (or possibly, Edwardian) wonderment that we might partake of this popped corn for the sheer amusement of it all. Ho-ho!”

But instead of carnivals, I always seem to end up eating popcorn, oh, on my break at my hourly-waged job in the break room underneath the fluorescent light, when I’m really hungry. I tear open the bag and—the problem of Slobbery, it’s compounded by the fact of this dusting of cheddar cheese and quite possibly and probably, MSG—I start really enjoying the taste and the texture and everything about the popcorn too much, and instead of taking small, genial bites, I’m soon grabbing these craven handfuls, loading my mouth. I get dissatisfied with those moments between the popcorn-in-the-mouth moments. I become completely greedy, ugly and white-dust-spittley-fingered. Someone who hopes to God that no one else will walk into the break room while I’m making such a raging fool of myself, eating this popcorn. Someone whom, at any rate, they certainly wouldn’t want for their friggin’ popcorn ad.

Girls’ Code

“Better listen to me, ‘Cause I wanna tell you, son.
Don’t give away your love; don’t give away your sweat.
‘Cause a girl can’t know you, and a boss can’t forget.”
-Minutemen

To discuss: Is there a Girls’ Code of Ethics?
I was talking to a very old friend on the phone today and she invoked that even-older set of laws regarding situations of ladies perpetrating what is supposed to be the very worst type of betrayal: against their own lady-friends. With men who are or were at some point, tied to said friends. In a romantic manner.
That story.

(“Ooh, catfight!”)

As long as I can remember, the whole idea’s only made me cringe, this notion that it’s up to women *only*, to uphold some sort of loyalty toward one another. Because the automatic flipside of that conviction can only be this: that men can’t be counted on. That Boys will be Boys. Which is just one giant pile of stinking biznullshit, far as I’m concerned, letting half our population off the hook as it does. I refuse and I refuse.

You Can’t Trust Guys.
And yet now that I find myself in this rather intensely crappy situation in which I do feel betrayed (and my sisters my old friends, their jaws drop when I elaborate “Oh Alice,” they say, “you have been betrayed; it’s not you it’s not your fault oh poor poor Alice” and I fall into this stinking archetype, this role so old and so worn and so tired.)

“You better back down before you get smacked down/
You better chill.”-Jill Scott

And yet now—I find myself *so much* angrier at, *so much* more hurt by, this girl/(friend) than by the guy involved. My reaction to this particular punch-in-the-gut feels particularly hardwired. It’s doesn’t feel like a cultural construct, so is it one?

But cultural mores run deep. To me, invoking some Girls’ Code still feels supremely fucked up. I’d rather believe in some simpler code, some basic decency that we’re all supposed to have. For me, believing in people—not half the people, but people—has always been something I’ve held as my principle article of faith in the world. Not stupid, blind faith, just human trust. We’re all we’ve got. Right? I’ve become closest to people I’ve let in with a great, big, open heart and I want to say that damn it, I refuse to give that up, now. I’m not a naïve fucking fool; I refuse to see my lack of guardedness as a sign of some immaturity on my part. Still, this has shaken me. This has worked to mess with that particular faith. I don’t feel trusting, now. And that makes me angry, too.

In the past couple days, I’ve heard a feast of Betrayal-By-Supposed-Girlfriends Stories; I’ve eaten them up like junkfood. Tasty while I’m hearing them and I beg for more, more, more to prove I’m not alone right when I feel Really. Fucking. Alone.

You Can’t Trust Women.
I ask for these stories and I’m given this veritable All You Can Eat Buffet: There’s the girl who walked in on her roommate/best friend and her boyfriend, the one whose friend made a habit on hitting on and sleeping with *all* her exes the moment they became exes, the one who’s given up on having female friends At All. (“With guys, it’s all on the table. You know you can trust them.”) All these stories fill me up and leave me with a big stomachache later.

I hate the moral: When the shit hits, you can’t trust your girlfriends. Because the Girls’ Code thing, besides saddling gals with all the responsibility and giving men a free pass to act like assholes, does something else. The truth is that women can’t be perfect all the time. We screw up, just as men screw up. But the message when women screw up is always the same: While boys get to “be boys,” women: you’re not allowed to make mistakes. And the ones who slip even slightly become slippery snakes.


“Well, who said life was easy/
and who said a man was fair/
Well I wish you well/
but keep your paws off mine.”
-Magnetic Fields

I didn’t want to join this pantheon. I never wanted to inhabit any of these roles. I never wanted to become a woman with one of Those Stories. I guess that yeah, I did want to believe that maybe, yeah, if I believe in people and treat those I come to love, Golden Rule style, that I’ll get the same treatment back. And maybe yeah I also wanted to believe that there is, on some level, such a thing as sisterhood. Because with all these double standards, with all this sexist bullshit, you’ve gotta have something, right?

Chebbles’s Mama tells me that it’s because I grew up in a houseful of girls that I don’t acknowledge the Girls’ Code of Ethics. “You just grew up with it being there, naturally,” she tells me. “The fact that you *don’t* treat your girlfriends this way is something that’s just ingrained in you.”
That’s one angle. Maybe if I’d grown up in a houseful of boys I’d just shrug this development off as kinda shitty, rather than feel so powerfully betrayed.

I could spend even more hours analyzing all this to death. Maybe it’s birth order. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s experience. Maybe it’s relative amounts of self-absorption. But none of this helps, when it comes down to it. All I’m left with is a head full of useless theories and a mounting number of sleepless nights. And all alone at three a.m., no amount of analysis will solve anything for you. There’s just no sense.