Monday, January 24, 2005
you say you want a revolution? well you know we all want to change the world
I have been barred (apparently the official term is RESTRICTED) from sleeping at the Boy's apartment on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights due to the fact that I prevent him from getting up for his 8:00 am classes. Let it be firmly noted that 98% of the time, this is not my fault.
Take today, for instance. 6:40 am, the alam goes off, so blaringly loud that I am jolted awake, even though I'm wearing ear plugs to drown out rock-concert-decibels snoring. I peel myself out of bed and start putting my socks on. They're my striped blue fuzzy toe socks, the kind with a slot for each toe, and so it takes me a while to put them on in a semi-conscious state. I'm wearing my socks, underwear with cherries on them, and my pyjama shirt, and am trying to get the energy to put my jeans on when HE comes back from the bathroom and lies back down on the bed in a little ball wrapped in a sheet, looking like some demented blue-plaid flannel burrito. I'm peering sleepily through barely-awake eyes, and ask him what the hell he thinks he's doing. He replies he's just going to lie back down for 5 minutes and then we'll get up and go. I know this is a bad idea. But I am also sleepy.
So I lie down and we both fall asleep and wake up at noon and he misses his class and for some reason this is MY FAULT. Correction: not my fault, but I am a contributing factor to his inability to wake up properly, despite the fact that I was getting dressed and HE was going back to bed. Apparently at 6:40 in the morning I am more attractive and warm than a Mine Maintenance class, and so I am henceforth restricted.
On the plus side, for some reason sleeping with ear plugs sends me into this crazy deep sleep state where I have the most vivid dreams. I am actually 100% convinced that everything is real until I wake up.
Last night (I guess it was really this morning), I had a dream that I was going to this seedy night-club with a bunch of people, including one of my old childhood friends (who I hadn't seen for two years until we met up last week for lunch and shopping). I have only been to this club once in real life, before Christmas with the cheerleaders, and I was not impressed. It's one of those places where all the girls look like strippers or cheap whores wearing too much makeup and not enough clothing, and all the guys look like skinheads or pimps. The place was also the site of a shooting a few years back, and so now the security is just insane. Not only do they frisk you thoroughly, but they make you empty your pockets, they search your bag, put you through a metal detector, examine TWO pieces of ID, scan your ID with ultraviolet light, take your coat and bag at the door, make you shell out $10 cover for the dubious privilege of hearing two DJs destroy your favourite and most-hated songs and yell nearly incomprehensible babble like "how y'all doin tanayite??" and "put yar hands in dee ayer!!" and "all da gurls say YEAH!!", and THEN the enormous bouncer finally lets you in.
This was a humiliating process for me the last time because I don't carry a purse (for perhaps obvious reasons) and instead I put everything in my pockets. The HUGE bouncer was not impressed. He asked me if I was here with anyone, to which one of the cheerleaders behind me replied (as though I was unable to speak for myself) "her boyfriend's up ahead." The bouncer then asked that the Boy be retrieved so that he could be lectured about how he needed to buy me a purse. First of all (this I didn't say), my boyfriend barely even knows what a purse is, much less how to go about buying me one, and second of all (this I did say) I don't WANT a purse, and the pocket system has worked just fine until this very moment, thankyouverymuch. Fortunately, the bouncer seemed too surprised to do or say anything more to me about this, but I think my dream picked up on my very-real anxiety I have about HUGE guys wielding ridiculous amounts of power over ridiculous arenas like tedious nightclubs.
In my dream, my friend got into the club first and then opened the back door so that I could get in and bypass the security. Everyone was doing this so I wasn't terribly worried about it. I got inside and immediately noticed that the club was about 100 times more chill than I remembered it -- there were couches and a classy-looking bar and waitresses walking around and the music was decidedly mellow. I remember everything about the scene, from the pale green of the couches to the blue-lit bar, to the strains of the music, to exactly what my hair was doing -- it was a lot shorter and was curly but a bit messy, like I hadn't washed it in a few days. I liked it that way, and thought I looked like a rock star, though I was also conscious of the fact that my hair had looked like that when I was about 11 and I had hated it with a passion back then.
My friend and I sat on a couch and were reading a magazine together when one of the huge bouncers came by, took one look at me, and yelled "American fucking idols!" In waking life, this phrase makes absolutely zero sense, but in my dream I understood that it meant that he thought I looked way too young to be in the club. I was about to explain that I was old enough and had the ID to prove it, but he moved in on me too fast for me to react. The bouncer ignored my friend, who has been four inches taller and has looked a few years older than me since elementary school, but he picked me up (I mean this literally) by the scruff of the neck like a kitten, holding me under my arms so I couldn't get free, and lifted me a good three feet off the ground. This hurt, a lot, particularly when I tried to wrestle myself free. He carried me like this all the way across the room, and the whole time I was thinking that I should really kick him in the balls, but I thought he might just inflict more pain on me, so instead I started protesting that this was assault and that I could bloody well walk to the door myself. He didn't listen.
By this point we were being shadowed by a pretty little cocktail waitress, who was egging on the bouncer by saying things like "watch her legs" and "make sure you're pulling her hair so she can't escape." Her hair was an incredibly unpleasant shade of blond, one that I associate (in real life and in the dream) with duplicity and cruelty. I think this is because of a few evil blond girls I have known in my lifetime, though the ones I've met lately have actually been really sweet and nice. I fully admit it is not very fair to associate hair colour with negative attributes, but it's not like I avoid blond girls because of it. At any rate, I was sure this woman was evil, down to my very core, and was doubly disturbed now that she was helping the bouncer hurt me and prevent me from escaping.
We got to the door and she obligingly opened it. There was a flight of stairs and it was about four or five feet to the ground. The bouncer swung me like a large animal carcass out the door and over the stairs so that I hit the cement directly. It felt like hitting the spring floor at the gymnastics club, not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but it still hurt and I was still outraged. Like a villain in a cheesy movie, the blond waitress stood in the open doorway laughing at me, and I started yelling "you can't do this to me! I'm 21 years old! 21! I have rights! I have ID!" but she just laughed harder and slammed the door loudly.
I somehow managed to scrape myself off the pavement and turned right around, ID in hand, and marched back into the club. The bouncer and the waitress were gone, and the place had reverted to something of a restaurant. I asked to see the manager, and the servers scrambled around trying to accomodate me, but finally admitted that the manager was never around and that the place was very poorly organized. I told them what had happened and they seemed mildly sympathetic, but also not quite convinced that that sort of thing could happen in their establishment.
I spent the rest of my dream-morning telling the story about the bouncer and trying to inspire the other people I met to help me get him arrested or sued or something. But no one seemed terribly eager to help, they were all just resigned to the fact that things happen and there's nothing much we can do about it.
I told the Boy about this dream when I woke up, and he said something about how even in my dreams I'm trying to lead a workers' revolution. Fair enough, but to me it had much more disturbing implications.
It's true that I am always, always, always irritated by how indifferent my demographic seems to be -- about politics, about social justice, about the larger world in general. My favourite and sometimes my only connection with the people I see on campus is to watch their faces as they walk by while I'm heading to class, listening to music and trying to GET them in some way. My parents sometimes tell me when I go on rants about kids I know how their generation was always fighting for something. It may not always have been for something smart. Some of them wanted to install a Marxist dictatorship through violent revolution, but most just wanted a say in how things were run at their university. They wanted to know why they got the grades they got and they wanted to prevent their professors from having the power of veto over their lives.
I don't see much of that at my school. I mostly see kids who get drunk every weekend, hook up with total strangers, talk about what they're wearing to various events, work at Starbucks, and are happy to scrape by in school with Bs and Cs. I don't have a problem with any of these things on their own, but when they make up your entire life, don't you have to stop and search for meaning every five minutes or so?
Maybe not.
Worst of all is that I'm not any better. When I try to question these things, people dismiss me as a snob and an intellectual and that's the end of that. I don't have the answers and I'm not leading a revolution, in real life or in my dreams.
I think this dream also shows a lot of my anxieties about men (potentially violent, irrational creatures intent on inflicting pain on me) and women (duplicitous, evil, shallow, and willing participants in all the stereotypes men have created for them).
But anxieties sometimes have a way of resolving themselves when I most need them to. Just as I was writing the last paragraph another childhood friend and former neighbour of mine (we'll call her Ducky for now) called and asked me, point-blank, what I thought her name should be if she was a boy. I decided not to be a conservative twit and ask her why on earth she wanted to know, but instead threw out a few name suggestions. Finally I asked her why. She replied, in utter seriousness, that she was entering a Drag King competition at a club downtown. For some reason I was intensely relieved, not because I was worried she was thinking of passing as a guy (this I would support her in wholeheartedly if it was what she wanted), but because I was glad that some people were still making fun of gender without getting all heavy about it.
I was relieved she was so comfortable with the idea as well. She said the winner gets to perform in the Gay Pride Parade in the summer (she's been living her girlfriend for two or three years now, so I think she's finally concluded she qualifies), and went on to ask me for song suggestions. I obliged, and I said I would come watch her perform.
It's at times like these that I feel grateful that I live in this city and country, where gay marriage is constitutional and people don't have to worry about pretending to be someone they're not. It makes me feel better about the pervasive indifference of my demographic to know that at least some people I know are open-minded and awake.
And after that huge digression, it is really time to do my reading!
Cheers,
N
