The re-entry

The busyness of the re-entry, combined with a visit from More Fun this week, has left me no time to blog. I am still here, feeling at turns shell-shocked, energized, annoyed, ecstatic. Here's some of what I have been doing during my absence:

1. Attending the heteronormative dinner. Married with Children Colleague Who Refuses to Bring Her Husband to Work Things or to Exist as Half of Coupled Unit attended sans husband. Yay MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU! (Really going to have to work on a better pseudonym for MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU.)

2. Dancing with a man with a peg leg and parasol

3. Being cornered in a tiny pub by and very briefly enduring the advances of a Muckity Muck Professor of Fancy Medicine at Terribly Prestigious University who tried to woo me with ridiculous babble about Lear, the "soul," and "human nature"

4. Attending a vast array of meetings, one of which devolved into weirdly heteronormative part-professional, part-personal individual reportage of summer activities, during which I wanted to say something like "Well, there was this one really intense week when the condom broke. Thank god I had some Plan B on hand! I just threw myself into work on the revisions for that article." I also have this impulse at holiday time when I get those family form letters. (Someday I will post a Year of Medusa fantasy version of the holiday family letter.)

5. Drinking a vast array of adult beverages

6. Hanging out with the rock-n-roll circus

7. With More Fun, deciding on names for our children: for a girl, Emmylou Harris Fun, and for a boy, Lionel Richie Fun

The busyness and the More Fun fun will continue into next week. Planning to join More Fun in Favorite City this weekend. Could NOT BE MORE EXCITED about this. Remember how I said September is going to be mine all mine? I am really trying to let myself let that happen.

"Partners expected" (a cranky rant)

Why is it that a seemingly politically progressive and sensitive person puts things like this in emails to groups of people, some of whom are known to be single: "Let's have dinner on Tuesday. Partners welcome and in fact expected" and "OK, let's meet, with partners, at 8"? Argggghhhh! This person KNOWS that I am (happily) single. That I am casually dating a couple of people. That I do NOT have a significant other or anyone I would think to bring to a dinner with colleagues.

"Partners expected" ?!?!??! Is there no better pithy little vicious statement of heteronormativity? Ironically, this person is someone who is VERY conscientious (in a simplistic and almost comical way) about gendered language and has been known to scold me for using "you guys," which I only use is an effort to avoid the class biases I encounter when I use my usual "ya'll" outside of the South. Well, let me tell you something, using "partner" instead of "girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/spouse" does NOTHING to correct the heteronormative directive that everyone MUST BE COUPLED. Okay. . .so you agree with the fact that your "partner" can be of any gender and your relationship can be a legal union or not. But your expectation that everyone around you is or should be or wants to be coupled is H-E-T-E-R-O-N-O-R-M-A-T-I-V-E. As well as F-U-C-K-I-N-G O-F-F-E-N-S-I-V-E.

I can't even talk about it without worrying that I am coming across as a bitter shrew. I am not bitter about not being in a relationship. I am not longing to be in a relationship. And this does not mean that I am broken. I am weary of not being able to pick up the phone to talk to my family, to turn on the television, to watch a film, to open a magazine, to go to the doctor without in some way dealing with the assumption that a woman my age should be in a committed relationship AND that there is something wrong with her if she does not have that or if she is not actively seeking that. I am dating a couple of good-looking, smart, funny, fun men. I am having [gasp] casual sexual relationships with [gasp] both of them. FUCKING DEAL WITH ME. Or don't. Just don't expect me to be something I am not.

Phew. I am of course not going to say any of this to my dinner-organizing colleague. I have thought of saying something jokey like, "Hmmm. . .are partners a requirement? If so, I could try to track down one of my lab partners from college or join a square dancing club but that could take some time. . .". Even that seems too snarky and not worth it. I know he is not being malicious and probably is not even conscious of his biases.

Back to work. I have a semester looming. End of rant. Down with heteronormativity, you nasty oppressive bastard.

Dream proof of media overload (and all manner of other issues)

I know I am in danger of becoming that boring person who posts only pictures of her pet on her blog, so I will instead risk becoming the annoying person who blogs only about dreams. This week's dream log also serves as evidence that I have been spending entirely too much of Februrary watching television and reading blogs:

Monday night: While passing by a cafe in a hotel where I was attending a conference, I noticed a man gesturing toward me. It was Larry King, eating a bowl of a oatmeal. (Some of the oatmeal was falling down his chin and into the folds of his jowls. Ewww.) So he says, in his exact Larry King voice, "Yeah, so sit down. Let me tell you something. Stop dieting. You're looking gaunt, here and here [gesturing toward each side of face]. You don't look good. And watch it with the booze, will ya? Now go." He goes back to eating his oatmeal, and I walk away with the distinct feeling that he had somehow mistaken me for Lindsay Lohan. I was upset not at what he had said but at the idea that he had not really said it to me.

Wednesday night: Matt Lauer totally felt me up. He was ostensibly measuring me for a bra for a segment on the Today show, but there was OVERT fondling.

Friday night: Last night's was the most detailed and emotional dream. Heather Armstrong decided to give me her life, complete with husband and child. I was to take over as her, to live in her house as her husband's wife and her daughter's mother. I kept trying to explain to her that I could not just fill in for her, because her child and her husband loved her. But every time I told her that she could not just be replaced, she would shake her head and give me this "you are so so naive or perhaps even slightly retarded" look. As she was training me, guiding me around the house (which was really quite spectacular, with all kinds of hidden spaces like a huge underground grotto with hot spring-fed baths), and telling me what to do, she kept saying, "You are going to have snap out of it and pay attention." I had this overwhelming feeling of complete inadequacy, not with the child or even with the impossible necessity of having to be a lapsed Mormon but with the idea that I would be a terribly inferior partner in the marriage.

So, yes, I think we can all agree that it's a good thing I will be seeing my new shrink again next week. I think I will just walk in, sit down, and bust out with, "Larry King thinks I'm too skinny, Matt Lauer and I got to second base, and I am a bad wife."