When I take a look around the farm - a museum of farm failures - then I remember that we grew these campanula, and that is something. When I found the first one in bloom I came close to tears. The exhilaration was new to me.
You know what else is exhilarating? This music video of
WE ARE THE WORLD from 1985.
I watch it and I feel really good. And I also sort of feel like all those musicians are old friends of mine, and I'm suddenly beaming at the computer screen...at my friend Waylon Jennings.
Really I just want to do this in the flower world. Get all the florists together and make a music video. I'd like to be the Diana Ross character equivalent, which is to say really pretty with amazing hair and seemingly genuine charisma.
I could really stand to watch it now in fact, as I've had a terrible day full of sheep mastitis, a miserably weedy flower field, and general uncontrollable entropy on the farm. The internet here involves a 'satellite' dish on top of our house made out of old hubcaps and tinfoil, powered by a gang of oversized field mice on stationary bicycles. They are oversized because they eat the cat food that we put out for the two 'barn' cats who were brought here from Brooklyn to eat such mice but instead prefer the sport of catching songbirds and butterflies. You can't always control who lives and dies at Worlds End. It's savage.
All this to say there are just not enough sky beams coming into that damn satellite to bring Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Bruce Springstien and all my other friends down. Only enough to watch partially downloaded videos on my phone as to how to milk out a mastitis infected udder. Not giving you the link to that one, because we are also friends. You and me, and Lionel, and…
But besides a sick sheep and a busted brush hog on our tractor and besides the fact that I royally fucked up some flowers in the field, things are great. And when people ask me lately how things are going, I try to stop and think objectively, and then usually respond THEY ARE GREAT, and I try to be convincing, because it's the truth. You, perhaps like me, have had a bad habit of always focusing on what's wrong instead of what's right. I think that can be a female thing more than a male thing; modesty sounds like a feminine word or a brand of maxi pads or something...[here did lie the paragraph where I ranted about 'humble bragging' and my distaste for the sweetness of women in my industry which arguably borderlines on misogyny...we are the world?!]
I google modesty, just killin time and procrastinating. I find a religious website about dressing modestly. I take a quiz
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Q: Do your shirts reveal your abdomen or back? Do any of your shirts have sexually suggestive slogans (such as “sexy” or “flirt”)? Do velour sweatpants with such slogans brazened across the backside count? If yes, then yes.
Q: Do you have to suck in your stomach to zip any of your pants? Do any of your jeans ride so low that your underwear can be seen? I unbuttoned my jeans when I sat down to write this, so yes.
I get bored with this quiz and instead continue to procrastinate from my chores by making a mix called "Modesty" that features Enigma Age of Innocence, because fuck it. But not before, in awe of this religious zealousness surrounding 'female modesty' unearthed on the web (the mice, breaking a sweat up at the dish), I google some of these books on amazon that instruct women on how to pursue purity in a sex-saturated world. A few minutes in I regret this, my amazon profile - with it's usual suggestions of astrology, gardening, and sheep related titles is forever marred with this new data; a shit smear across my preference logarithm that now results in pastel-colored covers on the sidebar with titles like "Strategies for Victories in the Real World of Sexual Temptation."
What's appalling to me about the sentiment behind this sort of thought is that it puts more 'shoulds' and 'should nots' on women...
[And here did lie the SAIPUA FEMINIST MANIFESTO that I choose to remove for more revision and editing, you can look forward to it in the book I'm finally writing...]
When I read or hear about the planned parenthood shenanigans in the media I get angry. I think hard how any logical person could think that this non-profit organization -- whose aim has always been to help people choose appropriate health care -- is coercing women into abortions and then selling fetal organs to get rich. It's comical and absurd and I get furious, and then I watch myself get so upset and I wonder where that comes from, the fire.
I guess it's the simplest question which I just can't understand why we're arguing about: Why can't women just do what they want to with their bodies? Why? It makes me teary to type it.
Thats the sort of feminism I feel, its a desire for women to be truly free. I'm shy to talk about this stuff because I don't honestly know a lot about feminism; it's history and where the thoughts are now. But I've been thinking a lot about gender roles lately and the way we all express different masculine and feminine energies...
For me those norms are little skewed. I grew up in a house where my mother was the primary bread-winner, and learned inadvertently perhaps that women were equal or even more powerful in the sense of drive and career. I've never wanted children, so I've never felt that pressure which in so many ways is a burden to women of our generation who are the first to be able to choose whether they want a family (my mothers generation felt less of that choice). And lastly I'm a bulldog in a very feminine soft-sided industry, one where I've never felt completely comfortable.
All this rambling to say that things are alright, and actually really good. I've got sheep problems and flower growing problems, but I've got SHEEP and I'm GROWING FLOWERS. There's no big dramatic soundtrack to life when your dreams are coming true. And I'm trying lately to stop more and enjoy those fortunes and beauty of life -- the ones that I (we -- all of us in the Saipua family) have worked so hard to achieve. I hope you all know that lots of those good fortunes have resulted from all of you who've supported and cheered us along the way.
