Filed under: age, Gen X | Tags: Blister in the Sun, Gen X, Generation X, Keegan Michael Key, Kids in America, Stephen Colbert, The New York Times, The Violent Femmes
Well, well, my fellow Gen X-ers. We have arrived. Again. The New York Times put out a style section spread on us and I tried not to pay attention to it because I was done, my Gen X siblings, I was done with weaving together the threads of all the Gen X articles I’d read and considered and so on. It came out a month ago but apparently I can’t leave it alone.
I read the New York Times piece. Sort of. What I actually did was scroll through it and skim the little paragraphs next to the pictures under the text obscuring “graffiti.” And I did click through to read one of the essays and some bits of others. This whole piece was easy to gloss over because there was really nothing there. It’s weird. Let me tell you. I have read so many articles about Gen X. Like, so MANY and this series in the New York Times was the most meaningless I’ve encountered. I’m including BuzzFeed listicles in that assessment. What I’m trying to say is that there was more depth in an “Are You a Gen X-er?” quiz than in the New York Times style section.
It feels like it was written by visitors from another planet who did some research on what was popular in America in the 80s and 90s and then called it “This Gen X mess.”
Listen – we can call ourselves and our stuff a mess if we want to but no one else is permitted to dismiss us this way. Also – where was this mess to which the headline referred? I did not see it explained anywhere. Is it because walkmen came out when we were kids? That seems to be the sort of thing the New York Times wanted to talk about. Walkmen. Strings around necks. A book called The Rules which gets its own essay – but which is a book no one I know actually read. Also featured: a musician “style icon” of Gen X-itude that neither I, nor my Gen X musician boyfriend ever heard of.
What version of Gen X is this?
Was there an alternate universe Gen X where all these things were important to us that I just missed?
Even the essay by a guy who seems to have been there is weirdly disconnected to my experience of Gen X-ery. And, like I said, due to my having written an 8 part series on Gen X, I have read a lot of diversity of Gen X experience. His essay felt as if it were written in an alternate universe wherein Alex P Keaton was not a fictional comedy character from TV’s Family Ties but a real life hero and the dominant cultural icon. It’s like his fan club president wrote this essay and is trying hard to convince the rest of us that Gen X had it so good, has it so good and is spending all our plentiful money on luxury goods.
That’s just not the Gen X I see. Or saw. Or ever saw. Unless it’s an Alex P. Keaton fantasy sequence on an alternate world Family Ties.
A Gen X friend of mine has a day job at the New York Times and told me that many of his cultural references and jokes fall flat due to his colleagues all being younger than him. It seems as if this might be true on the writing staff as well, if this Style section is any indication.
Gen X is not a mess. We may have once enjoyed a messy aesthetic on occasion. The stuff we really liked is not seemingly on the New York Times radar, actually, because the New York Times just went with what was selling well in the 80s and 90s. But Gen X wasn’t really buying, as far as I know.
I keep thinking of Keegan Michael Key on the Stephen Colbert show talking about how someone’s response to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” gives them away as someone in their 40s. Like, literally. Across cliques and subgroups, I would wager that most of Gen X will lose their mind on the dance floor for “Blister in the Sun.” “Blister in the Sun,” my friends. Which did not even CHART. The song never charted. The album charted eventually but only ten years after it was released! I mean, we loved it but we didn’t buy it.
Maybe I’m just remembering the indie parts but I keep thinking of a line from ani difranco’s song that goes,
“Generally my generation wouldn’t be caught dead working for the man and generally I agree with them. Trouble is you got to have yourself an alternate plan.”
I feel this sums up the Gen X-ers I know fairly accurately. It’s not Gen X that’s a mess. It’s the system, man. The system is a mess. We’ve been saying it for years now. We’re fine. If you want to understand us, the (former) Kids in America, maybe ask us what we think is a mess. We’ll tell you.
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Filed under: age, feminism, Witchery | Tags: anger, dragon, electrocution, fire, ma'am, magical powers, spontaneous combustion, The Power, witch
The man in an oxford shirt came up behind me at the narrow passage of the café and did not stop moving as he said, “Excuse me, ma’am” and walked on, scrolling through his phone.
I muttered, “Don’t you ma’am me,” after he passed but what I really wanted to do was set him on fire with my magical fire-shooting ability.
I know the offense was minor and he probably only called me ma’am because there’s no feminine equivalent to sir and even though it sounds like “Outta my way, old lady” to me, he thinks he’s being respectful and at least he didn’t say, “Move, bitch,” and I should be grateful for even an attempt at politeness. But maybe if I combusted enough people for calling me ma’am, we could finally find a respectful word for women instead of limping by with miss and ma’am and madam since forever. Sometimes it takes a little fire.
I want a fire shooting power or a spontaneous combustion ability or to just truly access my dragon self and be able to gobble up those that displease me. I am so weary of conceding and getting out of the way and I don’t want to make a mess but I do want to obliterate my enemies.
The thing is, though, even if I woke up with such a superpower tomorrow, I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t use it. If I got a skein, like the women in Naomi Alderman’s extraordinary book, The Power, I don’t think I’d go on a mad electrocuting spree. I think I would probably keep it to myself – but I sure would feel a lot better knowing I could do it.
If I had, in my back pocket, the power to vanquish a world of enemies, I might be a little more apt to speak my mind at a meeting or on the street or in the passageways of small cafes where boys feel they own the throughways. I might not mutter, “Don’t you ma’am me.” I might say it loud. I might let it resonate and hang dangerously over the air, as the power danced around my fingertips. And we could all feel the electricity I was keeping in store, what energy I was using to NOT combust someone.
My anger had abated somewhat after the fetid air of the Kavanaugh hearings cleared a little – or maybe my anger just went underground these last few months. Eventually, it seemed, I did not long to combust every man I saw. But the recent spate of attacks on reproductive justice have begun to once again stir the dragon I have within and I am longing to actually be as dangerous as I feel. Don’t ma’am me. You might not mean anything by it. But I’m not sure what I’ll do. You just better hope my magic hasn’t grown in yet.
This post was brought to you by my generous patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
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Filed under: age, feminism, resistance | Tags: defiance, defiant, elevator, obedience, obey, witch
He poked his head out of his apartment as I waited for the elevator. He then came out with his dog and followed me into the elevator. I already felt stalked. In the elevator, he seemed to be a giant, taking up twice as much space as me and the young man who had been on the elevator when I got in.
The tall man with his dog was instantly aggressive. He wanted to know if I’d come from the apartment next door to him. I had. Just that was enough to send this guy on a rant. He said the people in that apartment banged their cabinets day and night and he was furious about it. I told him I just worked there and knew nothing of cabinets but I didn’t think it was them. I mean, that apartment is inhabited by two infirm elderly people neither of whom can reliably go out on their own. There’s no way they’re hammering.
But this guy was convinced. And livid. At me, too. Just because I’d come from there. He was pretty terrifying, to tell you the truth. Particularly in an enclosed space.
His manner was terrifying, his logic absurd but the thing that blew me away was something he said: “That woman. She’s so defiant.”
He’s talking about an elderly woman who can barely walk. Defiant, he said. She’s defiant. And defiance is a very interesting word to use in this situation. Because it suggests that he expects to be treated with subservience and obedience, that he thinks of himself as someone in power, with authority and this woman has dared to defy him. She has refused to obey. He has told her to stop banging the cabinets (something she is definitely not doing, by the way) and she not only pays him no mind but she doesn’t respect (what he thinks should be) his authority. He is probably twenty years her junior but because he is a man, he thinks she is defiant.
I am very interested in defiance – on who is seen as defiant and who uses the word in relation to others. For example, despite decades of experience in teaching, I don’t think I ever once called a student “defiant” – no matter how much of a pain in the ass they were being. It would simply never have occurred to me. I think defiance lives in direct relationship to obedience and my worldview is such that I do not particularly believe obedience is owed to anyone. (I’m a big questioner of authority, as you might have worked out by now if you’re a regular reader of the blog.) Defiance basically means that someone has failed to be obedient to someone who demands it. The man in the elevator expected obedience from his neighbor (simply due to her gender, I assume) and his fury at being denied this obedience was such that he could not contain it and he spilled it in every possible direction. I think he thought to himself, when he saw me: “Ah, a woman younger than me. Since I can’t get that older woman to obey me, I bet I can make this one obey.”
Sorry Charlie. You have no authority over me. And also you met a witch in the elevator and now you are nothing but a pile of ash.
This blog is also a podcast. You can find it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you’d like to listen to me read a previous one on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs, an album of Gen X Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: age, feminism, Healthcare | Tags: A Sense of Impending Doom, Healthcare, mammogram, menopause, perimenopause, speculum, Superman, The Change, What Would Virginia Woolf Do?, women's health
On my 40th birthday, I was struck with a sudden and horrifying sense of fatalism. I figured I’d over-absorbed the cultural preference for young women, that I’d over-attached my sense of self-worth to my youth, even though I thought I knew better. I figured that the reason I felt like I was turning 80 instead of 40 was because I’d skipped the mandated mother stage and just went straight from maiden to crone.
Then, recently, on a podcast, the guest mentioned that “a sense of impending doom” was a very common experience for women going through what used to be euphemistically called The Change.
Now – a lot of us have a sense of impending doom these days, what with the political landscape looking like it’s auditioning for a post-apocalyptic B movie, but my sense of impending doom hit even before the actual impending doom. So I suspect it’s partly the hormones shifting in a changing body.
About two years ago, out of the blue, I began to get headaches. Weird ones. According to the docs – it’s migraines. And they have been debilitating, disabling and pretty much took over the last two years of my life. I saw four different neurologists and headache specialists. Not one of them suggested that this sudden late onset of chronic migraine might be a result of perimenopause. Not one. It took the mother of a friend telling me about her migraines ending after menopause and suggesting mine could be the start of that for me to put the possible pieces together. Do I know for sure that this migraine situation is perimenopause? Nope. That’s not really a thing that’s knowable.
You know why? Because despite the fact that every (cis) woman who lives long enough will go through it, there’s no real medical conversation about it. Despite the fact that there are very real, very serious, very debilitating experiences for many women in the middle of that transformation, no one seems to be addressing it. So many women my age and older have been struggling all on their own with this or that symptom, while there may be a common explanation for our pain or our sense of doom or discomfort.
Perimenopause is the process that leads to menopause – menopause being the definitive end of the menstrual cycle. And of course, this kind of reverse puberty, is a perfectly natural organic process. But just because it’s natural and organic, doesn’t mean there won’t be trouble and that we shouldn’t understand what’s happening. Childbirth is also perfectly natural and organic but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t understand all of its phases and aspects. Just because something is natural, doesn’t mean there won’t be trouble.
And I have run into trouble. Many of my friends have also run into trouble. And I find myself pretty furious about how little the medical establishment has to say about it.
In this same time period, my doctor insisted on my getting a mammogram. Just because I am 44 and now’s the time when they give them. There’s quite a bit of controversy about the efficacy of all this breast screening – quite a few people have suggested that it may do more harm than good. There’s no history of breast cancer in my family and there was no reason to suspect anything wrong but my gynecologist said she couldn’t give me the medication that might help with the hormone migraine situation without one.
So, there I was in a women’s imaging center, getting my boobs squished in a machine and then called back the next day to have them squished another way because of “asymmetries” and then be sonogrammed and pushed around with a sonogram wand and after all that stress, it turned out my breasts were fine. As we thought.
So here I am, having a completely unnecessary set of procedures that are uncomfortable, stressful, anxiety producing and time consuming – while the thing that is actually wrong, that is actually causing chaos in my body, goes completely unaddressed.
And sisters, I got really fucking pissed about it. I suddenly felt like – oh, this goddamn medicalized world is like a Hollywood adolescent boy – obsessed with boobs and vaginas (-we’ve been pried open by speculums from an early age-) but not particularly concerned with what is actually going on inside the person. The fact that we have this insane assemblyline for mammography and no understanding or plan for perimenopause is ridiculous. Yes – breast cancer screening is important. I get it. But not every woman gets breast cancer (gratefully!) And almost EVERY SINGLE (cis) woman will go through perimenopause. That’s half the adult population.
And before it (maybe) kicked in for me, I knew next to nothing about it. And I’m a pretty reasonably informed woman.
I knew about hot flashes. That was about the extent of it. Which you know – it’s okay. I’m allowed to not know things – but I get the sense that that’s all a lot of doctors know about menopause as well.
Here’s the thing – aside from compulsory mammogram and pelvic exams – women’s health is dramatically under examined. For the majority of modern medicine’s history, men have been seen as the norm and women as the deviation. In clinical trials of many things, only men were studied and the results were applied to women. And one of the extraordinarily infuriating facts about this is that women were excluded from such things because we have a menstrual cycle. So rather than study the hormones or the varieties of the menstrual cycle – science and medicine have mostly just told women to go ask our mothers. (An actual thing a doctor said to a woman asking about menopause.)
In treating my (possible) perimenopause symptoms, I’ve seen four neurologists, several physical therapists, two opthamologists, two behavioral optometrists, tried antidepressants, anti-convulsants and endless triptans. The first thing in two years to make a real dramatic difference is a low dose of estrogen. I mean…here is modern medicine looking at everything but the source, everything but perimenopause.
No one wants to talk about perimenopause or menopause. It is incredibly taboo. Initially, I suspect the more medically accurate language was supposed to help us make it less so. Like the movement to use anatomically correct language for our genitals, calling menopause menopause was once thought to be a way to liberate us from the stigma. But I don’t think it has.
So, I’m liking “The Change” – even if it sounds a little old fashioned. It is a good descriptor for what I’m experiencing. It makes me feel like a superhero in mid-transformation. I’m Peter Parker in the process of getting bitten by that radioactive spider. It doesn’t necessarily feel good during the transformation itself but once I come through it, I fully expect to be a more powerful superhero on the other side of it.
And since no one can tell me whether or not the change I’m in the middle of is actually perimenopause – since there is no medically precise definition of this moment for me – The Change is actually a more accurate description of what is happening to me. It’s certainly A Change if not The Change. And a lot of my friends are also going through A Change. A transformation. We’re going into a phone booth – like the one Clark Kent changes into Superman into. Maybe since we don’t really use phone booths anymore, we could co-opt the word. Like, when I explain what’s been going on with me these last few years, I could just say, “Well, I’ve been in the phone booth.”
Because, while these headaches suck, a lot, while it has been no fun in this phone booth, I will say that the benefits of this transformation are not bad. Pretty much everything that drove me crazy about myself in my 20s has faded. In my youth, I was constantly beating myself up for being too nice, for putting up with things that I didn’t like, for not saying what I thought. And I have, as I have entered the phone booth, grown much bolder, much less concerned about others, less fearful and much more direct and clear. It’s everything I wished I could be twenty years ago. The phone booth has these terrible health side effects but it has given me the super power of transforming myself into the person I wanted to be and never thought possible.
This blog is also a podcast. You can find it on iTunes.
If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs, an album of Gen X Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age, art, clown, comedy, music, theatre | Tags: cheese, compliments, feedback, Hamlet, mature, mothballs, Shakespeare, wine, wise
I have arrived at the point in my career wherein people are starting to call my work “mature.” It has happened with my playwriting. It has happened with my singing. And I do not like it. In both of these instances, “mature” seemed to be meant as a compliment. “Mature” is not (yet) code for “old” – but meant to suggest a kind of complexity and evolution. I think. So why don’t I like it? Surely I want my work to mature, right? I want my work to age like a good cheese or a fine wine, don’t I?
Don’t I? I don’t know. I’m trying to understand why “maturing” doesn’t please me. At the heart of my discomfort of it is the dismissal of what came before. If this play is mature, it suggests that the plays that came before were immature, just little adolescent saplings running around untethered. It implies a kind of linear artistic development and I just don’t think such a thing exists. An artistic life does not travel in a straight line. It circles. It comes back around to ideas from the past and brings them to the future.
It’s like this conversation my partner and I had about Shakespeare. He noticed that sometimes when scholars don’t have definitive evidence for when a play was written, some of them will group the plays thematically. That is, they think because Shakespeare wrote a play about fathers and with disobedient daughters in one year, that that would suggest the undated father-daughter play would be around the same time. To me, that’s bananas. While certainly we all have our artistic phases where we obsess over one thing for awhile – we also have artistic touchstones, ideas that we return to again and again, ideas that we investigate anew from a new place in the life circle.
And maybe that’s why I find the idea of maturity so uninteresting. I mean, Shakespeare, again, is a good example of this. Some might say Hamlet is his most “mature” play. It sits at the top of achievement in Western literature. And yet it sits right in the middle of his career. Probably written in 1600, Shakespeare had many more plays to write after that one. Some of those plays are very silly and some of them are quite wild (including my favorite, Cymbeline.) Which are the most “mature”?
Maybe it’s my clown training but I am not particularly interested in maturity. Maturity has airs of seriousness, waves of severity that just don’t connect with my sense of play. When someone calls me immature, they are usually pointing out my irreverence, silliness or non-conformity. I value all those things tremendously.
I know maturity doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve lost my irreverence but maturity smells like mothballs to me. What I hope people who tell me my voice has matured (either metaphorically or literally) mean is that my stuff is complex, layered and interesting. I sometimes get called “wise,” too. And I like that just fine. I like it a lot, actually. Because there is always space for a wise fool.
I suppose, too, that I can’t help but keep returning to the idea that labeling my current work as “mature” suggests that my previous work is less than. And I just don’t appreciate any compliments for my newborn that insult my previous creative children.
I don’t mean to make anyone self conscious about giving me compliments. I don’t receive quite enough of them to start getting picky about them. Believe me, I sincerely thanked every person who called my work “mature” because it feels appropriate to accept a compliment in the spirit it was given, even if it has an odor of backhandedness about it.
I will say, though, that no one has seen enough of my body of work to make such a judgment. The only human to have a thorough enough experience of my oeuvre would be my mother. She’s the only one who’s seen enough of it to make that call. And I think the last time she called me “mature” was when I was a teenager. (I was very mature then. I’m not sure I am anymore! )
So, if you are tempted to call someone’s work mature, maybe dig a little deeper. What do you mean?
Is the work complicated? Layered? Deep? Rich?
I mean – let’s look at wine and cheese. We don’t stop at describing a wine or cheese mature. We call it nutty or grassy or robust or smooth.
I would be so delighted to have my work described with the subtlety of wine or cheese descriptions. Some of my work may be mature. It may be immature. Neither of those categories is useful to me. Call it robust or nutty, though? I’m gonna eat that up.
This blog is also a podcast. You can find it on iTunes.
If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs, an album of Gen X Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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You can help support both my maturity and immaturity
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Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age, dance, Feldenkrais | Tags: dance, Feldenkrais, Movement, one song, pleasure
One of my Feldenkrais clients was pretty much house-bound when I met her. She could get around her apartment with a walker but going out was really challenging for her. She used to go out dancing once a week but now she barely moved at all. Mostly she sat in her chair or propped up in her bed.
In addition to our Feldenkrais Functional Integration work together, I saw that I needed to find a way to keep her moving when I wasn’t there. I tried to give her some audio Awareness Through Movement exercises but she couldn’t really hear them so that possibility was out. I needed to help her find pleasurable movement, movement she could do. Since I knew she liked to dance, I recommended she dance in her chair once a day. We found a Beatles song on her phone and did some sit down dancing for a couple of minutes before she got tired. When I left, I gave her a prescription of dancing to one song every day. (We don’t do prescriptions in the Feldenkrais Method so I found it hilarious to use this language for dance.) I was pretty confident that this was going to help her. I know just a little bit of twisting and weight shifting would do her tremendous amount of good. And it did.
Then I realized I should prescribe myself the same thing. I love dancing and it always makes me feel better but I don’t do it as often as I might – usually because I don’t feel like I have the time to commit to a class or an extended dance session. It is very easy for a day to go by without any non-utilitarian movement – despite my firm belief in pleasurable movement as a beneficial practice. Additionally, I have been reeling from movement triggered migraines – so movement has been a bit of a landmine for me in the last couple of years. At their worst, the migraines just want me to lie very still in the dark.
But. One song, I can do. Not in the MIDDLE of a bad migraine obviously. But I can find a way to dance to at least one song once a day. Working with a client with such a limited range of motion has shown me how easy it is to lose flexibility, to lose the ability to experience movement as a pleasurable sensation. But it also shows me how much benefit there is in just moving what you can move. If you can’t move your arms, move your legs. If you can’t stand up, dance sitting down. If you can’t dance sitting up, dance lying down. Even if the only thing you can move is your eyelids, it is worth dancing those around or dancing in your imagination.
When we experience injury or pain or any movement limitations, we often shut down more than we need to. We think if we can’t dance the way we used to we can’t dance at all. But we can always dance something in some way. A finger dance? A nostril dance? I don’t know. But I do know that a little bit of dance goes a long way for the whole body.
In helping my client experience pleasurable movement again, I saw that I also helped her re-establish pathways in the brain that remember how to walk with more ease, to be able to get up off a bench unassisted, to regain balance and so on. When I saw her last week, she joyfully told me how she went out into the world four times that week. Once even, she went out unassisted. I attribute that regaining of independence to the dancing (and to the Feldenkrais, of course.)
I know the aids in the next room think crazy things are going on when they hear me singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” but I’m working on getting her to dance with her arms while lying down, which will eventually allow her to roll herself over. Extra-daily movement like dance helps the brain understand that you want to be able to move in many directions. We have a use it or lose it brain and if we only move in our habitual paths, we lose our capacity to move in other ways. For myself, I wanted to be able to keep moving in many directions, which I do with Feldenkrais but I also knew it was possible that I would enjoy my life more if I followed my own advice and danced to one song a day.
And, of course, once I’ve started dancing, I tend to go on. One song becomes two, two become three for as long as is pleasurable or as long as I have time for. It’s an incredible mood adjuster. There have been many times that I did not want to dance because I was feeling hopeless or angry or sad. I danced anyway because it was only one song, after all – and most of the time I felt better. At least a little bit. I have a little note stuck to my computer that says “One Song” so I don’t forget to do it. Sometimes it’s late at night and I see my little note and realize I still haven’t done it. So I put my headphones in and do a late night boogie before bed.
In our time strapped world it is so hard to find time to enjoy to move our bodies, to listen to music with attention, to “indulge” in non-utilitarian tasks. We can find time for one song, though. And one song can help.
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Need some help choosing a song? This is my dance playlist. Just hit shuffle and go!
This was at a college reunion. There was a DJ and a dance floor. That stuff is super awesome and fun. But I don’t wait for that stuff to find a way to dance.
This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
*
You can help me keep dancing
by becoming my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
*
Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age, business, feminism | Tags: age, being seen, Cool, dentist, invisible lady
The last time I was at my dentist’s office, he passed by while I was in with the hygienist, waved, said hello and then, as he walked away said, “You’re so cool.”
It was very charming and he said it in such a way that made me feel very cool. Like he’d just seen Lou Reed or something. Or Laurie Anderson.
And my dentist is also pretty cool. He has this extraordinary quality of being genuinely excited about teeth while simultaneously being exuberantly curious about the people those teeth belong to.
But that day, the day he said I was so cool, he did something kind of uncool. Instead of giving me the dental exam himself, he sent in his new partner. He declared that I would love the new guy and that the new guy would love me and then my dentist was gone.
You may not be surprised to learn that I did not love the new guy and I’m pretty sure the new guy did not love me. The new guy barely even saw me. He was polite enough. He smiled and asked how my day was going but it was pretty much like talking with a flight attendant on the way out the door.
Now why did my dentist, who thinks I’m cool, who has a sense of me as a human being think this guy was so great? Probably because that guy is great to him. Me, though, the new guy just saw as a lady in her 40s with a set of teeth that were going to help him get paid that day. To him, there was nothing to see. He had no curiosity about who was in the chair in front of him.
I’ve come to recognize that sense of not being seen, particularly by younger men. The socialization of women being valued only by their youth and/or beauty means often that men, like the new guy at my dentist’s office, only manage the bare minimum of social politeness with women like me. The new guy will never think I’m cool. Not ever. Even if I came in arm in arm with Laurie Anderson and Kendrick Lamar. Not even if the entire cast of Hamilton sang me an entrance number and surrounded the dental chair.
And I don’t need my dentist to think I’m cool. It’s nice – but it’s not what I go to the dentist for. However it IS what I pay extra for. Not the coolness part but the being SEEN part. See, I have, periodically, in brief interludes, had dental insurance and I saw other dentists (some adequate, some rough, some appalling) but none of them saw me. And I went to see my dentist, even though he didn’t take my insurance. I could have gone elsewhere for cheaper, but I came to see him because he saw me and that seeing was coupled with a kind and gentle quality of care that was worth a lot to me.
But…I won’t go see the new guy. And I probably won’t see my dentist now either since there’s a good chance he’ll just toss me over to the new guy. I’ll go get my teeth cleaned and x-rayed and examined at a cheaper, less cool office my next go round.
And if I’m very lucky, there’s a chance that the new place will have someone who’ll see me and maybe, if I’m extra extra lucky, just maybe think I’m cool.
Laurie Anderson is SO COOL. SO COOL.
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