Chicks I Dig

I spent a portion of my childhood hating the fact that I was born female. It seemed being born female meant I was weaker, I'd have to resign myself to housework and cooking, I'd have to listen to 'icky lovey-dovey' music all the time, I'd have to always wear make-up and some elaborate hair-do and that the job market would be seventy percent closed to me when I grew up.

These were the musings of a ticked-off eight-year-old tomboy with no female role models. My first inklings that there is life beyond gender was given to me by reading. I read "The Color Purple" during a summer tanning session that ended with that book. It was a revelation. As the narrator, Celie, moves past abuse and rape as an almost illiterate but protective fourteen-year old, she is sold into virtual slavery to 'Mister'. Shug changed all that. Reading and writing changed all that. In the end, as the gift of family, love and self-possession take hold, she is a bold, intelligent woman that no man would hold down again. I was hardly being held down, but my need to find a strong woman was fulfilled.

I'd found my role model.

I read everything with Alice Walker's name on the spine. The two books that effected me as strongly: The Temple of my Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy. I wasn't the same after reading them.

My Mom was a surprising source of books that gave me lessons in selfhood as my mind formed. Ayn Rand is a staple on her bookshelf and I devoured as much as I could - they're are very filling meals for the mind.

From there I moved onto existentialism which led me to Martin Eden, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Tin Drum, The Flounder, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Being and Nothingness, Awakening, The Yellow Wallpaper, Herland, Crime and Punishment, ad nauseum. My bookshelf was full to bursting at all times and I'm quite sure only half of what I read was understood. I could have used a dose of my later finds: Angela Carter, Flannery O'Connor. Perhaps they could have helped me move beyond being such a pompous little shit.

Although I hated the fact the many older philosopher's of that ilk verged on misogynistic (in my massively self-important teenage opinion) the fiction put my mind and soul in synch. I read and enjoyed Nietzsche but then grew past it. I though Kierkegaard was kind of an asshole.

But further revelations were upon me. Anais Nin and Henry Miller whose work is twined in Amazon for a rather extensive amount of reasons). Ursula le Guin.

What was clear, maybe the only thing that was, was that I should write. And write I did. From my loopy kid handwriting to a typewriter, to a coded journal to Word; I wrote and still write as a way of staying sane, learning, lamenting, exploring and understanding. Withdrawal, sometimes of a physical nature, sets in if it is too long denied.

I made two new chick discoveries this week. The internet provides and open forum for the minds/imaginations of millions and Bitch. Ph.D. appeals to me on many levels, not the least of which is intelligence matched with brutally honest humor. The Gallery of the Absurd, the words and works of a woman as disgusted and amused by the cult of celebrity as I am. She has a much more distilled and erudite way of expressing it, of course.

On my death bed, my mind will still be seeking to understand the world and the place of humans in it. But I am eternally grateful (as are those that have to deal with me on a regular basis) that these musings take place mostly in my own mind and that they are now tinged with self-deprecating humor.

Thank you, Alice Walker.