putting my uterus where my mouth has always been

Within four days of conception, the thought that I was pregnant strayed across my mind and I. Could. Not. Shake it. For the most part, my body felt normal. Ebulliently healthy, in fact. The only thing funny was that my tits hurt. And not with the familiar, liquidy, pendulous ache I feel every month. They felt tight and like they were filled with large-grade gravel. I chased that pregnancy thought around my head for a while, shoving it into corners and under other thoughts, but when my period was one day, two days... six days late, I was not terribly surprised.

***

I keep having versions of this conversation:

Friend: So, I haven't talked to you in a while. How've you been?

Me: Better. I mean, I'm good. I mean, yeah, good.

Friend: What do you mean "better?"

Me: I mean, well, last week was strange.

Friend: Strange?

Me: Yeah, kinda rough. Strange.

Friend: What happened?

Me: I had an abortion last week.

I don't usually lead with announcements of this sort. Mostly, I assume people don't really want to know the details of my physical person when they ask after my well-being. I'm not one to revel in the overshare--or, at least, I'm not when not writing for this blog. But I have been pointedly acclimating myself to saying it. I had an abortion. I've been getting used to not cringing in anticipation of receiving a response I might not like so much. I've been consciously choosing to not hide the simple fact that a terminated pregnancy is part of my personal history now. And also, I've been seasoning myself to the fact that I feel shame about exactly none of it--not the sex, not the pregnancy, not the termination.

Upon the materialization of that nefarious little plus sign, I told a few friends. I waited a while to get used to the idea and then I told my mom. A few people immediately said, "You're not going to write this, are you?"

"I might. Probably. I don't know. I haven't decided."

Under normal circumstances, even the best-intended unsolicited advice makes me tic and shudder with irritation. But I must say I was unprepared for the sort comments I, a girl who happens to do a thing with words now and again, received upon intimating that I might write about aborting a fetus. "Be discrete," they said. "Be reverent, somber." "Protect yourself. It's too personal. You don't want those pro-lifers giving you their opinions on your blog, do you?" "Be respectful. Don't make jokes. This isn't funny." People said these things to me.

You know what? Fuck that.

First of all, I have more rhetorical ammo in my arsenal than any pro-lifer could ever hope to dodge. Seriously, people. If you have a problem with my terminating my fetus on principle, bring it. You people don't scare me. You don't scare me primarily because I can't take you seriously. You stand on the side of neither ethical correctness nor personal responsibility and therefore I have very little respect for your opinion on what goes on in my uterus. I know full well that I write this blog under my true legal identity and I wouldn't be publishing this post if I didn't think I could take the heat.

But secondly, though I know they didn't intend it, having people weigh in on how I should write this story felt tantamount to their telling me how I should feel about my predicament--and the subsequent solution. Somewhere in those well-meaning admonishments, I detect the implication that I, a writer and a woman who has had an abortion, am somehow supposed to be delicate in my discussion of this topic. But guess what? This process begins with fucking and ends with a red-brown smear on a comically thick maxi-pad. There aren't too many delicate things that happen in between.

That said, my decision was as clean, unconflicted and singular as a decision could be. Within 10 minutes of the appearance of my plus sign, I had already called a clinic for an appointment. Since, I have not wavered in my conviction that I was doing the right thing--not even once. Like a premonition, I wrote this post a few months back. In it, I confessed that I had no idea what I'd do if I found something unwelcome in my uterus. And truly, until it happened, I didn't know what I'd do. I mean, all along, I've been aware that I pay an extortionate mortgage on a small-ish condo in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. I'm aware that my social infrastructure is a little scanty in the child-rearing-support department. And I know that I am reticent to give my lifestyle the overhaul that having a baby would require I give it. But it was not something I could decide beforehand. I could not be automatic about it. But then, neither could I have known, in advance, of the blissful clarity of thought and internal calm I'd feel in the reality of that moment. I had no idea--not until I felt it.

There really is only one reason the decision was so easy for me. Inviting the guy, whose notch on my bedpost will heretofore be tabbed "the impregnator" (and, alternately, "the narcissist"), into my life--and bed--constituted a poor choice. Truth be told, had the precision-engineered genetic material squirted forth from virtually any other male member with which I've had contact in the last year and a half, I'm nearly positive I would not have felt such single-mindedness. In some strange, inverted way, I suppose that makes me lucky.

So. The guy. Yeah. I met a guy. We went out. On the first date, I thought he was a little boring and had an inflated sense of himself. I didn't imagine we'd go out again. When he texted me something suggestive later that night and followed up with a rather sweet email the next morning, I was flattered. I am easily flattered. But then, over the course of the next two or three dates, I began to tick off a list of inanities as they fell out of his mouth. A vaguely racist comment here. A few tacky digs about other men I've dated there. He frequently claimed to be "charming as hell," which, predictably, had the dual effect of making him seem socially ill-at-ease and uncharmingly arrogant. He accused me of being a film snob and of "over-analyzing" everything. I thought, well, if you don't like that I engage as deeply as I can with every cotton-pickin' thing in my world, you really don't like me. Then I realized it was me who didn't like him. Unceremoniously and definitively, I cut it off.

Two days later, I felt that tightness across my chest. And I couldn't decide what to wear. I blamed girly neurosis and commonplace sartorial indecision when I began changing my outfit 14 times every morning. Nothing fit right. It all itched and hung at an angle. I'd never, in my adult life, felt less sexy--in every last article of clothing I own. And then, internally, recurrently: I'm pregnant. Quiet. It's nothing. Fuck, I'm pregnant.

I still shake my head at the boneheadedness that got me into this age-old pickle. With a dude so cacophonously sub par, no less. But, simply put, I've had worse sex. Had he been able to keep some of those stale pomposities corked up inside him, he might have kept me entertained for another week or two with the sex alone. Between my inability to deflect the lavish demands of my libido and my irrational, yet persistent, anxiety that I may never have sex again, I'm rarely motivated to say "no." So, I don't know, somewhere around Round Three or Four one night (so as to not paint the poor fellow as utterly irredeemable, I really should concede that his stamina and resilience were definitive checks in his pro column), we ran out of his preferred style of condom. He imperiously objected to whatever I happened to have in my purse. Then, classily, he proceeded to make fun of me for having dated guys with cocks small enough to fit into them. He totally did. In the moment, his uncouthness left me too flummoxed to say anything about the teasing. Perhaps if I had said something, I would have been better able to shed the bitterness I continue to taste when I think of him.

So, sure, I knew I was ovulating. But I was also burnt out from having to play rousing games of Condom Police with nearly every guy I meet. I've had a perfectly good education about birth control methods, thank you. I know my options. But my experiments with hormone-therapy-based birth control have been disastrous and I'm nervous about slippage and increased recurrent UTI risk (I'm already quite prone) with copper IUDs and other insertable items. So condoms remain my only and my last resort. I'd love to generalize, averring that women are simply more aware of their personal consequences, in terms of condom-free sex, but, of course, that's not universally true-- I certainly have been with incredibly meticulous men who are all about the condom love. Regardless, I so often feel put in the position of being the safe-sex enforcer--a stance of suckage. I am the one, after all, faced with the decisions, the costs and the bodily disturbance when worse does (did) indeed come to worst.

That night, I was wet and lacking conviction when I suggested we delay. I caved. And he probably waited about a beat and a half too long to pull out. He came mostly into the crease of my thigh.

I realize this story is rife with dumbassedness, especially considering we weren't a couple of ill-prepared teenagers, but rather, two sexually experienced adults in our 30s. But it's exactly that that makes it a particularly valid little cautionary tale. Folks, it happens. It happened. What can I say? Fecundity, sex drive, all of it: signs of proper bodily function. Of health. They're also terribly dangerous toys.

***

I don't owe anyone a justification for my decision. I'm not trying to convince anyone I did the right thing. But because I'm shooting for accuracy and honesty, here's what was in my head as I stared at my fateful pee stick: I figured I had three options: 1) I could have the kid and selfishly deny it access to its father, out of my own shuddering distaste for him; 2) I could have the kid and spend the rest of my life resenting both it and the guy, the guy and I could have 18 years worth of epic battles over personal values and child-rearing decisions, and I could stretch my already tight budget beyond capacity, thus raising my own child with far less privilege than my parents granted me; or 3) I could terminate.

I was so lucky. My choice couldn't have been clearer. Option #1 was out of the question. I could never prevent a kid from knowing its father. That's ugly karma in which I don't care to partake. And no way, no how was I going to bind myself, for the rest of my life, to an anti-intellectual jockstrap registered fucking Republican ("I voted for Obama, though. Hope I don't regret it!" Oof. Like a post-coital whomp to my belly. ) -- much less do so to some poor, unsuspecting infant. The chances of him and me being able to maturely co-parent with a reasonable degree of accord? Laughably slim, right? I simply couldn't have let it happen. It would have made not two, but three lives exponentially more difficult. No argument in the world could convince me that there's a shred of ethical propriety to be found in that option.

***

I've written several drafts of this post. I've been bashing my head into it, unable to settle on an approach. I thought about detailing the procedure itself and the two fairly harrowing days that proceeded it. Fears of miscarrying, extra blood tests, delays, cramping, nausea, nerves-- all of it. Because no account of the abortive experience was real for me until I had my own. At times, I thought maybe I could try my hand at that version.

I thought about writing a letter to my doctor. I wanted to tell him about how rare and thoughtful and cautious and empathetic I found him to be--and how lucky I felt to have serendipitously become his patient. For the first time in years, a conventional medical practitioner put aside the hierarchical doctor-patient relationship structure in order to listen to me. I have a mild clotting disorder. Even minor surgery is a little more risky, a little more nerve-wracking for me. He talked to me, called for extra bloodwork and reassured me. The clinic I chose does a volume business, so his personal attention was more than that for which I could have asked.

Lucky. I am. Really.

Oh, and the sorority. I've begun initiating conversations with women close to me--the ones I knew had also terminated pregnancies. I wrote to women who'd written their own narratives-- to learn more, to say thanks, to affirm and be affirmed. That day in the clinic, even, I shared how-I-got-knocked-up and I'll-never-do-that-again stories with the jittery women waiting with me. All of those stories--varied as they are--are in my head now. They're part of this, crammed in here too. It's a bond. I can't explain it.

And I'd be remiss to not speak to very cool part of being pregnant. I felt such unexpected relief when I realized that, somewhere in the my mind's recesses, the fact that I'd never gotten pregnant before, despite all the messing around I've done, had bred a niggling worry that I might not be able to if I tried. In a strange synchronicity, it seems the author of one of my favorite blogs, Nightmare Brunette, has been going through something similar. She says this about the body's independent machinations:

Conception is still fundamentally a pretty amazing thing. In this condition, I could move to a place with no other people and, in less than a year, I would have made my own company. It's stupid to try to pretend it isn't special, to act like it's mundane and not miraculous to have this event trying to happen inside my body. You don't have to be religious or spiritual to think the ways nature works are exciting. You just have to not be a cynic.

She's not wrong.

And then there's my body's healing process: roughly 48 hours after an abortion, progesterone and other pregnancy-elevated hormones begin to dissipate in the blood. Morning sickness subsides. The mind sweetens into new relief and pre-pregnancy order. And despite all my best intentions for putting myself on a sex diet, my body began feverishly campaigning to get its pregnancy back. Gnuuh. Fertility. The staggering uptake in my cocklust had me swimming in flesh in my dreams, both regular and day. I've been haze-headed, soupy, lit-aflame-with-the-libidinous-directive and, really, nearly euphoric.

But it's all just too much. Too big. More than one measly blog post can possibly hold. I'm sorry. My form fails me.

***

Ultimately, I suppose the particularities of any of the writerly approaches I might have taken do not comprise anything unusual--and maybe not even anything all that interesting. The Planned Parenthood website says that "1 in 3 American women have abortions by the time they are 45." That's an awful lot of us. And yet, I've only read a handful of firsthand accounts. Why is that? The sheer paucity of these narratives is a problem, I think.

Right after my procedure, my doctor asked me, "OK, what are you going to do now for birth control? Because I don't want to see you again unless I run into you on the street. Although, of course, you might not want to acknowledge how you know me." Even he, a man who makes a living by providing this necessary service to his community--and, as Dr. Tiller's murder reminds us, risks his life to do so--is so deeply inculturated with the notion that unintended pregnancies and their subsequent terminations are humiliating for women that he back-stepped at his own hypothetical musing about he and I running into each other. But I wasn't humiliated. I said, "Doctor, I am not ashamed of this. Actually, I'd be proud to acknowledge that I know a man who does what you do." I don't think he was expecting me to say that. But I meant it.

Nevertheless, there still aren't all that many women telling this story--not publicly, not with their names attached. Even the article I linked in my previous post was submitted anonymously. Had I been able to write to its author and thank her personally, I would have. I was, however, able write to one Ms. Chelsea G. Summers to thank her for her three remarkable posts in which she details her experiences, and the fallout of telling of her experiences, over on her blog. Her posts gave me perspective and, well, kept me company that night after my surgery. And also, she makes a point that, frankly, goes unsaid far too often:

It’s no secret that I've had seven abortions, which is, I admit, a lot. I have narrated my abortions in stark detail, and I have discussed how people who identified themselves as pro-choice castigated me for my recurrent choice to terminate my pregnancies. Looking back on my life and the fifteen-year period of these abortions, I believe that my choice to abort was absolutely correct, even if my fuzzy choices that led to my getting pregnant were not. Faced with the same decision again—an unlikely scenario as I’m now about as likely to get pregnant as I am to die in my bathtub—I would unhesitatingly choose to terminate the pregnancy.

I've written about how difficult it was for me to come forward and tell the story of my abortions. I haven’t written so much about how rewarding it has been to hear from other women who have suffered as I did in the shadow of their silence. These women were afraid of voicing their experience of choosing to terminate a pregnancy, just as I was. We all lived in fear of being judged. Reading my story, many women came forward and thanked me.

Though I have been quite open about all this with most people in my life (and now with whomever reads my blog), I continue take her point well: no matter how right the decision, the telling of the tale is still a loaded act.

It's been a real challenge for me to write this post. My usual blurt-it-out-don't-look-back writing process had been shot to hell as I've fought through an anxiety about whatever judgment may yet come my way. Not only do I feel like what I'm writing is important enough that I care whether it's "good," but I also feel nerve jabs in my stomach every time I get close enough to finishing it to hit that "Publish Post" button at the bottom of my screen. Atop all the self-doubt I usually feel about my writing, an excruciating awareness of the political load that this issue bears has threatened to snow my post under more than once. As I said before, it's not that I'm ashamed of the act--any of the acts. But I will be ashamed if I can't manage to write a piece compelling enough to be worthy of the textual heritage of the issue at hand. For that reason, I too have been afraid of voicing my experience. Plainly put, I am more afraid of letting down my sorority sisters with a half-assed telling than I could ever be of a bunch of folks who disagree with me on the basis of religio-social principles that have no bearing on my life.

That said, the stories are, indeed, beginning to wend their way out of the closet--and with increasing momentum. The other day, a friend sent me a link to this HuffPo article about Ms. Magazine's upcoming "We Had Abortions" issue. 5000 women signed a petition, which will appear in the issue, acknowledging that this event is part of their histories too. Signing that petition is no small act, considering that people continue to die for us to have this right. That article also mentions another Steinem brainchild, The Choices We Made, which anthologizes a series of celebrity-written essays on the topic. The narratives are piling up, and as they do, I can't help but feel like the politics I've been preaching for all of my aware life are being validated. That's the power of these stories. We need them because the dominant narrative (Abortion is traumatic! It's emotionally depleting! It's crushing and sad and conflicted!) that exists in the social imagination doesn't have much in common with the reality of the experience.

I wasn't traumatized. It was the pregnancy that depleted me; ending mine restored me. When it's right (and I do not assume that it's given that abortion is always--or even often--right), it's neither sad nor burdensome. It's not even terribly upsetting. I didn't feel anything of those things.

***

I did feel something, though. Three things, to be exact.

I expected I'd be scared. I was scared. Not petrified, really, but on tenderhooks, for sure. I'm wary of conventional medicine in general and having my guts plumbed isn't high on my list of favored party games. I was scared in the way that I'd be scared before any medical procedure--not, specifically, because I was to have my uterus sucked clean. The specifics of the abortion, in fact, were really only incidental to my anxiety.

I also expected to feel lonely. I can't deny that, in the exam room, I had one of the most acute moments of psychological isolation I've felt since I was a kid. That room contained one doctor, one nurse and one patient. In truth, it was me and my decision, alone on a cold table. When the nurse offered her hand, I leapt at it. So grateful was I. In that singular moment of my own exaggerated cognitive withdrawal, another human recognized that I was a human--a human in pain. And she held my hand. Almost immediately, I felt like I was imposing (because I usually feel that way when people are kind to me) and I thanked her. And then I realized it was her job and felt silly...but still grateful. Such are these moments, I suppose.

But I never expected I'd feel moved. It's one thing to feel imperturbably assured of the correctness of your choices. It's quite another to feel uplifted deep down in your consciousness by the very ordeal to which your choice has led you. In the hours and days that have followed my abortion, and even in the recovery room immediately thereafter, I've been thinking quite a lot about all the activists who've spent their productive lives fighting for me to have all the readily available options that I do. The abortion providers who continue to be murdered as a direct result of their conviction that we should trust women have come to new prominence in my thinking. And I've been remembering how I was the only girl at my 8th grade lunch table preaching the pro-choice ethic that forcing a woman to bear a child is a disproportionate punishment for a few seconds of orgasmic accident. In the end, I didn't wish this mess upon myself. However, I have found the experience of living out the bottom line of my own long-held political stance--in a tangible way, within my own body--to be a profound one. Asserting this sort of empirical authority over my physical person hits deep. No other way to say it.

***
And after that, what is there left to say?

This, I suppose: in publishing this post, I'm aware that I may be forfeiting (tiny readership or otherwise) whatever privacy to which I might once have clung in favor of asserting that my abortion is not something I want to hide. That, too, is my choice.

I think it's a good choice. But I know it's a choice that may well might me bite me in the ass. That's okay. A little ass-biting is still better than forced parenthood.

what if sex is no longer a viable metaphor

So, Amazonfail fallout continues a day later. Really, the best part is the discussion that the debacle has sparked.

Still, answers coming out of Amazon itself are conflicted and I have no idea what to think about what's really going on over there. There does seem to be an effort underway to remedy this situation (see update here), which is the important thing. But it's been an amazing phenomenon, regardless.

Debauchette has posted some more interesting thoughts here. In particular, she says this:

Sure, we have erotic texts that are intended to arouse the reader, and that genre of literature usually gets its own isolated aisle. But sexuality is often used as a means to explore deeper themes, or to expand on philosophical discourse, or to access internal experiences, psychology, emotion, spirituality. Sometimes sexuality is political, legal, historical, or grounded in current events, and can take the form of fiction, memoir, history, essay, poetry. Identifying something sexual as “adult” is clumsy and arbitrary, like some clunky algorhythmic Miller’s test.

Specifically, she's discussing the disappearance of Catherine Breillat's book, Pornocracy, that was the companion piece to her film Anatomy of Hell. I've found both book and film to be weird and full of philosophical problems (e.g., they posit a victimhood inherent to the female experience and a model of gay manhood as "pure" and immune to the "corruption" that is female. Such things make me bristle for several reasons.) But Pornocracy is an excellent example to point out that sexuality can function in a text as a vehicle to discuss any number of other things, just as debauchette says. And that's why Amazon's new practice of shuffling texts that deal in sexual subject matter to a virtual ghetto is so deeply unnerving. If we can no longer find books that talk about sex, we'll be losing a deplorably great percentage of centuries worth of recorded human thought -- thought regarding a hell of a lot of stuff that's only tangentially sexual in nature.

Anyway, all these other bloggers linked above and below have said it all better than I. With any luck, all 57, 310 books will have their popularity rankings properly restored in short order and Amazon will devise a smarter system for preventing Harry Potter searchers from stumbling upon this damnably pernicious book with it's filthy, wanton jacket.

N.B. To be fair, I ordered my personal copy of Pornocracy off Amazon a while ago-- and I had to wait several months for it. The current printing was released in July of last year. Before that, there was some older translation of it that Amazon just didn't stock. So, the barring of this particular book may have had just a little something to do with the fact that they've only sold a handful of copies (to pervs like me) in the first damn place.

postcard from another "bleeding-heart nympho"

I think I've marveled before at the serendipity of the Netflix queue. So often, it seems that what arrives in the mail--whatever I may have added months ago--reflects something uncannily timely.

This weekend, I got a little film called The F Word. It's an odd film in that it's hard to keep in mind that the whole thing isn't real, so documentarian is its style. In the film, Joe, a radio talk show host, takes to the streets of NYC on the last day of the 2004 Republican National Convention-- and that day just happens to be the day on which his teeny indie station is being shut down by the FCC for not paying some extortionistic obscenity fees. The show itself is called The F Word mostly because its primary discourse surrounds first amendment rights ("F," I think, is meant invoke not just that f-word that in the most concupiscent of Carlin's 7 Words You Can't Say on Television, but also the F in "freedom.") Hence, the pointedness in the plot device of the FCC's iron-fisted edict.

As Joe ventures forth, he stops to interview all sorts of folks, attempting to capture as many different opinions on the re-nomination of Bush as the Republican presidential candidate in 2004. I honestly have no idea how much of what his interviewees said was scripted and how much of it flew out of their mouths in rough draft form. For most of the film, Joe meanders in and out of the crowd of 500,000 people who were protesting the RNC in one of the largest political demonstrations in the history of our country. Remember that? It was all over the news. Oh, right. It wasn't. The so-called liberal media totally squelched it. Barely a mention of it made the national news shows. But it did happen. 500,000 people of every political stripe-- the pro-military conservatives, the run-of-the-mill liberals, the anarchists, the libertarians, the Green Party-ists, the hippies, the women's rights proponents, the angry, the disenfranchised, the gung-ho, the opinion-havers--took to the streets and, by and large, the news media ignored them. And Joe tries to talk to as many of them as possible. And it's only when the credits run that you realize that all the people with whom he speaks are actors, with real names different from the names of his interviewees. Lending some realism is the fact that there is real footage of the protest and the convention itself interspersed with the low-budget handicam stuff in which you see Joe and friends. Reminding you that we're dealing in fiction, however, is a fairly odd dream sequence (which we learn was originally meant to be a drug-trip sequence in the "deleted scenes" portion of the DVD extras) starring Sam Rockwell.

The film was released in 2005, just a few short months after the second inauguration of our less-that-illustrious current lame duck. Clearly, it was meant to be a document of its very specific moment, and not much more. Toward that end, I'd say it is most successful. Here, I think I mean that it illuminates a remarkably stark contrast between this current election season that of 2004. In fake interview after fake interview, the left-leaning portion of the folks made it clear that they were not voting for John Kerry. They were voting against Bush. And those New Yorkers were pissed that he was using their city, one of the most progressive cities in the country, as a pulpit from which he could spew his retrogressive vitriole and 9/11-exploitative, hot-button-y rhetoric. But they would've been pissed anyway. They'd watched in helpless dismay as this man led the country in a direction they did not like for four years and were then hollering for a change of course as loudly as they could. Needless to say, not too many of us heard them. Thanks again, "liberal" media. Way to have our backs.

The frustrations and fears of these people are palpable in the film. But so is their resignation with regard to embracing a candidate like Kerry. One of the ugliest truths of the last election that the most devoted party-liners amongst us felt no real love for John Kerry. He was better than Bush, but he was milquetoast. Neither offensive nor inspiring. Simply palid. Beyond that, he was just too damn conservative. And therefore alienated a bunch of us who were supposed to be his base. A mistake, I'm afraid, Hillary Clinton might have repeated this go-round.

Four years ago, the DNC held their convention in Boston. Does anyone else remember Obama taking the stage at that convention? I'm sure you do. Before that, I'd seen his picture in a few magazines. I think I'd heard him give a short interview or two on morning news shows. He was engaging, handsome, smiled easily and beatifically. He looked like a politician. But on that night of the convention when he spoke, I was dutifully watching from my parents' kitchen, hoping to get just a little fired up about the candidate for whom I'd doubtlessly, eventually, vote. I had just finished my MFA. I was unemployed. I'd just ended an important long-term relationship. My personal footing was off-balance and I was scared about everything-- my own life and my country's.

When Obama began speaking, something just...shifted. He didn't make Kerry seem any more appealing but he reminded an awful lot of us of the essential humanist ideals for which our party is supposed to stand. A lot of folks talk about "drinking the Obama Kool-aid" or "being hypnotized" by his style-- and maybe some of that has gone on. Maybe a lot of us really are wowed by the more superficial aspects of his presentation.

I, however, choose to think there's more to the man. And that there's more going on in this election.

Now, several of my blogging friends have suspended usual blogging activities to focus primarily on this election, and I've been glad of it. Their blogs have been the source of many a YouTube video that I've forwarded around to my politically akin friends. However, I decided I didn't really want to do that. Based on pretty much everything I've ever written here, my political persuasions should be readily discernable. Though I am certainly as liberal as humanly possible about a lot of things, I value my civil liberties above all and therefore sometimes find myself resenting the limitations on those liberties imposed by well-intended liberal legislation... and casting furtive glances toward the civil libertarians. But because I've been so transparent about my beliefs up to this point, I figured who needs any more ramblings from yet another "bleeding-heart nympho?"

However, watching that movie has put me in a mood to spill out some of my reflections on our current campaign season. Please forgive me the cheerleading that is to come.

The morning after Obama's speech at the convention, two young black kids in black suits rang my parents' doorbell. I answered in my pj's, against my better judgement. The first thing they asked me was, "Are you happy with the way the country is going?" I probably snorted and said, "Um, no." Then one of them said, "Do you have any hope that it'll get better any time soon?" Right then, some little tremor of emotion pricked up through my throat and nose, as Obama's "I-don't-believe-there's-a-red-America-and-a-blue-America" speech rang in my head.

To my surprise, I told these kids, "Yeah! Yes. I honestly do!" They looked at me a little dumbfounded. Apparently, I'd inadvertently upended their script. They then handed me a couple of issues of The Watchtower, the dogmatic publication of the Jehovah's Witnesses' church. Oh. Of course. That's why they were there on my doorstep.

Now, these were two kids-- they couldn't have been much older than 16 or 17-- who'd pointedly been denied access to information on the political goings-on in their own country for their whole lives. Their church taught them that it is not the place of men to govern each other. God's, after all, is the only power that matters. As this was the belief system in which these boys were raised, they were scarcely aware of our country's two-party system-- let alone one rising-star senatorial candidate from Illinois. They had no idea that Democratic politicos from across the country were meeting in Boston at that very moment. And among those politicos was a man who was to be the first serious contender for American president who shared their skin tone. And that that was a big deal. Probably, they didn't really care.

But I wasn't lying when I told them I had hope for our country based on that speech. Truthfully, I developed a big ol' ideological crush on Obama that very night. Throughout all the hemming and hawing of the primary season, I knew he was my man. And no, I do not think that my early preference for him over Senator Clinton makes me any less of a feminist (quite the opposite, actually, but that's something for another post). I'm not in love with everything he's proposing -- I'm wary of tax breaks for anyone in a time of such extreme national debt, I do not think his proposal for maintaining the employer-based model of health insurance goes far enough towards dismantling and rebuilding a very sick system, and I honestly don't know how he's going to afford a lot of what he wants to do-- but I see something rare in this man.

I've been reading articles lately that criticize Obama's unflappable, cool demeanor and call him "detached." These articles warn us of a disengaged, do-nothing president, so passionless that he will be unable to rise to the occasion of any real challenges. I read those articles quizzically because, in my mind, detachment and disengagement are not the same thing. In a perhaps more Eastern mindset, one could define detachment as the opposite of attachment. Detachment would then include the notion of the ability to step back from one's own biases, recognize them for the the biases they are, and then make a more objective decision that wouldn't be possible if one stubbornly insisted upon standing by one's initial opinion. That's not disengagement at all. In fact, I might argue that that's a more fully engaged position that the unquestioning assertion of singular truth to which our current president is famously predisposed. Furthermore, I might argue that this capacity of detachment, if it's really present in Obama, makes him uniquely qualified to lead the sniveling, bitching, whining, partisan, bickering masses of us. Could it be possible to have a president capable of rising above the fray every once in a while? My goodness! What a boon that could be.

Beyond that, Obama is thoughtful. He is mindful and he values intellectual discourse. These aspects of the man's character are as transparent as daylight. Those are things I value in a leader-- as well as a person-- and they're not things I see as readily apparent in John McCain. Certainly, Bush's hokey anti-intellectualism and misplaced accusations of "elitism" are diametrically opposed to that for which Obama seems to stand. Diametrically.

However, I want very much to be able to say that I'm not voting for the character of either of these men. I want to say that I'm voting for the man who's written the platform more closely aligned to my own belief system than the other one's. And fortunately, that happens to be true. The courses of action McCain has planned seem short-sighted at best, catastrophic at worst, from every angle at which I look at them. I do not think it's a mere regurgitation of campaign rhetoric to assert that he will perpetuate and calcify mistakes that have merited Bush the lowest approval rating in history. I really do think Obama's ideas are simply more practicable and more sound. And would benefit the greater number of people.

However, there is no denying that it takes a special kind of charisma to inspire a center-right nation to vote a more progressive candidate into its highest office. Now, I'm writing this when we're still two days off from the election, buoyed on the optimism of the current polls. But even if the polls are wrong and we wind up with another four years of misguided conservatism, I think it's still clear that something in this man has sparked a light in the voting constinuency. And that's new.

The F Word really did hit the spot, in so many ways. Not the least of which is that it points at the possibility that the Democrats of Tuesday, 4 November, 2008 will not be voting out of lack of alternatives but out of, dare I say it, hope. And out of genuine, if cautionary, excitement about Obama's leadership, his character and his policies. How far we've come in four years, eh?

My polling place is about two blocks from home. When I walk over there Tuesday morning, I'm anticipating doing so, not with resignation that I'm voting for Senator Not Awful, but with goopy, sloppy elation that, for the first time since I've been of voting age, I'll be voting for a candidate in whom I believe. Goddamnit. That damn near brings a tear.

Correction: another bleeding-heart nympho dork!

More specifically, though, I'll wont' be voting against McCain, but for Obama. That's the difference 4 years makes.