Hi everybody, happy holidays. I hope you are zoning out on Law and Order in a carbohydrate coma. Anne, our publicity director here and a dear friend, and I have been Meloni-ing our way through December. He is our new imaginary boyfriend. You know it's getting weird when you're ranking the dudes on Law and Order (yes, even the scary narcissist Ice T) in terms of which one you would make out with first.
Oh--I probably shouldn't write that. If Anne and I have lust in our hearts, Dawn Eden might come around and tell us our friendship isn't deep enough. It was a little hard to discern exactly what she was saying from this Salon article, but she seems to think that friendships between women only have depth if nobody is slutty:
I'm not saying that my old friends weren't nice people, weren't giving people. But when you're not chaste, at base your friendships are transactional, and there may be sparks of real give-and-take, but never like the kinds of friendships you can have when you're taking the focus off the superficial.
Absurd. Of course this whole "I can only be spiritual and connected and not superficial if I have no sexuality whatsoever" is exactly what I wrote a 500 page novel to help dismantle. Time for some essays, I think. I think it's this huge crisis that women only think they get to have a sexuality if they are a porn star, an anorexic, or, as in Eden's case, a trophy wife. Women's sexuality is not internet porn--it's not automatically disconnected or self-hating or superficial if it's outside of marriage! My word! It's disconnected and self-hating and superficial if the woman is doing that to herself. And I am afraid it's kind of tough in this culture for women to figure out any other way to be. Essays, essays, I am typing as fast as I can.
In the meantime, I highly recommend The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. It is so gorgeous--a complex love story between two actual grownups, and a sense of story in the way I believe our best stories work--with an opening, a hope at the end despite these often grisly circumstances on earth.
Anne and I went to a pre-release screening last week, the theater was full of lunatics--people randomly yelling at the row in front of them, the guy behind me making masturbatory noises then suddenly stinking of peanut butter. It was like Personality Disorder Science Fiction Theater, and still the movie was amazing.