Dopp Juice Archive

I celebrated Valentine’s Day in the middle of a several-hundred-person pillow fight. It was amazing and beautiful and a great outlet for the anti-consumerist singledom disdain I carry for that day. Throughout the battle, I kept my glasses safely in a case in my pocket and lunged face-first at the whump-thwumpers.

Eventually, my neck got tired of being pummelled, and I stepped out of the fray to pick feathers out of my teeth and shirt. I put my glasses back on to get my bearings just before WHACK!, they were smashed off my face by an errant pillowfighter and buried under a groundcover of feathers. Panicked, I grabbed the five closest bystanders and had them hunt for me. One very well-meaning man found my beloved glasses. After he stepped on them.

Once upon a time, I used to wear contacts every day. I took this as a sign that maybe it was time to go back to them, and I carted myself to Lenscrafters the next day to get sized up for them. After a day of dilation-induced disorientation, I was home again. Contacts! Peripheral vision! Freedom!

But one major thing has changed since I was a daily contacts wearer: I no longer have hair. So, despite the fact that the contacts feel completely and utterly freeing, I was weirdly disturbed when I looked in the mirror. On days when I don’t wear makeup (which is about 50% of the time), I now look… really naked!

It’s jarring how much comfort we find in having some sort of shield between us and the world. Bangs to hide our worry wrinkles and long hair to curtain our cheeks. Foundation to hide our blushing. Shades to hide our tears. We paint dark lines along the edges of our eyes to remind people to see us directly, and then we shield them with lenses and frame them with angles and curves — thick and thin — to change the shapes of our faces.

When I make all that go away, I look uncomfortable. I look vulnerable. I look scared.

So it was back to Lenscrafters today, urgently looking for face jewelry. Give me something that will dress me up when I don’t have the motivation to do anything more than put on my glasses. Make me safe again. I’ve got the contacts — I know how to look like myself. Now give me something else!

I went for bigger. I went for quirkier. I went for something that would announce a confident style without any extra input from me.

And I got them.

And they feel weird.

But now I’m safe again. And now can go back to putting effort into appearing transparent. Whew.

(pillowfight photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid )

Dear Friends,

There’s a lot that’s missing from this blog. I rarely reference my art, my social network, my adventures, or my grapplings with identity politics. And that’s unfortunate, because these are significant and interesting parts of my life, and I’d like you to know about them. I’ve been keeping them off the radar because it’s been easier to let people make assumptions about my personal life than it has been to try to explain it to them. The downside of this is having to face some really wrong assumptions, all the while knowing that I haven’t done anything to prevent or correct them.

For reasons that continually boggle my mind, a lot of this seems to hinge around my sexual orientation. So let me take a stab at creating some common ground by offering up the label that makes the most sense to me: I’m queer.

This word seems to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so here’s how it works in my life. First of all, I’m not straight (most people seem to figure this one out). Second, I’m not a lesbian (and I’m pretty damned sure about that, so please don’t challenge it). Third, I’m somewhat androgynous (which, incidentally, is not the same as being butch). I live in the middle ground. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity. I’m queer.

“Queer” is a word with positive connotations in my circles. Unless you’re saying it with a glare and a snarl, it is not an insult. You can use it to describe me.

Another word you can use is “bisexual.” I don’t mind this term (and it’s a lot more appropriate than “straight” or “gay”), but you should know that I rarely use it to describe myself. To me, the term “bisexual” suggests that there are only two genders in the world, and I disagree with that philosophy. We can get into that debate another time. For now, I’d just like you to understand that gender is rarely an important factor when I’m deciding who to date.

I find that many people tend to assume I’m a lesbian, so I don’t think of this post as “coming out of a closet” so much as “submitting a clarification.” If we can get onto the same page about my identity, I think we’ll find we have a lot more to talk about. I hope you’re game.

Love,
Sarah

I wrote a few weeks ago about The Writ — my baby project that turned into a teenager and ran away from home. It’s had more than few near-death experiences out there in the big scary world, but it has relentlessly refused to die. At the time of this writing, The Writ has been alive for four and a half year and has 5,783 member accounts. People contribute to its workshop and use it to support each others’ writing every day. I haven’t touched the site in two years.

It hasn’t been without leadership, though. Julián Esteban Torres did an exceptional job of organizing an editorial staff, keeping promises, cranking out journal issues, and trudging through a hacked-together half-broken content management system on a mission to do something beautiful.

He and I have been passing the baton back and forth for the life of The Writ. He organizes people and I organize systems. I think our tandem leadership is the reason The Writ has survived. Both of us have invested our time, energy, and personal money into The Writ to the point of burnout more than once, and neither of us has ever made a dime.

The baton is back at my feet now, and I think I’m ready to pick it up again.

I don’t usually write publicly about my projects while they’re in their early stages; critique can kill a dream. But this one’s been already through the firing range and it ain’t dying anytime soon. Moreover, this isn’t about a website; it’s about a community. The only way I can do it justice is by listening and being transparent.

I want the community to have something more stable to stand on. They are a passionate group and they’ve proven they can take care of themselves if they have the tools to do so. I want to open up a line of communication for group discussion, self-organization, and collaborate planning (I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do this). I want to migrate the site to a stable and widely-used open-source CMS so it has a chance at evolving as technology changes. I want to make the website pretty again. I want to add features that put more control in the hands of each individual user. I want to honor the community’s organic growth over the last four and a half years and let whatever passion has fueled that growth to guide this process.

And I think that if the community also wants these things to happen, these things will happen.