Brugge 2 by Spencer Tunick. Installation of 700 naked people arranged in a theatre in Bruges.
There are brave souls in every land
Who worship nature, grand and nude,
And who with swift indignant hand
Tear off the fig leaves of the prude.
--Robert Ingersoll
I recently bit the bullet and splurged on a membership to the local fancypants all-female gym. This place is incredible. I’m talkin soothing eucalyptus steam rooms and unlimited towel service, y’all. It’s the swankest gym I’ve ever been to and I adore it.
So I was surprised to see that the Yelp score for my gym was only 3.5 stars. What more could anyone want out of a gym??
A quick read through the comments revealed a troubling trend: women were voting Healthworks down because of the naked women in the locker room.
Wait, what?
Okay everyone, listen up. This is important.
Just ask this girl.
Locker-room nudity has long been a source of anxiety for me. Even when I was a small child, I assumed that a room like a locker room that was designated for single-sex clothes changing would be an acceptable place to take one set of clothes off and put another set on.
I was wrong.
Surrounded by my blushing cohorts, each one modestly turned to face the lockers, all of whom somehow knew how to change clothes without exposing one square centimeter of flesh (I still haven’t figured this one out), I quickly realized that I’d better follow suit or risk being considered an underage Sapphic exhibitionist. So I dutifully turned toward the lockers and learned how to put a swimsuit on without removing my teeshirt.
Even then, I knew the truth.
These girls were full of shit.
Being naked is great.
I’m not alone in my ~radical~ views on nudity. The ancient Greeks didn’t just go naked in their locker rooms—they did their entire workout in the buff. That’s why gyms are called gyms—the name is derived from the Greek word gymnos, which means naked. These people are complaining about nudity in a place that we basically call the nakedtorium.
Modern luminaries like Alexander Graham Bell, Leonard Nimoy, and author Robert Heinlein are also vocal proponents of the benefits of nudity. Abraham Maslow, the brain behind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, states "I still think that nudism . . . is itself a kind of therapy." In fact, there are thousands of people all over the world who believe in the benefits of nudity. They’re called naturists or nudists.
Are there tangible health benefits to nudity? Yes. No. I don’t know. WHO CARES? It feels great. Sleeping naked keeps your temperature regulated nicely, not to mention the feeling of cool sheets pressing against your body. Swimming naked means no nasty infections from wet bathing suits, not to mention the feeling of water rippling across your body. Sunbathing naked stimulates vitamin D production—which we northern dwelling creatures need so badly in the winter--not to mention the feeling of warm sunlight warming all of the palest, most secret places. The mental benefits? Immeasurable. Being naked does a body good.
So here’s your imperative: Go take your clothes off!
Not sure what to do with your new nude self? You can participate in World Naked Gardening Day, or the World Naked Bike Ride. Wikipedia helpfully suggests nude activities like skinny dipping, nude snorkeling, nude canoeing (or “canuding”), or even nude hiking or ”naked rambling.” (I participate in an alternative version of naked rambling, wherein I stand around my apartment in the nude and talk to myself.) If you also enjoy thumpy music and flashy lights, you will love going naked at Burning Man and other regional burns, where clothing is optional. My particular tribe of burners have pioneered the field of nude line-cooking at our annual Pantsless Pancake Breakfast.
It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you try doing it without clothes.
Now go forth and naked your world up!
If anyone needs me, I'll be naked in the locker room giving my gym a bad name.
Discussion question:
Do you like to get naked and run around? If you think I'm nuts, please tell me, because that will be fun too.
69-year-old DJ Ruth Flowers starts her set with O FORTUNA. How sick is that??? Someone please invite this fierce beast to Transformus to camp with us at IHOP.
When the phrase "the last taboo" caught my eye in an internet article recently, my interest was piqued. In this ever-changing world in which we live in*, what could possibly qualify as the last taboo? Incest? Torture? Stirrup pants?
No. It's sex among the elderly. This according to Dr. Virginia Sadock, professor of psychiatry and director of the Program of Human Sexuality at New York University.
Pfft. "That," I thought, "is the least scandalous scandal ever." Shouldn't we all be so lucky to remain sexually active into our twilight years? How could something like geriatric sexology take the crown for a dubious distinction like "the last taboo?"
So I decided to engage in some hard-hitting journalism and go straight to a reliable first-hand account. It seems that a dear friend of mine, who is octogenarian and FABULOUS, has had the very same subject on her mind recently. She gave me the following account of living the last taboo:
Ten years ago I found my last sweetheart in the old folks exercise class at the "Y." I was 69 and he was 71, and we started a hot sex life that has endured for 10 years. The only problem is we aged as we reached 80 and 82, which has put a crimp in our hot sex. We figured it was all over at first. However, we still have desire and keep our once-a-week date which we both look forward to. We cuddle and kiss a lot until we head for the bed and continue kissing and caressing and manually pleasing each other. There's no penetration but we both feel satisfaction and lots of affection. And we've discovered "back scratching" is sort of an aphrodisiac and a wonderful aperitif after making love. (The gorillas obviously were onto the "back scratching" too.) Then we have coffee and watch "Family Guy." And laugh a lot....[Her boyfriend] and I still can't keep our hands off each other after 10 years! The taboo is all in our heads.
Admit it. You're clutching your pearls.
But why?? Why are we so squicky about the idea of older people remaining sexually active? Is it a vestige of our Judeo-Christian notion that non-procreative sex is verboten? Or is it just a symptom of the rampant ageism in our culture?
When I have big squishy questions like this about sex and religion and the Western tradition, I turn to my dear friend and fellow Nashvillian Julia, who is working on a PhD in theology and women, gender and sexuality (aka Sex and God) at Harvard. And we gchat about it have a Platonic dialogue.
Julia: i think generally speaking sex is structurally normative, as in: there are powerful political, cultural, social, etc. forces that structure the sexual and sexualized body as heteronormative, meaning: YOUNG, straight, able-bodied, etc. many of our prejudices about what an able body is, in fact, have to do with its sexual capabilities. me: WHOA so true Julia: what is an "impotent" body? me: if someone is disabled, one of the first questions that arises in the brain: can they still have sex? Julia: EXACTLY
we have very similar prejudices about the aged body
So it seems that it's both--that our ageism is wrapped up in our idea of the heteronormative sexualized body. WHOA. Leave it to a Harvardian to blow your mind.
So what does this all mean? Sure, geriatric sex is a taboo. What does it matter?
Here's how it matters. 26% of the American population belongs to the aging Baby Boomers generation. Among them, 87% of married men and 89% of married women in the 60-64 age range are sexually active. Among Americans over 80, 29% of men and 25% of women still engage in sexual activity. That means we're looking at millions and millions of sexually active elderly folks in the coming years.
That part isn't the problem. The problem is that our cultural taboo related to geriatric sex creates an inability to acknowledge the phenomenon in any meaningful way. Sexual support and sexual health care for the elderly is severely lacking.STD rates among the elderly are out of control. Just like abstinence-only education for teens leads to skyrocketing teen pregnancy rates, lack of sexual support among the elderly can lead to the spread of STDs and other public health issues. And, according to another of my many Nashvillian friends pursuing higher education with an emphasis in sexuality:
"When you combine lack of knowledge with lack of resources, you get gonorhyphallis."
--Lanier B., sex educator extraordinaire
And nobody wants that.
So what can we do to avoid this public health crisis? Start here: don't be afraid to talk to the elderly folks in your life about sexual health. You're bound to learn something interesting from them, and maybe they'll learn something important from you. I mean, Grandma Moses didn't start painting until she was in her 70s. It's never too late to learn new tricks.
*apologies to Sir Paul McCartney
Discussion Question:
Talk about how awesome you will be when you hit your golden years. Will you rock DJ sets with Ruth Flowers in Paris, or simply enjoy postcoital viewings of Family Guy with your hot boyfriend/girlfriend?
I can smell the colors outside on my lawn
The moist green organic that my feet tread upon
And the black oleander surrounded by blue
I get so overwhelmed by olfactory hues
Synesthesia, the neurological condition that causes stimulus in one sensory pathway to trigger involuntary responses in other sensory pathways (ie hearing colors, tasting pain, touching flavors), kind of sounds like it's made up. It kind of sounds like the thing that happens to people that take hallucinogens and maybe insane people.
But doctors estimate that anywhere between 1 in 100000 to as many as 1 in 200 people are legitimate synesthetes. The most common type of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia, wherein letters and numbers (called collectively 'graphemes') are perceived to have a distinct color--about 65% of people with synesthesia experience this. And I am one of them!
synesthete.org offers a full grapheme-color synesthesia test. In the test, the letters of the alphabet and numerals 0-9 are flashed randomly and the user must pick a color associated with each one. Each grapheme is posted three times. After the user has selected a color for each grapheme three times, the results are analyzed. Here are my results, which as you can see very conclusively determined that I have grapheme-color synesthesia:
In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull, green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e's and i's, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u. In the brown group there are rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h.
I have a similar idea of my letters, bordering on and perhaps fully qualifying as grapheme personification, wherein letters and numbers have genders and personalities. Soft, feminine bilabial plosives B and P are a soft, maternal pink. Masculine, nasal M and N are a macho dark green and blue. Simple I and O are white--something that many grapheme-color synesthetes experience in common.
It is difficult to explain but I do not see these colors when I see letters and numbers in front of me. I see that the text I am typing is black on white. But somehow I perceive the letters and numbers to have the color. Whatever part of your brain lights up when you see a blue ball--that's the part of my brain that lights up when I see an E or an S. I am fully aware that it is not actually blue, but my brain recognizes it as being blue. Am I making any sense?
Over the last few years, I've realized that my grapheme-color synesthesia isn't just a random experience that I have. I've come to understand how much it affects my day-to-day life--basically always for the better.
SYNESTHESIA IS A MEMORY AID
Which seems like it would be easier to remember? You can ask me a year from now what number I used in this example and I'll still remember--that streak of yellow-pink-green is impossible to forget.
SYNESTHESIA IS AN ARITHMETIC HELPER
Times tables are boring, right? No. They are gorgeous.
Most people can recognize the elegance of the x9 times tables--how the digits in the products all add up to 9, how the first and second digits in the products run exactly from 0 to 9 backwards and forwards, respectively. With the benefit of color, these fineries are amplified and put on display.
Moreover, I have realized recently that I work arithmetic in my head using color. When I see a simple sum, I think not 2 + 3 = ? but rather something more like pink plus yellow equals what? I think when I'm moving really fast it's more like just pink yellow blue. This makes me pretty handy with mental math and adding long columns of numbers and stuff.
SYNESTHESIA MAKES YOU FEEL PASSIONATELY ABOUT SPELLING
Grey is not the preferred spelling in the US for the shade between black and white. But in my mind, it is the only way to spell it. Just look at this.
Does it make sense for there to be a big splash of RED in the middle of the word gray? Ew. No. Grey it is.
Or how about:
Even though Vergil is *technically* better, since his full name was Publius Vergilius Maro, Vergil just looks so NERDY. Everything was fine until that blue E came to town.
SYNESTHESIA MAKES YOU AN AWESOME EDITOR
You can't crack a book about synesthesia without seeing this chart:
It demonstrates how synesthesia makes inconsistencies jump off the page. A non-synesthete has to hunt around for the 2s mixed in with the 5s. For me, the pink 2s leap out among the blue 5s.
This skill comes in handy, since I make a living as an editor. My grapheme-color synesthesia makes typos and other errors pop out.
My brain immediately identifies that gold-red-pink-yellow ("wakl") is an odd combination before I even consciously realize that there is a typo.
SYNESTHESIA MAKES GREEK A RAINBOW
Perhaps my loyal readers who remember my academic background are wondering whether I have a synesthetic reaction to Greek letters as well. The answer is yes. I had never really thought about it very hard until this moment, but I do. I was lost so far in thought as I made this chart that I forgot the omega! Shameful.
I think my synesthetic reaction to the Greek alphabet is very telling. The colors are by and large the same as the letters they closely correspond to in English, whether the letters look the same (as in alpha [Α/α] and A) or not (as in gamma [Γ/γ] and G). But what about the letters that don't have a direct equivalent in English? Like the long E sound eta (Η/η)? Eta takes on not the royal blue of E but rather the green hue of the H and N the capital and lowercase letters resemble. Theta (Θ/θ) makes a "th" sound, and the blue T and green H combine to create a lovely blue-green theta.
Perhaps most odd is psi (Ψ/ψ) and phi (Φ/φ), which make a "ps" and "ph" sound respectfully. My brain is so broken by these characters that they are the only graphemes I see in gradient--psis fading pink to blue to white and phis pink to green to white, mimicking the way the words "phi" and "psi" look spelled out in English. I don't begin to understand what all this implies about my synesthesia but I think it's pretty interesting.
SYNESTHESIA MAKES EVERYTHING WEIRD
While grapheme-color is definitely the strongest and most persistent and consistent synesthesia that I experience, I have a number of other synesthetic reactions. I often experience taste-color, but it so often corresponds to the color of the food itself that it is usually unremarkable. I mentioned a recipe not tasting "red" enough in this post. I also have music-spatial, touch-color, and a whole passel of other synesthesia-esque experiences.
I know that my synesthesia and my interest in writing have to have something to do with one another, but I haven't quite touched on how yet. Maybe my unique sensory perspective makes it into my writing? Perhaps it will make me Nabokavian. A girl can only type rainbow-colored letters and dream.
Discussion Question:
What is unusual about the way you perceive the world?
It's the beginning of May, as you might have noticed. The first of May finds me thinking not of maypoles and distress signals but instead of what Nick and I were up to two years ago at this time: recovering from Nick having a giant chunk of his head scooped out.
This is the story of Nick getting chopped and screwed. And being in T-Pain. Okay I'll stop
(Seriously though, if you're wondering, chopped and screwed actually refers to a method for remixing hip-hop songs. It's associated with Houston. And purple drank. So what could be more appropriate blog-readin' music for this story than hip-hop made by Texans on narcotics?
When Nick and I started dating in late 2005, we lived a maddening 1000 miles away from one another. Unable to bear the distance and the time apart, Nick used to fly to Austin or fly me to Atlanta every other weekend. Very early into these blissful weekends together, I started to notice something. Nick was an incredible snorer.
He had that classic log-sawin' open-mouthed snore that makes it impossible to sleep next to someone. Worse than that, he regularly stopped breathing and then vociferously woke himself up gasping for air. I used to lay awake at night and watch the man I was falling so deeply in love with just...stop breathing. The seconds that passed until his next breath lingered on and on like minutes or hours. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to stand it and I'd shake him awake until he sucked in a breath.
I told Nick I thought he had sleep apnea, which is basically when you stop breathing during the night. Grad school Katie was delighted to inform him that 'apnea' comes from the Greek ἄπνοια, like πνέειν (to breathe) plus an alpha privative. Nick was...somewhat less delighted.
When Nick unexpectedly moved to Austin in late 2006 and into my tiny apartment with me, the situation became a little more serious. Since my little apartment was basically just one room, there was nowhere to go to escape Nick's nightly snoring extravaganza. I bought the best earplugs I could find, which gave me some relief, but I still went to sleep every night worried that maybe Nick was going to stop breathing and never start again.
To Nick's everlasting credit, he did not wait very long before he did a sleep study. The results were sobering. Nick had sleep apnea--and how. He was basically not able to reach REM sleep at all because he stopped breathing and woke himself up approximately every six minutes. The longest period of time he went without breathing? 90 seconds. Hearing that made my stomach turn.
We had two options. Either Nick could wear a CPAP machine, which looks like this:
and sounds like this:
WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
every night for the rest of his life or he could have surgery to take care of it.
Who likes getting cut into? Nick decided to give the CPAP a try.
The CPAP machine was a bust from the start. CPAP stands for 'continuous positive airway pressure' and basically it is supposed to keep your airways open by changing the pressure inside your blah blah basically it just blows air up your nose and down your throat all night. Nick was MISERABLE. Perhaps it wasn't calibrated right. He just never got comfortable with it on. It felt weird to have all that dry air circulating through his airways all night. Add to that the fact that the machine was kind of loud AND that I woke up every morning next to something that looked approximately like this:
and you can see why we were both pretty miserable about the CPAP from the get go. It wasn't long before Nick started making arrangements to have his sleep apnea taken care of surgically.
Nick scheduled his surgery for the end of April 2008. His wonderful mother Susie made plans to come down for a week to help me take care of her ailing son, and I made arrangements with the good folks at UT Press to work from home for a week so I could look after my ailing now-fiancé.
The docket for Nick's surgery was impressive. It started out sounding pretty minor--fix the deviated septum, remove the giant tonsils. But the second two items on the list sounded a lot worse. They were going to remove his uvula and part of his soft palate?
For those of you who were not paying close attention in anatomy class, here's a diagram of the back of the mouth:
everything in green? GONE.
I knew then that Nick and I would never have the his-and-hers uvula piercings I had always imagined...
When the day of the surgery came, I think I was more nervous than Nick and Susie put together. I cried when they wheeled him down to surgery. I couldn't concentrate on the manuscript I brought with me to copyedit in the waiting room. The whole day is a blur of daytime TV and vending machines.
Nick came through surgery beautifully. He was awake when they wheeled him back to his room, and he was able to write us little notes to tell us how he was and what he needed and mostly that he loved us a lot. The surgeon told Susie, "Ma'am, your son really knows how to grow some huge tonsils." We brought Nick presents and doted over him and spent all the time we could in the hospital with him over the next couple of days until he came home. One evening Susie caught me on my knees in the hospital's chapel with tears running down my face saying a quick thank you to The Powers That Be. She said it was the sweetest thing but maybe I was being a teeny bit dramatic.
And perhaps I was. But it was a pretty big deal, as far as I could tell! They really hollowed that boy out. The back of Nick's throat looked like nothing I had ever seen before. It's the shape of the inside of a cathedral or a marquise-cut diamond.
It's kind of beautiful.
Nick spent basically the next 8 days or so hopped up on the legal equivalent of purple drank, sleeping constantly and healing up beautifully, so Susie and I took advantage of that time to drink Coors Light and gossip and plant a beautiful little garden and have all kinds of soon-to-be mother-and-daughter-in-law adventures. My favorite moment was probably our catastrophic attempt at making homemade mashed potatoes in this tiny, useless device:
Soooo Nick healed up and Susie went home and we all lived happily ever after, right? Well, yes. Mostly.
Two weeks after the surgery, Nick seemed to have made a complete recovery. He was back at work and life was back to normal. It was a Thursday night and I was tutoring my beloved Gregory Mohan in Latin at a little Italian restaurant a few miles away from my apartment. We had just ordered our slices of pizza and were settling in for an afternoon of conjugating when my phone rang. It was Nick. I answered.
My fiancé screamed into the phone back at me. I'M BLEEDING! YOU HAVE TO COME HOME NOW! The urgency in his voice broke into a sob. THERE'S SO MUCH BLOOD.
As he's saying these words, I'm floating out of the door of the restaurant, my feet not touching the ground. I'm calling over my shoulder GREG CALL YOUR MOM TO COME GET YOU THERE'S AN EMERGENCY and I'm in my car driving home on two wheels. I'm calling an ambulance and then a few moments later I'm hearing the ambulance in the distance already on its way to him. It's funny how slow and clear everything seems in those moments of absolute and complete panic.
When I was just a few blocks from home I got caught at a red light. A huge pack of motorcyclists were taking up almost a block of space, loosely scattered across two lanes, blocking my way into a gas station parking lot where I could circumvent the light. I skidded to a stop behind them and layed on my horn. GET OUT OF THE F$%&ING WAY I screamed crazily out my open window, a bespectacled young woman with a car full of Latin books picking a fight with a motorcycle gang. Several of the bikers literally flicked their kickstands down and got off their bikes and started making towards me with venomous eyes. I did not know these things actually happened outside of S.E. Hinton novels and Michael Jackson videos but I did not have time to stick around and see if there was going to be any coordinated dancing. I leaned my body halfway out of my car and screamed with all of my might, my voice breaking, I AM HAVING A MEDICAL EMERGENCY PLEASE F$#*$ING MOVE SO I CAN PULL THROUGH THAT PARKING LOT The bikers wasted no time getting out of my crazed way. I honked and waved gratefully as I peeled through the parking lot towards home.
I got to our townhouse right as the ambulance was getting there to find Nick in the front yard with blood trickling out of his mouth and soaking his shirt, an impressive trail of blood leading back to our apartment. He was panicked but it was clear that the bleeding was slowing and the worst was over. I followed the ambulance to the hospital.
It turned out Nick had coughed and blown a suture in the back of his mouth, and a blood vessel had ruptured. When Nick called me, the blood was shooting out of his mouth in a spray. Later on I found that Nick had tried to clean up a lot of the blood in the bathroom so I wouldn't be frightened when I saw it, but it still looked like someone had taken a water balloon filled with blood and dropped it into the bathroom sink. It was like a crime scene. I'd find blood spatters in the house for months to come.
They had to do emergency cauterization on Nick's wounds that night to guarantee that the vessel wouldn't rupture again. More anesthesia, another night spent in the hospital. My dear friend Sam Hoekstra (now Hoffpaiur) came to the hospital in the middle of the night (on a work night!) to come and keep me company and distract me. I will never forget how kind she was and how much I appreciated it.
And THEN Nick healed up and everything was fine and we lived happily ever after. And Nick doesn't really snore anymore, and he definitely doesn't stop breathing during the night. So we're extra happy. The end.
Discussion Question:
What's the scariest phone call you've ever gotten?
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