Because sometimes a gal needs a category for the posts that describe her xx life.

Send me your beards!

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Not your real beards. Keep those on your faces. Please.

I want you to send me your “protest beards.”

What am I talking about? Good question. This past weekend, I posted about the horrible injustices faced by dwarf women in Middle-Earth.

That post – which featured faux PSA photos of me in a faux beard – has gotten a lot of views, and by a lot, I mean more than the eight views a day I usually get (normally because someone’s been Google Searching for a photo of the chick from Alien Nation).

Since there’s been a lot of interest, I’d like to invite you all to send me your protest beards. Below are some examples.

Ads for the bearded lady campaign

Photoshopped-in text is optional.

You can send me your protest in three simple steps:

1) Cut a beard out of paper.

2) Scrawl a slogan on it, condemning the oppression of female dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

3) Using your cell phone or your computer’s camera, take a photo of yourself wearing the beard.

Then send it to me at annjoconnell<at>gmail<dot>com, which is technically the fourth step, I guess.

I will be accepting entries until Jan. 20, and then I will post the best ones. And because this is a contest there will be a (completely unrelated) prize. (Yaaaay, free stuff!) The person with the best protest beard will get a copy of my new e-book, Beware the Hawk. (Yaaaay, self-promotion!) I really hope I get some photos of beards, because I’d hate to host a contest and have no one show up. So get out your scissors and your Sharpies, and prepare to beard injustice in its lair.

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The Lonely Mountain is much lonelier when you’re a girl dwarf.

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And by “dwarf” I mean the mythical variety, featured in The Hobbit, not the medical condition.

I’ve been pretty deep in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien lately.  My husband and I just finished reading The Hobbit aloud this evening, taking a chapter or two every day after dinner. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy straight through, something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Add a LOTR movie marathon and the hype about the new Hobbit movies and what we have here is an immersion.

Whenever I read Lord of the Rings, my inner geek collides with my inner women’s history nut and I find myself obsessing about the plight of the dwarvish women. There’s not much written about them, because, in case you haven’t noticed, there aren’t a lot of  ladies in The Lord of the Rings. You could count all the prominent females on the toes of one hobbit foot, if you count Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, which I don’t. Tolkien could write a mean adventure, true, but for him, women appeared to be an afterthought. The Lord of the Rings is pretty much a sausage-fest. Galadriel was like the lone female Fortune 500 CEO on a Forbes list from ten years ago. What I’m saying here is that the glass ceiling in Middle-Earth was exceedingly low.

No one had a lower glass ceiling than female dwarves. Their glass ceiling was subterranean, and not just literally. Dwarvish women appear in one short paragraph in the Lord of the Rings appendix, which Gimli more or less recites in the Two Towers film. According to Tolkien Gateway, femae dwarves are mentioned in Tolkien’s book War of Jewels as well (which I have not read.)  Here’s the breakdown, for people who are not as obsessed as I:

•Only one third of dwarves are female.

•They are kept in the mountains by the male dwarves and only travel “during times of great need,” and then they are disguised as men.

•They look and sound like dwarf males anyhow, (allegedly) right down to the beards.

•The dwarf population dwindles when they have no secure dwelling – this tells me that the dwarf women are kept in mountains to be baby machines.

•The ladies are not mentioned or recognized in dwarvish genealogy (except for Thorin’s sister Dís, who is only mentioned because of her two sons.)

•No one who is not a dwarf has ever seen one, so some men have come to believe that dwarves are born from stone.

That last one bothers me most. Tolkien’s dwarves keep a lot of secrets – secret technologies, secret doors, secret languages – but to keep one gender a secret? That’s a cultural fail. It’s pretty degrading, it’s totally unhealthy and it’s probably abusive.

Perhaps you think I’m being unfair to the male dwarves and to dwarven culture in general. Think again. Anyone who has ever taken a high school health class knows that isolation is one of the first signs of abuse. An abuser wants to control you, so he (or she) cuts you off from your friends, sunlight, opportunities in the outer world, etc.

Now let’s pretend you’re a dwarf maiden. The men in your family keep you locked in a mountain, far away from light, fresh air and  visitors. Your brothers are free to go out into the world to work and have dragon-related adventures, but you have to stay home and brush out your beard. That is, when you’re not bearing sons.

You are kept far away from the outside world, which is a problem since you won’t be anywhere near the door when when the Orcs/Dragon/Balrog attacks. Oh, and the Orcs/Dragon/Balrog will attack, because the dwarves in Tolkien’s books never learn from their mistakes. They always mine too deeply and  they consistently fail to develop effective anti-dragon security systems.  So who won’t be able to get out while all the dwarf-men are running for the door? Right. You.

This is an appalling state of affairs, and something ought to be done about it. I’m not talking about some crazy campaign featuring a wizard and a Fellowship. I’m talking about a grassroots campaign. Let woman, elf-maiden and hobbit-lass stand together and campaign for justice on behalf of our silent, bearded sisters!

That said, I’d like to introduce the Bearded Ladies Initiative, complete with grassrootsy, home-made public service announcements that I slapped together in an hour using a piece of paper, scissors and the camera in my computer.

Free the bearded ladies

Sad, true, and seldom acknowledged.

Bearded Lady Campaign

She isn’t your dragon-hoard, male oppressor!

I encourage those who stand with me to make their own beards and write their own slogans. If you’re really committed, buy a tee shirt. All proceeds will go to me, unless you can find me some real Tolkien-style dwarf ladies languishing under the mountains. Which you won’t, because as Gimli tells us, they are well-hidden.

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Mowing the lawn.

Today I mowed the lawn.

I know this is not a big deal to most people. I know that most people view mowing as a nuisance. But I’ve never mowed before, so I came out of the experience feeling like a bad-ass.

The whole thing started this morning, when I returned from my daily walk with the dog. As we galloped up the sidewalk, trying  (and failing) to negotiate the “heel” command, one of my neighbors appeared and asked if my husband and I would like his push mower. The neighbor no longer needed it, since he recently paved and tiled his entire yard. This is a lawn care solution that I know my husband envies, but since I insist on having vegetation in the yard, and not stones, we decided to accept the push mower. I thought it would be a nice, green alternative to the weed whacker. My husband agreed with me, probably because I had a crazed I-want-that-push-mower look on my face.

My husband is in charge of yard tools for the most part, but this morning he was busy with work, so I went to the neighbor’s house to retrieve the push mower.

All of a sudden, I had a new toy. The neighbor showed me how to use it. It made a satisfying whirring noise. Oooh. It reminded me of that fun rumble action on an XBox 360 controller. I decided to try the mower out, just to see how it worked. I’d just mow the part between our sidewalk and the street, the little strip of grass that makes me nuts because it’s outside the hedge, and therefore invisible to my husband from his perch on our porch swing, and since it’s invisible, it sometimes ceases to exist for him. In order to get that weedwhacked, I must nag with all my might, occasionally invoking the City of Bridgeport’s blight ordinance, and how the city is desperate for cash and they will come by and fine us, someday, oh yes they will.

So I mowed that. It was kind of like the super-easy training level you get in video games, just to familiarize the player with the controls. No mini-boss, just exploration. Then I felt confident enough to move to the the front yard. Then I remembered that I have things to do today and I went inside and worked. But then I took a break and mowed part of the back yard. Then I went back inside and worked. And then I couldn’t stand it. I mowed the rest of the yard.

I realize it’s just a chore, but it felt like a revelation. It was always one of the jobs I felt like I had to wait for someone else to do; either my dad or my brother or a landlord or now, my husband. The division of labor along gender lines wasn’t a big deal in my house while I was growing up, but for some reason, mowing the lawn was always a man’s job. The one time I saw my mother mow a lawn, it ended in the death of a large lawn ornament and confirmed my childhood suspicions that God doesn’t want women to operate lawnmowers. But today, I had a sort of She-Ra, sister-is-doing-it-for-herself, empowering feeling when I was cutting that grass.

I realize that this feeling will fade pretty soon. Probably as soon as mowing becomes my particular chore, which will probably occur as soon as my husband reads this post. That said, I feel like I’ve overcome yet another prejudice I had about myself, and crossed off another item on my List of Self-Sufficient Things Everyone Ought To Be Able To Do. And that list is another post altogether.

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Me and my inner monkey

At the end of January, Cordelia Calls It Quits wrote a great post about the Inner Two Year Old.

We all have an inner something. Inner children. Inner bitches. Inner lizards (or, if you want to get all technical, the reptilian brain.)

One of my monkey cousins at the Bronx Zoo.

I have an inner monkey. Go ahead and laugh. But before you start making jokes about bananas and Bonobos and the flinging of excrement, give me a chance to explain.

My inner monkey is the part of me that has stubbornly refused to evolve.  She doesn’t believe in diets or alarm clocks or working out differences through rational conversation. She’s not superstitious, intellectual, religious or creative. She’s not into impulse control. She is interested in one thing: Survival. She has sharp senses when it comes to detecting a threat. If I ignore her warning, I usually end up in trouble. She’s good at responding to a threat too; when I was attacked by a guy on the Boston T, it was the inner monkey that retaliated, not me. When my the alarm on my biological clock goes off, that’s my inner monkey. When I’m hungry before bed and I think about my mom, back in the day, telling me that it’s good to go to bed a little hungry, my inner monkey jumps up and down, screeching. Go to bed hungry? Hungry? When there’s food in the house? Never!

Although she manifests in many ways, food brings out the inner monkey more than anything else. The authors of the novel Good Omens wrote that civilization is only two meals away from barbarism. I know that’s true for me. If I don’t keep the inner monkey fed, there are problems.

Three years ago, when I began a strict diet (too strict, as it turned out), I lived life like a huntress. I was always on the lookout for food. Everything else in my life was a distraction from my quest for food and life was sort of a pause between mealtimes. Every person I met was a person who might be competition for my food. If I had cut out a few more calories, every person I met might have been a potential meal. Hungry though I was, I did not turn to cannibalism.

I descended to something far more hideous: Mathematics.

In an effort to consume more food while staying within the confines of my diet, I began to do insane amounts of math. I devoted more time to the calculation of my caloric intake than I did to all of my math homework assignments combined. My inner monkey doesn’t do math, but she did bully me into doing it for her.

Most often, though, she makes an appearance in the grocery store. Particularly if it’s crowded and I’m hungry. No good can come of that. Watch a documentary about monkeys competing for food and see how well it turns out. I’ve learned to eat lunch before grocery shopping.

You could argue that all these inner entities are different names for the same thing. In some ways, the inner monkey is a lot like Cordelia’s Inner Two Year Old. She has needs, and she has impulse control issues, and if I don’t meet the monkey’s needs and control her impulses, she will attempt to take over. But she’s also like Elizabeth Hilts’ Inner Bitch. The monkey knows what she wants and she knows what she doesn’t want. And very often it turns out that what the monkey wants is good for me and what she does not want is bad for me.

And (when she’s been fed) the inner monkey is more fun than I am. She hasn’t forgotten how to play. She’s always on the lookout for a tree to climb. She likes yoga, because she can sit on the ground, reach for her toes or be upside down.

Not that I’m saying that I should pay attention to the inner monkey’s every demand. If I did that, I’d sit around all day, eating, snarling at intruders, and trying to flag down members of the opposite sex. I’d have one child per childbearing year I’ve lived. I might be a cannibal. Despite this, Stop & Shop would not allow me in their stores.

What I am saying is that, like any wild animal, the inner monkey should be respected.

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The biological time bomb.

When I was younger, I didn’t believe in a biological clock. It seemed incredible that I would ever desperately want children.

Don’t get me wrong – I think I’ve always expected that at some point in the future I’d probably have kids, but I never actively desired them. And in many ways, I still don’t. The idea of having kids is terrifying on quite a few levels, actually. For one thing, I think I’ve mentioned that I worry a lot. Having small humans to worry about would make me a neurotic wreck. For another, I have a weak stomach and kids do nasty things. And then there’s the fact that I have a hard time communicating with people under the age of seven.

So I was pretty shocked about a year and a half ago when my brain started ticking like a time bomb. This state gives new meaning to the phrase “of two minds.” My rational brain doesn’t want children;  it wants to continue living its current rock star lifestyle. Meanwhile, there’s this weird primal voice in my brain that’s just howling for children. I smack it down, but it has weird ways of fighting back. I get strangely emotional when I see baby clothes. Holding an infant sends me into a pheromone-induced haze. The only thing that snaps me out of it is a child howling.

None of this has been helped by the fact that my doctor told me last year that my childbearing days are trickling away. I was 31 at the time. I was celebrating the fact that my 30s were the new, improved 20s and this old guy was telling me that I have a dusty uterus!

Evolution is a bitch. But so is karma. Because I find that some people simply don’t believe in biological clocks. And men I’ve talked to – one of whom was a medical student – seem to believe that the biological clock is a social construct. Oh dear – I used to think that too.

In the meantime, two good things have come of this. The first is the realization that the biological clock will eventually go away. Either I will age out of it or I will have a kid. The second good thing? Thanks to my doctor’s remarks, I now have a great name for an all-female country-western band. Click below, on “continue reading,” for a look at our first album cover. (Apologies to those who don’t see a page break and are just getting an image.) Read more

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