giving up the ghost.

At least the majority of the American people don't think I'm an unqualified moron. Yet.

This morning, sleepily, after hearing extensively about my menstrual woes, my husband remarked:

"You make being a woman sound like the worst thing, ever. It seems like you're barely holding it together all the time."

He's right.

I'm quitting, you guys.

I guess you could say this is a long time coming. Since I've gotten married, my hygiene has slipped significantly. I don't wash my hair nearly as much as I used to. I cut it off for a bob, which I intend to gradually snip away at until my hair resembles Edie Sedgwick's. I only wear makeup if I'm actually going somewhere (anywhere public any time before 6 pm doesn't count as 'somewhere'). I've worn high heels two times in two months. I'm just fucking tired of being female, and I don't care anymore.

I'm tired of not being able to shit regularly. I'm tired of haranguing my breasts into a wired felt-cotton trap every morning. I'm over worrying constantly if I'm knocked up. I'm sick of concerning myself with how I look and wondering if I should censor what I say.

You see, women are in a constant pursuit of looking as attractive as possible. Always. We are told from childhood that our purpose is to decorate the earth, to light up men's faces as they leer at our chests and appreciate our delicate features. We are on display 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We're supposed to diet and keep up with trends and have huge breasts and no wrinkles and not be smarter than the men we're involved with and we should be mild and passive and motherly and cheerful and just fucking perfect. If we're not doing everything we can to impress dudes, then we're under fire for being fat, ugly, man-hating feminazi lesbian shitasses (Scott Baio's wife's words, not mine - though I wish I could take credit for such a zinger). And if we happen to be too attractive, it's our fault that we led men to rape us, because we're sluts and whores. We have to be slaves to a society and then get backhandedly fucked by said society just for doing what they tell us.

But you know what? I'm not doing it anymore. I have a nice place to live, a job that's tolerable, an awesome cat, and a man that loves me even if I have chipped nail polish and have been wearing the same bra for four days in a row. Even so - what is the point where we say enough is enough? Is that aging? Recognizing that you're not the hot chick, the ingenue, the demure doll who men bend over backwards for? Or is the recognition that you don't even care enough to try to play that game anymore?

Women deal with enough blood and shit and tears. We owe it to ourselves to be honest. And to love ourselves for that honesty alone.

I don't know how to love Jesus.

I would make a West Virginia joke here, but I'll refrain, because it's the Christian thing to do.

I tried; I really did. I used to go to church on Sundays with my friend's family when I was eleven. I was excited to learn the Lord's Prayer and I took communion despite the fact I was never baptized. I used to beg my mom to buy me those hurricane candles in the grocery store with pictures of Mary's face glued to the glass. I was fascinated and enamored with the quiet, cold, insular, and ancient world of Catholicism.

And then I got a little older.

I wasn't raised with a religion, an issue I would torpedo at my mother during my pre-pubescent temper tantrums. "Why don't I go to Sunday School?" I would wail. My mother, nonchalantly, would reply, "Because those fucking bitch nuns ruined my life." My dad always maintained that he didn't believe in anything really, but if he actually cared, he'd be Buddhist.

Growing up in a very Italian, psuedo-religious town, it was hard not to feel left out. Now, there was no passion in any of it - it was tradition, it was going through the motions until you were confirmed, it was something you did to set yourself up for later in life, but it seemed like everyone did it. The only people who were actually dedicated, who went to church regularly, were the old widows, who'd kneel with their rosaries and pray for the health of their grandchildren and seek solace in the words of old men, much like the husbands that left them behind.

This past weekend I attended a VERY religious wedding, with the all the classic elements - insistence on honoring God in the vows, stressed importance on having Jesus as the focus of the marriage, backhanded comments about homosexuals and civil marriage. I tried not to roll my eyes. I tried to honor the belief system of these people (both of whom I actually like very much), much as I would hope they'd honor my complete apathy to any religious system, nearly all of which have been clear in placing women below men and systematically devaluing half the species. I can't subscribe to a set of beliefs that tells us to believe in the love and power of a God who lets people starve and allows extremists to kill thousands of people in his name. I also can't believe an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being that supposedly created everything in the universe actually has a sex and a gender.

Now, don't get me wrong - Jesus sounds like a good person. It's just all the crap surrounding him that turns me off. I won't speak badly of the guy, but due to the circumstances, I just don't think it's going to work. It's not you, Jesus; it's the assholes who think they know you. It's the self-righteous pastors and priests who condemn all of us who fornicated, lied and cheated - yet those were the people you flocked to. You knew long before Billy Joel that laughing with the sinners was better than crying with the saints.

Just do us all a favor and tell the people who worship you to lighten up.

I don't fucking get romance novels.

 I'm not heartless, I swear. Brokeback Mountain made me cry.

I know it's not going to shock anyone, but I really don't care for that whole "I have a uterus and thus I am only interested in storytelling about heterosexual love affairs with non-descript characters and one brutally over-dramatized sex scene" thing. I understand that there is a segment of the female population that secretly reads trashy Harlequin romance novels about ripping corsets and riding "members," and that's fine, because they keep that shit on the down low. Nobody would dare to read "Mistress: Pregnant by the Spanish Billionaire" anywhere remotely public.

But, unfortunately, it is socially acceptable to read the printed diarrhea that is any Nicholas Sparks novel. And I want to punch this douchebag in the face simply for introducing his particular brand of fantastical and formulaic love story into the cultural lexicon.

Yet another movie based on one of Sparks' books just came out, with Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth (don't worry, I have no idea who the fuck he is either) playing the romantic leads. Now, I'm not going to see this piece of shit movie - he's responsible for six of these god-awful things so far, and the only one I saw was A Walk to Remember because I was fifteen and a romance-junkie friend dragged me against my will - but I bet I can narrow the plot down in one sentence: Rebellious individual meets overly generous and kind person, they each learn the error of their own ways, make out, and then one of them dies.

.... And this guy makes MILLIONS of dollars? Why, you ask?

I'll tell you why - because American women are given no great fantasy. We all want to escape our lives, right? Transcend the banality of rising at the same time every morning, working in the same cubicle, bogged down by the decision of whether to have chicken or fish for dinner. Society has established numerous legal avenues for men to just get away from their lives - sports, whiskey, Xbox 360, Tolkien, sportscars, the list goes on, ad infinitum.

What do women get? Romance novels.

It's just assumed that LOVE is all we care about. It's just assumed that from the second we're born with a vagina we're just waiting longingly for our princes to come. All our dreams revolve around the white dress, the diamond ring, the moment of completeness when we find The One and can settle down and start popping out children and never worry about anything again except for The One maybe dying in a mudslide (Nights in Rodanthe) or dropping dead at 17 with leukemia (A Walk to Remember) or enjoying a wonderful life with us and then forgetting the entire thing in old age due to dementia (The Notebook).

So basically, Nicholas Sparks is dictating our greatest desires and deepest fears. I'm so glad there's yet another man who knows exactly what women want. I'm also so glad that the vast majority of women have absolutely no taste in literature, because they're all making me look so much more posh by default.