fighting words for paranoid bitches

squint your eyes and look closer
i'm not between you and your ambition
i am a poster girl with no poster

i am thirty-two flavors
and then some

and i'm beyond your peripheral vision
so you might want to turn your head
cause someday you're going to get hungry
and eat most of the words you just said

both my parents taught me about good will
and i have done well by their names
just the kindness i've lavished on strangers
is more than i can explain

still there's manywho've turned out their porch lights
just so i would think they were not home
and hid in the dark of their windows
til i'd passed and left them alone

and god help you if you are an ugly girl
course too pretty is also your doom
cause everyone harbors a secret hatred
for the prettiest girl in the room

and god help you if you are a phoenix
and you dare to rise up from the ash
a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
while you are just flying back

i'm not trying to give my life meaning
by demeaning you
and i would like to state for the record
i did everything that i could do

i'm not saying that i'm a saint
i just don't want to live that way no,
i will never be a saint
but i will always say

squint your eyes and look closer
i'm not between you and your ambition
i am a poster girl with no poster
i am thirty-two flavors and then some

and i'm beyond your peripheral vision
so you might want to turn your head
cause someday you might find you're starving
and eating all of the words you said

ani di franco. again.

so there i was all cranky and well past the pms stage, barely conscious barely coherent barely human except for the bitch in me that seems to stay awake past dreaming.

when you catch me at that window of time between bed happiness and breakfast-or whatever meal it is i wake up to- chances are you get me conscious but war freak-ish.

not just me actually, it's a trait i share with the four other estrogen laden members of my flip family. we have different snooze hours but the waking up window is eerily identical.

anyway i digress.

considering that the insanity of the past days has been a departure from the life i had a few weeks past i was looking forward to the easing back, truly, the starting at the middle that i, low EQ person that i am, failed to do. then i was rudely reawakened to a certain reality that i was trying to prepare for but now it seems is barreling my way full speed.

and the words i heard sparked a temper simmer that i nursed the entire day, letting it rest to accomodate then surfacing at the most inopportune of times. and my mouth, freakazoid marathon runner that it is in comparison to my sluggish body, produced words i regretted as soon as my brain reconnected with the rest of me. and those words, those fighting words, i now acknowledge as a product of my cowardly, paranoid self.

i have for the most part exercised discretion, i have had a lot of fun that i deny-and will continue to deny-having, in the interest of preserving whatever privacy is left to me when i have fun. for too long the scrutiny, the uninformed criticism, the self-serving hypocritical interventions. for too long i held on to the words i wanted to let loose. and i felt that discretion would save me from a war i didn't want to fight but a war i wouldn't hide from nonetheless.

but that discretion was taking its toll. because who doesn't want to smile and be happy? the happiness however temporary is happiness all the same, and in my world the spectacular serendipitous congruence of time manner and place, of friend, summer in manila, and now, is cause for happiness.

and the toll it exacted, that evil sonovabitch discretion did, was exhaustion and a tendency to find meaning in words that may or may not have been offensive had i been fully conscious, but more often than not in my efforts to be more mature i would let pass. but no. now is defensive mode.

and why shouldn't it be? arguably i have had the best of times and the worst of times in the last five years. i've fallen in and out of relationships that have caused pain and damage to my reputation and considerable damage to my health. there are things i regret more than others, things i cherish more than others, but for the most part i have taken responsibility for my actions, and even for the actions of others.

i've paid, in many many more ways than one, for my at times monumental phenomenal unparalleled stupidity.
and still the criticism, and from people who know dick.

i weather that too, and hold my tongue for the most part, but sometimes, it's too much. and now that there seems to be in the offing another barrage of character discussions, i feel sad and angry that i have to think of this again.

hence, ani di franco. the perfect fighting words for when you can't fight.