Cleavage, by Kelly Diels. What is this blog all about, anyways?




spacer

Sex. Money. Meaning. Cleavage is sexy and means more than you might think.

Once upon a time, I lurked on university campuses doing political sciencey things. This meant I talked a lot and read a lot and drank a lot of red wine with arty, smart, politically outraged and passionate people.

In that world, cleavage means conflict. Difference. Divides. The lines that shape us.

In other words: life.

This blog is about that. Cleavage is about sex, money and meaning and how those intersecting realities shape our ideas and our lives. I’m talking about intimate, mundane, thinky, cosmic stuff.

Like Sex.

Sex can mean sex and therefore dating or relationships or maybe even love; or it can mean gender; or it can mean women; or it can mean bodies; or or or.

So when I’m thinking about sex, I might wonder,

How do I navigate the straight dating world when I don’t buy the dating rules because they’re stupid and gendered and boring and I’m a feminist and over all of that sexist bullshit that says men are hunters and like the pursuit so women shouldn’t put out and instead we should let men hunt us? But we’re feminists who want to get laid and maybe not end up cat ladies. Nothing against cat ladies. So we have to date. And dating is gendered and coded and blah blah blah blah. And what does that all mean, anyway? (and ‘we’ means me).

Like Money.

Money can mean money, power, privilege, hierarchy, or it can mean work, or jobs, because most of us get money that way.

So when I’m thinking about money, I might wonder,

How do I stay true to my peaceful ideals and parenting philosophy (and apparently I have one though some might call it un-parenting) and not yell at the kids when they’re dawdling and I’m late for a meeting that might land me a super-profitable and satisfying gig that will allow me to have more control over my money and my time so I can stay true to my parenting philosopy and have more quality (non-yelling) time with my kids? And pay off Mr. Visa who keeps threatening to send his goons?

Like Meaning.

Meaning means meaning. Sometimes it means mining it in the midst of the daily hurly burly. Sometimes it means celebrating the mundane. Sometimes it is finding freaky poetry in the weird and wonderful. Sometimes it means marking surprise. Sometimes – always – it means making it. Mostly it means connecting the dots of your unlined life.

Cleavage Is About The Spaces In-Between and Writing the Lines that Shape Us.

Let’s write lines. Let’s connect the dots. Let’s think along yellow brick roads from rural barns to roses in the concrete.

I’m thinking of the famous barn-scene in Twister. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are running for their lives from a tornado and seek shelter in a barn. Or so they think. They slam the barn door shut, turn around, only to discover – horrors! – a cache and obstacle course of sharp, pointy and malevolent medieval weapons.

There is no rest, no hunkering down: they have to run the gauntlet to escape the barn right back into the tornado. And so it goes.

I’m thinking about the poet Tupac Shakur who asks:

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in concrete?

and then goes on to write and rap:

You see you wouldn’t ask why the rose that grew from the concrete had damaged petals.

On the contrary, we would all celebrate its tenacity.

We would all love it’s will to reach the sun.

Well, we are the roses, this is the concrete, and these are my damaged petals.

Twister is daily life and Tupac is meaning. Cleavage is a place for possibilities.

Let’s think and write and live our way through the daily gauntlets so we can grow roses in our cracked and precious earth.

And ourselves.

spacer  print this
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.