Note: this is an entry from winter 2020. The awful person I talk about tuned out to be awful but I didn’t want to post this because she was dating Mikey and he really wanted me to like her. They broke up for all the reasons I knew they would, but you don’t come between a man and the object of his love because she’ll get the benefit of the doubt every single time. All you can do is bite your tongue. You don’t even get to do an “I told you so” dance afterwards.

I’m posting this because it pertains to last winter’s desire to start a salon in my apartment.

_______________

In non-Covid times, public meeting places are hives for exchanges of ideas crucial to the lives of artists. It might look like the superficial act of getting drunk and smoking a thousand cigarettes while spouting off strange ideas to the untrained eye, but I assure you it is much more than that.

So what does one do when health is at a premium but creative juices still need attending to? One creates a salon in one’s home. It’s something I’ve been doing since I got back from Tucson in May 2020. My apartment is a sacred place–a safe space—for thinkers to ruminate, for ideas to marinate, for philosophers to contemplate, and I am the potentate.

I rule with an iron fist, but only because I am so fiercely protective of this space. My apartment doesn’t have a place for lots of people
One of the things that bugged me the other night was the awful girl’s insistence that Jo March (Little Woman) is a lesbian.

I don’t begrudge other people’s headcanons but this awful girl isn’t a lesbian. She just sees Jo as one. Ok. One interpretation. But I’m not a lesbian and every word that Jo utters in Greta Gerwig’s version is something I’ve thought at one point. I am Jo. I disprove her theory she confuses for fact.

It isn’t that Jo’s a lesbian. It’s that her gender position on the spectrum isn’t as feminine as, say, Meg’s. It’s a gender thing, not a sexuality thing. Gender is a construct. Sexuality is not. The Marches were Transcendentalists. They taught their daughters to critically analyze gender constructs and what they got were a bunch of misfit daughters who were limited by societal expectations of 1860’s Massachusetts. I can relate. I was raised with similar conflicting cues that made me an outcast in 80’s and 90’s Mexican society.

Through the course of the night, the awful girl was adamant about all her opinions, but her opinions were all gross. She’s performative about her understanding and empathy towards not cishetero types and yet she conflates sexuality with gender. It’s like the girl took an intro class at some point in her life but didn’t actually pay attention. She just thinks she’s an authority on things now.

So I just stopped engaging. There’s no exchange of ideas and hope of synthesis with her. She’s just going to double down on whatever bullshit sounds good to her and never question her own opinions.

Oh, and she spilled red wine all over my stuff TWICE and didn’t lift a finger to pick it up. Like a sociopath. Or someone raised in a barn-like structure. So yeah, she’s dead to me.