Sexual behavior in the human (fe)male

I'm writing like I did at the inception of this blog. Then again, I've been writing a lot lately, almost to the point of graphomania. Something's come over me lately, some urgent energy, and the way I've been releasing it is in my journal, in writing and revising poems, in here. A friend suggested that perhaps forces beyond me (like the upcoming lunar eclipse on Tuesday) are acting upon me. It's possible. I'm just grateful to have an outlet.

I finished Middlesex the other night. There were parts of it where Jeffrey Eugenides is a little too clever by half, but for most of it, I was completely absorbed. Here's a passage I loved that reminded me of something else I read that I can't place (Kundera? Calvino?). I love it anyway, but it also connects with me in a big way right now, as I brace for each complicated state of mind that comes my way. I'd call my current state "the difficulty and relief of abandoning living in fantasy."

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's family." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age."

The narrator (this isn't spoiling anything; it's revealed on the first page) is an intersexed person, hermaphrodite, etc. But like any good premise for a book, this is mined for metaphor:

Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Haupstrasse here in the year 2001. We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

In a similar vein, I checked out Kinsey from the library last night and watched it, as I've been meaning to do for quite a while now. According to the film (which was a little artistically heavy-handed sometimes, but the acting was wonderful - especially Peter Sarsgaard's), what fascinated Kinsey was variety: the fact that each organism is distinct from all the others. The character in the movie gives this speech; I don't know if Alfred Kinsey actually said or wrote it:

...everyone is different. The problem is, most people want to be the same. They find it easier to simply ignore this fundamental aspect of the human condition. They're so eager to be part of the group that they'll betray their own nature to get there.

It helps me greatly to watch and read things like this every now and then, to remember the infinite variety of which we are capable, and not to be pushed into ideas of normality just because they're there. And even though I am averse to the idea of living in Bloomington again, I think I would move there if I could get a job at the Kinsey Institute library.