so....what happened?

to these people.....from high and junior high school. I was on the Web and for the hell of it started looking up names of people I was once friends with but haven't seen in years. And years.....like this girl Jen from high school, who was very pretty but troubled, but through no fault of her own. She was beaten, by her father. She left our school to go to her local one but hated it there. I miss her, and it saddens me to think back on those days which are way over, the past now. But thinking back I can feel it like it's happening now.

Or another ex friend who just stopped talking to me....although I didn't try to repair things, either. But I can track her, because her name registers when I look it up. Jen...I only found someone with her name living in Brooklyn. I really truly hope she is not living with those same parents.

Do I really want to see these people? I almost don't want to know where they are now, or to see their faces older. But thinking of her brought those days back so strongly and I'd almost forgotten....

update: it's been a while

No I haven't disappeared off the face of the earth. I'm fine, for the most part, for all that I'm menstruating which is very tiresome to go through. Right now I'm putting, or attempting to put, music on my ipod which is Fleetwood Mac (the Tusk album....my favorite personally!), Kim Wilde, J Geils Band....yeah all this stuff I listened to as a kid I'm still listening to. I'm obsessed with this stuff.....back in elementary school my dad had a neighbor who was a promoter for a record company. He got all these promotional copies which he'd give my dad, which I'd listen to. This is some of the stuff....

I love this music, still. Not that I don't listen to modern music, but I'm obsessed with the 70s and early 80s, which were really an extension of the 70s. I also got Planet Funk, a modern group. I don't listen much to rock music....

So for those people trying to contact me at laurasaiter@earthlink.net, I'm no longer at that address. You can get me here now: lauramsaiter@gmail.com.

Sparkles.....love

thinking back

As much as junior high was a horror show in many ways, strangely I am feeling many good thoughts about it in retrospect. There were a lot of great bands just springing up and that's what I remember most. But it's something else, so hard to explain. There was something really powerful ïn the air" just don't know how else to describe it. Something sexual. When we left Chicago for NYC when I was thirteen my mother was regretting that she'd made a hasty decision and given up her independence, and my sister wasn't born and knows nothing about this, never knew things any other way, but I remember. That must be why we're so different. But I never once regretted leaving Chicago. I felt absolutely......my shrinks and school counselors would tell me how "traumatized" and messed up I was by being upsurped out of my environment, i.e. Chicago, and my parents' divorce....but I am telling you I felt no remorse whatsoever about leaving there, and that Republican school I was in. I don't miss the kids, black and white, who ganged up on me after school and against whom I was forced to fight, or the ones who made comments about my protest of animal experiments on cosmetics. To be honest, people resented me because I'm smart and so is my family. We read and didn't watch TV for the most part. When I have kids, they won't watch TV. What's the point? I saw through all the layers. That threatens people.



I knew NYC was the city for me when we moved into Sonny's West Village apartment. People may think....I didn't grow up with two parents and a white picket fence atmosphere and I certainly view the world differently from people who did, but I don't consider myself "damaged" because of that. I don't see how growing up with parents who have to stay together, like my sister and mother did, is healthy either. Or in a household where the woman is under a man's rule. This is part of what Bush calls "family values...."



But....there was something really positive about my first year in NYC, full of hope. I made friends I still have to this day. There was a very strong connection. I live in this town for a reason; I must belong here. I need to live on the coast. Some of the people from those days, I still feel close to them even though I don't see them. I do look back on that period all the time though. Certain people I had feelings for, I really believed in. I still do.

love religion

I always am bothered by how people turn other people into God. I think, they're people, their fame is man-made, as is the media. Or rather hu-man-made. But I understand in part how people feel. I've turned some men into God. I turned them into Jesus and expected them to save me. They didn't, though. They fucking didn't. I always wonder, to those that want me now, where WERE you when I was buried alive and had to claw my way out? So why should I feel grateful for your attention now?

De Beauvoir wrote about how women have no religion of their own. But men become that. For gay women I suppose it's different, but I was raised on Cinderella and to believe in Prince Charming who will take care of you. In spite of the women's movement and everything that came with it most women are still waiting for him. But the years have gone by and he hasn't appeared, and the ones I thought were turned out to be......even if I was in love with them another part of me lived in fear of them. A sterile hell.....that's what she wrote. I'm disillusioned. What can I say? The story is, there' s no Prince Charming, face reality. You wake out to find out the man you married turned you into his slave. Once the wedding's over.

street harassment

I am wondering if I.....today it was so bad it made want to never wear a miniskirt again. Constant whistles, leers, "hey how are you"s and it's so fucking endless, endless. Yesterday I was walking around the downtown Manhattan area with my mother who has bright blond hair. We passed construction sites (yep, a cliche but sadly there's truth to it) and it was unbearable, the invasion of space by these men. I know it's not all black and Hispanic men (or Middle Eastern) who do this, but in my neighborhood, Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy, it's out of control. I'm not prejudiced and it's hard to write this because I really don't want to get into a nasty place here, but the reality is in these communities it's horrible, incessant. And physical attractiveness plays a role here, a big one. No, actually, when I was walking home there was this white guy turning around and staring at the women who passed him, like checking them out. Frat boys too......so, it falls on all races and classes. And I'm thinking, I actually have made myself less attractive in the past to avoid this attention. Plus, I was having a rough day to begin with and feeling really unsexual. Sexual harassment is rampant, still, and how do we escape it? And if it's not men on the street it's men in the higher levels, ones with real power, who can get away with it. And women are criminalized, along with gay and trans people. We can go to jail for having sex. We're damned, if we get "compromised" when it's men who created these situations and put us there--but we get punished. But it's not hopeless, just a never-ending fight. One hurdle is climbed, only for there to be another. Still, if we don't, we might as well just go back to the feudal days. This is intolerable, this situation. I can't take anymore, and I won't. One of these days a woman is going to go ballistic on these men man it's only a matter of time. And for big-chested women; I don't know how they take it. If I so much as wear a tank top I have to deal with stares; it's so bad unbearable. What should be do, go out in nun outfits? Why is the human body made to be this bad thing, like we're bad for showing it? Cause that's what it amounts to.