Bring on the Rain...

It seems that awhile ago there was a country song about a woman coming through tough times in love. I've done that recently, but to my great pleasure, I seem to have come through largely unscathed. I'm not one to write about my previous lovers, at least not often, but I may get around it it eventually.

I'm more interested in bringing on the rain in a literal sense, though. Tonight DC is soaked with rain, the kind that comes hard enough to permeate the solid pack of the soil and seep down fair enough that the grass finally gets its moment in the sun (or the rain) and can squish under one's feet.

I came home from work a few hours early today, wracked as I was with incredibly painful menses cramps. Menstruating has always been impossibly painful for me, and at 2:30 pm I found myself doubled-over in my cube, chin barely held above the desk of my little cubicle desk, pushing my knuckles deep into my abdomen in an effort to change any aspect of the waves of pain emanating from within.

It sounds a little strange, perhaps, but the power and implication of menstruation blows my mind. To think that women have all this strength inside of us, as well as the inherent ability to carry a living creature within our expanded abdomens - is that not phenomenal to contemplate? I don't think that I want to have children, but it is mind-boggling to me to think of the loss of blood and bodily tissue that ensues every month that the female body is not pregnant, and to think of the clockwork with which it occurs. I am very interested in science and in the natural world, and I find menstruating an oft-overdue reminder of our very status as members of the Animal Kingdom. We can pretend we're not, but there is nothing like the pain of menses to remind me that we're only in control of so much, and the rest is in our evolution.

At any rate, after attempting to continue my boss' upcoming magazine article and failing miserably, I inquired with my coworker in regards to leaving early, sent out an e-mail, and left. One seeminly-undending bus ride later and I was walking in my front door. I went straight to bed and slept an exhausted sleep, giving my body the full indulgence it needed to devote all my energies and attentions to the effort involved in menses, and woke up 2 hours later feeling calmer, soothed, and well-rested.

But best of all, I woke up to the sound of raindrops pinging off my air conditioning unit, my single window darkened with the grayish light of storm clouds. Rain. I have loved a good rainstorm since college, when I would sit out on my cooperative home's wide front porch, cup of tea in hand, and watch the storm move up and across the NY State Finger Lake that still feels like home. Rain to me is reassuring, cleansing, and a little blessing from nature urging me to stay inside, curl up, stay warm, be dry, and relish the moment.

I have favorite rainstorms, such as the one where my ex, P, and I stood out in the front as it pounded down on that same co-op in college, and reveled in the coziness, and the lush green that resulted, while a friend in his full raingear meandered down the road. There was the rain I danced in senior year of college, when P wouldn't accompany me (he didn't want to get dirty), but his mom told him if he loved me he would (it's true). Another rainstorm in college brought the tail end of a hurricane up our lake, and the dog I walked for $30 a week and I ran down over the high edge of road, towards the lake, to watch a literal wall of water come flying up the lake toward us, whipping my hair around my face, and causing massive branches to drop from trees, only to stall in front of my eyes, dissolving back into the lake as so many rain drops falling from a storm front that was no longer there. I love rain.

There was great rain in Alaska, too. I had the great providence to go backpacking in Denali with a dear friend for a week last fall, and it rained the entire time. I had a brand new backpacking tent which I swore up down and around would be big enough for the two of us - and it wasn't. We spent four days listening to the constant fall of diminuitive raindrops as we traversed two valleys of the beautiful land that is Alaska, during shoulder season. Luckily for us, we had good raingear, having just spent a summer living and working on the North Slope, but we spent the week feeling damp and cooking, eating, and living in the rain. At one point, cramped in our tent, wet raingear stuffed down deep into our sleeping bags (to bake it dry with our body heat), I just rolled over from where I had been reading, and began to laugh hysterically. My friend Greg's nose dripped incessantly, we both smelled awful (I, of course, opined that he smelled worse), and the rain showed no sign of stopping. We were camped high in a divot between two small peaks, next to a stream, and unbeknownst to me, the next morning the rain would turn into a light snow. I'm grinning just thinking about it.

On that particularly trip we feasted on a lunch of smoked cheddar cheese (Greg likes to eat well, as I do, while backpacking) and pita bread, and I remember the two of us crammed together on a hillside at midday, smushed behind a rock around which the rain flew horizontally, like a hail of bullets in an action movie. I raved that the pita and cheese were "seriously, Greg, the best thing I have EVER eaten!", and stood up at intervals, cheeks red with the cold, to turn and face the rain, allowing the little drops to hit my face like so many pinpricks before I collapsed down next to Greg again, giggling and hysterical with the sheer fun of it. My favorite picture was taken immediately thereafter, on the afternoon of our last day, as I stood in the front of the distant finger of a receding glacier and did my best to pose as if I were a great adventure, about to strike off into the unknown. The photo is dark with the cloudiness of the day, off in the distance my raingear is dark blue (making me hard to see), and there are visible raindrops on the camera lens.


To anyone else, it's a pretty poor picture. To me, it's everything I loved about life in Alaska, that week, that trip, and Greg. It's beautiful.

Tonight, however, under the garish city lights of Washington, DC, the rain presents no such challenge. Instead of journeying off into the wilderness or up the glaciers, I flopped down the stairs in my fuzzy black slippers, ten-year-old stretchy PJ pants, and a sweater that was my grandmother's, and I made myself first hot chocolate, and now a minty tea. I've camped out in our warmly-lit living room, on the couch just inside the picture window, so that if I crane my head back I can see the wet leaves of the trees illuminated by streetlights struggling to cast a beam of light sufficient enough to see the sidewalk. A bit of minty tea in a mug from my college, Aretha Franklin's Greatest Hits on the radio, and the comfort of my long-departed grandmother's sweater embracing me in its warmth and I am happy.

There is something to be said for the nights when you know with certainty that there isn't anywhere, in that moment, where you'd rather be.

Women for Women

I've been away from blogging for a bit, but I don't think I'm giving up on this yet. I think a lot about what I'd like to talk about in a blogspace, and I'm getting to a point where it's fair to say I read a number of blogs. I stopped blogging because as I finished my second to last post, back in June, or something, the man I had just started seeing walked into Sparky's, the little coffeeshop where I used to like to write, and I sped up my typing in an effort to close the laptop before he could get a glimpse of my Blog name. I didn't want him to see it. I wanted to be able to write about him, and us, and who I am when we share space.

Well...he saw the page, I stopped blogging for fear he was reading, and I haven't had the time or the space to blog for awhile. Except as of Monday, there's no more blogging about him, because I finally ended what should have been taken care of months ago, probably. He was a lot of fun, though, so I let it go for a bit longer than I should have. He won't be checking this page anymore, though (I doubt it would have even occurred to him, actually)...so I guess I'm back.

***********************************************************************************

Earlier this evening as I headed out of work, I contemplated staying late in order to attend a talk being given in my building's auditorium. The talk was in regards to a book released this past week called, "The Other Side of War: Women's Stories of Survival and Hope," and was authored by Zainab Salbi, co-founder of Women for Women International.

As I was leaving I ran into a fellow intern and a new hire, both of whom were planning on attending the talk, and got dinner with them instead.

I'm so glad I did.

One of my favorite things about living in Washington is having the opportunity to attend lectures much as I did in college, and to leave afterwards much as I did in college - mouth agape, heart in my throat, wondering if I'll ever live up to my own expectations, wondering if I'm even really living, or living my life right, at all.

The first thing I noticed at the talk tonight was all the hair. I entered after the event had begun and sat in the back, and ahead of me was a sea of hair of all types, black and brown and one shocking white and curly, a little old lady hunched down in her seat. Women of every color and type, including every type of hair. It's always so beautiful to see women gathered together in support of something bigger than, outside of themselves, coming to learn from and listen to the stories of other women who have suffered, but found strength despite that suffering.

In noticing hair, however, I also observed a notable lack of men's hair. Maybe I'm oversimplifying a bit, but doesn't it seem strange that most men don't see fit to prioritize events that feature women? "But it doesn't pertain to them," some argue. "It's an event especially for women." Right.

Because women's suffering, and survival, is a women's issue, not a human issue. And because genocide is a woman's issue, and rape, that most terrifying of all tools of war, is just a woman's issue. Right, right. I forgot.

I have a friend, a male friend, who doesn't like the term "feminist." One night we got into a heated discussion about why I call myself a feminist, and why I call him a feminist. I don't hate men (he clearly knows that, being one himself), so he couldn't understand why I'd claim the term. You're not a "feminist," he said. You're a "humanist. You believe in egalitarianism."

Well, no kidding.

To which I replied, "no, see, that's just it. Feminism fights for equality. It is about equality. It's just that women actually have to fight, daily, just to be treated equally. that's why I'm a feminist. I believe women should be treated equally to men."

Now for the topic at hand. Women's experiences are considered a feminist topic - women as victims of torture, or of rape, or as making up approximately 80% of refugee camps, are considered to be a women's issue. But just because the stories are of the experiences of women, and are spoken from women's hearts, with women's words, does not make the topic of women and war a feminist issue. Women's experiences surving genocide and war tell a story about humanity, and oftentimes a lack thereof. It is a humanist issue - it is a human (and human rights) issue.

Learning to Blog is the Hardest Part

Learning about blogging has been way more complicated and time-consuming than I had ever previously anticipated. Granted, the Blogger folks make it pretty much a no-brainer, but then again I just spent 45 minutes trying to figure out why my font changed midway through the draft of my most-recent post (turns out when I went to edit the HTML the font size had been reduced to 85%. Oh, obviously!

So for the moment, all my fun and creative ideas, as well as ideas I've borrowed from other blogs in regards to format, fun and function will have to wait. At least I got the font size uniform...right?

I also want to mention that I have a really, really hard time being succinct (I know, you're shocked). One of the goals in having this blog is for me to learn to tell part of the story without beating people over the head with every little detail (or, worse, having people not read the posts because they're just WAY too long!

So my apologies for the lack of brevity, and if you know how to do it better, please feel free to enlighten me...I can use all the help I can get!

"It Smells Like a Fish Tank in Here!"

I currently rent a room in a small rowhouse in an "up and coming" neighborhood in the wonderful city of Washington, DC. As this is my first year in DC/out of college/finding my own housing, there have been some bumps along the way, mostly having to do with the little nuances of day-to-day life that I just never had to deal with while living in on-campus housing.

I would say, however, that overall I have had terrific luck with housing hereabouts, including finding my three fabulous housemates via Craigslist (keywords: progressive, activists, students - that's all it took!), and renting my furnished room in our beautiful rowhouse for a not-too-bad $650 a month.

Of course, living in a rowhouse, even a recently renovated rowhouse, has its pitfalls. One of the problems with DC's booming housing market is that lots of folks decide to invest in property, buy rundown homes, and "flip" them in a rapid renovation process, such that it's not too unusual for the externalities to look fabulous (in our case, lofted ceilings and shiny wood floors), while the insulation or heating system or other super-important-yet-not-immediately-apparent internal components get neglected.

Case in point: our second floor toilet, which is overly sensitive to just about everything that gets sent its way...and after having the fabulous and funny plumber come and lift the entire toilet off the floor for "snaking" not once but twice in one month(!), we finally realized/were told that the plumbing had not been installed at the correct(universal toilet-plumbing) angle, and that in order to prevent him from continuously showing up at the house and putting our toilet on plastic bags out in the upstairs hallway, it was our mission to prevent any and all female visitors from flushing sanitary products, and to prevent everybody else from flushing just about anything else.

::sigh::

With this in mind, funky smells, sounds, and/or bubbling wallpaper in our little Failed State are not that unusual...

But this week was an exception to the norm.

For the last week or so, my room has had this vaguely funky ...odor to it. We only recently put the Central Air on, AND my room is the smallest, AND I didn't have a fan, AND I was away for the weekend with the door shut the entire time...so at first, I didn't quite freak out. I just assumed that something in my room was musty, that I had gotten rain in the room and that when the weather warmed up a bit it got a tad funky, etc, etc. I made up excuses. Eventually, though, the funk was getting a tad overpowering. I'd open my door or walk into my room, and I'd want to close it again, so I started poking around. My room is about 10 x 14 sq ft (and I'm probably being generous), and I generally am over the top about keeping it clean (not tidy)...but I wondered if I had left food in the bottom of my trashcan (which I never do), or something of that nature.

But it got so bad last week that I called my housemate, N, into the room, and asked him to take a deep breath, and tell me if he thought it smelled funny. Now there are good stories about N and I and an ongoing discussion as to whether there are squirrels on our roof or whether I'm imagining things...but we'll save that for the "Squirrels" blog entry.

So my housemate comes in and I have my newly-acquired-$52-that-was-supposed-to-be-$30-on-sale fan blowing, and he says it's a little funky, but not too bad. I protest that that's because of the fan, but then he looks pointedly at my soccer bag with a little smile on his face, and speculates that the funkage might be originating therein. It wasn't, but it inspired enough doubt that I gave up on trying to persuade him...maybe I was imagining both funk and squirrels.

In the days that followed I became increasingly antagonized by the smell, and left my fan on constantly. I'd get home at night and move things around, sniffing all the while, probably looking like a complete nut to all the world outside my windows (and indeed, a good percentage of the neighborhood can see in my windows, as my room is off the back alley/backyards). I sniffed up and down, sniffed my mattress, my carpet, my pillows...everything. No dice. Everything smelled but nothing smelled like a legitimate source of the funk in question.

The other day I finally couldn't take it anymore, and I had my other housemate (the owner of our house), M, come into my room to take a whiff. He and I sat on the bed just breathing, giggling and looking at each other as he wrinkled his face in disgust. "It smells like a fishtank in here!"

We proceeded to take turns poking around some more, sniffed, speculated on the air conditioning vent, the old heating grate, the storage space in the ceiling. He offered to hire a contractor (M is notorious for calling a contractor to do anything from the most basic weather-stripping to installing a complex new wrought-iron fence...he's big on the calling of the contractors, but it's very endearing)...and yet he made the astute point that he couldn't exactly call and say, "Yeah, hello, Ahmed? FLAG's room smells like a fish tank...can you come over???" So he shrugged, we laughed, and ten minutes later he brought me in his little bowl of aesthetically-pleasing but completely useless potpourri. Right.

Ultimately, this weekend, after a long Friday night out playing and barhopping in Adam's Morgan, a good guy friend of mine stayed over, and the two of us crammed into my twin bed (a blog post waiting to happen)...and before I opened the door to my room I apologized profusely for the stinkage. Then I opened the door, and we were both knocked out by the stench. He couldn't help but comment on it, I was embarrassed, swore it wasn't me(!)...and I resolved to fix the stench this weekend, even if I had to open the wall grate. Luckily for me my friend was polite nonetheless, and let's just say we toughed it out...and found other distractions to pass the time.

Today, however, was the day. I was going to find the source of the stink. I figured I'd vacuum the hell out of my room, I'd move everything around, I'd dust, I'd wipe the surfaces...and even though my room was already pretty clean.no stone would go unturned.

So I took off the sheets, and I vacuumed, and I moved everything around and I was mostly ready for everything and anything (or so I thought). I live in DC - it's a city, there are roaches, spiders, all kinds of fun creepy crawlies, and I'm finally getting used to just pulling out the Raid and moving on with my dad. But today in the midst of cleaning I grabbed my suitcase, which was previously wedged between my desk and my dresser (my room is tiny), and I haul it out of the way without a thought, put it behind me, grab the vacuum, and turn around to see that there is a Dead Mouse, curled up into a fetal position as it was when it died, rotting under the spot where the suitcase was located, up again my desk. And I can't help myself - I scream. I scream, I jump onto the bed, I do what I would generously call the "Ewwwy" dance, wherein my knees come up and I prance around the room wringing my hands, whining "ew ew ew ew" over the whine of the vacuum cleaner, which is still on in the corner. I was, to generalize my reaction along society's traditional gender lines, "such a girl." (I hate this saying, but it's what I'm trying to get at in this long-winded intro).

At first, I couldn't bring myself to look at it, I couldn't bring myself to try and move it, because for all I knew, it was still alive and dying. I just didn't want to look at it. Generally a "tough" girl, generally not phased, and someone who likes to look out for the well-being of the people I love, there I went, running into the hallway where I found N, and I couldn't get a word out.

"Blah-blah-blah-MOUSE-blah-blah blah!" came out...no sense, nonsense, and just that one actual word, mouse. N and Z, my third housemate, came out into the hallway then, where I was intermittently doing my "ewwwwy" dance and whining. Grossss! I kept yelling, as if that was going to scare the poor (dead) thing off. They laughed a little (who could help it), and gave me pitying looks, but did not go in to scope the deceased. Z expressed some concern about a new challenge for our Failed State, then headed back down to the World Cup, while N struggled to hide his smile as I continued to shriek "Ew!" and wring my hands. Almost immediately, however, N offers an escape hatch.

"Do you want me to pick it up?" he says, with the most sympathetic smile ever.

"Do I want him to pick it up????"

"YES!!!" I want to yell. "Oh please do!!!! " The very idea that he will just go in there, my mouse-removing knight-in-shining-armor, without screaming or shrieking or hand wringing, and make that disgusting little decomposing critter disappear without me ever having to see it again...is almost too lovely to contemplate. "Yes!!!!" I yell inwardly. "Please!!! Take it away!!"

But outwardly, I don't say anything. I can't quite bring myself to say no, exactly, but I just stand there wide-eyed and stricken, kicking myself inwardly for my stubborn insistence on my own independence. I know I have to be the one to clean up this mouse. For me. For my own self-respect. I mean, I want someone to clean up the mouse for me - it's true (who wouldn't?). I want to just have someone to make it go away, and am inwardly somewhat willing to be desperately grateful to any of the three men I live with for saving my poor, shrieking, pseudo-feminist-self from the dead mouse goo. But I can't.

I think most people would say here that it's either a) not necessarily unfeminist of me to not want to clean up a dead mouse (as I've just said, very few people probably ever want to clean up dead mice), and that in a truly egalitarian community/house/co-op the idea is to rely on one another's strengths, such as N removing the mouse (something I don't want to do) and me doing the dishes (something he doesn't want to do). I also can anticipate the obvious argument b) that not everything has to be politicized or about feminism. But, I would argue, this example is. N isn't offering for the fun of it, or because he particularly doesn't care (I don't think) - he's offering because he's a man and men have been taught to do these things, and in particular to do these things for women. Our socialization within our genders is tripping wires that involve boys dealing with mouses and girls screaming and doing the "ewwwy" dance. And yet, as much as I hate my "oh, save me" response, I can't seem to repress it. Plus, my pride just won't let me have him do it!

So instead I grab the paper towels, turn towards my room, and stand over the remnants of our furry rodent friend as I repeatedly try to bring myself to grab him and flip him into the trash can. But I can't. I've never been good with dead critters. I swerve to avoid toads, have never knowingly killed anything, and can't come to terms with the fact that this little dead mouse needs to be transported in my paper towel swathed hands. SHIT.

I ended up taking two strong pieces of cardboard and literally scraping the little sucker off the carpet. It turns out that as he bestowed his fishy dead-mouse-body smell on me, he was also gooily decomposing on my (inconveniently white) carpet. So I find myself using the cardboard to scrape him off, hoping he won't pop into some kind of horror story decomposing mush, and yet do so so vehemently that all of a sudden with a final scrape the little corpse pops up into the air like some manner of fetid dead-mouse-popcorn-popping, and lands on my cardboard. Oh, ew...

Needless to say, I tossed him, ran outside to throw out my trash ("ewwww-ing" all the way), and then Simple Greened the Bejesus out of my carpet to get the brown stains out. Then I perfume-bathed the entire room, and left it, doors open-wide, as I relocated to Sparky's Cafe for a much needed-caffeine jolt and some blog-based escapeism.

And you know, now that I know the smell should be dissipating, and that I cleaned up my own mucky mess, all I can think is I'm really glad I cleaned it up, myself.

Even if I only did it to prove that I could.

What's In A Name?

What's in a name? A whole hell of a lot, apparently. I recently decided I was interested in beginning to blog, if only to have my thoughts down on paper, to have a space in which to examine the decisions and questions which occupy so much of my time and energy. I also wanted to talk. I'm not blogging for a soapbox, really, although I'm sure some of my content (probably a lot, actually), will be political. I'm not blogging because I need an online journal, or because I want to spend more time on the computer - I get that at work.

I did decide to blog for a couple of reasons, after a good amount of justifying it to myself. It's not that I think my life is particularly interesting, per se, or that my writing style is notably individualistic or beguiling. The primary reason I wanted to start "Fight Like a Girl" is because I like to talk about life, and I am looking for some kindred spirits. I like to think about why we do what we do, how we interact with our goals, dreams, passions, and the obstacles to achieving them. I talk, shout, argue, debate, agree, disagree and think constantly about the choices we make in society, the way the small, day-to-day things we do can sometimes change our lives profoundly. I overanalyze. I might be a little academic. I'm extremely human. I make lots of mistakes.

It seems fitting to mention here that when I say I overanalyze, I don't (think I) do it to a ridiculous extent. I am busy, young, happy, outgoing, outdoorsy, etc. I try lots of things, I'm not particularly inhibited, and I am sufficiently past many of our society's collective neuroses and obsessions that I won't utilize my blogspot as an "I'm so fat..." place to complain.

I might, however, talk about my feelings on women and musculature, my interest in the natural fluctuation of my body during a year which has been filled with extremes of activity and inactivity, or realizations about the way other people perceive me. That I might do.

So...with that I start, I guess, and we'll see if anyone else wants to share my space, if you will, and talk a bit about life, love, feminism, work, passion, ecology, science, urban vs. rural, western New York, global climate change, latin america, social justice, good books, bad politics, and a host of other topics yet to be seen...


In the meantime, let me explain the name. The question, "what's in a name?" was of particular importance to me not so much this year, but last, when I was still in college. During the last year or two of my undergrad I participated in the creation of a new, student-run newspaper on my campus. We had a mainstream paper, of course, but it was slowly being co-opted by the Campus Republican student group, who saw the overall campus apathy towards the paper as an opportunity to step in, take the reins, and get their word out. Uh-huh.

A year after their fateful decision my "progressive" colleagues and I decided that it was time to retake the media, on the only scale that was available to us; Think Globally, Act Locally...right?

We started a paper. A 'zine, if you will. Somewhere between 12 and 18 pages of 8.5 x 14" photocopies stapled in the middle and folded in half, produced en masse in the basement photocopy office of our tiny liberal arts college, and hand-distributed at the dinner hour to folks entering the central dining venue on our campus.

People were thrilled with the idea - it went over fabulously. Before we knew it, before it was more than a casual proposal, "Maybe we should start our own paper?", we had writers, we had ideas for stories, we had support (both financial and otherwise) and we had a meeting date, time, strategy. Recruitment posters. Everything.

What we didn't have (of course), was a name. It was "the paper," "our paper," the "progressive students' paper"...our little feat of resistance. It was our baby, but it was unnamed.

And so, in a strategy session that took place on the musty, bargain-basement-carpet floor of my cooperative (euphemistically nicknamed The Farm Side, as a harkening back to better days in Western New York), approximately seven of us sat in an uneven circle, spread between folded out futon, mismatched chairs, the edge of my desk and of course, on that carpet, trying to hammer out a name. Ani played in the background, I took notes on the very same five-year-old laptop that now overheats in my lap, and we threw them out there. Names. By the tens, if not hundreds. We wanted resistance, something with pep, fight, provocative, interesting, intellectual but not aloof. Cannonball? Slingshot? Trebuchet? Provocateur? We were social justice activists trying to start a paper about...about what? Ourselves, really. Our community. Our view. The way we saw the world. Everything.

One of our number, the artist who had first proposed the paper, sat a little to the side pilfering paper from the print tray of my printer/scanner/photocopier number, sketching out possible logos and designs to accompany our many candidate names.

As the processed continued, we got a little goofy. Names were coming slower, there was no agreement and fierce dissent over the ones we did have. Hours had passed, but we had to resolve it "today". We were ready to go, the paper had to get started. This was the day it would be titled.

We eventually did pick a name. After agonizing for awhile we dropped the antagonistic edge, the social justice current, and went for something a little more fun. A tad fluffier, but perhaps more attention-getting. We designed a cool logo, made six-hundred copies, and watch hundreds of students circulate and talk about our "newspaper." It was a rush.

My own process in deriving a name for this blog was a bit similar. I don't want to get into all the nitty gritty of the hows and whys and more importantly, perhaps, the why nots...but I had a lot of ideas. Song lyrics, Ani Difranco my muse, were tempting. So was poetry. Cliche abounded. Creativity plummeted. There was the possibility that my little experiment with blogging was about to fail miserably, or that I would become a superlative feminist. My blogging role model, the first blog I ever read (which persuaded me that there was more to blogs than I had given them credit for) was Bad Feminist: http://badfeminist.blogspot.com/. (I think she rocks)

It wasn't that I wanted to be Bad Feminist, or that I was particularly interested in blogging - the thing about it was that it made me feel less alone in the world and in my view of it. Feminists are sassy, fun, smart, interesting, sexy and cool people. Women, men, and every gender identity in between. Spunky, brilliant, and chill. Finding my brand of feminism on the web was a little like finally tracking down the progressive kids at my preppy-yet-lib arts college - "WHEW....someone who gets me."

So, sure, I could be the Good Feminist. The Happy Feminist. Feisty Feminist (the last had some appeal, I do admit)...but I didn't want to build off of someone else's ideas, and I didn't want to accidentally-on-purpose borrow anyone's intellectual property, either.

Thus, I Fight Like A Girl. And, it's true...I do.

I want to write about feminism, first and foremost, but I want to talk about love and sports and science and passion and politics and social justice and the world...and on all of these topics, my perspective, my experiences have been colored by my experiences as a woman. I find that each new political challenge, each soccer game I play in, everyday in my now pretty mellow and day-to-day existence is seen, felt, touched, smelled and tasted from a feminist vantage point - and I like it.

I have a lot of fight in me, a lot of energy, a lot of passion. I am willing to fight for what I believe in, for what I care about, and on behalf of my beliefs. I fight, and I happily do it my own way - like a girl.

And so...we begin.