Bouncing Back

Okay, I've spent the past week trying to think of a credibly creative excuse for why I haven't written anything since April 30th. Why I haven't even been motivated to force myself to write something lame. Why I've sort of breezed past a few queries about that silence, and why I've been low-energy and disaffected and detached about this blog.

It's not like things haven't been happening. For example, last week I went to Dar es Salaam to do a reporter training and had a great time. My friend Kelly is back in the Mamaland, this time redesigning a paper in Tanzania, and we had a brief blast over a couple of days before I had to come back to Nairobi. When I did get back, I got stuck in a 4 hour traffic jam in the rain coming home from the airport and almost lost my damn MIND from fatigue and frustration. Oh, and it's been cold and rainy and gray and dreary the past few weeks in this neck of Sub Saharan Africa, and I'm wearing socks to bed these days, and I'm feeling at loose ends, and frankly, I have not been feeling even remotely witty, insightful, or sharp.

But today, I finally got the inspiration I needed to connect fingers to keyboard. Ironically, it came from a source that may be related to my overall psychic ennui. While reading one of the local papers earlier, I came across a wiseass sports analogy about women. I'm probably forgetting quite a bit of it and paraphrasing the rest, but what it boiled down to is that an 18-year-old woman is like a football because she gets chased around by 22 men. A 28-year-old woman is like a basketball, because she gets chased by 10 men. A 38-year-old woman is like a golf ball, because she gets hit on by a 3 or 4 men at a time, but a 48 year-old-woman is like a ping pong ball, because she gets pushed back and forth between just two men, before falling off the table and likely getting stepped on.

Now, I'm not entirely humorless, even while in the throes of another patch of grueling hot flashes, so it was funny at first. And then it just wasn't, dammit. It was yet another reminder that no matter how you feel inside, or even might look on a day when you're rested and wearing something appropriately professional-yet-sexy, it's chronology that counts, especially in African cultures. So even when I think I'm looking fit and firm, a lot of people, both male and female, look at me and see "Past Prime" instead of "Grade A Prime."

What's worse, there's this one young woman in the newsroom who turned 30 a few months ago, and who makes a regular sport of commenting about my "elder status." We mostly joke around, have even hung out for drinks and dinner a couple times, and when she's not being obnoxious, she's a lot of fun. Never mind that a half dozen other folks have rushed to reassure me that she's joking...AND that she's actually wildly jealous of me, and my looks, and my brains, and my class. I've taught myself to brush her jibes off, but it can be a challenge at times.

Here's the thing: Even when you know you're not what people might be thinking you are, sometimes their verbal bollocks can't help seeping through your armour. Still, most of the time, even in Kenya, I'm certain I am NOT a withered old mama whose best years are decades behind her, dammit! Six days out of seven, I feel like my life is literally just beginning, and the best things in life...the best job, the best home, the best man, the best LIFE, are waiting for me just around the bend.

But here's the funniest thing of all...it is mind-bendingly ironic that I'm sitting here in Kenya bracing myself against all sorts of perceptions and opinions about who I am as a 48-year-old, never-married woman, and what I'm capable of, when back in the States, a 50-year-old, never married, INSANELY qualified professional woman is starting to be put through the wringer about who she is and what she's capable of, largely because she never got married.

Seriously, I'm absolutely fascinated by all the debate about whether Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan is gay or not!! I guess I've been away from the US so long--and immersed in a deeply religious, traditional, 3rd world culture where there's no doubting that people are flabbergasted that I'm 48 with no husband and no kids--that it was just too easy to believe that America has gotten past that kind of narrow, ass-backward stereotyping of an accomplished, older single woman.

Okay, I know it's a lot more complicated than just being branded an Old Maid, which I've sort of processed and wrapped in purple tissue paper and stored away in a corner of my brain. Really, I've made my peace with it. I have. But this whole Kagan Kerfluffle has introduced a new element, one that has probably been fluttering through the old noggin without me being fully prepared to confront it.

For years now, I've joked about people back in my sleepy little Southern Illinois hometown suspecting that I'm a lesbian; it's just part of my shtick. But if I'm really, REALLY honest with myself, I've probably fallen back on the default mode of concluding, "Of course people know I'm not gay!! I have too many bizarre stories about tragically hilarious dates, and epic failures in online dating--all with bona fide members of the male gender! I've been in there pitching for the girl-boy team my whole damned life, and just because I've batted 0 for a 1000 so far doesn't mean I'm going through some inexorable metamorphosis where I'll eventually give up the charade and admit I want the pole position on the Double X Raceway!!!"

But based on everything I'm reading about Kagan and this whole process, I can't help concluding that because of my age and never-married status, a lot of people would conclude I'm gay. A lot of American people. And you know what? Given everything else I have to worry about, that ain't no thing but a chicken wing. What I am wondering about is why the Obama Administration is being so batshit evasive about Kagan's private life.

I mean, let's all be grownups here....the very fact that they're being really squirrelly about her personal demographics, and getting all publicly hinky about the asinine speculation--AND according to some sources, forbidding people from talking to her family--means that she probably is gay. Trust me, if she were just a 50-year-old never married, six cat-having Susan Boyle clone, the White House wouldn't have hesitated a minute to put all that out there for public consumption. And when I say that, I realize it probably sounds like the same sort of ham-fisted stereotyping I've been musing about.

It just adds up, that's all I'm saying. But here's the other thing: If you're gonna have the balls to nominate a lesbian to the Supreme Court, don't get all faint-hearted when the rubber meets the road. Because while you might think you're protecting her privacy, you're only further heightening the mindless demonization of being gay. Of COURSE her qualifications for the job shouldn't hinge on her sexuality in any way shape or form. But refusing to acknowledge it only makes it seem like some sort of disability that shouldn't be "held against her."

Now, I know this is a lot of self-righteous, fancy-pants pontificating from somebody who's been blissfully spared direct contact with the seriously warped American Obama Era Teabagging Coulter/Limbaugh/Palin/Beck-ish Zeitgeist--and the Good Lord KNOWS I am not trying to dump on My President and his policies. Basically, the First Brother can do no wrong in my eyes, so this is just a friendly long-distance critique from another stereotypable single woman of a certain age trying to do some complicated shit in a Krazy Kulture that thinks I'm a flippin' freak. Just consider me "out and proud" as a 48-year-old never-married straight woman who, when it gets right down to it, has also had to do her thing in spite of the cliches and the snickers about her pitifully unattached state, and has done a pretty damned good job of it.

If Elena Kagan had the guts to get where she did before all this confirmation tomfoolery, I suspect she can handle some people's narrow-minded, bullshit Witch-Hunt attitude about who she might or might not love. I oughta know. After all, I AM a 48-year-old single woman who has been batted back and forth a few times, and I may have fallen off a table or two, but I keep bouncing back, higher than ever before.