Ever since I got married, I’ve been eating a lot of jam sandwiches. This is because my spouse is allergic to nut butter. We had a lengthy debate about “sun butter”, which is a substitute not made from nuts, since it contains only ground-up sunflower seeds. The final decision was, it tastes too much like nut butter, how can it not contain nuts, no, no, absolutely not.
I suspect that if I were incarcerated, I would have the option of eating sun butter and jelly sandwiches. I brought this up at home, and was advised not to make jokes about the American penal system, because we are lesbians. I agree, we are free not to make jokes that imply the patriarchy exists.
There are a lot of things out there that are offensive to a lot of people. Still, I like things that bring me joy. I love the painting “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh. I bought a poster of it and hung it on our bedroom ceiling. It was not easy to stick it up there. After I had the stars on the ceiling, I loved to lie looking up at it. This was joy-inducing because we live in New York and we don’t get stars like that. I only saw stars anything like that the time I went to Nova Scotia. That sure was a peaceful place. Also, I have agoraphobia so I don’t like going outside to places where I can see stars. Only inside, thank you very much. Shortly after I decorated our bedroom, my spouse demanded an explanation. I told them that Van Gogh’s art brings me joy. They calmly reminded me that said art never brought Van Gogh joy, otherwise why would he have taken his own ear off? Do I want to feel sublime feelings while dead artists suffer?
I don’t mean to imply that I treat anything my spouse says as a joke. Once, really the first and last time I was invited to meet their family, I found myself in their converted farmhouse on Cape Breton Island, getting to know the parents and their three cats. One of these furballs, nicknamed Cooter, suddenly arched his back and jumped from the ground to the top of the linen cabinet. “Get down from there, monkey,” said my spouse’s Mom. My spouse arched their back and calmly reminded Mom, “we can’t call a cat monkey. It’s racist.” Naturally, I didn’t try to contradict my spouse. It was only a few years later, when I was working as a librarian—and lemme tell you, what a great career for an agoraphobic lesbian, a total “inside job”—a patron returned a book called The National Geographic Book of Why.
This book had explanations for all the things in the world around us, which of course I never walk around in because I’m afraid and I’m married and very content, as I have elaborated above. One page asked why playground structures are called jungle gyms and monkey bars. Apparently, a Chicago lawyer named Sebastian Hinton patented the Junglegym in the 1920s. He came from a family of mathematicians who wanted to help children explore the third and fourth dimension and beyond, and figured the only way to teach kids about space was to give them a way to climb and explore their innate “monkey instinct”. The Hinton family’s research led to sci-fi stories like “A Wrinkle In Time” and many more. But the original patent for the Junglegym uses the word “monkey” like 50 times. I know. I’m a librarian. I read it.
Is it possible that someone out there is offended that a mathematician wants humans to embrace their inner monkey? Was he a Communist, too? Or is that a species-specific thing?
My spouse once told me they don’t mind if I read banned books, as long as I do it inside the library. Bringing conflict into our house is just bad karma. For similar reasons, at our wedding we exchanged conflict-free cubic zirconia. I do wear jewelry and have a large collection of precious stone rings, but I wear them on my toes, where my spouse is not likely to see them.
You see, why can’t what’s below have as vibrant a color spectrum as what’s above, meaning the sky or the removed poster of Van Gogh? Why can’t my inner life outshine anything that I dare not show on the outside?
Every time I go to the Renaissance Faire (which my spouse gently reminds me should be referred to as a Medieval Faire, since that’s the kind of stuff you find there), every time I sit in the Joust pavilion, dressed in my nun’s outfit with the thick veil—OK, sometimes I leave the house but it has to be for a very good reason—every time I am watching the knights joust, I secretly wish a horse will lose control and run into the stands and skewer me like a kebab. I will get lifted into the air on the end of a big lance, and as my body is waved around, rainbows and sonatas will pour out me into the world that wasn’t colorful enough right before.