The Flip Flop Girl

Go to the Beach!

New Post and New Thoughts!

Wear Your Flip Flops with Pride!

Don't Let the Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes Win!

I've been feeling a need to take a break both physically and mentally so my boyfriend and I headed out of town for a spring break. We stayed with my folks for a bit in LA and then made our way to a friend's beach house. They left us to ourselves quite a bit so we were basically sitting off The Strand, just the two of us, just a few flip flops away from the Pacific Ocean! Very breath-taking, very romantic, and just one bump in the road we had to deal with.

We were both a little drunk, maybe a lot drunk, and I was just babbling about all sorts of stuff. I decided to tell him about this blog which, until then, I had thought to keep to myself. But, at the moment, I figured it was nothing, just a blog, right? But maybe a blog is never just a blog, especially after all the crazy shit I've put on mine. Funny I should say "crazy" because that's the word that slipped through his lips after he read through one entry after another. He said I was crazy! And he didn't mean it in a nice way. He said the sex stuff was way over the top. And he wondered why I felt a need to write the way I did.

Instead of telling him to fuck off or anything hostile like that, I decided to be mature about it. I told him I'd have to think about it. I was too drunk to make any sense. And then I said that maybe I did know how to articulate that. I made the stories more charged than they had to be because I was getting off on it. As much as I've complained about being needlessly over-stimulated, I was actually seeking it out. I'd also tried to tailor my stories to make certain points. But before I tried to explain any further, he just smiled and said it was cool. I told him that maybe I didn't even need to write this blog anymore. He said that maybe I did need to step back from it but that he couldn't imagine me not writing. He said he saw some raw talent that was on its way to becoming something, exactly what he wasn't sure, but he still wanted to let me know that he supported me. He said maybe I could help people as well as entertain them. He also asked me to try to take a break from turning our sex into one of my hot stories if at all possible.

I do remember a mellow sobering moment we shared on the sofa that he can't have a problem with me telling you. He had his big feet on my lap. Usually, it's the other way around. I have my big feet on his lap. This time it was his feet on my lap. His feet just casually made their way over to my lap and I don't know if he was expecting me to do anything because he never said. For once, I let all my thoughts float away and did nothing. They just rested there. We both just rested. And it was good.

Being around so many people in flip flops, so many feet, so many pedicures, was a good thing too. Feet are simply more out and about in California and especially around the beach. It was refreshing to see form truly following function. It actually is handy to have flip flops around the beach! It's practical. It's a way of life. You don't have to think about it. The further away you get from the beach, however, the more thought you have to put into being casual. Once you're wearing flip flops down a busy city street, you're really making an effort to be care-free. I embrace that effort! Just trying to connect the dots.

As I relaxed in bed one day with the TV, I caught some of a Fox News talk show-or was it MSNBC? The Hannity Show, I think. Anyway, it was a typical political show tilted to the right with another no-neck/loud mouth, Mom's apple pie-eating host. He was interviewing Nancy Pelosi's daughter who has a documentary on Showtime exploring the world of American Christian fundamentalists. Well, I'd read awhile back a story about her documentary being unfair to fundamentalists in USA Today which left me wondering about USA Today's political views or at least about the writer's own right wing slant. When I saw her interviewed on this show, she came across as very professional and level-headed. She even had the Hannity guy playing nice with her. She pointed out that she made a point to show this demographic group in a fair setting leaving out extreme examples. I think his only pointed question to her was asking her why she chose to focus on evangelicals and she said, very correctly, that it was because they were considered a factor by the media in the last presidential election. If you ask me, she was far more polite than she had to be but maybe that was because she was talking to this bombastic talk show host.

Anyway, it has been interesting to me how I'm as attracted to politics as I am to any other pop culture subject. It takes someone like Jon Stewart to make us all aware of politics and make it entertaining but politics, all by itself, is such a circus. If I am capable of taking flip flops to an OCD level, I know that right wingers are using the same amount of energy, if not more, to drive home their agendas. Maybe their energy is actually the same kind of energy, some molten hot sexual force, that they have repressed and converted into self-righteous vitriol. The OCD for conservatives (and I know there are varying degrees but we're suffering from too many of the same along with those moderates afraid to be themselves like Rudy) is an overwhelming feeling that they are, no pun intended, right! They believe they possess some pure form of being right that can determine questions of right and wrong, life and death, when life begins, who should live and who should die, who has rights, who does not. It is a little old lady in tennis shoes out to save the world! But the little old lady in tennis shoes view of the world is very limited, backward, repressive, controlling, and out of touch with reality. What is so ironic and sad is that this view of the world finds itself taking so much space on our media, old and new from the tv to the blogosphere. Well, sheer quanity is never quality. We know that. What we're still working on, those of us who are sensible, is how to best reach a middle ground in this country so that we don't have more Bushies and Halliburton and the like in power forever.

The more we all find a way to go to the beach the better off we'll all be. I'm considering moving to the beach in the future when I can afford to do it right. I want to see us all take a healthy step back and watch our backs too! We want to have fun. We want to navel and toe gaze to our heart's delight-even to excess. Perhaps that's our right. But it's nice to have options too because the more distracted we allow ourselves to become, the more likely that the little old ladies in tennis shoes will always have the last laugh.

Labels: beach, blogs, conservatives, flip flops, foot fetish, Jon Stewart, politics, pop culture, right wing, sex, Writing