I had a writing date the other day with my friend
Kim Brittingham and she asked me if I believe in the law of attraction. I think I said yes, but I may have qualified it a little. I definitely said something along the lines of, "Well, I do believe that if you think negatively you attract negativity." I realized that in fact I do believe in the law of attraction, yet I'm also a little afraid of it, because sometimes I'm afraid of what I want, or that I won't be able to handle it if I get it, or that I don't deserve it, or myriad other reasons why I tell myself not to ask for things, not to dream too big in case I fail.
Maybe my issue is not so much the law of attraction so much as my need to cultivate a single-minded to devotion to...whatever it is I should right now be devoting myself to. As it is, I do this thing where I spread my energy very thin because I'm afraid to pin it all on one big thing, lest that thing disappear, whether through my fault or someone else's. But I decided today that even though this is my general m.o., I want to change. I want to be a go-getter. I want to push myself to work toward the hard things. I want to be more like the writers I admire every time I read them like
Glennon Doyle Melton and
Justine Musk. I don't necessarily know what that one big thing is for my entire life, but today, in a split second, I figured out what my big thing is for this summer of 2013. I want to go to the
Edinburgh Film Festival for the first time to write about
The Surrender, based on the memoir by
Toni Bentley. Here's the official description:
Direct from a sold-out run at the National Theatre of Spain comes Toni Bentley's notorious, hilarious, erotic memoir and international bestseller. ‘An extraordinary book by a woman with an ax, and an ass, to grind’ (Barry Humphries), adapted in English and performed by Isabelle Stoffel, ‘a stunning actress’ (El Mundo). Directed by award-winning Spanish film director Sigfrid Monleón, the play tells of a ballerina initiated by a stranger into ultimate sexual submission and the joy she finds on the other side of convention. The Surrender is the witty, profound, true story of one woman's sexual obsession.
The second I saw this existed, via Toni Bentley's
Twitter stream (the play has its own
Twitter account), I wanted to go, but "wanted" is too weak a word. I had this click moment, where I felt like this was what I was supposed to be doing this summer, which is looming before me with a bit of aimlessness and randomness. I love my new apartment, and spend approximately 90% of my time in it, but I miss traveling. I can't afford nor do I want to do as much of it as I once did, but I want to travel more meaningfully and purposefully, to events and places where I can explore things I couldn't anywhere else. And I'm going to do my damnedest to make that happen by scouring all my go-to travel sites like
Johnny Jet and
Nomadic Matt and
Airfare Watchdog, and pitch this story. Some of it will depend on my quarterly royalties, aka my salary, but I think the bulk of it will be on my figuring out a way to make it happen. I'll keep you posted, and if there are other must-see plays at Edinburgh, let me know (rachelkb at gmail.com). The run is from July 31st to August 26th, and I'd probably be going toward the end of it.
I was led to look Bentley up because of her recent article
"The Vagina Fallacy" at The Daily Beast, about why we use the word "vagina" instead of "vulva." Here's part of what she had to say:
Why in this time of such relentless sexualization in the media, and ever-more detailed discussion and research on female sexuality, do women themselves persist using the wrong term for their own sexual arena? From sassy in-the-know Lena Dunham to Oprah Winfrey, mother to us all, to Naomi Wolf, feminist extraordinaire (she dedicated an entire book to the wrong place), to that smart lady Eve Ensler, they are all calling her their “vagina.” As a woman I am embarrassed by our ignorance.
Now, of course, one can indeed refer correctly to the vagina, meaning the relatively short, but expandable, passage of a woman’s sexual anatomy that connects the outside world to the inside one, its main purpose being impregnation through intercourse and, then in return, as the birth canal. But the vagina is only one of our many parts—it really is Grand Central down there —and while vital for reproduction it is somewhat secondary for female pleasure. How on earth did the poor little vagina, a single cog in the great female wheel, become the catchall for the whole shebang?
Labels: Edinburgh Fringe Festival, law of attraction, Surrender, theater, Toni Bentley, travel
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