At last! I have arrived upon the shores of Youtube. And this time I am singing and playing a song, not waxing philosophical about feminism and body image. So, like… Please go listen!

I know, I know, I’m so sucky at posting regularly and why follow a blog if the blogger is never posty… Okay.  I’m turning over a new leaf.  My blog will forthwith be a news/blog scenario, so you’ll get regular updates on what is happening in rorieville as well as my miscellaneous emotional and political diatribes. To that effect, here is a link to some pictures from a show last week!  http://tinyurl.com/dd58gr Furthermore, if anyone is free on Wednesday, I will be playing in Patchogue at the Brickhouse Brewery with the band.  We’re on at 10:30, and we’re actually the featured act of Chris Cauley’s open mic…  SOOOOO if you feel like coming down and playing some tunes yourself, sign up is around 7pm.  It’s good people at the Brickhouse. 

Once, someone I cared about a lot and later parted ways with called me out on my feminism when we were having words. Said that I was all talk, and that I went on and on about how women deserved to be respected and to think and do what they thought and did without it being called into question, but that when it came to myself I was just pathetic and consumed by my emotions, disrespecting myself and allowing myself to be ruled by need.I guess I’m paraphrasing wildly here because I made a point of not saving that conversation. But anyway, it’s come back into my head lately. I’ve been really down, and I’ve been down over valid things, but I keep having this feeling that if I were a stronger, smarter woman I wouldn’t have gotten myself into feeling this way.So then I examine it (and re-examine it… and re-examine it…) and determine what I already knew: I can’t help how I feel and I don’t really have much control over the things that are upsetting me. So all I can do is try to ride it out and be nice to myself. Instead of, y’know, blaming myself for feeling bad on TOP of everything.And here’s the obvious realization I’ve come to: experiencing emotional pain does not make you a weak person. Like, duh. It just makes you human.I’ve been thinking about it from a feminist perspective, thusly: People still seem to look at emotion as a more feminine trait.People say things like: women are more in tune with their emotions. Women are more intuitive. Women are more warm and nurturing. Women are more emotional while men are more rational.For starters, these statements are just full of blatant sexism that hurts women AND men. And I don’t believe one word. Women and men have equal capacity to be emotional, caring, supportive and self-aware. What IS true is that culturally, women are taught that it’s OK (natural!) to be emotional whereas men are taught that it’s manly to hide it. (As a broad generalization that obviously has exceptions–I speak of cultural trends here.)Secondly, these statements that SEEM to be positive statements about women (except for perhaps the last one) all have much darker sentiments attached to them: Women are hysterical and too emotional. Women are not in control of themselves and ruled by their hormones.* Women are drama queens and can’t leave well enough alone. (Have you noticed there is no male equivalent for the term “drama queen”?)Like so much that is sexist, women take themselves to task for it too. Women get mad at themselves forloving too much. “I just shouldn’t care so much. I hurt MYSELF by caring.” CAN WE JUST GET REAL FOR A MINUTE AND RECOGNIZE THAT MAKING STRONG EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS IS WHAT MAKES LIFE BEAUTIFUL AND, UNFORTUNATELY, IT LEAVES A PERSON OPEN TO PAIN.Okay? Srsly. And this isn’t a SOLELY female problem, I should point out — I know men who also feel that they “love too much”. Not to mention how society totally shoots down men who try to be open and emotional. I opine, however, that part of the reason there’s this big taboo on CARING is that it’s seen as a female trait and is therefore undesirable. Certainly, Big Manly Men never find themselves in the embarrassing situation of caring too much. Nooooo, when they feel down they just go shoot things with four legs and pee on trees in the woods and stuff! This reminds them that they are Manly and above such things as emotions.All us other emo schmucks are just being big dumb GIRLS by acknowledging our feelings. Right?This post has been difficult to write because it’s something that’s very close to home at the moment.I’m still locked in the “I’m so emotional and I can’t help it but doesn’t that make me a weak hateable person?” struggle right now. So, my own self doubt has made it difficult for me to put my thoughts on this into words. But I’ll tell you what: lately, I’ve finally developed the confidence to start judging myself with the same criteria that I use for everyone else. And I found something out: I like myself. I think I’m honorable, kind and sweet, and couldn’t be without being as emotional as I am. I have no intention of changing–not just because it’s not possible, but because I LIKE being this way.*Sexist culture likes to paint both women and men as being ruled by their hormones–women for being “too” emotional (every time a woman gets legitimately upset a man seems to be around to accuse her of PMSing) and men for being “overly” sexual (testosterone = fight and have sex!) I’d like to take a moment to point out what a load of crap that is. Firstly, each sex has an equal right to both sexuality and emotion, and secondly, WE’RE A PRETTY INTELLECTUALLY DEVELOPED SPECIES AND ARE CAPABLE OF CONTROLLING OURSELVES. For sure hormones have an emotional and physical effect on all of us–but hopefully none of us are so ignorant as to think that means that we have no say in how we comport ourselves. Hormones are not license for unpleasant behavior. If I may borrow an unpleasantly conservative-tinged term–”personal responsibility”, people.

Because I’ve been busy.

I have a love/hate relationship with being busy all the time.  There’s a validation in busy-ness.  There’s also stress, and not getting important stuff done, and not getting to focus on important things that really demand more time than you have to offer.

I’m 23 and I want to have fun and have good conversations and moving experiences and crazy random stuff happen to me.  And I guess, I do have that stuff.  And it’s hard to enjoy it in the moment because in the back of my mind I always feel stressed about something else I’m not doing.

I played a show tonight in Jersey and I kind of felt like I was phoning it in.  I played good, I had a pretty good time…  but my heart wasn’t in it the way it has been for every other gig I’ve ever had, ever.  And it’s not because I’m not still in love with music; it’s because I couldn’t get outside of the stress of I-should-have-done-a-better-job-promoting-this-are-my-friends-bored-watching-me-do-suburban-coffeeshop-people-give-a-crap-about-music-like-mine-and-is-it-really-the-best-way-to-move-my-career-forward-anymore…

Feeling bad about yourself is the quickest route to not enjoying the things you love, and the quickest route also to mediocre-izing a performance.  I made a lot of resolutions this year about getting stuff done and I’ve been pretty serious about keeping them.  At the same time, I feel like something needs to change, still, because I feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to put in to keep it all up, and on a different side of things, totally freaked out about money and making a living.  I’ve been working for myself for a while now, and I love the freedom and mental health benefits, and have no trouble disciplining myself to work — but not knowing when and how my next “paycheck” will come is putting me in constant stress.

I have all these shows coming up and I’m afraid none of them will go where I want them to go because I don’t have the time to promote them properly, and I’m still not even sure what “promote them properly” even means.  I read constantly about marketing and stuff now, and try to pay very close attention to what works and what doesn’t…  and I still feel very hit or miss about it.  Maybe it’s because I never really have time to put all the work in that I really should be putting in, on promotion.

I don’t know.  It’s easy to get down on myself about it.  It’s also not that hard to see that I have a busy life, I work at least 50-60 hours a week between “work work” and music (I’ve counted) and I’m doing my best.  And neither of those things matter that much–whether I choose to give myself a break, or to be hard on myself, the bottom line is that I’m not going to be happy until I see myself moving forward at a faster pace.

I don’t know what to do about all this.

I’m just letting it spill out of my head right now.  Hopefully tomorrow I can just spend working, working, and working and feel like I’ve made some progress on all fronts.

A friend made a post on her blog about physical attraction and her relationship to it.

I think she has a little inner war going on about external attraction versus inner value. If she is attracted to someone for external attributes, does that make her shallow? Et cetera.

My 2 cents, which I get to make as lengthy as I want because this is MY blog, are in short, no, it doesn’t.

In long, I think “the external” is too broad a topic. I see two major categories that deserve distinct attention.

1. External beauty that is inborn and lucky trait. The kind that makes me go see every movie with Johnny Depp in it, regardless of whether I think the movie will be good or horrible. The kind that manifests in both of the lovers I’ve had in my life, causing me to go, “zuh? why am I the lucky schmoe who gets hooked up like this?” External beauty of this nature doesn’t say a whole lot about the possessor of it, but hey–I don’t know many who are immune to it.

2. The sort of external beauty that reflects a choice.

Your body (I feel) is one of the most readily available tools of expression that you have. I feel it only makes sense to be attracted to (or unattracted to) the choices that people make with their bodies, and the thing that I like about this is that it’s based in something other than chance. It’s a real reflection of who a person is.

I’m generally attracted to people who do anything off the beaten path with their body-canvas. I’m further attracted to people who bash existing stereotypes and roles with their choices, because I hate stereotypes and roles, and it lets me know that I could definitely like that person. I think it’s really hot that my boyfriend has long hair and sometime’s wears women’s clothing.* Actually, one of the chief things that attracts me to a person is how out-of-line they are with gender norms. It’s just how it is. Gender sucks. You bash gender, you’re in with me. The interesting thing is that I’ve always felt this way, but only in the past year or two have I really explored my feelings on feminism and gender–leading me only recently to my “gender sucks” conclusion.

~

I was always a feminist, because I was lucky enough to have a mom who was a feminist, and because of a general pervading feeling of “duh? of course women should have the same rights as men?” I went through a few stages in the relationship between my self-image and my feminism. When all my friends were getting excited about shaving their legs and buying lipstick for the first time, I didn’t think beauty should matter to me at all, and didn’t shave anything or wear any makeup.

I don’t remember when I started shaving and wearing a little bit of makeup, or why. I guess the collective excitement got to me. That, and the fact that I was still reading teen magazines. Why did I ever read those?

My relationship with makeup ran its course from disdain to grudging desire to be attractive to the mere desire to differentiate myself with things like lots of black eyeliner. I don’t feel that the desire to differentiate oneself is childish or antifeminist. I don’t see how I could possibly not feel the desire to differentiate myself. I also acknowledge that I am differentiating myself just as much on the (considerably more frequent) days that I wear no makeup at all, and I enjoy those days as much as the black eyeliner days.

I stopped shaving under my arms about a year ago and initially planned it as an indefinite experiment. I knew that I generally found it attractive when other women did not shave, and that therefore it was quite possible that the only reason I was shaving was because I was afraid of what people would think or something. I decided therefore, to stop for as long as it took to make a decision that would really be my decision. When I became equally comfortable walking around hairily in a tank top, then I would be ready to say “I shave/don’t shave simply because I like it this way.”

And I found out (this is the ending of the story that is obvious to everyone but the person going through it, I guess) that I really do like not shaving better. It’s more comfortable, but I also just really like it. It would be a betrayal of me as a person–not as a woman or as a feminist or as an anything else, just as me**– to start shaving again. So I haven’t. And that makes me like me, externally and internally.

–

*I tried my hardest not to get into a feminist dissection of this phrase, but I just couldn’t help it. My boyfriend does not, in all fairness, wear women’s clothing: he wears clothes which were manufactured for women, but which belong to him. He is a man, and since the clothes do belong to him, in the barest of truth I have to conclude that he is wearing a man’s clothing. But y’all know what I mean.

**Which also comes back to feminism, because a large part of my feminism is the belief that a woman should be free to make choices as herself first–before she makes decisions as a mom, as a woman, as a feminist, as a wife, as a sister, as an anything else. That’s part of the freedom that women have been denied: to consider ourselves.

So I’ve been complaining for …what… a few years now? about not having a drummer.  I put up a few new ads on Craigslist, and I guess new year’s is the time to do it or something.  Now I’ve got seven or eight different people who’ve responded to me.  I’m as daunted about this as I would be if NO one had responded to me.  Now I’m like… okay, what do I do?

Well, rorie, you could be an adult and set up times to meet with these people.

Okay, but what if I meet with them and don’t like them–then what?

I’m not great at rejecting people.  I’ve been realizing that part of the reason I’ve had such a hard time finding a drummer is that I want to find someone whose playing I really like–yet, at the same time, I really don’t feel like I deserve someone that great to be spending all that time rehearsing with me, especially when my ability to pay them is dependent upon how gigs go.   I want someone I can grow with — I guess a lot of musicians want that?  Yet when it comes right down to it, I don’t think I feel like I deserve to have other musicians invest their time in me.  Maybe I just need to get over that.

In the meantime, though, I’ve spoken to a few other musicians and gotten a tentative band lineup (sans drummer) together.  We’re going to start rehearsing next week I think.  No matter what, I’m forcing myself out of my me-and-a-guitar comfort zone…  It’s way past time.

And since I’ve made that decision, there’s a buttload of work I could be doing on Marketing Me With a Band.  So I guess it’s time to get moving.

There are a few awesome photographers sneakin’ around at the lobby of the Patchogue Theatre. One of them is Walter Petrule, who photographs every performance there and does a kickass job. Another is Leah Haynes, whom I just met last Sunday and who sent me these.

She also invited me to join something she’s involved with called The Free Artist Network. I have a little page there (I’m actually just setting it up) now, so please check it out, set up your own page, and say hello.

thefreeartistnetwork.com/roriekelly 

(Remember, the more social networking sites you join, the more points you get in Virtual Heaven.)

i won a caption-writing contest and i didn’t even know it.

http://trevorlikestodraw.com/winnerz.html
(The one with the witches! That’s my funny thing that I made up!)

I got hooked up with these great folks called Paradiddle Records (who as we speak are mixing and mastering Jay Scott’s live album, which I’m on a little bit) and they have helped me out with some online distribution of my acoustic EP, the four songs i have copyrighted right now.

Here’s where you can buy it, if you’re so inclined. Spend five bucks, support them, support me, everyone’s happy.

The weird thing about being a (kind of broke) independent musician is that I already feel like this EP–recorded variously in late 2004/early 2005–is like “rorie kelly: The Early Years.”* I’ve been aggressively making music–by which I mean, playing out constantly and really trying to promote myself–since the year I turned 20. I am now 23 and a half–and you know what? A lot happens in a few years, if you’re talking about music. And I’ve changed quite a bit. I still play acoustic, but I’m looking for a band and I wouldn’t touch the word “folk” with a ten-foot pole anymore. And I do like a lot of folk music. I just feel that it’s a term that people unthinkingly apply to anyone with an acoustic guitar, especially woman, and it has come to feel like kind of a write-off. Folk is also a very low-key genre and I’m interested in being anything but low-key. And I think that comes across in my performance a lot more than it used to.

Jump Little Children was my all-time favorite band until only a few months ago (because I realized it was time to move Tegan and Sara to their rightful place on my list. JLC still rocks my freakin’ socks). When they released their second album, Vertigo, they also began selling a double-CD called “Jump Little Children: The Early Years” at their shows. It was a mix of questionably well-recorded demos and early live shows. I was (and am) a crazy fan, so I was just as excited about this as I was when the Beatles Anthology came out. And the coolest thing was not “yay, more music from JLC!”–it was hearing the immense differences between how they used to sound and what they had grown into. Hearing the roots of the music. It was hella encouraging, too, to know that Jay Clifford was not born into the slinky, unearthly grace of his voice–he worked for it and he earned that grace. Hearing a good-singer-that-will-be-great learning to use his voice is such an inspiring thing, I think. It totally blows all of that self-defeating “Well, people are born with talent and I just don’t have it” crap out of the water.

Anyway, on my end of things, I have this album I’m STILL finishing up (that I started working on in 2005, if anyone’s counting) that I think sounds really freakin’ awesome–but isn’t even released yet. I’ve just gotten online distribution for my acoustic EP, which I’ve come to think of as like, “The Rorie of Yesteryear,” and I’m promoting that–but in the meantime, my mind is already on how I want to record album number two, and on which of the freakin’ billion songs I have piled up will be making the cut.

I don’t know. It’s odd. I need to either get signed, or get a whole lot better at this whole “independent musician” stuff right away, because … it’s time to get in gear. Really time to get in gear. 2007 served to drive that point home or me again and again (and again) and 2008 is the year to make it happen.

*If you want to hear about the REALLY early years, I self-recorded ten or twelve songs in my bedroom in 2001 or so. Boy do you not want to hear that stuff. (Unless you’re Rakie, in which case you don’t have a choice because you’ve already heard it.) That was the “this girl could get good in a few years” era. Still like a few of the songs I wrote from that period, though.

I really like making fliers.
I think I’m posting this less to promote my show and more to show off my pretty thing that I made.

I need to get my priorities straight.