Raging Hormones

I woke up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding. The opposite of puberty. Then I thought of a photo of my parents taken when they were 25 and students at Berkeley Baptist Divinity School (now The American Baptist Seminary of the West), beautiful and fashionable, walking arm in arm down Telegraph Avenue in 1944. A new image: myself as my father making love to my mother. There's more to gender than meets the eye, consider Larry Wachowski. John says that although physically very feminine I have the mind of a man. I don't go for that old Western mind-body duality myself, it's just a trick of language.

Then I remembered a dream. There was an anti-Castro Cuban exile (what we Marxist Spanish majors at Stanford used to call a gusano - worm) acting as Washington's ambassador to somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. She showed me a photo of herself posing with a young Arab family at least as beautiful as my parents were. A conversation about politics having gotten awfully complicated lately. A fine hotel, concerned that my husband and I were occupying separate rooms. Many objects resembling dildos, but more imaginatively designed.