Smelly feet

Route 66. Driving through the desert. 100 degrees outside. A/C full on. Bruce Springsteen on the stereo.

The landscape that is passing by is the same for miles and miles. Sand, mountains, rocks. Three amigos are roadtripping the US in the classic way. Me and two other guys. One is my really good friend, and the other one is his good friend. So I don’t know the last guy that well.

We spent more than 50 hours together in the car – me as the driver, my friend in the front seat and his friend in the back seat. 50 hours in our pretty white Dodge with so many cool functions we were almost blown backwards. There was no key, you pushed a button to start the car, you could control out of which speaker the majority of the sound should come, control the temperature for the driver, passenger and back individually and I could keep going. But you couldn’t control the smell in the car.

Several times, I was overwhelmed by a gross smell. The kind that takes you by surprise and can clear out a room – but there’s no escape when you’re trapped in a car on the highway in the middle of nowhere. At first, I couldn’t detect the source. But when I started to make sense of things, I figured out that every time the smell came, the backseater (the friend of my friend) had his feet up on the thing in between the two front seats and thereby closer to me. There was a consistent correlation between the two. So smelly feet was the issue.

But when you don’t know a person that well, it’s kind of a taboo to tell them that their feet smell. So instead of commenting upon it – which wouldn’t be very efficient either, since he couldn’t really do anything about it or get rid of it in the car (I suspect those old, worn-out shoes with lots of years behind them to be the real issue) – I would turn off the A/C and go with open windows for a little while. Only though when the air outside is about a 100 degrees, it doesn’t have a very cooling effect. But a change of air was definitely needed sometimes. Then when we did open the windows, my friend, sitting in the passenger front seat, put his arm in the frame, and the new, fresh wind that was supposed to clear out the smelly feet-smell, would be “poisoned” by the sweat odor from his armpit. Being blown straight into the car. Directly towards the backseat. Oh how it isn’t easy to be three in a car in the boiling hot desert and still keep it smelling like rainbows and flowers.

Another taboo-unlocker

My interest in taboos led me to this unique columnist with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Dani Burlison. Read the following interview and discover new types of taboos, how to write about them and how to become a succesful writer:

 

A non-stop-writing taboo-unlocking armchair anthropologist

“Don’t stop writing and don’t try to be something you’re not.” Columnist Dani Burlison stopped writing once during her young adult years, because a boyfriend read her work and told her it was “awful.” When she started again, she felt embarrassed to show her work to anyone. In spite of now receiving six rejection letters over the past two weeks, she learned her lesson and will never stop writing again. 

Burlison began her obsession with reading at the age of 4. She shamelessly labels herself as the “nerd” in the advanced reading classes she took in school. When she ran out of books in between visits to the library, she would write her own stuff. This evolved into a passion for writing poetry in her teenage years, until the boyfriend made her stop writing for several years. Getting back on the horse wasn’t easy, but many years and ups and downs later, in the fall of 2011, she became runner-up in the annual column contest with the publishing company McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Mid-life crisis turning into a columnist career

At the time she entered the contest, Burlison’s life was at a crossroad. “I guess since I am in my late thirties you could call it a mid-life crisis,” she says. She was urgently looking for a way to improve her chances of making money as a writer and was considering going back to school for an MFA (Master of Fine Arts). When she became runner-up, she thought to herself, “F*** more grad school and more student loans! Writing for McSweeney’s is better than any of that.” And that was the beginning of an unlocking of social taboos through the written word.

Dendrophilia and other social taboos

Burlison is fascinated by “the weird s*** that people are into.” Talking about these things that might be too “odd” or “uncomfortable” to talk about is exactly the idea behind her column, which she describes as a brutally honest, humorous anthropological study of people.

The column “Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos” is named after one of the oddest and most painful taboos, Burlison can think of. Dendrophiliacs are people who have sex with or are aroused by trees. “I’ve actually met a few people who have done this, although they were on LSD or something,” she says.

Humor as an essential ingredient

Burlison emphasizes the characteristic humorous edge that she wraps around the social taboos. She describes herself as a humoristic armchair anthropologist, self-taught herbalist, closet singer, soon to be beekeeper, and a hippie with a pagan-leaning outlook on life and a penchant for indie rock, hip hop, tattoos, good beer and gossip. In one of her columns she refers to herself as a feminist and also recently tweeted a link to a video discussing females’ roles in the Oscar movies.

Above all though, she sees herself as a single mom having a blast with her two daughters. “The other day I was banging away on deadlines and one daughter was working on her novel or drawing and the other was working on an incredible sculpture for an upcoming art show and we were all singing along to Elvis Costello and Built to Spill. It was one of the happiest moments of my week,” she recalls.

Inspirational voices

Other than finding a great deal of inspiration in her daughters, she finds the greatest inspirations are the voices of songwriters. “Tom Waits lives nearby and whenever I see him I try to brush up against him to snatch some of his creative energy. I know it sounds creepy but he’s like this magical creature,” she says.

She also subscribes to writer Nick Flynn on Facebook, and when she questions if her writing is too much, she often finds herself thinking “What would Nick Flynn do?” However, Burlison weighs evolving her own style of writing and encourages others to do the same: “It is great to have writers we look up to but we should never, ever try to write like them. I really believe that each person has his or her own voice.”

She believes the best way to find your own voice is to never stop writing and that her own written voice is still developing – and probably always will be. Therefore, Burlison will never stop writing, regardless of what her boyfriends say or the number of rejection letters she receives.

 

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Burlisons column can be found here.

 

No naked butts

The other day I was watching Sex and the City. The episode where Harry moves in with Charlotte and leaves his teabags all over the place. And walks around naked. Even though I can’t remember the episodes scene by scene, something was wrong with this episode. Something was missing. Harry’s naked butt. It had simply been cut out.

(from approx 2:00)

When I was driving home from school with some friends, the song “Young, Wild & Free” was played on the radio. And so, 4 girls in a car, we of course sang along. But at a certain time we song solo. We belted out “So what we get druuuunk, so what we smoke weed” – but apparently they get *beep*, not drunk, and they ‘sleep’, don’t smoke weed, at least as long as they’re on the radio.

Same goes for the song “Rack City” that on YouTube is Rack City Bitch and in the radio is Rack City Chick. Kind of a difference.

Watching the Hangover was also a perforated experience. Waiting for the epic scene where the bride’s brother, Alan, turns around in his sexy thong (or lack of same), we could keep waiting, cause apparently Alan’s naked butt had been cut out – just like Harry’s.

The things is, I notice these scenes have been cut out because they are in fact memorable due to the controversial in seeing something as private as another person’s naked butt. You notice the words have been changed because of the controversial in swearwords. We notice things that stand out or are different. So we notice when they’re missing, because we exactly noticed they have been there before.

Since I, as mentioned, am not from the US, I have a different perspective on things. It seems like in the US it is still a taboo to show things that are kind of sexual (or just plain naked things), and play certain words concerning alcohol, drugs, sex or swearwords. Where I come from – this is not the case. We don’t have nearly half as many “beeps” in our songs. And we definitely do not cut out the naked butts in tv-shows or movies.

Although it might spare some kids’ ears and eyes, if you grow up not seeing these things like naked butts or knowing they’re cut out or words are changed because it is a “taboo,” the things might actually become more tabooized. You could think nakedness is ‘wrong’ and singing about getting drunk is not allowed. Although there are so many aspects of this, which I will not bring up here, I believe general openness to these things is the way ahead. Show it all, play it all, and trust people for their better judgment.

Dirty talk

120 students seated in rows. Listening. Not hearing, but listening to the teacher’s wisdom. Taking it all in. You learn about perception, nonverbal signs, how haptics is an important part of maintaining relationships…

You daydream a little bit and allow yourself a mental trip outside the classroom. Thinking about the workout you’ll do later, what you need in your fridge, every now and then glancing at the clock, counting down the minutes till you get off. You occasionally hear “selection,” “organization,” “cognitive schemata,” but all of a sudden it evolves into “cuddling,” “intimacy,” and “sex.”

Snaps you back into reality. Both because it’s pretty out of context and because the word is an attention-getter. The teacher starts to talk about how his friend and his friend’s wife haven’t had sex in a year and a half. Asks the student if sex is an important part of a relationship? And suddenly the intimacy level of the class is at a whole other level.

Certain words are more difficult than others to get over our lips, because they’re a taboo to talk about or suffer from previously being a taboo. Like sex. Back in the days, this was not something you’d talk openly about, which is why you don’t say the word on autopilot like you do with milk. You never think about it when you say the word “milk.” But you become very conscious about your uttering when you say out loud the word sex, no matter how natural you try to make it. It changes the conversation.

Sometimes the ‘difficulty’ of saying some words or sentences varies within different languages. English is not my mother tongue, and saying ‘dirty words’ in English is just seemingly much more innocent. “I love you” in my own language is much more difficult to get over the lips than saying it in English, because it doesn’t have the same meaning to us who don’t have English as our first language.

Even these particular three words are an interesting kind of “everyday life-taboo,” because you don’t talk about it and the meaning of it until someone has said it out loud, but both parts involved think about it. And if someone says it and the other one don’t say it back – boy we’ll have an awkward situation.

There is a huge difference between thinking or reading these tabooed words and then saying them out loud. Getting them over your lips. You become much more conscious about your uttering and turn off the autopilot. It is a curious thing why we react this way around “dirty” words or awkward subjects like “I love you, I love you not.” They are an attention-getter and they change the ‘mood’ of the conversation. But practice makes perfect right? So practice may make natural as well.

Welcome to a world of tabooyahas

You’ve just entered a virtual room that will make you go tabooyaha. Taboos, booyahs and ahas will float together in a humorous look at the silent sides of the everyday life. Here, the things that are unsaid will be said. The things we all think but never say out loud, will be said out loud. You could call these “things” everyday life’s little taboos. This blog is room for “untaboonizing” it through a written voice. I will zoom in and focus my gaze on the tiny details that tail embarrassment along. That makes us a little uncomfortable. That puts our brain on overtime to find a proper way out of the situation. And I will zoom out to look at it in the perspective of relations between the involved parties.

As an appetizer, I’ll throw out words like body parts, toilets, alcohol, sounds and smells. Imagine you, as a female student, notice your male teacher has his fly open…

He’s standing in front of a class of nearby 50 students, wavering his arms, eagerly walking around the class to “get to everyone”, even the ones in the back who sat there to avoid being “gotten to”. You know very well that everyone in the class, as well as yourself, struggles to keep their eyes from constantly floating towards his special area. The poor guy wanders around the classroom, unaware of his “openness”. As you as students are seated and he is standing, you get dropped one level closer to this scenario that is unfolding below the belt. Should someone, slash you, tell him? Awkwardness rises due to the teacher-student-relationship (God forbid you’d embarrass your teacher), and male-female regarding the sexual tension of the bodily area, you’ll undoubtedly fix eyes, conversation and attention of 50 students on.

Why is this transboundary? I will begin my journey into this taboo-jungle and try to illuminate the embarrassing, uncomfortable and unsaid. The scene will be set in the everyday life – in the trolley, in the supermarket, public restrooms… Just to name a few. My hope is that you get a few tics along the way, looks of recognition in the mirror and maybe even catch yourself with a glimpse of a smile.

Booyah, aha, and tabooyaha!

Bonus: Click to see another type of “Taboo”