In one of my dream lives, I am an independent filmmaker. So going to a premier of the 48 Hour Film Project made me nervous and a little jealous, but felt right, like existing in the midst of the grass roots kind of moviemaking I so love, even for just an hour.
Ostensibly, we were there to support Kristen, who appeared in the last, and best, short film as a disillusioned debutant in what turned out to be her last game of cards. Chamber #6 debuted in obvious
superiority to an appreciative crowd who had just sat through half a dozen shorts ranging from not good to should have been axed in pre-production.
But, it so happens that Davy, the praised, but reticent, director of Chamber #6 is also half the brains behind another project of great interest to me. Several months back, Kristen mentioned to two of her coworkers that she had a friend with one arm. These coworkers were, apparently, very bored, because they became intrigued and proceeded to barrage her with questions about me...how do I shave, put on a bra, etc. Being the creatives they are, the guys then turned their curiosity into a song, with lyrics like ‘how do you feed a giraffe with a short arm?’ I imagine something akin to The Lonely Island parodies.
Walking into Davy’s house for the premier after-party, Kristen casually mentions the song guys are excited to meet me and one of them will be at the party. I’m introduced to Davy, wondering if I should reveal my identity with “So, I’m that girl with one arm who inspired your song,” but I think I might just be stating the obvious. How many one-armed friends could Kristen have? But after witnessing a game of beer pong for the first time and realizing I have no regrets about missing out on Greek life, I can’t help myself, and blurt out within Davy’s hearing, “I just want to know when the music video comes out.” He doesn’t hear me, so Kristen repeats. Davy looks up to meet my eye with a knowing look of being caught in something mischievous, trying to discern my reaction, a shy smile wanting to come out and play. I grin. I want to play, too.
Standing close by, Christian, up-to-now life of the party and beer pong champion, perks up, not wanting to be on the outside of the joke. Davy turns to give a hushed explanation, of which, I can only hear, “how”, and “one arm.” In an almost instant turnabout, Christian is sobered, almost offended. “Ah, no man, I don’t make fun of stuff like that, stuff that people are born with.” He can barely look at me. “That’s just not cool.”
I’m hooked. I almost can’t help myself from jumping across the kitchen counter in excitement at the prospect of a new convert. “Why not?,” I press, “Is it OK for me to make fun of myself? Don’t you think we have to be able to laugh at ourselves?” I think I’ve got him cornered, but though he’s now able to look at me, he refuses to board the disability train. “I just don’t do that.” What kind of topsy turvy politically correct universe have I stumbled into, I don’t know. Minutes before we were all laughing about how East Indian Swedish American, Christian, looks like a Mexican with his mustache. I feel myself in a moment of irony, so twisted, I don’t even know how to proceed. But I start to feel guilty about the teasing, ending the conversation with the only thing I know for sure: “I respect that you feel that way.”
But the rest of the night, when I speak, I notice Christian watching me more boldly, curious, studying.
I think something might be changing after all.
OneArmGirl
*Postscript: In textations with Kristen this week, I was made aware that production of the above mentioned song was brought to a sudden halt, its writers believing it had gotten "out of control." No! The Evil Empire of Political Correctness is gaining ground. If you have feelings about this, please leave a comment, and I will forward them to the people who can make a difference.
Around the time my little big sister moved in, a poorly organized gang of ants took up residence on our kitchen counter. I’m not suggesting a relationship between these two events, merely stating the facts.
No matter how rigorous our determination to keep food particles off the counter, one dirty dish left for five minutes brings a new battalion of scavengers from an undisclosed location. They don’t seem to be coming from or going anywhere sp
ecifically, just moving about at will. I wonder if they might be an excommunicated band of rebels, having refused to stay in line, tired of working for the man (or woman, in this case), outcasted now in a poorly planned reconnaissance mission.
I’m not bothered by ants as a species. I actually quite admire their seemingly oblivious determination to succeed in a world where most everything is bigger than themselves. They strike me as possibly the only beings with a greater work ethic than my Germanic relatives.
Washing up dishes, I splash a small wave of sudsy water onto the counter, inadvertently swamping one ant near the sink edge. Watching him struggle through what must seem like an ocean, I find myself quietly cheering him to the dry counter. Though it looks promising, when I check back after finishing the silverware, he’s curled in a ball, still surrounded by water. I feel responsible for his misfortune and wonder what might be done to save him. While shaking my head in disbelief at my own weakness toward the intruders, I grab a paper towel. I lay it over the ocean, which soaks up in a couple of seconds. Removing the towel, I am delighted to see the ant unfurl himself, seemingly unharmed. Later I see him paused by the edge of the sink, passing his minute antennas through his front legs, removing the remnants of his watery ordeal. I hear one Christmas during World War I, German and ally soldiers left their trenches to celebrate together on the field over which, hours before, they’d exchanged bullets.
But before you jump to any conclusions about my altruism, I should confess that I mercilessly pounded a cockroach to death in the sink this morning, then turned toward my sister in a WWF wrestler stance, growling my victory.
All in a day’s work.
OneArmGirl
My mom and her four brothers have been stoically wading through the contents of my grandparents’ house as neither my grandma nor my grandpa now live there. Up to now, this has only affected me in my inbox with conspicuous subjects like “desk,” “bedside table,” and “mountain goat leg lamp.” For re
asons I can’t get into right now, I am seriously interested in the last.
But recently I received an email attached with pictures of this stuffed rabbit...yes, with a prosthetic hook arm. I have vague memories of it from childhood time spent in my grandparents’ basement rumpus room, but until it showed up again a few weeks ago, I never really considered its existence at all.
Many questions come to mind... Why? How did this happen? Where did it come from? Why does it give me the creeps? What happened to his legs?! And mostly, What is the likelihood that a rabbit would ever be fitted with a prosthetic arm? I was highly suspicious until Kristen sent me this timely link. Apparently more likely than I thought.
But perhaps most importantly, How did this prosthetic-wearing rabbit come to be in my grandparents’ basement? It would seem that, at some point in time, my dear grandma acquired not one, but two, stuffed rabbits with prosthetic arms for her toy collection. Now, there are one of two options...a)My grandma had a hook-arm rabbit fetish, or b)She had a granddaughter with a prosthetic arm and, wanting me not to feel strange or abnormal, added those rabbits to her collection. How she found them without the internet is inconceivable.
But the thought that those rabbits had existed in her basement for as long as I can remember, primarily for my benefit, had never before occurred to me; Until now, eleven years after my grandma left this world, when my mother uncovered them, and I unearthed another deepening of my grandmother’s love. And why did she buy two rabbits with fake arms? That is still a mystery.
But what should become of the rabbits now? Send them to me stat, I tell my mother by phone, they have a new career awaiting on my blog. But it was decided that only one rabbit should be sent and his brother should remain with my parents, as two might be a bit much for one apartment (don’t want to get the neighbors talking). I think they could use some time apart anyway.
Only one thing remains. My unexpectedly inherited one-armed rabbit needs a name. Any ideas?
I love you, Grandma, very very very much.
OneArmGirl
I'm gonna let you contemplate it for a while. Consider it strange. Consider it avant-guarde. Consider it till you question all that is right and good in this world. If you come away wrinkly browed, blinking in consternation, don't worry, you are not alone. Consider it a teaser to my next post.
OneArmGirl
My sister Genevi comes to live with me this week, driving two thousand miles of North American highway with my dad, a trailer full of East Indian wares and, most importantly, my bicycle. In honor of this and for love of my sister, I am posting excerpts of an essay I wrote several years ago...
Genevi is my little sister. Or, she was my little sister; now she’s 5’ 11’’ and goes by Gen because no one knows how to pronounce or spell Genevi. She used to b
e smaller than me, but she’s always had bigger opinions. She cried when she was five because she didn’t like Mom’s new brown shoes. Then there was the jean skirt period, when she refused to wear anything but jean skirts, even outside playing in the desert dirt. She recently reminded me that she also wore jellies. So, in jean skirts and jellies, she took to the great outdoors of the Southwest on her bike, up and down the chronically potholed road to our house.
I mostly remember trying to make Genevi be the little sister that we wanted, someone who needed us and did whatever we said. She loved the name Sarah and whenever we played anything, that’s what she wanted to be called. But we knew that, and so demanded that she not be called Sarah, but a name that she hated: Alice. “If you aren’t Alice,” we said, “you can’t play with us.” Genevi, tortured by the ultimatum, usually ended up in tears.
It wasn’t until I had to move back home as an adult, that my relationship with my littlest sister began to look like a friendship. She was a teenager then, with a life and friends, but she still wanted to talk to me, to be with me, creating an opportunity I didn’t deserve. And I discovered, though separated by eight years, we were standing on common ground.
I was explaining one day how I felt my disabilities were closing in on me, that they were keeping me from being who I wanted to be and doing what I wanted to do; and then, when I thought I might get some real pity, Genevi looked at me and said she felt the same way. She had trouble reading. She told me how this inability to accomplish something that so many of us take for granted made so much of her life difficult. She got nervous in classes when everyone took turns to read, and was always having to think of excuses for getting skipped over. Street signs went by too fast to decipher; comprehending written directions akin to remembering names in a Russian novel. Above all, she didn’t want to look stupid, and remained on alert for an ambush at every turn.
I jumped in big sister style to tell her all the things I felt a ‘seasoned’ handicapped person knows, like that you have to learn to not be afraid to tell other people the truth about who you are, that everyone has things to hide, that your disability can be an advantage...but in the middle my eloquent dismissal, I stopped, and for the first time, I was really seeing how hard it is to do that. What would it be like to have so much trouble doing something that comes so easily to most? How much would 
that have affected my life, to walk into a classroom afraid every day that I couldn’t keep up with my peers? How would I have dealt?
And so Genevi became my ‘little big sister.’ We joke about being a walking freak show, me a mere 5’3’’ with my one arm, and she nearly six feet with the kind of body that makes men stop on the street to ask if she has a boyfriend.
“I think my boobs are my biggest disability,” Genevi tells me, laying across my bed in a usual interruption of whatever I was doing. I smile because it sounds funny and also true. She wears a triple D bra, which she often points out, but still means very little to me except I know she can never find any that fit except next to the girdles in the grandma section. She said she found a website that sells bras for women “whose cup runneth over.” We both laugh. What used to be a rare moment is increasingly more common with us, laughing about our various disabilities.
A while ago, Genevi wanted a breast reduction surgery, so my parents agreed to the possibility if she first lost some weight. She signed up with a weight loss program that cost a lot of money and got no results. She changed her diet, weighed her food on a little scales in the kitchen, ate only ten nuts at a sitting, and went to the gym religiously. But nothing happened. Weeks passed, months, and she would just gain or lose a pound here and there. She’s finally off the plan. She’s lost more weight just being happy and living life and she’s not talking about breast reductions anymore. She’s even started showing a little more cleavage, much to Mom’s chagrin. The girls are coming out of hiding and so is Genevi’s insecurity.
“They’re just so much a part of who I am,” she says.
Why OneArmGirl and not OneArmWoman?, a reader wants to know. Funny, because when I turned 30 this past spring, feeling I might now be able to sit at the adult table, I was asking the same question; not about my blog, but about myself. I had a crisis of sorts, not mourning my 20s, but wondering if I was woman enough to be 30.
Chronically the late bloomer, I feel I’m at least five years behind the curve on most things. I bought a DC Talk cassette in the late '90s, one of the early ones when they were still rapping; I saw the first Godfather last year; I tried smoking a cigarette for the first time in my late 20s, previously believing that it would kill me, not slowly paving my lungs with tar, but the next day.
Now suspiciously eyeing the three or so short shorts still left in my closet, I’m concerned about living up to my age. Maybe I need to buy some dress suites, I don’t know.
“Would you rather be a woman or a lady,” my friend Rick, also with one arm, asked once. We both agreed woman, though I’m assuming he was speaking hypothetically for himself. Woman evokes power and sensuality and reminds me of closing at the Hastings bookstore when Lenny Kravitz’ ‘American Woman’ pumped out the store sound system into my veins. Every time I hear that song, I feel an urge to organize bookshelves...or maybe start boxing. A lady sips tea and carries Emily Post; a woman doesn’t have to wear makeup to be beautiful.
I want to be a woman, I really do. Girlhood remains too vivid to entertain nostalgia. I was full of concerns then, like whether pacifism was a viable political ethos in the emerging global climate. In that sense, I feel like I’ve been 30 my entire life, or what I imagined 30 to be, just waiting to fit in my skin.
But what makes a woman? Ownership, pride? Feminism feels alien to me; like an exotic animal I visit at the zoo, but always looking through the fence. I don’t know what a rivet is, much less a riveter (though it sounds interesting). Hearing only distantly the call to arms that roused my foremothers, I feel most myself when men open doors.
I expected to feel arrived at 30, but now I don’t feel old enough. Problem is, I’m having more fun being an adult than I ever did being a kid. Just thinking that I could go out today, shave my head, and tattoo a dragon on it, makes me giddy. Or, I could make pancakes for dinner, every night, for a week, and no one could stop me. No one would know till the morning paper: “Woman dies of carb overdose.” Yes, woman.
Maybe adulthood is not so much an arrival as another passing through. I’ve been considering less what I need to build up, thinking more about what needs tearing down; digging through the layered years, excavating my girlhood, trying to find what’s real and what’s not. I’m letting go of career to pursue calling; beginning with buying a pink writing notebook with Tweetie on the cover so I keep laughing at myself.
But why OneArmGirl? One might argue I have an increasingly repressed need to reconnect with my inner child. Yes, one could argue that. But on the surface, it just sounds better; it’s catchy, more marketable. Yeah, I’m an artist obsessively questioning identity, but I also have a lot of business in my blood.
OneArmWench, also very catchy, was suggested, but then I'd feel pressure to post regular pirate references. I was once Sultry Sarah the One-Armed Pirate, but that's a story for another time...
OneArmGirl
*This is the first installment of a series called 'Ask OneArmGirl' that will explore reader questions, but probably never answer them.
When I first got my job, I told people I worked with autistic horses, which was not true, but easier than "I work with horses and teach riding lessons at a farm residence for women with autism." By the time I get to the end 
of that, I see faces contort from interest to confusion to spaced out thinking about a favorite Seinfeld episode.
This is good, because if they manage to stay focused, the next question is usually, "What is autism exactly?" or "How do you feel about the exponential growth of the autistic diagnosis in the modern age?", the answer to either I do not know, nor do I particularly care.
What I care about is people, and how horses transform them. When I see a person, scared and intimidated, go up on a horse and break into a smile, her whole body taking on a shy confidence even she didn't know she had, everything else I've witnessed loses color.
At least twice a week I try to convince riders to climb 5.5 feet off the ground onto a horse called Sam I Am. If we get that far, I'm ready to call it a day and head back to a shower and the latest online episode of House.
Regardless of what autism is or isn’t, all of the women who live on the farm are different, puzzles that I’m trying to put together. Missy stands to my chin and slides on small steps like beginning on roller skates. “Hi Tash” she said the first time she met me. Up on Sam, she responds with an affirmative “Yep” to my inquiries: “Missy, are you comfortable?”...“Missy, are you having a good day?”... On about the fifteenth “Yep,” I get suspicious. “Missy, are you a space alien?” “Yep,” she says, not missing a beat.
But mostly what I "do" is drive 20 minutes to a barn in the valley, near enough to trail ride to the Rio Grande, work on my farmer's tan, play with horses, and restrain my wrath toward a rowdy pack of pygmy goats. I find it endlessly ironic that the work I enjoy the 
most is physical; working with my hands...or hand...or teeth or foot, whatever gets the job done.
All three horses at the farm have handicaps, causing me to wonder if I was hired to maintain consistency. All together, we have a bowed tendon, severe arthritis, and one blind eye. They would probably be diagnosed autistic as well, according to Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation, which explores the similarities in cerebral processing between animals and those with autism. Both are more aware of everything than the rest of us.
A few months back, I chipped a front tooth when I grabbed the metal end of a halter strap with my mouth. I looked in the mirror, horrified, imagining the slippery slope to losing dentures in the couch cushions. Turns out, it was fairly easy for the dentist to remedy. Life goes on. My lips are getting in shape now, sharing the workload with my teeth. And I smile thinking about what one might do with a degree in English literature.
“I like your hair, Tash,” Missy says from atop Sam. “Thank you, Missy,” I respond to the unexpected compliment. “You look like a grandma,” she explains.
OneArmGirl
Note: Names have been changed because I don't want the HIPPA Mafia coming after me.
superiority to an appreciative crowd who had just sat through half a dozen shorts ranging from not good to should have been axed in pre-production. 
